It could yet go down as the biggest mugging ever seen in Croydon – the day that nearly 36,000 people were conned into voting for Conservative Mayor Jason Perry.

So just how did Perry, the incompetent Mayor who hiked your Council Tax by 33% and still managed to increase council debt to £1.7billion, manage to scramble together enough votes to get re-elected last week?

That’s the underlying question that our panel of readers, joined by former BBC London politics editor Tim Donovan, try to answer in our local elections special edition of the Croydon Insider.

For this episode of our premium content, available free-of-charge to paying subscribers of Inside Croydon, our panel of readers are Oumesh Sauba, the co-founder of the Croydon Business Association, former Labour councillor Brian Finegan and nearly-councillor Connie Duxbury, who stood for the Green Party in South Croydon ward.

They joined iC Editor Steven Downes in our virtual studio Under The Flyover for an hour-long discussion of the local elections and what it all means for Croydon over the next four years.

Tim Donovan offers his expert analysis on the “earthquake election” across London, as the results from Lambeth to Hackney, from Bexley to Tower Hamlets are discussed, and our panel try to answer the unanswerable…

Plus they explain how

• You can’t have NOC – No Overall Control – in a borough which is run by an Executive Mayor (which the people at Retch and the BBC seem not to understand)

And they discuss:

• Croydon’s nepobabies (such as Jack Barwell, pictured right)
• Reform resisted – what happened to Farage’s party?
• How the left vote split cost Rowenna Davis the mayoralty
• The Mayor candidate who was fined £40,000 by the Home Office, and
• What next for Croydon over the nextfew weeks, and years?

This Croydon Insider podcast is free to Inside Croydon subscribers, part of the package offered to our loyal readers which also includes special offers, priority bookings and exclusive prize competitions.

This latest podcast is available by clicking here.

Or you can purchase it via our Spotify page by clicking here.

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