Ego trip: Saturday’s Reform rally was mostly about Nigel Farage. No questions were allowed from the floor
The new episode of The Croydon Insider, our regular round-table, news panel discussion podcast thingy, looks at recent events in Croydon, including the Reform party’s rally at the Fairfield Halls, where they revealed their candidate for Croydon Mayor – and sparked a storm which has seen around a dozen members quit the party over the imposition of Ben Flook without any local selection process.
The Croydon Insider is premium content for paying subscribers to Inside Croydon, with a panel of guests drawn from our subscribers and contributors.
In this episode, iC Editor Steven Downes is joined by Cheryl Fergus-Ferrell, Tony Hooker, Nadia Azizuddin and Neil Bennett.
The discussion ranges far wider than Nigel Farage’s latest ego-trip.
Fergus-Ferrell introduces our listeners to fascinating true crime shows, with David Swindle, “The Scottish Detective”, coming to Cryer Arts in a few weeks to talk about some of the infamous and notorious cold cases he has investigated.
Hooker, the founder of Litter Free Norbury, discusses the council’s rubbish contractors, Veolia, and a mystery of our own – Croydon’s 1,000 “vanishing” street bins. And he asks the very reasonable question: just why won’t Croydon Council publish the details of their latest multi-million-pound contract with Veolia, after more than a year’s delay?
Azizuddin brings us up to date with the omnishambles around Croydon’s “unlawful” LTNs – low traffic neighbourhoods – and we discover how the council is trying to keep its fine refund system all hush-hush – to try to reduce the number of claims it has to handle.
Former BBC News broadcaster Bennett explains the story behind the 1961 Lanfranc air disaster, when 34 boys from the Thornton Heath school, two teachers and three air crew were killed when their plane crashed into a mountain near Stavanger, in Norway. And, Bennett explains, because of the dedicated work of a sister of one of the boys, and some recent fund-raising, how the Lanfranc Memorial at Croydon Crematorium is about to get a long overdue clean-up.
Our panel also discusses the local elections to be held in Croydon on May 7, and Saturday’s carefully stage-managed Reform rally, where hecklers were bundled out and not a single question was allowed from the floor.
The Croydon Insider is premium content exclusively for Inside Croydon’s paying subscribers. To download the latest episode, and to access our archive of Andrew Fisher Interviews and previous Under The Flyover podcasts, click here now.
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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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