All change: Cllr Stuart King’s shadow cabinet was stripped almost bare by his own party’s ineptitude and Croydon voters’ rejection of some of the less well-liked, even despied, members of his inner team
Our Town Hall reporter KEN LEE on the immediate fall-out from Labour’s Rowenna Davis failing to become Mayor of Croydon
Leadership material?: Cllr Rowenna Davis
There will be a Labour Party leadership contest this week – but in Katharine Street, rather than Downing Street.
While Bensham Manor councillor Ellie Sandover’s Uncle Keir clings on at No10, last week’s seismic mayoral and local election results in Croydon have left the Labour group at the Town Hall in a state of disarray as well as obvious dismay.
Only three of Labour’s nine-strong shadow cabinet survived their party’s own cull and the voters’ judgement on their time in office as councillors, with the widely disliked “Thirsty” Chris Clark, pompous Chris Herman and underwhelming Jess Hammersley-Rich (who?) the shadow cabinet members getting dispatched at the ballot box on Thursday.
Labour was declared as the winners of 30 council seats at Saturday’s ward count at the Fairfield Halls, losing four from their 2022 tally. But with several senior figures retiring or being blocked from seeking re-election by their own party, it has created huge gaps in Labour’s leadership team at the Town Hall.
And that has caused speculation among councillors and grassroots members over what direction they are likely to take, after four years in opposition to a failed Tory administration under Mayor Jason Perry, without any real sign that they might oust him from office.
Perry and the Tories retain control of Croydon Council, by virtue of his slim 1,113-vote majority over Labour in the mayoral election declared on Friday (the number of councillors each party has at the Town Hall has been rendered a near-irrelevance since the borough moved to the directly-elected mayoral system in 2021).
Although Labour is Croydon’s biggest single party following Thursday’s elections, they may now be forced to work more closely with the Greens, who with eight councillors (including the suspended Mark Adderley), hold significant voting power on key issues.
Greens Ria Patel and Esther Sutton and LibDem Claire Bonham were the only councillors consistently to vote against Perry’s budgets and Council Tax rises from 2023, as Labour under King’s leadership repeatedly folded into pusillanimous abstention. After the 2026 elections, any Labour-Green-LibDem bloc vote at the Town Hall would still lack the two-thirds majority required to amend a Perry council budget.
Taking a lead: Stuart Kind is thought to have the support of Rowenna Davis to continue as Labour leader
With Rowenna Davis missing out on becoming Mayor, but being returned for a second term as a councillor in Waddon, some assumed she would take over from Stuart King as group leader.
Davis maintained before the election that she thought it best that someone other than her take on the position of leader of the opposition (Special Responsibility Allowance: £18,405, plus the £12,000 councillor basic allowance) if she wasn’t elected Mayor.
After an often brutal and cruel campaign, in which TikTok videos of town centre flashdances failed to overcome outright lies and deception from Perry and the Tories, Davis, the mother of two young daughters, may opt for a spell out of the frontline. According to one Katharine Street source, “She will be acutely aware that she would be taunted relentlessly by Perry and the Tories for the next four years if she took the job on.”
Davis, as a former chair of the council scrutiny committee, might be an obvious choice for a job in Labour’s shadow cabinet under Stuart King, who was the agent for her mayoral campaign. This Thursday’s meeting will seek to fill the vacancies left by last Thursday’s elections.
And it could also choose the group leader.
King, a former parliamentary candidate and a cabinet member in Tony Newman’s administration, has been Labour’s leader in Croydon since 2022. His day job is as a director of a firm of lobbyists for property developers, where his colleagues include Peter John, the former Labour leader of Southwark Council.
“Stuart is still the best candidate based on ability, persona and performance,” according to one source. At the Fairfield Halls count over the weekend, King was indicating that he was prepared to take on a second term in the role.
Well-regarded: Cllr Amy Foster
Before May 7, members of King’s shadow cabinet had been queuing up to take his crown: Chrishni Reshekaron’s deselection by Labour might have been partly caused by her lobbying other councillors for their support in a leadership coup post-May 7, and Clark’s ambitions were also plain, despite his inability to “read the room” about his own abilities.
Amy Foster, who retained her seat in Woodside, has indicated that if Davis does not seek election as leader, then she might do so. Working full-time as an aide to MP Natasha Irons would offer Foster a perfect platform to run Labour’s Town Hall tem.
Janet Campbell, King’s deputy leader and a widely respected as a competent Town Hall Chamber performer and ward councillor, might attract support if she decided to stand. Campbell is a West Thornton ward colleague of King’s, and on Thursday topped the poll in the ward, getting 400+ votes more than her group leader: 1,765 to 1,305.
Respected: Cllr Janet Campbell
Both Foster and Campbell are post-Newman councillors, so less sullied by the dodgy decisions of that 2014-2022 administration.
Of Labour’s 30 councillors, 13 were newly elected on Thursday (including returnee, John Wentworth, a Steve Reed stooge). With so many new and young councillors, any leadership contest would be very unpredictable.
As with all matters Labour in Croydon, there remains an uncertainty over how much local autonomy will be allowed, if any, with the party still in “special measures” with Labour’s ruling NEC and London region since they bankrupted the borough in 2020.
Scandal has haunted Labour in Croydon for more than a decade, and it is not going away just yet, with four party members, including former Croydon councillor Carole Bonner and ex-party official Joel Bodmer, due to face charges at Westminster Magistrates’ Court a week tomorrow including conspiracy, computer misuse and perverting the course of justice, in respect of efforts to tamper with the Croydon East parliamentary selection in 2023.
As a Katharine Street source warned, “There must be an outside risk, if there is a vacancy, that Wentworth is appointed to the role by London region.”
Wentworth returned to the council after being narrowly elected (by just 53 votes ahead of a Green candidate) for Norbury and Pollards Hill. Until 2018, he had been a councillor for Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood.
Match of the day: in 2015, John Wentworth (bald head, right) was caught watching a Crystal Palace game during a Town Hall meeting
Wentworth has twice worked as election agent for Steve Reed. Now retired as a headteacher, Wentworth was notorious when a councillor under Newman for getting caught watching a Crystal Palace football match on his tablet in the middle of a serious Town Hall meeting.
Because of work commitments, Wentworth stood down from the council in 2018, so wasn’t a councillor at the time the council finances collapsed in a flurry of Section 114 notices.
“It would, of course,” said our source, “be absurd to appoint someone new who doesn’t know the dynamics of the current Labour group, but that wouldn’t bother London region, whose only consideration would be party loyalty.”
And Wentworth would almost certainly enjoy the support of Reed, the Labour Together co-founder, who has long had a pernicious influence with London region and the NEC, and Croydon.
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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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A fair analysis of this election would indicate Labour have not done badly in Croydon compared to many other areas. Hardly the reason to get rid of the last dregs of the disastrous Newman Regime. A better reason for Croydon Labour is to get rid of their connection to these failures as memory fades and they need to be seen as a fresh opposition. Further it is also the grouping that represents the Mandelsonian wing and they really need to move on from that into the future.
What was achieved by the election last week? Croydon was a ‘no overall control’ (NOC) borough last week and it still is this week. There were only two NOC boroughs before the election and at least Croydon didn’t lost the plot like the other NOC borough, Havering , which voted for hatred and now is controlled by Reform.
Despite between them running Croydon into the ground ever since the London Borough of Croydon was formed in 1965, Labour still have 30 councillors and the Tories still have 28. What does it take for the voters in Croydon to finally reject these malign influences?
The Greens have quadrupled their councillors from 2 to 8 and the Lib Dems have doubled their from 1 to 2, but they will still be small opposition groups at the council. Croydon could and probable should have joined Waltham Forest, Hackney and Lewisham in going Green, or extending the Lib-Dems dominance of SW London a bit further south-east and gone to control by them. In neighbouring Sutton, all 20 Tory councillors lost their seats, but in Croydon voters are still wedded to the red-blue duopoly.
AND we have got four more years of the hapless Piss-Poor Perry as mayor, screwing up everything he touches. Croydon had the opportunity for change, but blew it !
Croydon is not NOC. It has an Executive Mayor. The number of councillors elected is a virtual irrelevance
‘King Faces Leadership Challenge’ grabbed my attention. How could this be, after his brilliant US Congress speech? And I realised … it was just a Croydon thing
Campbell and Foster are both personable and smart, a rare combination in Labour councillors, especially those selected without the involvement of members. Both of them are astute enough to be able to work beyond party boundaries to take Perry on.
I must confess, I hadn’t really considered Janet for the role. I think she would be a good choice.
I’d like to see some actual opposition from the opposition. In my view the following should be undertaken :
1. Some forensic analysis of Perry’s 2022 manifesto and his failure to deliver
2. A forensic analysis of the 2026 manifesto exposing the lack of substance
3. A regular drumbeat across all local social media of comment, thought pieces, take downs etc… about the failings of the Mayor. Those of us that keep getting banned from NextDoor can’t do it all ourselves!
4. Greater hostility in the council chamber regarding voting, questions etc… No one wants to see an ‘honest broker’ – vote the budget down every time for crying out loud!
5. The Leader of the Opposition should be the Mayoral candidate. And the Mayoral candidate should be The Leader of the Opposition.
Welcome to Inside Croydon, Tim.
Has anyone seen any opposition politician in Croydon call for Perry’s resignation as Mayor over the humiliating High Court decision over LTNs, in which Perry’s big gob cost the council at least £10million alone?
No, thought not…
Your suggestions are all negative, sadly. Haven’t we had enough hostility already? The end of duopoly could mean the end of opposition for oppositions sake
In an ideal world there’d a progressive coalition to get rid, permanently, of the Tories. If just a few of the Green, Lib Dem or even, god forbid, Jose voters had given Rowenna the benefit of the doubt Perry would be gone. But here we are. An Executive Mayor system doesn’t need the support of the opposition – so the other councillors may as well make life miserable for him.
If the leader of Croydon Labour wants to be taken seriously as the Opposition, they should start by opposing the malignant control freaks in their own party, e.g. Steve Reed. High time that Starmer toady was deselected
Agreed – for the 2nd election in a row a self-imposed ejection has (possibly) cost the local party the Mayorality. No one votes for parties because they’ve ejected troublesome Councillors. Keep your enemies close, and your errant Members closer!