Giving Croydon the finger: Nigel Farage’s grifters’ bandwagon rolls into the Fairfield Halls on Saturday – which is very bad news for Tory Mayor Jason Perry and his Conservative colleagues
After all the calamities inflicted on Croydon by Tory Mayor Jason Perry, from his 33% Council Tax hikes to his unlawful LTN fines, has Labour fallen into their old trap of over-promising before under-delivering?
WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor, sifts through the latest polling figures
It’s very bad news for Croydon Conservatives that Nigel Farage is to headline a rally for Reform UK Ltd in Croydon on Saturday.
It is typical of the Tory Mayor’s failed and bungled administration that the Fairfield Halls, a council-owned venue, has accepted the booking from Farage’s very well-funded party of grifters, so potentially undermining Jason Perry’s re-election campaign.
The publicity for the event must be worth many Tory-to-Reform vote switches that Perry and Croydon Conservatives just cannot afford.
The question that will emerge from the Reform rally, where they are expected at last to reveal the identities of their 2026 local election candidates in Croydon, including their mayoral candidate, is this: which party will mislead the electorate more – Reform, the Conservatives or Labour?
We know that Reform Ltd misled voters at the previous set of local elections last year.
This year in Croydon, Reform are expected to take a chunky bite out of the Tory vote, which might be just enough to get Labour’s Rowenna Davis over the line in the mayoral election and see the Croydon Conservatives suffer their lowest ever haul of council seats in Croydon since 1964, before it became a London borough.
Town Hall tilt: Labour’s Rowenna Davis seems hopeful about her prospects
Some Croydon Conservatives might be counting their blessings that they are not in Bromley, or in Sutton, where Reform are expected to make significant gains, enough to take control of the council in Bromley and to obliterate the Conservative opposition seats in LibDem-run Sutton.
The contest at the polling stations on May 7 is this: which of the borough’s political duopoly will lose fewest votes to their challengers – Conservatives to Reform, Labour to The Greens. The way things stand, it seems more likely that Labour will win out.
It all makes this a depressing contest, one that is shaped by Labour and Conservatives’ standings nationally, which has seen them both fall by almost one-half since the last Croydon local elections in 2022.
Try this little test of support over the coming weeks. Every time you see a canvassing selfie from the Tories or Labour on your social media, try counting how many in the photo are councillors seeking re-election or on the party payroll in some other manner, and how many of them are enthusiastic members doing their bit for the party cause. If it’s a ratio of less than 8:2, we think that would be unusual.
The two parties will try to maximise turnout on polling day in party strongholds, of course. Labour needs to work hard to reverse what we saw in the north of the borough in 2022 and at the 2024 General Election, when some polling stations saw fewer people than the Marie Celeste… The reputations of Tony Newman, Alison Butler and Paul Scott, and Simon Hall, Croydon’s very own “Gang of Four” who bankrupted the borough, still haunt our streets.
Labour’s problems with dissaffected supporters and ex-members, is that, as of today, 43 days until the elections, and despite repeat requests to the party’s London Region who control the selection process, the party still has not announced candidates in 11 of the borough’s 28 wards (all of them in the south of Croydon). Labour has so far named just 45 candidates for the borough’s 70 council seats, with election day barely six weeks away.
With every vote, from Crystal Palace to Coulsdon, counting just the same in the race to elect a Mayor, Labour’s failure to activate its core supporters in the south may prove costly for Davis.
In the mix: a snapshot of national voting intentions this week. Reform’s lead has slipped from 8 points to 4, With four parties polling at 17% to 23%, small margins and local factors will count for much on May 7
The two-party system is so ingrained in Croydon that they might still top the polls locally, even if their public offers to the borough’s residents just don’t add up. To keep this polite, both parties are selling Croydon false prospectuses.
Conservatives claim that Jason Perry has stabilised the council finances. The facts suggest otherwise.
The council has debts of £1.4billion, just the same as when Perry walked in to Croydon Town Hall as Mayor in May 2022. That’s despite him flogging off millions of pounds-worth of public assets, raising Council Tax by 33% and doing the local government equivalent of living off pay-day loans – with this year’s emergency funding from government of £119million, the second highest bail-out of all councils in 2026.
Meanwhile, Labour’s push for power is being done while making barely credible promises, with some reckless over-promising that risks tripping up their campaign.
Reform are not credible challengers for the mayoralty, as they are expected to poll pitifully across the north of the borough. If Labour has been slow to name all their council candidates, Reform has been worse… rolling out a series of “champions”, ward-by-ward, and then erasing their profiles from their local party website, as well as deleting their Twatter account and closing their Faustbook page. It’s as if they have something to hide (plot spoiler: they very much do).
Inside Croydon understands that support for Reform in Croydon is waning, and fast: from around 1,500 members in Croydon last summer, to fewer than 800 by the start of 2026. Some Tory-to-Reform defectors, even those announced as “ward champions” (ie council election candidates), have switched back to Croydon Conservatives.
Friend-less: LTN scandals, collapsed property deals and Council Tax hikes have made Tory Jason Perry an unpopular figure
With the national party sending letters to what seems to be every person on the electoral roll, and some low-key Reform Ltd campaigning in New Addington and Shirley, does suggest that the Tories might lose up to five council seats in those wards.
In Addiscombe East, where low shares for the two main parties leave a vulnerability, Reform could snatch Tory cabinet member Jeet Bains’ seat, on a relatively low vote share.
Reform can hope for little more as the party’s national opinion poll standings have drifted down, as their leader’s MAGA links look less attractive to some voters during Trump’s war on Iran.
At Ladbrokes, Reform have moved well out to third place in the mayoral betting from to 7-2 from 7-4. Their odds on the Tories have come in to 7-4 from the previously overly generous 4-1.
Maybe some of the odd-setters have been reading Inside Croydon?
Otherwise, May 7 is expected to be a dreadful night for Labour in local elections in the rest of London and across the country, and so possibly the final straw with the parliamentary party over the future of Sir Keir Starmer as leader (Inland Revenue investigations not withstanding, of course). Croydon might offer Labour some slight solace, provided they can bounce back from their underperformance in 2022.
Back then, memories of Newman and his Numpties were still fresh. In Croydon, Labour polled at 6.7% below their party average in London.
This bounce back is a crucial and potentially winning factor in this election, albeit by a slim margin on a vote share below 30%.
Our early prediction of the make-up at the Town Hall is a Labour Mayor and then the number of councillors:
Labour 32
Conservatives 26
Reform Ltd 5
LibDems 4
Greens 3
Labour’s odds with Ladbrokes have shortened in the past week, to 11-10 (though that is on the mayoral race only, result at 90 minutes; no penalties and definitely no extra time).
The closeness of this election battle has resulted in some increasingly nasty, and often deliberately misleading, leaflets being thrust through letter boxes.
Conservative literature offers Perry’s exceedingly modest achievements, most of which have been financed by the Labour government. There is a vague hope in their literature about Purley Pool being built. The 2022 Tory promise was to have Purley Pool open immediately…
But then, Perry also promised to remove the borough’s low traffic neighbourhoods on “Day One”, as he was recently reminded by a High Court judge. Instead, he – or whoever is Mayor from May 8 – now has to find £10million that the council hasn’t got to refund all those who were fined by Perry’s “unlawful” schemes. Those £160 fines still smart with residents.
It is the suggestion that the finances have been fixed that is the big con by Perry.
Debt has flat-lined at £1.4billion, but will rise hugely as asset sales run out and more government loans are required by the council.
Labour’s simple message could be “The Conservatives failed to fix the finances – our candidate has the government connections to give the best chance to sort Croydon’s debt.”
Promises, promises: but few of these pledges are realistic or within a council’s powers
Instead, we are offered a set of promises many of which go far beyond the powers or influence of a mere borough Mayor. Davis’s election manifesto is expected to be released tomorrow, but in the past week she has promised no abstraction of police officers from Croydon for the Met’s other needs in London. Croydon Council has no such powers.
And while Davis’s promise of no 33% Council Tax increase – as has been the case under Perry as Mayor – is potentially do-able (she just needs to avoid a special-permission, one-off 15% hike, as Perry asked for in 2023), it’s very likely that the next four years will need a series of 4.99% maximum increases. Davis said as much at a hustings event last week.
Labour say they will ban phones in Croydon schools, but the council has no such powers.
Davis also says her council would stop the Delta Point evictions. But again, the council has no such powers other than repeating what local Tories have already said about not using Delta Point’s landlord for emergency housing. Nothing has been said about returning the donations made to the Labour Party by Asif Aziz, the owner of the company that manages Delta Point.
Labour promises to go into the food supermarket business to reduce the cost of living. Reducing food costs by £5 per head per week in Croydon would cost £104million a year. Bite by Bite instead of Brick by Brick.
And then there’s the “evict corporate squatters” promise, which has a ring of Mille Tant, the character from Viz, about it.
Davis’s literature doesn’t specify who she might mean by these “corporate squatters”.
Does she mean Westfield, after 14 destructive years in the town centre? Hardly likely… Or how about Network Rail, with the vacant site between East Croydon Station and No1 Croydon? Or don’t public bodies count as “corporate squatters”? There are, after all, still some vacant sites around the borough owned by the council itself.
The real problem with this promise is the idea of “real” developers, just at a time when the private sector home-building market is collapsing in London, flat prices are falling, there’s a skills shortage in the construction industry, and building and borrowing costs are soaring.
Davis’s leaflet makes no mention of the risk of huge legal costs in contested Compulsory Purchase Orders that could be incurred by Croydon’s renownedly accident-prone legal department.
So ahead of an election which currently looks like it’s leaning Labour’s way, a disillusioned electorate offers fertile ground for the Conservatives, and Reform and the Greens, never mind the LibDems, to suggest that Labour are trying to con Croydon voters.
Read more: Et tu Brute: Fringe party claims credit for getting Perry elected
Read more: Commissioners: council lacks focus and robust delivery plans
Read more: Take a step back in time for the start of the election campaign
Read more: Perry agrees to pay £½m to reclaim flats at Red Clover Gardens
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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I imagine there will be a number of Tory voters who will vote for Tory Councillors but who will vote Labour for Mayor (even whilst holding their noses) in the hope that neither PPP or the Reform candidate get the job.
It may be a triumph of hope over experience to think that a Reform surge in Croydon will be bad news for just Conservatives – surveys show that 19% of potential voters are people who did not vote last time. And if the voting intentions figures – which obviously cannot be much of a guide to our Mayoral elections – have any effect on Croydon we may be in for a shock. Mind you, I suspect people are so appalled by the Lab-Con continuation governments that anything could happen.
It amazes me that anybody, apart from die hard fascists and racists, is still supporting Deform! They have revealed themselves to be a joke party run by clowns. I hope the people of Croydon give a resounding f… off to the Fagash Fuhrer and Deform. They have proved at other councils that they can’t organise a piss up in a brewery!