Nothing much to shout about: Chris Philp, returned as MP for Croydon South, surrounded by the entire membership of the Croydon Tories last night
No sooner had human punchbag ‘Congo’ Chris Philp managed to cling on to his Croydon South seat, the Evening Standard was bigging him up as a Conservative leadership contender.
Political editor WALTER CRONXITE reports
The Evening Standard, a doomed city centre news rag that seems to think that London ends on the northern banks of the River Thames, described Chris Philp’s Conservative “hold” in Croydon South at the General Election as “a shock”.
Seriously?: no wonder this newspaper is going out of business
It would only be a shock to anyone who did not account for “the Croydon Effect”, and how the residents of Sanderstead, Purley, Kenley and Coulsdon would never bring themselves to vote for Labour, the party that laid waste to their borough.
Given that lack of informed judgement at the Sub-Standard, you can probably discount the paper’s odd attempt at a follow-up by suggesting that Philp is now a contender to become the next leader of the Conservative Party.
Imagine that. Johnson. Truss. Sunak. Philp…
Indeed, in their eagerness for a “line”, any “line”, the Standard reporter managed to ignore Philp’s own, half-hearted polite rebuttal.
The paper reports today: “Asked whether he will run for the Conservative leadership, he said: ‘I haven’t even thought about that yet, let’s just see how the dust settles. But who knows?’”
Which to any sensible journalist would be a line not worth inflicting on any sensible editor.
Croydon South was the only constituency in our area that was actually in play in yesterday’s General Election, as Labour threw the kitchen sink at trying to get two-time loser Ben Taylor over the line as part of the party’s national landslide.
Taylor had been a pretty hopeless candidate at council level, losing two local elections in short order, including delivering the worst result for Labour in the 60-plus-year history of the current borough of Croydon.
One Croydon South resident described Labour’s Taylor as a “political fantasist”.
“The guy knocked on my door on three separate occasions and made identical nonsensical claims,” they said.
Croydon South has only ever been held by the Conservatives since it was created in 1974. Philp, first elected in 2015, had a 12,339-vote majority in 2019. Under the twin threat of Labour and Reform, he got back last night by 2,313 votes. So much for the BBC’s ecit poll, that said he had only a 1% chance of winning.
“All of the MRP polls, and the exit poll, said that we would lose Croydon South,” Philp said. “We have bucked the trend – the result here was a lot better than many other places around the country.”
No shock to us: how Inside Croydon reported on the Croydon South election 10 days before polling day
John Crace, the Grauniad’s parliamentary sketch-writer, and Victoria Derbyshire, the presenter of BBC Newsnight, may both be breathing their own sighs of relief at Philp’s parliamentary survival, for their own selfish reasons and the prospect of comedy gold in the coming months.
After refusing to answer Inside Croydon’s Election Questions, this morning Philp, now an opposition MP, told this website: “I’d like to thank all the people who voted for me in Croydon South and supported the campaign. We won despite all the predictions that we would lose, and succeeded very much against the odds.
“It was an intense campaign – walking hundreds of miles, delivering tens of thousands of leaflets and knocking on thousands of doors. I will not forget the rapid clean-up operation required of our Purley office and garden ahead of the (then) Prime Minister’s visit on Wednesday either.
Same old song: Philp making his acceptance speech last night, watched by loser Ben Taylor
“I will continue to work hard to get things done for the local neighbourhood, working with Mayor Jason Perry and others.
“I will continue to press for delivery of a new pool for Purley and a new medical centre and banking hub for Coulsdon, more police for the town and district centres and the use of live facial recognition to catch wanted criminals, as well as pressing for the rapid commencement of the Westfield project and fighting to protect the character of the area from over-development – amongst many other things.
“I will also continue to seek to help residents with any problems they have which I can assist with.”
Read more: Voters being taken for granted as ‘battleground’ moves south
Read more: Younger people have had their futures sold down the river
Read more: Desperate times, desperate measures: PM Sunak visits Purley
Read more: Coulsdon flats deal was rushed through as massive tax dodge
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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
What an election contest this is going to be to lead the Tories after this election.
With the likes of Philp, Badendoch, Braverman & Jenrick. A group of men and women trying to discover a likeable personality.
You may not think any Tory has a ‘likeable personality’ but what do you thinik of the Toolmalker’s Son? Does he have one? Hard to tell.
There’s been some insane nonsense spoken in this election, but that is the mentalist bollox yet.
Don’t forget this is the party that elected Liz Truss as leader. Anything is possible, particularly now.
Any snake oil salesperson will do…
That said perhaps some of the others might look at how she managed to lose her rock solid majority seat with a -43% swing and learn something. At least Kwasi had the common sense to fall on his sword rather than wait for such a brutal electoral decapitation. I mean, that’s got to be some kind of record.
Nigel Farage was a member of the Conservative Party from 1978 until 1992. Oddschecker https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-conservative-leader have him on as low as 8 to 1, if you like a flutter on who will take over when Sunak resigns or is dumped.
Philp is on 100 to 1, if you want to throw your money away.
Bad Enoch is the current favourite
I have a vivid memory of the evening Tony Blair was first elected, seeing the Evening Standards delivered at London Bridge Station – they were like hot sausage rolls – gone in a minute.
Today, the evening standard was piled high – nobody was interested. Its a pale streak of piss newspaper I would not wipe my arse with.
As for Philp – he’s another pale streak of piss who will be manoeuvring for personal gain – but who wants to side with Liz Truss’s handbag holder?. Philp has the political convictions of a ferret.
Bliar? The man who took us into an illegal war and set about squeezing socialism from the Labour party. As was.
After 17 years of the Tories, Blair was such a relief. Unlike Sunak, John Major clung on to the bitterest of ends propped up by the Ulster Unionists. It felt like the collapse of a one party state – they’d been in so long. We didn’t know Blair’d go bonkers and start invading Iraq because he hadn’t told us that … It really was a “new dawn”.
Blair also had some positive policies. The National Minimum Wage (which we were told by the Tories was going to destroy the economy), independence for the Bank of England after years of Chancellors setting interest rates personally creating Lawson/Barber boom bust cycles to try to win elections was another winner … Banning the barbarity of hunting with hounds, reducing (if not managing to completely eliminate) hereditary peers… Devolution….
For a brief time it was all wonderful… The country even started to make a surplus… And spending was under control too with Gordon Brown’s Presbyterian “Prudence with a purpose”… Fiscal discipline waned a bit later…. In his autobiography Blair talks sinisterly about “building up political capital”… so … “I could spend it” or something along those lines so his mad foreign policies were there he just concealed them but…
But the point is Blair still had visible policies. And not a lot of them were expensive either. Compare the above 97 manifesto, Starmer’s 24 manifesto …
Build some houses
Have more green energy
Erm…
….feels like thin gruel. Apart from dumping toxic Tory policies like Rwanda and National Service ….what does he actually plan to do? He had a whole pledge of promises when he became Labour leader which are almost all abandoned now … So what replaces them? This remains to be seen…
Once he was a Trotskyist
Once he was a Corbynite
Then he was Prime Minister
But who really is Sir Keir?
Nutshelled.
Philp “lost” 4000 to Regurgitate, sorry, Reform. These votes would have made his majority a bit more respectable. I never thought that he would actually lose his seat to Taylor. I think that the Plastic Tories, sorry, Labour, should have put up more heavyweight candidate.
I feel quite enraged by this comment.
‘Heavyweight candidate’? What is that even supposed to mean? A candidate affiliated with Croydon Council, or a supposedly ‘elite’ non-resident parachuted into the constituency?
Ben Taylor was the first Croydon South PPC selected directly by its CLP (via a fully democratic, open and uncontentious process) since 2015 (which is not to denigrate the 2017 or 2019 candidates, including Olga FitzRoy, who I know personally to be an excellent campaigner, activist and, more recently, Lambeth councillor), and he is extremely popular with the local party membership not only because he’s a local resident who personally understands the needs and experiences of most other Croydon South residents (irrespective of how Thursday’s results turned out) and thus has a direct investment in its future, but also because we’ve seen how tirelessly he campaigns, how clued-up he is on local and national political issues and events, and how well he communicates with electors, particularly on a one-to-one basis.
Ev, I don’t know how inclined you were to support the ‘Plastic Tories’ even if a more ‘heavyweight’ candidate had been chosen to represent Croydon South, but I do worry that attitudes like yours are symptomatic of a certain snobbery and disregard for the vast majority of ordinary working and middle-class people who actually live in this community, where a significant minority of residents reside in remote gated private estates and either send their children to fee-paying schools on the outskirts of the constituency or grammar schools in Sutton, rather than the accessible state schools a few hundred yards away from their doorstep. Clearly, you disagree, but had Ben Taylor been elected to serve Croydon South on Thursday, I, as someone who’s predominantly lived here since the 1980s, would feel that I was finally being represented who genuinely understood my personal grievances, needs and aspirations, as well as those of many across the constituency who are struggling, and are even more disenfranchised and marginalised than I am.
Pity you never got more “enraged” by more important issues involving your party, Mathew.
Everyone knows that Ben Taylor is not a strong candidate. Quite the contrary.
Just because, for once, you were part of a CLP that was allowed to actually select its candidate does not alter that fact.