Political Editor, WALTER CRONXITE, on how Alan Cook’s poll success on the other side of the borough boundary is sending shock waves into Croydon
‘We’re gonna need a bigger vote’: has London just got its first glimpse of the Reform shark?
They’re going to need a bigger vote…
You know how, early in the original Jaws movie, with John Williams’ sonorous score building the tension, the worried police chief and others are all looking out to sea?
They know the shark’s out there.
It just hasn’t broken the surface yet.
Last night, in a council by-election in Bromley, the shark came to the surface.
Alan Cook, an actuary and IT consultant and former member of the Conservative Party, is the first Reform UK candidate to win a council seat in Greater London.
The reverberations of that result are likely to be felt across the borough boundary, in Croydon, at next May’s Town Hall and mayoral elections.
Cook won a council by-election held in Bromley Common and Holwood ward caused by the death of Councillor Jonathan Laidlaw, one of three Conservative councillors elected in the ward in 2022.
Another Tory loss: last night’s Bromley Council by-election result
Cook’s win came despite the Tories throwing everything at the by-election, even with party leader Kemi BadEnoch showing up on doorsteps in south-east London yesterday. Or maybe that’s why the Conservatives lost…
With all the usual caveats about low turn-outs for council by-elections, the Conservatives saw their vote share decrease by 11.8% from the 2022 result. Labour was pushed into third place, after losing 10.4% of its vote share.
The Bromley Common and Holwood ward by-election on July 24 result was
Reform winner: Alan Cook
Alan Cook (Reform) 1,342 (34.0%)
Ian Payne (Con) 1,161 (29.4%)
Elizabeth Morgan (Lab) 720 (18.2%)
Laura McCracken (LibDem) 540 (13.7%)
Ruth Fabricant (Green) 185 (4.7%)
Bromley Council remains under Conservative control, that was never in question. They now hold 34 of the council’s 58 seats. The next borough-wide local elections in Bromley will be on May 7, 2026, the same day as local elections are to be held across London, including in Croydon.
The result is significant, as it shows Reform moving into London, having taken over Kent County Council at last May’s elections and last week winning two council seats in Dartford.
It also suggests that the outcome of next May’s Croydon mayoral election is now more wide open than ever before.
Croydon Labour’s candidate for Mayor, Rowenna Davis, is known to have been conducting some very specific polling in the borough through YouGov, the results of which have not been made public. That may be either because all the numbers have not yet been crunched, or because, five years since Labour crashed Croydon’s finances, the polling returns are not great news for Davis’s chances of succeeding Tory Jason Perry as Croydon Mayor.
Elsewhere on the periphery of London last week, in a by-election in Basildon, Essex, Reform were taking a council seat from Labour, too.
Another wally with a brolly: Tory leader Kemi Badenoch did nothing to help the election prospects in Bromley of candidate Ian Payne (striped jacket)
YouGov’s own national opinion polling, on Westminster voting (that is, not local authority) intentions show Reform on 27% to Labour’s 23%, with the Conservatives on 17%, LibDems on 15% and Greens on 11% (polling conducted on July 20-21).
Other pollsters have offered snapshots of public opinion this month that suggest Reform could be as much as 14% ahead of Labour.
So while London has, in the main, so far remained resistant to the dubious charms of Nigel Farage and his Reform grifters (the Tories held a council seat in Fulham last week, for example), developments yesterday suggest that next May’s Croydon mayoral election could be split three ways or more, and using the first-past-the-post system, could be won with less than 25% of the vote.
The new party of the left, whatever it might end up being called, led by ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, has attracted online sign-ups from 200,000 in less than 24 hours. That represents dire news for Blue Labour’s Davis.
And Reform’s advance is equally bad news for lame duck Mayor Perry, the man who failed to fix the finances.
Perry has been consigned to spend the final months of his term of office with government-appointed Commissioners staring over his shoulder, wanting to know when he is going to get a grip on the council’s finances, the “runaway” spending on agency staff and the repeated failures of the borough’s housing department.
Perry was selected as the Conservative candidate for the 2026 mayorals in autumn 2024; some within the local Tories are beginning to ask whether he needs to step aside for another, less tarnished candidate now the Commissioners have arrived.
Given his own record of incompetence and non-achievement, as well as his 27% Council Tax hikes (with more likely to come next April), his parroting of Reform slogans about the Green Belt is unlikely to be enough to save Perry, as a candidate, from the inevitable wave of public opinion against the two biggest parties.
Conservative losses are not just happening because of their members and supporters switching to Reform. There’s also large numbers of loyal Tories who are simply not bothering to vote for the party, or any party.
Millionaire grifter: Farage, looking for local Reform candidates in Croydon
Labour in Croydon, following the catastrophe visited on the borough by Tony Newman and his Numpties, appears to be suffering a similar malaise. At last year’s General Election, Labour may have won three of the four Croydon seats, but it was done on a noticeably lower turnout of their own voters.
On new constituency boundaries (making direct comparisons more awkward), Sarah Jones retained her position as an MP, now for Croydon West, but with a 12% drop in her vote share. Even in Streatham and Croydon North, Steve Reed’s vote share was down almost 6%.
Will the Corbyn-led party offer an alternative to the disaffected on the left? And will there be some kind of “left alliance” with the Greens, who themselves are hoping for a popularity boost once, as expected, Zack Polanski is named their new leader in the next few weeks.
The political realities in Croydon are that Labour and Tories are both well-funded – with massive effective subsidies coming from the cash-strapped council, as their councillors are levied on their allowances. Little wonder, then, that Reds and Blues are so keen to hike their allowances and rebuff suggestions that councillors in Croydon should take a pay cut.
In Croydon, neither the Greens nor the LibDems are well-equipped – in terms of cash for leaflets or social media campaigns, nor boots on the ground – to exploit the shortcomings and unpopularity of Labour and Conservatives.
Nor, until now, were Reform.
There is little sign of any grassroots, local organisation in Croydon for the party of Farage, which is run on a top-down basis from its swanky millionaires’ offices on Millbank.
Reform candidates have been fielded in two council by-elections this year in Sutton, but as the LibDems and Tories slugged it out, there was barely any campaigning by Reform. Nonetheless, they still managed to get 12% and 18% of the votes.
It was much like that in Croydon at the General Election in 2024: Reform candidates in all four seats, but barely any campaigning to speak of. Only Scott Holman, with 13.4% of the vote in Croydon East to finish third (at the expense of the Tories, whose vote share was down 14.5%), made any kind of impression for Farage’s lot.
Out campaigning: Labour’s Rowenna Davis
Yet even today, there’s no “Croydon Reform” web presence. There is a Reform UK Croydon and Sutton branch page on Facebook. It has 103 followers.
A former senior official in the Croydon Conservative Federation, Nik Stewert, last month issued a curious press release, announcing that he was now chairman of Croydon ReForm. ReForm was presented in that manner, with a capital F, at every mention throughout the brief statement.
Since when, nothing more has been heard of Stewert, or his ReForm. He has not answered any questions, and Reform (lower case F) UK headquarters has been silent on the matter of who is running their organisation in this part of south London.
Of course, it is entirely possible that, like rats in a sack, there’s some kind of squabble going on between personalities in Croydon and Sutton’s Reform group. Internal tussles are, of course, a Farage party speciality.
Last night’s result in Bromley may focus their attention, however. There are several parts of Croydon with similar demographics to the neighbouring borough, where Reform candidates, even paper candidates, could harvest enough votes to win council seats next May, in areas including Shirley, New Addington and Selsdon.
In split wards, such as Addiscombe East and Waddon, a strong Reform showing might disadvantage the sitting Conservative councillor sufficiently to hand a council seat or two to Labour. In Coulsdon’s wards, votes for Reform might even see the LibDems pick up an extra seat.
This is all very early days, long-range sort of stuff, done without the benefit of the local polling figures recently collected by Labour, but it is possible that on May 8 next year, Croydon, too, might have a clutch of Reform councillors.
Unless, as Roy Scheider might have put it, Conservatives and Labour manage to get some bigger votes…
Read more: Tories back Perry to have another go as £82,000 per year Mayor
Read more: From tantrum to grovel, Perry shifts posture for Commissioners
Read more: Agency spend scandal: Perry blasted for ‘ridiculous shambles’
Footnote for history: In the time it has taken to draft and edit this report, the number of “sign-ups” for the Corbyn and Sultana “Your Party” has gone from 200,000 to 250,000.
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