Temporary fascia: from left MP Sarah Jones, Maddie ‘Mrs Anonyvoter’ Henson, Ben Taylor and Natasha Irons outside Labour’s ‘Nuts!’ office in Coulsdon
Embroiled in a series of controversies, the latest being the cover-up of the vote rigging for their own Croydon East parliamentary selection, the local Labour Party blundered into a cover-up of a different sort in Coulsdon on Saturday. And no, this is not an April Fools’ gag.
Standing in front of a disused high street shop, MP Sarah Jones and election candidates Ben Taylor, Maddie Henson and Natasha Irons proudly “unveiled” their party’s new campaign offices, under a banner of Croydon South Labour Party.
Trouble is, the temporary Labour banner has been strung across the front of the shop’s former business: Guitar Nuts!, and the “Nuts!” can still be clearly seen despite Labour’s best efforts at a cover-up. It doesn’t take much to read a hidden message into it all…
Ordinary Croydon residents beware: Saturday marked the formal beginning of the campaigning season, through to London elections day on May 2 and then onwards to a General Election sometime later this year.
Playing a different tune: Guitar Nuts! in Coulsdon has been long-closed, and now is home to the Labour Party
The respective fortunes of the two major parties can be judged by the turnouts at their campaign events on Saturday.
A few miles north of Coulsdon, Croydon’s Conservatives were out and about in Park Hill with their deeply underwhelming, Trumpian London Mayoral candidate, Susan Hall.
Hall’s recognition levels, even among Tory voters, is subterraneanly low, but this abject turnout for one of the party’s “stars” will have been a shocking forewarning of things to come for the likes of the Conservatives’ parliamentary candidate in Croydon East, Jason “Mr 15% Council Tax Hike” Cummings.
There were fewer than 20 present, and they included piss-poor Perry, the Mayor of Croydon, and a smattering of candidate wannabes. The group was otherwise made up of mostly councillors (who effectively get paid out of the public purse to waste their time at events like this).
Low turn-out: this rag-tag assemblage of mostly councillors and candidates is all Croydon Tories could muster for Susan Hall on Saturday
So underwhelming was the photo-call that the Conservatives’ Mayoral candidate did not think it worth tweeting about it in the two days that followed…
The weekend’s polling results, which showed that in the next Parliament, the Conservatives would be reduced to just 98 MPs, had not been published by the time of Hall’s dull visit to Croydon, though she will have had her party’s own figures to confirm that she, too, will be struggling at the ballot boxes in a month’s time.
Tory Central Office may have moved into a state of battle readiness for a General Election (the latest speculation is that it could be held in July), certainly if Chris Philp’s conduct is anything to go by.
Philp has been the MP for Croydon South since 2015, during which time he has not held regular constituency surgeries (residents have to “book” an appointment), while he has fronted local campaigns against social housing in the Purley “Skyscraper” and in favour of a high-cost elderly housing scheme in the even bigger Purley Old Folks’ Home, while pursuing his career at Westminster as an ever-willing media punchbag on behalf of criminals such as Boris Johnson and idiots like Liz Truss.
Doubled your mortgage: Tory MP Chris Philp
In 2022, Philp was Chief Secretary to the Treasury when Kamikwasi Kwarteng crashed the economy with his Trussonomics Budget. Since then, anyone with a mortgage in Philp’s constituency will have seen their monthly payments almost double, while also contending with resulting 11% Cost of Living Crisis inflation.
Among the prominent Conservative MPs liable to lose their seats if the polling is anywhere near accurate are the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, the next cab-off-the-rank as far as Tory leadership contenders go, and Michael Gove (no great loss) and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt from what had always been seen as true-blue Tory safe seats in the Surrey stockbroker belt.
Some of those projected as losing seats had majorities of 27,000 at the last General Election in 2019. Philp’s was 12,000, and according to the pollsters, the millionaire businessman who has refused to publish his tax returns could struggle to cling on to his cushty little part-time job at Westminster.
In his latest email to constituents, Philp has taken to describing himself as “An active local MP”, which most would regard as a bit of a stretch, and claiming that he is “Working hard for Croydon South”.
According to one local Tory source, “That makes it look very much like Tory Central Office has told MPs to prepare for the General Election campaign.”
Absent friends: Labour had a decent enough turn-out of paid councillors and candidates in Coulsdon on Saturday. But where was MP Steve Reed OBE? Or chair of the neighbouring CLP, Carole Bonner?
Labour feel that they have a chance to unseat Philp. The campaign office in Coulsdon is one signal: this is the first time that they’ve had such a presence in the south of the borough, although the temporary signage does give the sense that there are no plans to extend what is likely to be a short-term lease.
The party has barely bothered to campaign at all in the constituency that includes Purley, Kenley, Sanderstead, Selsdon, South Croydon and Coulsdon in previous elections going back at least 20 years – since the days of Gerry Ryan running Tricky Dicky Ottaway close(-ish) in the first flush of Blairism in 2001.
The boundary changes make Croydon South a stronger Tory seat (Waddon has been hived off to Croydon West, for instance), but will the perceived threat to Philp see the Conservatives redirect their campaign resources away from Croydon’s other constituencies, including Croydon East?
Matters for Labour in Croydon, meanwhile, are far from straightforward. There remains deep-seated resentment among residents of how Labour crashed the council’s finances, and there is growing awareness of the fixes and fiddles that the party indulges itself in internally, most notably the latest scandal in Croydon East.
And for all the display of unity outside the Coulsdon guitar shop on Saturday, there were some notable absentees.
Labour was showing off its election candidates, including Natasha Irons (who was eventually chosen by members in Croydon East), Melanie Felton and Jess Hammersley-Rich (both hand-picked for borough by-elections by Starmerite regional party apparatchiks), and Mrs Anonyvoter, Maddie Henson, the GLA candidate whose “election” was conducted entirely by… ahem… her own company’s online voting system, Anonyvoter.
Unexplained was the absence from this little gathering of one of Labour’s two current Croydon MPs, Steve Reed OBE. Or Joel Bodmer, the candidate at the centre of the vote-rigging allegations. Or Carole Bonner, the interim chair of the scandal-hit neighbouring constituency, Croydon East.
Now why might that be?
Read more: Scotland Yard’s cyber crime unit investigating Croydon Labour
Read more:#TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
Read more: Anonyvoter’s co-owner wins Labour vote held on Anonyvoter
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
