By WALTER CRONXITE, political editor
Piece of cake: Chris Philp, centre, on regional telly yesterday morning, being given a pre-election visibility denied his challengers in Croydon South
There might be a reason for Tory minister Chris Philp appearing more chipper over the prospect of his chomping down on some chocolate cake on regional telly yesterday morning: he may have just seen the latest, large-scale opinion poll results, which suggests that he is within 2% of his Labour rival in the contest to be Croydon South’s next MP.
That may seem like grasping at straws for someone who had a 12,000-vote majority at the 2019 General Election, but this time around, that 2% figure is the closest that Croydon Tories have had to “good news” for many months.
Today marks 10 days to go until election day on July 4, and the most recent poll from YouGov suggests that Philp might yet pull off a Houdini escape act and hold on to his Croydon South seat – just as his party is facing an electoral wipe-out, including Tory colleagues (and staffers) slumping to embarrassing defeats in Croydon and Sutton, some even at risk of losing their deposits.
YouGov sees the Croydon South seat, where Philp has been MP since 2015, as a “Toss Up” between the two major parties. Labour’s Ben Taylor is just two points ahead of the Tory incumbent on 39% to Philp’s 37%.
And none of these large-scale national election polls ever take account of “the Croydon factor” – where the impact of the Labour-led council’s financial collapse in 2020 Croydon deters voters from switching to Labour.
YouGov’s MRP opinion poll (multi-level regression and post stratification, in case you were wondering) had a total sample size of 39,979 voters. The poll is big enough to extrapolate and cross reference from opinions nationwide by factors like gender, age, ethnicity, past voting record, occupation and income, supposedly to reapply them proportionately to the particular make up of the population of seats. Information gleaned in the 2021 census is of particular help to pollsters in this respect.
None of it factors in Tony Newman, Paul Scott, Alison Butler and Brick by Brick, though…
Written out of history: Tony Newman and his Numpties never happened, according to Labour’s General Election candidates in Croydon
The polling emerged at the same time that reports appeared that Conservative High Command was pulling back its campaign support for lost causes around the country and directing candidates in seats they seem bound to lose to go and campaign instead in the remaining marginals where’s there at least a sniff of a chance they might hang on.
LBC’s Tory politics pundit Iain Dale – who wanted to run for election in Tunbridge Wells until it emerged that he’s said live on air that he didn’t like living in the place… – wrote yesterday: “If what I am hearing is right, CCHQ has more or less given up the ghost.
“I have heard of three candidates in Tory-held seats with majorities of between 4,000 and 6,000 who have been ordered to shut down their campaigns and redeploy themselves to help cabinet ministers with majorities in excess of 20,000.
“And if they refuse, their computer logins to the party systems are cancelled and they’re told they won’t remain on the candidates list after the election.”
Those orders seem likely to apply to Conservative candidates like Simon Fox (the Waddon councillor and parliamentary assistant to Philp), who was only ever really a paper candidate in Croydon West, and former private school teacher Anthony Boutall in Streatham and Croydon North. Both Tories are being predicted to finish only fifth in their respective seats.
The Financial Times compares the 2019 Tory election victory to the forecasted “Starmer-geddon” approaching next week: “A number of so-called MRP polls… paint a picture of devastation for the Tories in some of the richest areas of Britain, including the London commuter belt. In the capital itself, a wealthy European megalopolis, the Tories face an almost complete wipeout.
“Opposition parties are trying to exploit resentment towards the Conservatives. Sir Ed Davey, whose centrist Liberal Democrats hope to be the beneficiaries of Tory woes in the south, tells the Financial Times: ‘The Tories are anti-university, anti-business, anti-London.’ He adds: ‘It’s a really negative message’.”
Re-drawing the map: how the FT’s graphics department has applied the latest YouGov polling figures
The newspaper also quotes David Gauke, one of the more reasonable Tory ministers purged under Boris Johnson, as saying, “The impression the Conservative Party gives at the moment is of being hostile to young people, international business and often hostile towards London and its metropolitan values.”
And they also get down and dirty with a couple of ex-MPs from sarf London. “For Paul Scully, minister for London from 2020 to 2023, it is not surprising that people who live and work in the capital are turning their backs on the Tories, given that the party appears to have prioritised trying to cling on to working-class, socially conservative voters who backed Johnson in 2019,” the FT says.
“’It’s frustrating,’ he says, admitting that he has to fight perceptions that the Conservatives do not like London. ‘It has been a lonely battle.’ By focusing on this one core group of voters, he says, it has ended up excluding many others. The party ‘is getting smaller and smaller’.
“Asked about the party’s troubles with more prosperous voters, Sir Bob Neill, until recently the Tory chair of the House of Commons justice committee [and MP in Bromley], has a succinct response: ‘There’s one answer to that: Brexit’.”
Yet despite Tory officials switching the party’s resources to not-quite-lost-causes, in Croydon South Philp is still struggling to get many people out canvassing for him.
Those cringe-worthy selfies of politicians, where they claim to be “talking to the people”, usually show Philp surrounded by his Conservative councillor mates, together with the borough’s £82,000 per year executive Mayor, who appears to have taken a long-term leave of absence. Indeed, part-time Perry and most of the borough’s councillors appear to have been doing more party campaigning than council work since the start of March, when the London election campaign began.
Not many friends: Philp in one of his recent campaign selfies. Three of his five ‘supporters’ are Conservative councillors, one of whom is actually paid to be his election agent
Labour’s pictures, too, are usually jammed with councillors surrounding the candidate. But there are party members out canvassing, too, from elsewhere in south London. Labour’s social media is full of implied giggles about how far Labour is reaching out into the opulently verdant Croydon South.
Labour’s social media is, in short, triumphalist regarding Croydon South as a done deal.
Other unlikely targets deeper into Surrey have been eyed, too, including Reigate, where Croydon resident Stuart Brady is the party’s energetic candidate.
Such apparent advances in the polls, though, have prompted some complacency and arrogance among some of Labour’s hand-picked and approved candidates.
The party appears to have briefed its candidates to keep schtum about its recent failures with Croydon Council, to dismiss it as unimportant (seriously!) or claim it was, “Nuffink to do wiv me, guv”.
Sarah Jones, in Croydon West, has refused to answer questions from this website about the council’s financial collapse. Steve Reed, now focused on the Streatham bit of his new constituency, is barely ever seen in Croydon these days except for the occasional set-piece photo with the party’s candidate outside a Croydon South railway station.
With Labour steaming ahead towards a super-majority at Westminster, and the likes of in-denial Irons and Newman apologists Reed and Jones having super-majorities in their constituencies, the notion that anyone will ever be held to account for what they did to this borough from 2014 to 2020 becomes diminishingly slim.
“Labour has thrown the kitchen sink at Croydon South,” according to one party activist on the ground. Yet even that might not be enough to persuade the conservative (small “c”) voters of Kenley, Purley and Coulsdon to switch their votes to the party of Tony Newman, Alison Butler and Brick by Brick.
They’ve thrown the kitchen sink at Croydon South: Labour candidate Ben Taylor (fifth from left) at Purley Station yesterday, joined by Ellie Reeves, a member of the controversial Labour Friends of Israel group. Taylor has been telling voters that the 2020 council financial collapse under Labour was nothing to do with him…
One retired Croydon political activist told Inside Croydon, “Philp will be portrayed as a hero if he pulls this one off. And with the extinction-level event predicted for Philp’s caninet colleagues, such as Penny Mordaunt and Jacob Rees-Mogg, if Philp does survive, his seniority within the Conservative parliamentary party of 2024-2029 could see him play a significant part.
In reality, as the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election result showed, it’s harder for Labour to make progress on the very fringes of outer London. Steve Reed OBE’s usual poor judgement as the campaign manager in Uxbridge will also have hurt Labour there. “The Croydon Factor” of Labour bankrupting the borough will also help Philp at the margin – maybe a margin that proves decisive.
Ben Taylor’s mendacious script on the doorstep when meeting prospective voters is that he is nothing to do with Croydon Labour’s recent past. Which, even were that true (Taylor was an activist and among the party’s candidates selected for the 2022 local elections; he proceeded to deliver Labour’s worst-ever result in Croydon Town Hall election history), is hardly the kind of robust, responsible take that might reassure the better-informed voters.
The full You Gov poll suggested vote shares in Croydon South are
Labour 39%
Conservatives 37%
Reform 10%
Liberal Democrats 8%
Green 5%
Others 1%
The Greens’ poor performance is repeated in Croydon East, where their candidate Peter Underwood is predicted to play out a contest for the wooden spoon contest with Andrew Pelling, this time round standing for the Liberal Democrats.
Little, or nothing, has been seen of any of the Reform UK candidates in Croydon that Richard Tice has stumped up £500 a time for as their election deposits, as the racist party relies on racist Nigel Farage’s frequent media appearances to garner them support – which again might be just enough to dent Philp’s re-election hopes.
Direct messaging: Ria Patel, in Croydon West, has clear messaging for voters
Jason Cummings, the former Woolworth’s Pick ‘n Mix manager who is standing in Croydon East for the Conservatives, told those hustings last week that he does not expect to win. According to the YouGov poll, he is at risk of losing out to New Addington resident Scott Holman, of Reform. Labour’s Irons is on 47%, in an area which, until 2017, regularly returned Conservative MPs.
The Conservatives, according to YouGov, are on just 7% in Fox’s Croydon West, where Labour’s Sarah Jones in on 60%, and in Streatham and Croydon North, where Reed is polling at 58%. Parties have to poll 5% to ensure the return of that £500 deposit.
The implosion of the Tory vote in the north of Croydon will vacate the space for other parties to challenge for council seats in 2026. That challenge will not come from The Taking The Piss Party, who share the dregs of just 2% of the vote with the Workers Party and TUSC.
Over in Carshalton and Wallington, where the LibDems have directed their activists to campaign rather than in Croydon, Bobby Dean and his dog Chester are set to score the highest ever share for any political party in the seat in this configuration – 57%. Tory Elliot Colburn, having scraped into parliament with a majority of a few hundred in 2019, looks like he’ll be seeking a new job come July 8.
Luke Taylor, the LibDems’ carpet-bagger standing this time in Sutton and Cheam, looks set to win the seat back from the Tories is a tighter contest, by 39% to 30% for Tory Tom Drummond.
Read more: Tory election candidate warned by police over dodgy leaflet
Read more: Poundshop politician who puts the ‘sham’ into shambolic
Read more: Voters being taken for granted as ‘battleground’ moves south
Read more: Younger people have had their futures sold down the river
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