GENERAL ELECTION SPECIAL: Our in-house psephological expert, WALTER CRONXITE, looks at Croydon’s new constituencies and the uncertain political prospects for some come July 4

Drowning Street: PM Rishi Sunak has a £2.5m media briefing room at No10, but chose to make his election announcement in the rain, without a brolly. And he wants to lead the country…

With a sodden Prime Minister running away from letters of no confidence from his own party’s backbenchers and calling a General Election for July 4, after that washout on the steps of No10 that some national newspapers today have dubbed “Drowning Street” (geddit?), Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives could be facing on wipeout here in south London.

According to polling pundits Electoral Calculus, we are very likely to see no Conservative MPs returned in Bromley, Croydon or Sutton.

But will the particular politics of this part of south London – what we like to call “The Croydon Effect” – really see all Conservative hopes here thwarted? Or will there be a national Tory collapse during the campaign that allows other parties to say that they are the real challengers to Labour in the capital?

This year sees new Parliamentary boundaries, with more seats for London overall and Croydon going from three seats to four – Streatham and Croydon North; Croydon West; Croydon East; and Croydon South, the only Conservative-held seat in the borough currently.

Electoral prospects are already bad for the Conservatives after 14 years of often chaotic misrule, but they could get even worse. According to their in-house website Conservativehome this morning, there’s a “very real risk of the Tory campaign collapsing, taking the future of the party with it”. And “collapse is perhaps the predictable option”.

Suggestions that somewhat desperate Conservative backbench MPs are actively seeking to cancel the election by sending in enough letters of no confidence to the 1922 Committee are seen in rather poor taste, the equivalent to “a mutiny on the Titanic: justified anger at poor leadership, rendered moot by events. The iceberg will not renegotiate the collision”.

So with that background hum of disquiet nationally, let’s look at our various constituencies…

Streatham and Croydon North

In Croydon, Labour are seen by Electoral Calculus as having a 100% chance of winning in Streatham and Croydon North and Croydon West.

New constituency, same Reed: Labour activists were enthusiastic at a meeting addressed by their candidate for the new constituency last night

So, Steve Reed OBE (who has been MP for Lambeth South since 2012) and Sarah Jones (Croydon Central MP since 2017) will be back on those green benches for the two new seats in, according to Electoral Calculus, a Parliament where the Conservatives will only hold 85 seats compared to 472 for Labour and 50 for the Liberal Democrats.

The same calculations show the Greens winning two seats.

If the Conservatives really do look like doing that badly, watch out for the FibDems saying that they are the “real challengers” to Labour in south-west London.

A re-elected Reed will get a great deal of personal satisfaction from representing Streatham, once his home and where he lost out for a Labour nomination in 2008 against Chuka Umunna. The new Streatham and Croydon North seat includes Norbury, Thornton Heath east of the railway line and Upper Norwood, all part of Reed’s existing seat.

Consigned to almost certain defeat, according to Electoral Calculus, will be two councillors: Claire Bonham, the hard-working LibDem councillor for Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood, and Green Party councillor in Lambeth Scott Ainslie. Electoral Calculus sees Ainslie pushing Conservative candidate Antony Boutall into third place.

Candidate: LibDem councillor Claire Bonham

Except Reed, all candidates are expected to secure only modest vote shares here, all more than 50% behind a Labour juggernaut.

It has been rumoured for months that on this “Independents’ Day” election there will be a Muslim independent running, backed by local mosques, aiming to undermine Reed for his stubborn refusal to meet Muslim community leaders to discuss Labour’s support for Israel over Gaza.

The Streatham and Croydon North seat is prosperous in places and has a 60% ABC1 social class composition progressive voting base, people who might vote for other parties non-Tory parties instead of Labour, especially so if the win locally for Labour is seen as such a foregone conclusion.

Croydon West

Handover: MP Sarah Jones, whose Croydon Central constituency is largely re-booted as Croydon East, congratulates selection winner Natasha Irons

The old Croydon Central seat where familiar figures such as Andrew Pelling and Gavin Barwell were Conservative MPs before Sarah Jones won the seat for Labour carried on a wave of Corbynmania seven years ago is mostly to become the new constituency of Croydon East.

Jones has opted to, well… go West.

This gives Jones a very safe Labour seat for her future political life.

Jones’ new constituency runs along the A23 from the top of Purley Way playing fields down to Ikea and across to Thornton Heath Ponds. It includes Selhurst and South Norwood (which confusingly puts the Croydon West seat to the east of Croydon East). The seat also includes Croydon town centre and Broad Green and Waddon wards.

The Greens are expected by Electoral Calculus to come third in this seat, with their campaign narrative likely to be that they are the real challengers to Labour, in an area – much in common with the rest of the borough – still suffering the effects of Labour crashing the council’s finances.

The Green candidate here is Marley King, who ran in the recent London Assembly Elections for Bexley and Bromley, when she came a distant fifth.

Parliamentary ambition: Green Party candidate Marley King

The Conservatives are running Simon Fox, the only Tory councillor in the seat, his having taken a seat from Labour in Waddon ward in 2022 when Andrew Pelling split the vote.

The Liberal Democrats have Jahir Hussain as their candidate. Hussain is the president of a large Tamil Muslim mosque in the heart of the seat at Thornton Heath. He ran for Woodside ward in this month’s council by-election where he came fourth.

George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain may be running a candidate. Respect, with George Galloway links, did very poorly here in the 2012 Croydon North by-election, when Lee Jasper was sixth with 2.9% of the vote and a lost deposit.

Croydon West does have a large Muslim and Tamil population that might give the LibDem the platform to challenge the Greens for second place. However, the seat has 50% of the population not being in social class ABC1 and has white C2, D and E voters who might back the Tories, even if they are in terminal election freefall nationally. Grasping at straws, perhaps, but the Conservatives say that they polled well in Croydon West’s West Thornton ward in the GLA election.

Croydon East

Mr 21%: that’s Jason Cummings’ Council Tax increases, not his vote share

Jones sidestepping the new Croydon East constituency created a vacancy for a Labour candidate, which resulted in allegations of vote-rigging and fraud, and is still the subject of a live investigation.

The only changes to the old Croydon Central seat is the loss of a polling district to the east of Portland Road near Norwood Junction, the loss of the town centre Fairfield ward (to Croydon West) and the mostly affluent Park Hill and Whitgift estates (to Croydon South) and the gain of Tory-supporting Selsdon town centre and Selsdon Vale (from Croydon South).

According to Electoral Calculus, Merton councillor Natasha Irons, eventually named as Labour’s parliamentary candidate, is given a 99% chance of taking this seat, which is clearly no longer the see-sawing marginal that Croydon Central used to be, which once inspired Barwell to write his pot-boiler How To Lose A Marginal Seat.

Irons will probably have to spend most of the next six weeks campaigning introducing herself to her likely constituents, so late was her selection.

Croydon East Constituency Labour Party, which was formed in October 2023, is supposed to finally get round to holding an all-members’ annual meeting tonight – the first that the party’s all-controlling officials have allowed to go ahead, months later than promised. How that meeting conducts its business may give an indication of whether Irons can expect more than token support from the grassroots members.

A bit like in Croydon West, a 45% C2, D and E voter population may boost the vote for Conservative candidate Jason Cummings, the former Woolworths pick ‘n mix manager and yet another former member of Barwell’s staff.

Conservatives say they polled really well in New Addington in the London elections this month, and they hold three of the four council seats there, where Labour used to be strong.

Try, try try again: Andrew Pelling, Tory MP, Labour councillor, is now a LibDem candidate

Cummings’ prospects face two threats. As the council’s cabinet member for finance, he shares responsibility with Croydon Mayor Jason Perry for increasing residents’ Council Tax by 21% in the past 12 months. The other concern for Cummings is that the former MP for the area, Pelling, is running for the Liberal Democrats in his first Parliamentary election since 2010.

Pelling also used to be the councillor for the old Heathfield ward here and seems likely to take a few percentage points off Cummings, especially from the “plague on both their houses” voters who have become disenchanted with Labour at the Town Hall and Tories in Westminster.

Selsdon resident Peter Underwood is running for the Greens in Croydon East. He was fourth in the recent Croydon and Sutton London Assembly election, and he was an encouraging second in the Selsdon Vale and Forestdale by-election in 2022 with a pretty good 24.9% of that vote.

As in Tory-held Croydon South and all the Bromley seats, Electoral Calculus sees Reform coming third in Croydon East, and this may stop Pelling or Underwood breaking past the falling Tories. Reform’s candidate is Scott Holman, who got a poor vote as a Brexit Party candidate in Kingston and Surbiton in 2019, losing his deposit with just 788 votes.

Croydon South

Wash-out: how the right-week magazine captured yesterday’s ill-staged election Announcement

Croydon South, with 72% ABC1s, is a Labour target, and that will make it probably the most interesting of Croydon’s four political battlegrounds over the next six weeks.

With the Tories in freefall nationally, “Congo” Chris Philp, the Conservative Minister for Bungles and Prat-falls, really should be facing a return to his business interests in eastern Europe. But the voting in the London elections earlier this month suggests that “The Croydon Effect” might just come to his rescue.

This will be such a tough contest between Labour and Conservatives that, even if the Conservatives are going down the plug hole, third parties are going to get squeezed here.

Labour’s candidate Ben Taylor is given a 90% chance of winning by Electoral Calculus. This, though, does not take account of Taylor’s history of deeply underwhelming election performances.

Philp, whatever his vote-losing performances in the national media, is seen as a strong incumbent boosted by the ease of contact of having the email addresses for half of the local electorate secured through years of fastidious data-scraping, all paid for by the tax-payers. Having a long-standing and experienced political agent, Coulsdon councillor Ian Parker, also aids Philp’s fight for survival.

Deeply underwhelming: Labour’s Croydon South candidate Ben Taylor

The warning signals are there for Labour. Taylor’s party’s vote share in the London elections was down or little changed compared to three years ago, despite Labour being more than 30% better off compared to the Conservatives in the national opinion polls since May 2021.

The impact of Croydon Labour’s governance problems and the bankrupting of the council was seen, too, in Mrs Anonyvoter, Labour councillor Maddie Henson, dropping the Labour vote below 30% for the first time since 2008 in the Croydon and Sutton London Assembly election.

Waddon ward being taken out of the reconfigured seat will also help Philp hold on.

By definition, those electors who vote only in General Elections will likely pay scant attention to local concerns. They are a lot of the voter base. That London election in Croydon and Sutton had only 4-in-10 of the public even bothering to cast their votes. By contrast, the Croydon South parliamentary 2019 election saw a 70.7% turnout.

The vote-squeezed candidates in Croydon South include Major Rick Howard for the LibDems, who was third in the 2022 Croydon mayoral election. But the LibDems in Croydon have rendered themselves marginal figures, slow to publicise their candidates and confining their campaigning to small patches of the constituency, at the far ends of the seat in Old Coulsdon and in Park Hill and Whitgift. The Liberal Democrats are, as ever, distracted by events in neighbouring Carshalton and Wallington.

The Greens are even quieter than the Liberal Democrats in Croydon South – their candidate is Elaine Garrod.

With old, lost battles, such as Brexit and ULEZ, still irritating the far-right, Philp is liable to lose more votes to Reform than to the more progressive parties.

The Reform Party’s social media says that their candidate is a Hastings councillor called Lucian Fernando, who has featured in the Daily Mail saying that letting road verges go uncut in May is dangerous for motorists in East Sussex. Which sounds like a perfect fit for Croydon South, then…

• For our overview of the seats in neighbouring boroughs and nearby areas, click here

Read more: Scotland Yard’s cyber crime unit investigating Croydon Labour
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
Read more: Don’t panic! MP Philp could lose seat in Tory election wipe-out
Read more: Tories’ election ‘targets’ include new Croydon East seat

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