Gang show at the Fairfield Halls: Jason Perry shortly after yesterday’s result. His Tory mates helped get him re-elected with lies and decpetion, and even broke the law
ELECTION COMMENTARY: Jason Perry, Croydon’s failed Mayor, may have been handed another four years in office, but the voting numbers declared yesterday spell trouble for the borough’s other Conservatives.
By STEVEN DOWNES, Editor, Inside Croydon
Jason Perry, Croydon’s failed Mayor, backed by his Conservative gang members, did not win the borough’s second mayoral election this week. Keir Starmer lost it.
By any reasonable assessment, Jason Perry’s four-year term from 2022 has been an unmitigated failure. Residents’ Council Tax is up by 33%, yet the cash-strapped council’s debt is up by £300million, to £1.7billion.
Perry’s latest budget, forced through with legal threats against opposition councillors, proved to be so unbalanced that the government-appointed Commissioners have ordered Conrad Hall, the finance director called in to try to untangle the mess created by four years of bungling, to come up with a fresh financial plan for 2026-2027 by July. The next few weeks will be more than interesting.
Perry has failed in so many ways.
The High Court ruling in March over the Tory Mayor’s money-spinning Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, which could cost the council more than £10million, ought to have seen the Mayor resign. But that would have been the act of a man of honour. Instead, Perry has doubled down on road safety measures, and is threatening to remove controls on our roads that make them safer and cleaner.
Signing on: Jason Perry, watched over by his wife and son, little Willy, does the paperwork for his £86,000 part-time job. Pic: Gabriel MacArthur
Croydon is the “fly-tip capital” of England, and yet Perry signed a waste deal with rubbish contractors Veolia, the same firm he had sacked barely 18 months earlier, giving them a pay rise. Perry has kept that contract secret for more than a year – draw your own conclusions why.
Major capital projects, such as the promised Purley Pool, have stalled, not a brick has been laid.
Perry liked to boast about the six kiosks opened by his big business mates Westfield in the Allders Parade, yet meanwhile more than 30 other businesses were exiting the Whitgift Centre last year, as the town centre decline gathers pace on the Tory Mayor’s watch.
His promises to track down and bring legal action against the people responsible for bankrupting the borough proved to be so much hot air. It is the one attribute that Perry has plenty of. His 2026 election campaign was replete with deceit, out-and-out lies and even law-breaking, while there is a suggestion of a fraud audit being undertaken at the council over possible misuse of public funds for the lamentable Borough of Culture year.
Under Perry, the council issued its third Section 114 notice and eventually had to be taken over by Commissioners. That supposedly took real power out of Perry’s hands, yet he continued to squander public money in his own interests, with dodgy Town Hall Pravdas, council “newspapers” stuffed with pictures of Croydon’s Great Leader.
Official statement: the council document from yesterday’s mayorl count
Perry’s biggest promise in 2022, to “fix the finances”, has been his biggest failure. Croydon is no closer today to getting a debt write-off, or even a rescheduling, than we were in 2021. And, let’s not forget, Perry had opportunity to seal such a deal with a Conservative government before Starmer was elected in 2024.
Perry’s focus has been unrelentingly on himself and his re-election. The council has been in a state of standby for the past nine months or more. There’s an interim chief exec, the interim assistant CEO will soon be gone and they are recruiting for a new finance director. This amount of top-level churn would not happen in a well-run organisation.
After four wasted years, we are lumbered with a lame duck Mayor who will use Thursday’s election result to push through measures in a manifesto that remained virtually unseen by the vast majority of the borough’s residents, with policies few would readily accept. Or, in the case of the privatisation of our public parks, believe.
Perry has never been one for teamwork. He has a record of riding roughshod over his own cabinet and holding opposition figures – and the public – in contempt. Today’s count of council ward votes may provide more twists in the tail, with senior Tory councillors anxious to see if they have held their seats against the challenge of Reform.
It is hard to explain, given Perry’s disastrous track record, how even one person – perhaps with the exception of Mrs Perry, or Perry’s little Willy – could have voted Jason Perry on Thursday, never mind the 35,871 Croydon residents.
Out on his own: with no real public mandate, will Mayor Perry v2 be more consensual?
Yet even those figures need to be given some overview and context.
In this new, multi-party environment where the old duopoly has been significantly dented, if not entirely broken (that’ll be a judgement to be made over the next three or four years) , Perry was elected with around 31% of all the votes cast. That, in itself, is hardly a ringing endorsement.
But there are 286,933 people registered to vote in the borough. That means he only got the support of just 1-in-8 of Croydon voters. The increasingly Trump-like figure of Perry will need to be reminded of that stat every day he remains in office.
Those crocodile tears he shed when on stage at the Ashcroft Theatre yesterday evening were not of joy at victory, but out of relief that his political career had not been finished in failure, as he so richly deserves.
For that, Perry can thank not Mario Creatura, who in typical style ran his nasty and deceptive campaign, but Keir Starmer and Steve Reed and his Labour Together mates.
No real mandate: even with an increased turnout Tory Perry had the votes of just 1-in-8 registered voters in Croydon
Until Thursday, Labour controlled 21 of the capital’s 33 boroughs (and the City of London). That situation has been utterly changed by Thursday’s elections, which were held with the most unpopular Prime Minister in history resident in Downing Street.
In what the developers’ friend, Nick Bowes of the London Communications Agency, described as “the most consequential set of local elections” since 1965, Labour has lost control of stronghold boroughs Southwark, Enfield, Barnet, Brent, Waltham Forest, Hackney, Lewisham, and Haringey, as well as 2022 trophies Wandsworth and Westminster.
In neighbouring Lambeth, they still have half their wards to declare today, with the Greens already winning big in the first set of results. Was Reed at The Oval for the Lambeth count yesterday? For he was nowhere to be seen at the Fairfield Halls offering support to Croydon’s unlucky Blue Labour candidate.
Yes, Perry’s Conservative colleagues won back control of Westminster, but as was shown in next-door Sutton where the Tories were completely wiped out (by the growth of the Reform vote letting the LibDems take 51 of 55 council seats), Kemi Badenoch’s brand of Toryism is not resonating with most Londoners.
We ought to acknowledge, and thank, the Tories in Bexley and Bromley for seeing off the threat of the Faragists. Londoners have always been a shrewd lot, and the grifters, tax-dodgers and snake oil salesmen of Reform Ltd appear to have been mostly repelled at the gates of the capital.
You don’t have to scratch Farage very deep to reveal his inherent racism. Speaking in Chelmsford last night (Reform won Essex County Council), Farage described London as “a foreign land”, as he had the dead ‘ump at the overall lack of traction his limited company has made here.
London v the rest: the Faragists don’t appear to have made the gains in the capital that they have seen elsewhere in the country
Of course, Reform won spectacularly in Havering (it’s almost Essex), but elsewhere struggled to make the breakthrough Farage so keenly desired. Today’s count of ward votes at Fairfield Halls will provide further detail on whether that rejection includes Croydon.
And this is where things could get interesting. Very interesting.
There were two ballot papers on Thursday. Not everyone who voted for Jason Perry as Mayor will have necessarily voted Conservative for their councillors.
And figures from across the country, and across London, indicate that today’s 28 declarations, for wards from Coulsdon in the south to Crystal Palace in the north of the borough, may deliver a few more shocks.
Luke Tryl, of another consultancy, More In Common, highlights that, based on the results in so far, “Labour’s vote drop in London is now almost as great as their drop outside London. But the Tories’ drop is eight points lower in the capital than outside and their vote share overall five points higher in London.”
Friends in low places: market trader Jose Joseph relished undermining the Labour vote
Former Croydon MP Andrew Pelling told Inside Croydon, “Some of the Labour meltdowns elsewhere in London suggest Labour should take solace in Rowenna’s result in Croydon, especially if there are few losses in ward seats declared today.”
And a source close to Labour candidate Davis said this morning: “The left vote just split more than the right.”
That might be a barbed observation about the presence on the ballot of the likes of Jose Joseph, the ex-Labour and former Reform member who stood as an independent.
Joseph siphoned off 1,500 votes. “When Labour lose, I win,” he said at the count, more than once, yesterday. Joseph’s not the slightest bit bitter at all about his political career having hit the rocks of a £40,000 Home Office fine for employing an illegal immigrant.
And Croydon had its own version of the Green surge, too, with Peter Underwood getting almost 20,000 votes for third place. It was, though, as always with Underwood’s candidacies, not quite enough to see him elected.
Early views from the count yesterday of the ward votes for Selsdon Vale and Forestdale, where Underwood is a council candidate, suggest that he might just miss out once more, with Jack Barwell, son of Lord Barwell, benefiting as a consequence. It is not only Labour that has nepobabies on the Croydon ballot papers.
The net swing in support from Conservative to Labour suggest that Tory big beast Jeet Bains could be vulnerable in Addiscombe East. The weakness in Reform’s vote, as seen yesterday, might make the previous forecast multiple gains of council seats more limited, though New Addington will be well worth a watch as Inside Croydon delivers another day-long live election report, but this time with 28 election results to declare from the stage of the Ashcroft Theatre.
Jason Perry Cons 35,871 (-7.8%)
Rowenna Davis Labour 34,758 (-4.8%)
Peter Underwood Green 19,404 (+3.9%)
Ben Flook Reform 14,467 (New)
Richard Howard LibDem 7,815 (-5.0%)
Michael Pusey TTIP 2,597
Jose Joseph Ind 1,568
Ben Goldstone TUSC 461
* Figures in brackets relate to vote share comparison from previous local elections in 2022, based on that year’s ward votes
- Inside Croydon’s unmatched live election coverage on Friday was read by almost 63,000 people (and counting) – twice as many as voted for Jason Perry, in an overwhelming endorsement of the journalism that this news website continues to provide, despite the perverse management of the council and its Mayor.
With our reporters in the Ashcroft Theatre for the count, Inside Croydon delivered the result as it happened, and almost 20 minutes sooner than the BBC. The non-local news site run from Canary Wharf by Retch published its election report four hours after the declaration.
We thank all our readers, and our loyal paying subscribers, for their continuing support, and we will continue to work to ensure that your voices are not ignored by Croydon’s failed Mayor.
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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 note your article, however the people of Croydon have re elected Mayor Perry showing that they do not accept the views in your article.
Les, as you write your snide little comment from the comfort of the large, four-bedroomed council house that you managed to land while Jason Perry was Mayor, can I just remind you that all of the statements made in the article are based on demonstrable facts, and not the deluded ramblings of a bitter old man.
That’s a lie. 1 in 8 people in Croydon have re-elected Mayor Perry. 3 in 8 people voted for someone else. 4 in 8 people didn’t vote. I’m sure you, like me, will see this imbalance, and the spectre of Reform gaining a parliamentary majority in 2029 and call urgently for proportional representation.
Careful what you wish for – Reform wants PR and that could let Nigel in No. 10
But a general election in 2029 is still three years away, Tim.
As Reform have shown in the handful of places foolish enough to let them run things, it all ends badly, with sackings, resignations and endless bad publicity. By 2029, Reform will have spent 3 years running Essex and LB of Havering (a.k.a. near Essex) into the ground and alienating everyone, and they should get little/no traction with their message of hatred in a general election ?!
When did you become a Tory arselicker Les?
Harsh, Jane.
Lickspittle is so much better
Excellent coverage, thank you. Appreciate the depth of insight.
Small query though: the Green vote trebled from 6,193 in 2022 to 19,404 which suggests more than a 3.9% increase.
Thank you.
Take a look at the small print, Brian. We’ve compared vote shares with the councillor vote shares of 2022, for some technical reason that Walter Cronxite feels is important.
Thanks, I missed that. Does Walter also design bar charts for the Lib Dems?
“The left vote just split more than the right.”
Labour hasn’t been a left-wing party for decades, it’s a hobby-horse for authoritarians masquerading as people with a social conscience
So the ‘real’ left wing is not authoritarian?
Must of taken ages to write this up. Very content rich backed up with factual information. A must read. No point doing interviews with Perry btw…as he lies his way out of everything . A pity the older gen couldn’t see this before voting