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Polls tighten in Town Hall race as Farage’s grifters get closer

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SEVEN DAYS TO GO: You probably don’t want to read ‘It’s too close to call’ again, but judging by the latest, London-wide polling figures just published, the race to be Croydon Mayor is tighter than ever.
By WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor

Croydon could be just a week away from electing a Reform Ltd Mayor.

The JLPartners MRP poll of more than 2,000 Londoners has been extrapolated to put Reform just 3% behind Labour and 1% behind the Tories in the Croydon mayoral and council contests.

Not a fluke?: Ben Flook, the slightly robotic Wallington schoolteacher, and ex-Tory, standing for Reform Ltd

If we expect 100,000 votes to be cast a week today (97,457 ballot papers were cast in 2022), that percentage difference represents a meagre 3,000 votes between the two major parties and grifter Nigel Farage’s bought-and-paid-for candidates.

For an average, two-seat ward, that’s only an 86-vote margin between Labour, Conservatives and Reform Ltd.

With vote shares so badly fragmented and the opinion polls so inconsistent, Croydon’s typical tactical voter is facing a tough call on which boxes to put their Xs in next Thursday.

Of course, no ward is “average” in Croydon, with Labour votes more to the north, Reform’s vote more to the east and south-east, Conservatives more to the south, and with enclaves containing Green votes in central Croydon and Liberal Democrats supporters in the borough’s far fringes of Upper Norwood and Old Coulsdon. This unevenness of the distribution of votes would mean that Reform Ltd, riding on the back of well-funded regionally distributed direct mail will – if that 20% figure is sound – gain a fair tranche of council seats, though still trail the Tories and Labour.

It cannot be repeated often enough, apparently, for the benefit of Professor Tony Travers, BBC London and even the Financial Times, who repeated the “no overall control” nonsense this week, but at Croydon Council, power rests with the executive Mayor, and it is the pan-borough Mayoral election which will decide who is running the Town Hall for the next four years.

In 2026, there appears to be a very real possibility that the far-right could win on a very low vote share, meaning those seeking to reject Farage and his ilk face some difficult judgements on possible tactical voting.

The splintering of British politics has left JLPartners predicting that Croydon will see the lowest winning vote share in Greater London. That emphasises the real vulnerability to Reform Ltd just sneaking in to power at Katharine Street.

The poll predicts the following shares (figures in brackets relate to the polling numbers at the start of April):

Rowenna Davis, Labour 23% (-2%)
Jason Perry, Cons 21% (-2%)
Ben Flook, Reform Ltd 20% (+2%)
Peter Underwood, Green 17% (-5%)
Richard Howard, LibDem 14% (+3%)
Others 6%

Past elections have been framed by “shy” voters: the kind of people who, for whatever reason, prefer not to state their true voting intentions. So if there are just a few “shy” Reform voters, Ben Flook, a politics teacher at a grammar school in Wallington, may have to rearrange his teaching plans for the remainder of the summer term if he is declared Croydon Mayor next week.

Both Labour’s Rowenna Davis and Tory Jason Perry have lost 2% of their support just since the start of April, according to the same pollsters.

Vote loser: local MP Steve Reed (fourth left) was out on the streets this month. But is he and Starmer’s government costing Croydon Labour votes?

In Labour’s case, such decline can be explained by the daily negative stories surrounding Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. Of course, these are local elections, but national headlines influence voters – something which Farage’s bunch of grifters must be delighted about, as their campaign material has been almost entirely based on national issues.

“Get Starmer Out!”; “Secure our borders”; “Restore law and order”; and the real zinger to appeal to all the closet racists out there… “Put the British people first”. Not much reading between the lines needed there.   

With Parliament now closed until May 13, it is possible that the negative Starmer stories may abate. But Labour campaigners in Croydon – the few that remain – are worried that that won’t be the case. Every appearance on television news of the increasingly unpopular local MP Steve Reed smugly stating the case for the government could be costing them hundreds of votes in Croydon.

Of course, no London borough is the same. It may be stretching polling methodology too far to predict detailed local results on the views of 2,022 Londoners put into subsets of types of voters that vote very differently in each borough, places all with their own diverse and particular local political cultures.

The YouGov/Sky MRP poll of just one week ago had Reforn on only 10% in Croydon, with the other parties in a four-cornered fight on vote shares of between 17% and 23.5%. Such differences to this week’s poll probably show two things: first, that a week is a long time in politics, as Harold Wilson once said; and secondly, that some of the polling results are not to be relied upon.

Bad news on the doorstep: Labour’s national woes are damaging Rowenna Davis’s campaign

So some pollsters are going to have some explaining to do for predictions that might prove to be well wide of the mark in a tricky punditry situation.

We believe that Inside Croydon’s own calls remain the best, based as they are on local political trends. And anyway, we would say that, wouldn’t we?

We have taken the view throughout that Labour have maintained a small, consistent but gently eroding lead, hurt by national Labour troubles.

For the Tories, Jason Perry is seeking to fight the 2022 election all over again. He held back his manifesto until this week, presumably on the basis that he doesn’t want people to see it. Or to check for election promises which, if recent form is anything to go by, he will fail to deliver.

So much of Perry’s election material, interspersed with lies and deceit, refers back to 2022, rather than his own record in office. There’s a reason for that.

Perry’s failure to deliver on its promise to “fix the finances” while hiking Council Tax by 33% makes for a very different atmosphere from four years ago. Gone is the widespread enthusiasm to remove the failed Labour councillors from office.

The key to the 2026 election is how much of Labour’s 6.7% underperformance in 2022, compared with the rest of London, can be recovered by Davis and her council candidates. They could need all 6.7% to win, and then only narrowly.

Le crunch: tactical voting blocked Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front. Might it be needed in Croydon to stop Farage?

Opinion polls putting Labour just ahead in Croydon rely more on pollsters’ hunches of the borough now being socially Labour-leaning than on any real analysis of the campaign’s effectiveness or the “bounce back” from 2022.

There was a time when the Red-Blue duopoly in Croydon shared 73% of votes cast. This time next week, that could be down to 44%.

If voters feel they need to stop Reform Ltd, a bit like in recent French Presidential elections, progressive voters will have to hold their noses and vote for Labour or Conservatives in the mayoral part of the election to keep Farage out of Croydon.

In this way, between them the duopoly might get closer to 50%, in the mayoral election.

Only in the councillor elections will this tactical voting be less necessary.

Of course, the JLPartners poll may be wayward. But in the end, when the count is conducted in the Fairfield Halls on Friday and Saturday, May 8 and 9, it will be real votes that matter, not opinions.

Read more: Apr 23: Fewer than 100 votes in it between Perry and Davis for Mayor
Read more: Apr 11: Election countdown: splintered voting could see Davis win
Read more: Labour forces Davis to erase ‘genocide’ from her manifesto
Read more: Commissioners: council lacks focus and robust delivery plans
Read more: Four black women among six councillors rejected by Labour

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