Capital gains: Sam Coates on Sky News on the likely changes across London’s 32 boroughs, including a Labour ‘gain’ in Croydon – though only just, according to YouGov pollsters
Two weeks today, Croydon voters go to the polls to elect the Mayor of Croydon, with the bookies and pundits saying that in this corner of the capital, the race is just too close to call.
Political Editor WALTER CRONXITE casts his expert eye over the latest standings
Croydon’s Mayoral election is now down to fewer than a 100-vote margin between Labour’s Rowenna Davis and Tory incumbent Jason Perry, in a four-cornered contest.
That’s according to Sky News’s interpretation of a YouGov poll on London voting intentions, the results of which were released yesterday.
Such a photo-finish would be an even narrower majority than the 2022 mayoral win for “Part-time” Perry, who four years ago took power thanks to just 589 votes.
According to the pollsters, this time Labour are just out in front in Croydon.
The poll suggests that the winner of the Mayoral election will win on less than a one-quarter share of the 100,000 votes likely to be cast on May 7. Such is the splintering of the vote that Peter Underwood of the Greens and even the Liberal Democrats’ Richard Howard remain in contention as outsiders to pull off a surprise mayoral victory.
Taking the lead: Labour’s Rowenna Davis has a difficult couple of weeks coming up
This Sky News/YouGov poll concentrates on the election battle for Greater London, which is helpful in looking at a part of the country with a decidedly different and more progressive political outlook than much of Britain. Take away the chatter and, frankly, hysterical nonsense generated by Nigel Farage’s limited company elsewhere, and a very different picture of voting intentions emerges.
But there is still a distinct break in the old Red-Blue duopoly.
The London poll certainly provides something much more relevant, and accurate, for what is likely to happen here in Croydon.
Sam Coates, Sky News’s deputy political editor (or “Mr Toad”, as he was known in the office at Wapping in the days when he was an eager young colleague of Michael Gove at Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper), told viewers that the Croydon result is too close to call, with just
0.1 %
between Labour and Conservatives. Sky News’s London borough prediction map showed Labour as the narrow winner, because when they count the votes on May 8, whoever has the most votes for Mayor, by however narrow the winning margin, will have control of Croydon Town Hall until 2030.
Elsewhere in the capital, after the halcyon days of 2022 when Londoners rejected the Tories after what was then 12 years of Conservative austerity government and the disastrous premierships of Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss (Sunak deserves a little credit for at least trying to get us out of the shit left behind by Truss and her Treasury minister, Chris Philp), things do not look so good for Keir Starmer’s party today.
In 2022, Labour won its highest number of councillor seats in Greater London since 1971.
In 2026, Keir Starmer was already a deeply unpopular Prime Minister even before he became mired in scandal over Peter Mandelson and cronyism. The little local difficulty over the Croydon East parliamentary selection, another Labour scandal which was first reported by Inside Croydon in 2023, also brings with it the risk of making Davis’s mayoral campaign collateral damage.
Always up for a freebie: but Croydon Mayor Jason Perry refuses to be questioned on his piss-poor record in office
While Labour’s 2022 election results across London were buoyed by anti-Tory sentiment, it was a different story here in Croydon, where Labour underperformed the city-wide vote by 6.7%. The independent candidacy of Andrew Pelling and the dark shadow of Tony Newman and his time in charge of the Town Hall combined to leave Val Shawcross just short of becoming Croydon’s first executive Mayor.
Four years later, with Council Tax up by 33%, libraries closed and lollipop patrols axed, the Purley Pool still closed, more shops in the Whitgift Centre shutting than opening, no new council homes built and staggering additional borrowing – £119million this year alone – a good deal of those who voted Perry four years ago will now be suffering a form of “buyer’s remorse”.
For Rowenna Davis, she needs her bounce-back from Labour’s 2022 Croydon performance to outweigh the damage caused by her national party leaders, including local MP Steve Reed. Just who was it within the Labour Party locally who submitted a formal complaint about the mention of genocide in Gaza that saw Davis forced to self-censor her Croydon manifesto?
Labour’s Croydon bounceback is reflected in the Sky News poll. Across London, Labour appears set to lose 38% of its 2022 vote, according to YouGov’s number-crunchers. In Croydon, Labour loses 32% of its 2022 vote.
That buyer’s remorse after four years of piss-poor Perry is also reflected in the polling figures. Across London, the Conservatives are set to lose 35% of their 2022 vote. In Croydon, the pollsters say that Perry’s Tories will lose 39% of their 2022 vote.
Croydon’s stand-in chief exec and returning officer in charge of the election, Elaine Jackson, has decided that, after the shambles of Croydon’s 2022 vote count under her predecessor Katherine Kerswell – which saw election results delayed until the Sunday evening, almost 70 hours after the polls closed – she won’t start the count of mayoral votes until 1pm on Friday, May 8.
Desperate measures: fringe candidates have resorted to breaking the law – fly-posting is illegal – to get their message across
As a first-past-the-post contest this time, with no transferable votes to worry about, it is to be hoped that Jackson’s tellers will deliver a result at the Fairfield Halls in time for the early evening regional news programme. On Friday, rather than Saturday, of course.
A victory for Davis would boost Labour morale in south London, with Lewisham and Lambeth being set to see huge council seat losses to the Greens according to the YouGov pollsters.
Lewisham operates, like Croydon, under a directly elected Mayor. In 2022, they also elected 54 Labour councillors. There are 54 council seats in the one-party state that is Lewisham. The Sky News poll predicts the Greens to win the Lewisham mayoralty and a fair chunk of council seats.
Labour are set to fall to second in Merton, too, behind the Liberal Democrats, yet cling on to power in Southwark and in Wandsworth.
A huge winning margin for the Liberal Democrats is expected in Sutton, where Reform are expected to almost wipe out the Conservatives.
In a Croydon election where the votes appeared to have splintered, with four or five parties polling between 23% and 16%, Davis has held a small but steady lead throughout the campaign. But what one Labour MP described as the “purgatory” of the news cycle reporting a drip-feed of developments in the Mandelson scandal appears to have closed Davis’s lead to the smallest of gaps, the equivalent of just 97 votes based on the 2022 turnout figures.
Falling leads are dangerous if they gain momentum into mounting losses in the final two weeks of the campaign.
In the past week, the bookmakers have taken fright and made Perry favourite to win. Little more than a month ago, the Tory candidate was 4-1, with Davis short odds favourite.
Torrid market: low volumes of bets on elections make the market volatile to change, but as Oddschecker shows, money has been piling on piss-poor Perry
The poll in Croydon sees Reform scoring much more modestly than the Greens. In turn, that possibly means that the Tory vote will be less split than expected. Meanwhile, the Greens are taking votes from Labour.
This signals trouble for Rowenna Davis.
High Croydon polling scores for Greens and the Liberal Democrats could see despairing Labour voters drifting off to these progressive challengers in the last few days of the campaign.
Rounded figures in the YouGov poll take Labour to 24% and the Conservatives to 23%:
Rowenna Davis, Lab 24%
Jason Perry, Con 23%
Peter Underwood, Green 19%
Richard Howard, LibDem 17%
Ben Flook, Reform 10%
It seems almost certain now that whoever does win, they will do so with 1-in-4 of voters, or fewer, voting for them, making it an extraordinarily low winning vote share election.
Reform, from dead candidates to mass resignations, have not managed to make much traction in Croydon, except perhaps towards the south-east of the borough, from Shirley to New Addington and Selsdon. That’s all close to the borough boundary with Bromley, which is expected to be one of three or four London boroughs to fall under the control of Nigel Farage’s limited company.
The Sky News poll does not give individual council seat predictions, as they feel that the very close fragmented standings of the parties make this a difficult call. They are not wrong! What the poll does confirm is that while Labour still leads in London, the capital is in its own way subject to the fragmentation of national party politics.
When it comes to council seat predictions in Croydon, the three old parties benefit from geographical concentrations of their voters, such that relatively few seats look set to change hands. Since 2021, this website has maintained the view that the mayoral system at the Town Hall is just #ABitLessShit than the “strong leader” model that it replaced. It is the mayoral system, though, which is giving the other parties their best chance to challenge for control of the Town Hall.
With two parties neck and neck and with two others making progress on the leading pair as they enter the final straight, the next 14 days is no time for any false steps or errors. Which explains why Jason Perry has dodged and ducked any and all questioning on his disastrous record in office.
- For the full list of candidates standing for Croydon Mayor, as published on the council website, click here
- For the full list of election candidates in the borough’s 28 wards, click here for the official listings on the council website
Read more: ‘Red v Blue’ at Town Hall elections could suffer a Green-wash
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: 33% Council Tax increase: Mayor Perry’s legacy for Croydon
Jason Perry, Croydon’s failed Mayor, has refused to give a pre-election interview to Inside Croydon, where he would face questions about his record in office- Paid-up subscribers to this website can listen to The Andrew Fisher Interview with Labour’s Rowenna Davis by clicking here
- And you can listen to our interview with the LibDems’ Richard Howard by clicking here
- Our Andrew Fisher Interview with Peter Underwood is now available by clicking here and paying a subscription to Inside Croydon’s Patreon site
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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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There’s not an appealing candidate among them but honestly, for the love of god who the hell is it that’s actually planning to vote for piss pants Perry??? I have a bridge to sell them.