Fortunes revived: Margaret Thatcher benefited from an increase in popularity following the Falklands War in 1982, when Conservatives won 62 of Croydon’s 70 council seats
Polling day in Croydon’s local elections, including its second mayoral vote, is on May 7.
WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor, sifts through recent opinion polls and by-election results, but has a warning from history of how ‘challenger parties’ can be swept aside during elections held at a time of war
Two months to go until local elections on May 7, and while “Red v Blue” wars don’t appear to have materialised on Croydon’s high street (fingers crossed; thank goodness), over at the Town Hall, the borough’s previously dominant political duopoly appears to be facing a battle for its very existence.
Let us begin with the caveat that we apply to all Croydon’s political coverage: national polling, even London-wide polling, rarely amounts to any real consequence around here. And that has been even more so since 2020 and the council’s financial collapse under Labour.
But other factors, national events, international conflicts, can have a part to play in how Croydon residents decide to vote, even in local elections where massive Council Tax hikes, or getting the bins emptied or pot holes filled in are the issues at stake at the ballot box.
And there’s lessons from history that candidates, whether for Croydon Mayor or to become one of the borough’s 70 councillors, would do well to note.
The last time that Croydon held borough-wide local elections, in 2022, the Conservatives and Labour took a chunky 73% of the vote for councillors, and they got 96% of the councillor seats.
Better calibre: Croydon’s first Green councillors, Esther Sutton (left) and Ria Patel, have impressed
But the three council seats – one for the LibDems with Claire Bonham in Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood; and two for the Greens in Fairfield: Esther Sutton and Ria Patel – represented the biggest number of non-Red-Blue councillors in Croydon since 1982.
That was the year of the Falklands War, which transformed the 1982 council election, and where three notionally independent (they were shy Tories, really) Residents councillors were elected for the last time.
That 1982 Croydon election saw the Conservatives win 62 seats to five for Labour and the three Residents in Thornton Heath.
Yet just a few weeks earlier, the SDP Liberal Alliance had been tipped to win outright control of Croydon Council. Bill Pitt had won a parliamentary by-election in Croydon North West for the Liberals in the autumn of 1981.
Yet the Liberals and their SDP allies did not win a single council seat come the spring of 1982.
Nine weeks out from the 2026 elections, it remains hazardous to predict results. International conflict can dominate sentiment in local elections, and challenger parties can drop away. Much could yet happen over the Israeli and US attacks on Iran.
Croydon’s last elections four years ago showed cracks appearing in the old Red-Blue dominance. Even in Croydon’s first mayoral election, the strength of challenger candidates showed that things were slipping for the tired old twosome.
Pitt the much younger: Bill Pitt’s 1981 by-election win in Croydon North West was a false dawn for the Liberals
New councillors Patel, Sutton and Bonham have improved the calibre of questioning at council meetings, when they have been allowed as, five years since the Croydon public voted in favour of a mayoral system, council officials have still not managed to complete the revision of the Town Hall constitution.
Labour, since they were ousted from power following the borough’s bankruptcy and the scandals of Brick by Brick and the Fairfield Halls fiasco, have in opposition often been compromised, either hamstrung by their record in office, handicapped by the poor performance of their oddly inept finance spokesperson, and held back from having little depth, talent-wise, on their front, or back, benches.
Given the calamitous incompetence that Tory Jason Perry has brought to the Town Hall since 2022, it is little wonder that, impressed by the new councillors, there seems to be some public momentum towards other parties’ candidates being given a chance. Last week’s Gorton and Denton by-election result will have reinforced the messaging that the Greens really can win.
In Croydon 2026, only the Greens offer the prospect of a credible third-party challenge for the mayoralty. The Liberal Democrats are disciplining themselves to target only modest ward gains, in Bonham’s CPUN ward, and also in Coulsdon. Across south London, the orange team are concentrating on consolidating in Sutton and in trying to win Merton.
So it was that even Jason Cummings, Croydon Tories’ cabinet member for finance, during last week’s budget meeting in the Town Hall Chamber, told the Greens and the Liberal Democrat councillors that he’s looking forward to Labour losing their remaining seats in the wards they currently represent.
Cummings has probably seen his own party’s polling numbers, and will know that two of the best bets on the 2026 Croydon local elections is that the Greens will win all three seats in Fairfield ward (ousting Labour’s Chris Clark), and that the Liberal Democrats will capitalise on Labour councillors’ poor performance to win at least two, if not all three, seats in Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood.
Latest national polling: The Times shows Reform Ltd’s poll lead gradually reducing
Nationally, Labour and the Conservatives alike are trying to cope with a structural collapse in their poll standings. Voters still remember Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. They are uninspired by Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch. Polls have the old duopoly on 19% each, only second and third to Reform Ltd, and with the Greens gaining fast.
Labour’s national poll standing has halved since May 2022, and even then they could not win the Croydon mayoralty, despite having a strong candidate in Val Shawcross.
Things are no better for the Conservatives, who have shed 40% of their 2022 polling.
It’s all becoming a battle between the two old heavyweights about who can lose the least number of votes.
In that respect, one of the (many) mistakes Jason Perry has made while Croydon Mayor has been to get rid of the alternative voting system that got him elected in 2022, and to replace it with first-past-the-post.
The threat of Reform Ltd cannot be dismissed altogether, but it is reasonable to assume that the second preference for many of those voting for Nigel Farage’s party in Croydon on May 7 will most likely have been Tory Perry. Now, the Mayor has denied himself hundreds, if not thousands, of potential second-round votes. In 2022, Perry won after second-preference votes by a measly 589 majority.
Mayor mistake: Conservative Jason Perry at the 2022 Croydon election count
Labour’s mayoral candidate this time round, Rowenna Davis, is doing all that she can to distance herself from the bad old days, and bad old ways, of Tony Newman, Alison Butler and Paul Scott, and Simon Hall.
In the recent Andrew Fisher Interview podcast for this website, Davis even apologised for what her party had done to the borough. Six years coming from Labour. At least by apologising, Davis acknowledged wrong had been done.
Davis’s challenge on May 7 will simply be to get out the vote. In 2022, Croydon Labour underperformed the party’s results in Greater London by 6.7%. Get that 6.7% back and the election is much improved for Rowenna’s Reds. It’s a very big number in a low vote share, multiparty contest.
But to do that, they really need Starmer and the party nationally to turn things round, and quick. Labour Together is a made-in-south-London scandal that has been simmering for years. Chinese spying arrests, self-suspending Labour MPs and discredited dirty tricks campaigning, as happened in Gorton and Denton, will do nothing to improve things for Starmer, or for Davis.
Make no mistake, this kind of national politics has a local impact.
Polling analysts Electoral Calculus have the Greens winning all but one ward in Sarah Jones’s Croydon West constituency and winning Steve Reed’s Streatham and Croydon North seat in a General Election.
You cannot imagine Labour being a challenger in Croydon South in a General Election today, as they were at the 2024 General Election. The continuing lack of any declared council candidates in the south of Croydon underlines that Labour is a party in retreat. In a borough-wide election for Mayor, where a vote in Purley is worth the same as a vote in Norbury, having Chris Philp as MP in Croydon South, where turnouts tend to be bigger, represents a real problem for the Red campaign.
Erasing the records: Daniel Tebbutt, ex-Labour and ex-Tory, is Reform Croydon’s third chair in 12 months
Labour is helped, at least marginally, by the Corbyn-led Your Party not fielding any candidates. Whether the highly motivated and experienced campaigners among their membership lend their support to the Greens in Croydon could be an important factor.
As for Reform, even Reform does not appear to know what they are doing for the fast-approaching elections.
From choosing a dead Yorkshirewoman as their mayoral candidate, to allowing dodgy Peter Morgan to draft their policies locally, including suggesting the scrapping of the tram network, the grifters’ limited company that is passing itself off as a political party appears to be a shambles in Croydon.
In January, they deleted their Twatter account (128 followers). Last month, it was the Reform Faustbook page that got wiped. And someone has gone to great trouble to erase all local news from the official Croydon Reform website, including the various Britain First and BNP past-members who appeared to have been selected as their election candidates (so much for Farage’s much-vaunted vetting process).
It remains true, though, that distrust and despair with the Red-Blue duopoly, what the far-right likes to call “the uniparty”, may see many crosses placed on voting papers on May 7 alongside anyone listed as a Reform candidate. That could badly dent Tory Jason Perry’s campaign.
But challenger parties such as Reform, the Greens and LibDems face another obstacle to overcome the old incumbents, who in Croydon benefit from £500,000 of public money, redirected from councillor allowances and into party funds since 2022.
Labour and Conservatives also have much more data on past voter preferences.
The political geography of Croydon wards does not help the new players either. The political landscape had a large number of council seats which were supersafe for one old party or the other. Forty-one of Croydon’s 70 council seats had 25% majorities in 2022. The absence of competitive wards was one of the reasons that pro-mayoral system campaigners offered for having a directly-elected Mayor.
North-south divide: how Croydon voted, by wards, at the last local elections in May 2022. In 2026, Labour hasn’t yet picked candidates for 11 of Croydon’s 28 wards
The big ward majorities in Croydon can see huge changes in vote shares but result in only modest shifts in control of council seats.
Gains for Greens, Reform and the Liberal Democrats seem inevitable, but could be limited.
Momentum for the Greens in council seats might also come from improved status in the mayoral election.
The Electoral Calculus figures suggest a Green councillor group at Croydon Town Hall on May 8 of 30 – which seems vastly over-stated. In 2022, Labour won the most council seats, with 34.
The change brought from a borough-wide mayoral vote, where every vote counts, does create a very different prospect for competitiveness in that contest.
Before Labour’s latest debacle over the non-selection of Andy Burnham as the party’s candidate in Gorton and Denton, you might have considered Labour as favourites to win Croydon’s mayoralty. Not now.
And the question voters will be asking themselves on May 7 2026 is fundamentally different from the one they were posing on May 5 2022. Then, the question facing the electorate was: “Who should I vote for to get rid of this Labour council?”
In 2026, they might be asking two questions. After 33% Council Tax hikes, failures with Westfield and the Purley Pool, the £22million Red Clover Gardens scandal and now the devastating High Court judgement over LTNs, voters will be asking, “Who should I vote for to get rid of piss-poor Perry?”
And they will also be asking, “Can I really trust Starmer’s Labour to run our cash-strapped council?”
It all means that when they come to count the votes for Mayor – and hopefully make a better, quicker job of it than former CEO Katherine Kerswell managed over four days in 2022 – three or four candidates will each have between 17% and 25% of the votes cast.
It is likely to be very close, the margins tight.
The way we were: how the voting broke down for Croydon Mayor in 2022
From fifth in 2022, the Greens’ Peter Underwood could accumulate 25% of the vote in 2026. The Greens’ national poll ratings have improved by 50% compared to four years ago. The spectacular increase in party membership – around 2,000 new members per day since Hannah Spencer became an MP last week – is a huge boost for the Greens. The conflict in the Middle East could sway voters to support anti-war Greens (and Liberal Democrats).
If the Greens can communicate to Croydon voters that they can be a credible and close mayoral challenger, at an exceptional time when those Red-Blue standings are so low, then they might just shatter that old duopoly.
Reform still haven’t named a mayoral candidate. At least not one with a pulse.
With their council candidate announcements placed on pause, it is increasingly unlikely that they could mount a real campaign, with real candidates, in the time remaining. They are unlikely to poll well in the north of the borough. They are expected to win control of nearby councils in Bromley and Bexley. But while Farage’s grifters’ company could win their first Croydon Council seats in New Addington, Shirley and Selsdon, it’s unlikely to be much more beyond that.
They may impact the election in other ways, taking away enough votes from the Conservatives in Addiscombe East that Jeet Bains – one of Croydon Tories’ big hitters – loses his council seat to Labour, while in Old Coulsdon, LibDems John Jefkins and Gill Hickson might win at the expense of the Conservatives.
A dog’s chance: party leader Zack Polanski and by-election winner Hannah Spencer have made Greens more credible
Professor Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, regarded by some as the guru of London politics, has said that the Greens might take 600 council seats off Labour in London.
In boroughs including Camden, Keir Starmer’s home patch, Islington, Hackney, Lambeth and Southwark, the political map of London may need re-colouring come May 8.
Labour’s struggles in what are normally its heartlands in the capital will also adversely affect Rowenna Davis’s campaign in Croydon, as her party won’t be able to spare her resources to win a council when they need to work hard to defend those they already hold.
One last sure bet is that many Croydon ward wins and the mayoralty are going to be on very low vote shares. It will leave the winners with not much of a mandate, as they try to tackle the challenges of a terminally bankrupt council.
Read more: High Court judge orders end to Croydon’s ‘unlawful’ LTNs
Read more: Perry agrees to pay £½m to reclaim flats at Red Clover Gardens
Read more: Starmer shocker: could Gorton and Denton happen here?
Read more: Surrey Street market trader Joseph quits Labour in race row
Read more: Four black women among six councillors rejected by Labour
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2026, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for an EIGHTH time in nine years, in Private Eye magazine’s annual round-up of civic cock-ups
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Surely having a hapless idiot like Chris Philp as Tory MP in Croydon South, even though turnouts tend to be bigger, represents a real benefit for the Labour campaign there ?!
Do people contemplating voting Green really want all drugs to be legal?
And according to their national manifesto, increase spending by over £100bn annually. If you thought Labour bankrupted Croydon, imagine what state it would have been in under the Greens with those sorts of spending commitments.
There’s a certain, perhaps deliberate, economic illiteracy within this comment. It’s the snide implication that an increase in government spend might be done without making cuts in other areas.
The Trident replacement programme, for instance, to provide nuclear submarines just so that Donald Trump can get around the US’s treaty obligations, and over which Britain really has no control, is estimated to cost at least £200billion, money which could be much better spent in other areas, not least the country’s conventional forces, and with money left over for social programmes and council services.
Likely that Croydon would be in a better state, because one of the areas earmarked for extra funding in a Green national government is local authorities.
As to the national budget – good question. I’m a Green supporter but the MMT economic model beloved of some is more of a conversation-starter than an applicable reality.
That said, things haven’t exactly been going well the last eighteen years. The austerity model has led to underinvestment in quality-of-life and a whole raft of false economies that have left people worse off. There has to be a better way of doing the sums which allow investments in a happier, healthier and more educated country to count as an asset, rather than a debt liability.
Depends what you mean by legal.
The Green policy is not “remove all criminal penalties for all drug offences”. More like, “amend current rules so that individual users aren’t dealt with via the justice system, adopt a safe and regulated supply so that addicts and users can get what they need in the least harmful way”.
And you can’t have a safe, regulated supply without regulating it.. which means there still have to be laws about who can and cannot sell what, how, where and to whom.
As someone who doesn’t think taking drugs is a bright idea, but my reasons why not are pretty much 100% health, 0% morals, I think that’s a sensible way to run things. Keep the criminal penalties for dealing significant quantities outside of the rules, but also make it easy/cheap enough for users to get their supply legally (while still keeping it away from kids etc.) that there’s far less incentive to deal and no profit to be made from doing so.
“In that respect, one of the (many) mistakes Jason Perry has made while Croydon Mayor has been to get rid of the alternative voting system that got him elected in 2022, and to replace it with first-past-the-post.”
This isn’t correct.
Neither he nor the Council have the power to do this. It was the Tory Government who changed the electoral system for Mayors and Police & Crime Commissioner to First Past the Post (and likely regretted it as it let reform pick up a couple of mayoralties in 2025)
And this will be reversed shortly by the current Government via the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (but too late for this years elections)
I’m all in favour of blaming PPP for his actions but let’s not blaim him for things he had no control over.