The Home Secretary, James Cleverly, has said that he thinks there will be a ‘good decent amount’ of Conservative candidates elected at the General Election, despite a huge loss for the party’s mayoral candidate against Sadiq Khan earlier this month. Susan Hall was defeated by Labour’s incumbent by a margin of around 275,000 votes.
Mr Khan will now serve in the office until at least 2028. But the former Tory London Assembly Member, who was elected to the body in 2008 before stepping down to run for Parliament in 2015, remains optimistic ahead of July 4.
Mr Cleverly told MyLondon: “We saw that, of course, in 2019, we won a very significant majority across the country, including a large number of seats in London, having not previously won the mayoral election prior to that. It’s disappointing that we don’t have a Conservative Mayor of London.
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“As I say, I think Sadiq Khan has has really failed Londoners, he’s let Londoners down. And I have no doubt that with some of the fantastic candidates and campaign teams that we have around London, that we will return a good, significant number of Conservative MPs from London to make sure that all Londoners are represented in the House of Commons.”
Earlier this month, the Chairman of the Conservative Party, Richard Holden, told MyLondon that there are ‘lessons to learn’ and there will be ‘a lot of reflection’ as people make their own decisions over whether Ms Hall, was the right person to take on Mr Khan.
He would not be drawn on whether there would be any changes to how the party’s candidate for mayor is elected in the future. Mr Holden said: “We’re always looking at keeping the broader processes and how we do stuff under review.”
Ms Hall ‘fought campaign on common sense conservative principles’
After the mayoral result was officially declared at City Hall on May 4, a spokesperson for Ms Hall’s campaign said: “We fought a campaign on common sense conservative principles, and defied the polls. Hard work, grit and determination, embodied by our candidate, Susan Hall, boosted our vote significantly above the parties polling in this great City.
“Our message overperformed, our candidate won over hundreds of thousands of Londoners with a plain speaking honest campaign.”
A spokesperson for Mr Khan’s campaign said: “Sadiq has secured a historic third term as Labour Mayor with a landslide win in London. This is the first time in the history of the London mayoralty that an incumbent has increased their margin of victory and seen a swing towards them.
“This is the biggest ever margin of victory in a mayoral election… After eight years in office, Sadiq has secured an unprecedented third term with 44 per cent of the vote. This is the best re-election result for any Mayor of London.
“Ken Livingstone was re-elected with 37 per cent of the vote in the first round and Boris Johnson was re-elected as mayor with just a 3.7 per cent margin in the first round.
“Sadiq has increased his share of the vote in places in both inner and outer London. Londoners have clearly rejected the overwhelmingly negative and divisive campaign run by the Tories.”
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