And then there were five: the Sutton and Cheam candidates face (some) public questioning
Hustings? What hustings?
Across the two constituencies in Sutton, there has been only one public meeting organised ahead of Thursday’s General Election, in the hotly-contested Sutton and Cheam constituency, where it all kicked off when someone posed a question of religion aimed at the LibDem candidate. BERTIE WORCESTER-PARK reports
With the General Election battleground in Carshalton and Wallington pretty much already conceded to the Liberal Democrats, it’s the neighbouring constituency of Sutton and Cheam that’s on a knife edge, with the LibDems trying to overcome a Tory majority of 8,351 from 2019, when Paul Scully retained his seat for the Conservatives.
Labour, too, are injecting proper campaign resources here for the first time in many years, but will still need an enormous shift in voting patterns to overtake the Conservatives and LibDems.
There are six candidates in Sutton and Cheam, and five were invited to hustings organised by Churches Together and held at Sutton Baptist Church on Saturday. The Reform UK candidate, Ryan Powell, didn’t respond to the invitation and didn’t turn up, another sign that that party is more interested in mischief-making than any real intention to serve the people. His absence was, nevertheless, surprising considering that Sutton and Cheam voted in for Brexit in 2016.
Independent Kingsley Hamilton had to fight to get a seat on the panel, as the organisers originally only invited the “major” parties. They relented, but the moderator, Jeff Richards, constantly addressed Kingsley as “Hamilton”. He may have only himself to blame for that: on the ballot paper, the candidate has styled himself “Action-Man Kingsley, Hamilton”.
Exiled Tory: self-styled ‘Action Man’ Kingsley Hamilton
Hamilton is standing to spite the Conservatives. He was a Conservative Party member but stood as an independent against Tory Catherine Gray in the recent St Helier West council by-election. The Tories won the council seat from Labour (just consider that, in 2024), scraping home by just seven votes from the LibDems. Hamilton, after getting 367 votes for his troubles, was duly expelled from the Conservative Party.
The programme for the hustings was far too long, with 12 questions and therefore 60 answers: two and a half hours on a church pew was a stretch for many in the audience of around 100, many of them party activists and supporters. Several members of the public drifted away. One actually shouted at the moderator to get a move on.
Some of the questions were unnecessarily complex. The candidates often seemed bemused by the over-cleverly-crafted questions. This was reflected in their occasionally strange answers.
Opening statements were predictably predictable, and bland.
But the Tory, Tom Drummond, used the platform to launch an attack on his main rival, LibDem Luke Taylor. This is Taylor’s third time of trying to get elected as an MP, having previously tried and failed in Battersea and then Mitcham and Morden. “I was a resident who became a politician. I wasn’t a politician that became a resident,” said Drummond, pointedly.
During the hustings, the candidates’ answers would often be nebulous, with the panel members almost redefining the question to suit their party’s approaches.
It was when we got to the third question of the night that there was a sense that a lot of the audience – or at least the Tories in the audience – were hoping would come up. It was clearly aimed at Taylor, and had a heavily critical tone that might be expected in a church, at a hustings organised by churches.
It was also, perhaps, the epitome of a leading question.
“How can any Christian in Sutton and Cheam vote for you with integrity when you have deselected a chosen candidate on account of his Christian beliefs? How can you call yourself democrats when you have done something as shockingly illiberal and as discriminatory as this? Is it appropriate for political parties to deselect candidates for holding religious beliefs?”
The question even got a round of applause. The questioner had just led the metaphorical elephant into the middle of the room.
Ringleader: Luke Taylor was uncomfortable when asked the inevitable question
The background has been national news, as well as well-reported here on Inside Sutton.
The Daily Telegraph, Independent, The Times and many others have reported how David Campanale, an award-winning BBC journalist, was selected as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Sutton and Cheam in December 2021, but then was subject to a campaign to deselect him.
Campanale has alleged that Sutton LibDems did this as they wanted to create a “secular” party, and that he, a former member of the Christian People’s Alliance party, was labelled a “religious nutter”.
Campanale is suing the Liberal Democrats over his deselection, and his legal papers identify Luke Taylor as a “ringleader” in the campaign against him.
And here we were at the Sutton and Cheam hustings, with Taylor on the platform as the LibDems’ General Election candidate. Faced with a direct question over the Campanale issue, Taylor fudged it, hiding behind the ongoing legal case.
He claimed it was Campanale’s politics, not his religion, that led to his deselection. “The Liberal Democrats have many Christians in our ranks. All of our London MPs are practising and very vocal Christians.” Tell that to Tim Farron…
“I knew of his faith, but I did not know of his extensive political background and his political views. Any suggestion that his deselection was motivated by faith is for the birds,” Taylor said.
Taylor’s fellow panel members smelt blood. Their responses were uniformly that people’s religious beliefs should not be discriminated against, “unless they are preaching hate and prejudice”, as Tracey Hague (sitting in for the Greens’ absent Aasha Adam) succinctly put it. Labour’s Chrishni Reshekaron, a councillor in Croydon, demonstrated her local credentials (she grew up in Sutton) by giving an example of a former Sutton Labour councillor who held strong religious views but who remained welcome in the party.
But it was Drummond who put the knife in.
‘I agree with Chrishni’: Tom Drummond takes issue with Taylor’s excuses and backs the response from Labour’s candidate
“I find that last answer extraordinary,” Drummond, the leader of the Conservative group on Sutton council, said in response to Taylor’s fudge. “It took a simple Google search to find out David Campanale’s history.
“So why would you not have looked at the candidate? If that’s your due diligence, then we have to question what your due diligence is like in all other aspects. And I think an MP should do better than that.” Ouch.
“I would also say it takes something to bring Labour and the Conservatives together in absolute unity, and I agree with everything Chrishni said.” Double ouch.
What galls many Liberal Democrats in Sutton is that Taylor, who lost the original nomination to Campanale, who may or may not have been the “ringleader” in the deselection, ended up being the principal beneficiary.
Taylor has a history of harassment of political opponents, including having his Twitter account suspended for violating rules that ban abuse. This included calling opponents “scumbags and liars”, and a “festering sack of excrement”, all duly screengrabbed before Taylor got round to deleting them. Taylor described MPs Paul Scully and Elliot Colburn (both Conservatives) as “cancer”.
At the hustings, the responses from other candidates, and shouts from the audience, rattled Taylor. His behaviour became belligerent, with eyes rolling, lots of harrumphing and clownish gesticulation as his fellow panel members delivered their answers. And there were still another nine questions still to go…
On St Helier Hospital, the usual party-line squabbles were repeated. No one will admit to wanting to close down the area’s biggest hospital, but none of the candidates could say how it might be properly funded.
Public transport saw most agree that Sutton was treated unfairly, with calls for more frequent trains to London, for a tram extension to be funded and for more frequent buses. Transport for London’s proposal to change the SL7 SuperLoop bus between Croydon and Heathrow to terminate at Sutton, with the Sutton-Croydon section served by the single-decker SL5, also came under attack.
The final statements, made to a weary, depleted audience, after a mere two-and-a-half hours, were just as predictable as the opening comments.
Taylor, up first, had written his comments on the back of a Liberal Democrat campaign poster which he gleefully pointed towards the audience. According to Taylor, the Liberal Democrats weren’t the Tories or Labour, but a third way.
Reshekaron claimed the polls were showing that Labour had a realistic chance of winning in Sutton (they don’t). Hague said the Greens were the only party to ask the questions nobody else would, and that they stood for social, racial and environmental justice.
Drummond focused on the track record of LibDem-controlled Sutton Council as a measure of whether Taylor really would be a “local champion”, citing ULEZ, parking zones and charges, low-traffic neighbourhoods and bus gates. The Conservatives, wherever they stand, never manage to come to terms with the correlation between car use and climate crisis.
Hamilton pointed out that he had been on television regularly… “I do bend the rules a little bit,” he said, indicating perhaps an unrecognised qualification to be an MP.
Farage’s Racist UK said nothing. They didn’t turn up.
These hustings weren’t the best for the pretender to the crown, Luke Taylor. There’s still a lot more to come from the Campanale affair which, were Taylor to win the election, could cast a huge and damaging shadow over his legitimacy as an MP.
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