Even the right-wing press doesn’t much care for the Harrow hairdresser. By our political editor, WALTER CRONXITE
This is a slap in the face for Conservative candidate Susan Hall, but not undeserved and certainly overdue.
The Evening Boris is not called that without good reason: the commuter’s evening paper, a favourite of City workers on their journeys home to the suburbs and stockbroker belt, has long been Tory supporting. It is owned by a Russian billionaire who was made a peer by Boris Johnson and until recently had former Tory Chancellor Gideon Osborne as its editor.
So for the Standard, on the eve of the election, to endorse Labour’s Khan is quite a move, and reflects very harshly on Hall as a Conservative candidate, and on her party for selecting her.
The Standard endorsement does not come without caveats. Khan’s eight years at City Hall has not been without its downsides.
But when the Conservatives have nothing to offer Londoners and they have framed almost their entire campaign around their counter-factual, illogical opposition to one measure, ULEZ expansion, they really left Dylan Jones, the newspaper’s editor, and his editorial staff no where to go. The Standard is an enthusiastic supporter of Mayor Khan’s ULEZ extension.
Knock-out blow: if Susan Hall can’t win over the right-wing Evening Boris…
It seems entirely impossible that Jones won’t have cleared this last-minute intervention with his proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev.
It is a low-risk editorial punt: the newspaper knows that they will have to work with Mayor Khan for another four years.
They have published their support on a day when polling suggests that Hall has got as close to Khan as she has ever been, with the gap down to 10%. In any other election, a 10% margin for the winner would be embraced as a magnificent achievement.
Hall’s campaign, the Standard says, critically, “does not appear close to being enough to win over the floating voters any Conservative candidate must secure to be competitive in the capital”.
Hall is the hairdresser from Harrow who, politically, is just a fringe figure. Although a London Assembly Member, she has never personally been elected to City Hall, but has relied on the capital’s party list system to jump aboard the gravy train.
The Standard describes the Conservative selection that arrived at Hall as their candidate as “chaos”, and suggests that they would have been happier if Paul Scully, the MP for Sutton and Cheam, had been the choice.
Hall’s “campaign has proved to be uneven at best, not aided by a lack of support from a national party which all too often affords the impression of having given up on the capital,” they say. And that’s without mentioning Hall’s overt support for Donald Trump and far-right extremists in this country.
Never convinced: the Standard has not taken to the vacuous (at best) Susan Hall
On housing, “Londoners continue to be priced out of their own city”, the paper observes, correctly, of the Mayor’s struggles in a housing environment framed by the disastrous Right To Buy.
But Khan’s “biggest weakness is undoubtedly crime”, they say, “with knife crime having risen significantly since 2016 and jumped 20% in the most recent annual figures covering the 12 months to the end of last December”.
The paper continues: “Still, Khan can point to some significant policy achievements. First on air pollution, a silent killer on London’s streets. On transport, the Mayor remained a champion for the Elizabeth Line in its difficult stages and can take his share of credit for the remarkable turnaround in Transport for London’s finances, which were on life-support following the pandemic.”
The paper calls out the Conservative Government for its anti-democratic move to change the mayoral voting system: “The decision by the Government to switch the electoral system to first-past-the-post dictates that voters realistically have only one of two levers to pull: Labour or Conservative. This theoretically increases the chances of an upset.”
The inference is that even that stunt won’t be enough to salvage Hall’s chances of success. The paper fails to mention any of the 11 other mayoral candidates, not even Count Binface, although the Greens’ Zoe Garbett and LibDem Rob Blackie get to be caricatured in the paper’s cartoon.
The Standard says, “Of course, this election is ultimately about the future. Who can work more closely with what is likely to be a Labour government, secure the investment and demand the greater powers the capital needs to thrive as a global city in the 21st century?
“In a straight choice, we believe that person is Khan.”
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