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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