CROYDON EAST SELECTION: After more than six months of scandal and voter fraud, grassroots party members finally got to have their say this morning over who their parliamentary candidate will be.
By STEVEN DOWNES

Irons works: after a five-month delay, Merton councillor Natasha Irons was today selected as Labour’s Croydon East candidate

Natasha Irons was this morning selected as the Labour Party’s parliamentary candidate for Croydon East and, very likely, will soon become the MP for the new constituency.

Irons, 41, is a cabinet member in Labour-run Merton Council, where she has been a councillor since 2018. Irons has worked as a media planning manager at Channel 4 since 2011.

Irons had previously tried to get selected as a parliamentary candidate in Croydon, but was rejected by Croydon South’s members, who instead opted for the worst-performing Labour council election candidate in the borough’s history.

Irons gave a tearful acceptance speech after it was announced that she had won on the first ballot, with more than 50% of the vote.

To the evident relief of hundreds of party members who gathered for the selection meeting at Coloma girls’ school this morning, they finally got to have some say in the process, after months of controversy, allegations of vote-rigging, and while their local party is subject to a police investigation.

Inside Croydon broke the news earlier this week that the Metropolitan Police’s cyber crime unit is conducting the investigation into Labour’s Croydon East selection, which was abruptly halted last November when complaints were made that the local party’s membership lists had been tampered with.

At the start of this month, Labour confirmed that an internal investigation had found that there had been electoral fraud in Croydon East.

After a five-month hiatus, Labour only re-started the selection process earlier this month, but with one of the four short-listed candidates, Unison union official Joel Bodmer, no longer in the contest, leaving Johnson Situ, Olga Fitzroy and Natasha Irons to face the local members today.

Red suit: Lambeth councillor Olga Fitzroy

Today’s hustings represented an end-game of sorts, at least as far as getting a candidate selected.

It was the first time that the members of the new Croydon East Constituency Labour Party had been allowed to meet in the six months since the CLP was formed. But this meeting was called and conducted by officials from Labour’s London Region. After all that’s been going on in Croydon, local officials weren’t trusted with that task – even the ones that London Region itself had installed as recently as last October.

The meeting was held against a backdrop of further allegations of vote-rigging elsewhere in London, with Sam Tarry, the MP for Ilford South, threatening legal action against the Labour Party over the conduct of the selection process in his constituency.

In Croydon East, it was discovered that 120 out of around 500 members in the CLP had had their details – address, phone number or email – changed on the local party’s membership database without their knowledge or consent ahead of the originally planned selection meeting last November.

And at least 30 “postal” votes had been cast by email without the members’ knowledge – potentially very handy when it comes to a tightly contested selection…

All of those previous votes, using the controversial Anonyvoter system, were voided. A fresh process was run this week, with the deadline for remote votes yesterday.

In a letter from London Region’s Lucy Atkinson, the three remaining candidates were instructed that their supporters could gather outside the meeting hall from 10.15am, and that they would be allowed to leaflet the selectorate as they arrived for the meeting that was due to start at 11am.

Saturday class: Coloma girls’ school was used for the selection meeting

Chairing the meeting was London Region vice-chair Shama Tatler, a councillor all the way from Brent.

Carole Bonner, the former local councillor who was the interim chair of the CLP, was nowhere to be seen at the meeting. Nor were “Mr and Mrs Anonyvoter”, Mark Henson, Croydon East’s interim treasurer and his wife, Maddie, the directors of the company that supplies the voting system to the Labour Party. This despite Maddie Henson recently being announced as the party’s candidate for Croydon and Sutton in May’s GLA elections.

Melanie Felton, the interim CLP secretary, was present, although she played no admin role in the proceedings.

The candidates had each been allowed to nominate an observer to keep an eye on the process, and their first task had been to count all the votes cast using Anonyvoter.

Outsider: Shama Tatler from Labour’s London Region chaired the meeting

Situ, who works at City Hall on Mayor Sadiq Khan’s comms team, arrived in a blue suit with a red tie, while Irons accessorised with a scarlet scarf. Fitzroy outdid both in the party loyalty sartorial stakes, though, wearing a bright red trouser suit.

Sarah Jones, the MP for Croydon Central since 2017, and fresh from her latest appearance on BBC Question Time, mingled among the members as they arrived. Croydon East’s new constituency is formed largely of Jones’s patch – the wards of Addiscombe East, Addiscombe West, New Addington North, New Addington South, Selsdon and Addington Village, Selsdon Vale and Forestdale, Shirley North, Shirley South and parts of Woodside, but not Croydon town centre.

Following boundary changes, Jones has opted to be Labour’s candidate in the new Croydon West seat (there was no members’ selection meeting there), which is reckoned to be safer than Croydon East. Nevertheless, Electoral Calculus reckon Croydon East is 98% likely to be a Labour seat at the General Election.

Hence the competition to be chosen as the candidate.

And now all Natasha Irons has to do is win over the voters in Croydon East, and persuade them that despite being picked in the middle of a criminal investigation for the same party that bankrupted the borough, she really can represent the constituents in an effective manner.

The Greens (Peter Underwood) and Tories (Jason Cummings) selected their candidates for Croydon East last year.

Read more: Scotland Yard’s cyber crime unit investigating Croydon Labour
Read more: Labour admits serious breach of private data in Croydon East
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection

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