Farage and Polanski get ready to chew through the London ‘donut’
Populists on the right and left are upsetting the old order in the U.K. capital — and risk dealing Prime Minister Keir Starmer another hefty blow.
By SAM BLEWETT
in London
Photo-illustration by Júlia Vadler/POLITICO
Forget the “donut.” The classic electoral map of London — a safe, red Labour core encircled by a dependable ring of blue Tory suburbs — looks set to be chomped to pieces.
As Keir Starmer braces for a brutal set of local elections on May 7, his party is confronting a terrifying new picture in the capital, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK biting into the right-leaning fringes and a surging Green Party gobbling up parts of the progressive center.
Labour officials struggling to hold on to the U.K. capital now fret about a “pentagon” — a mind-bending fight in which they’re fending off challenges on multiple fronts, while the Conservatives are grasping to stay relevant. An already priced-in hammering in Wales, Scotland and in councils across England could, according to YouGov polling shared with POLITICO this week, be compounded by big losses in the capital.
All of that offers up fresh ammunition for the growing tranche of Labour MPs — who need local reps to fight future campaigns and deliver for voters — wanting to eject their embattled leader.
“People will come back and say I’ve lost all my f****** councillors and I’m obviously going to lose my seat — but for London it’s a different level,” said one government minister granted anonymity like others in this piece to speak freely.
“Some of the MPs in London have never lost before. They don’t know what it’s like.”
Farage marauds from the right
The early April sun illuminates Nigel Farage’s blue suit as he marches down Romford Market, flanked by a huddle of supporters and security heavies.
The historic market in the far-east London borough of Havering isn’t as thriving as it used to be, but everyone from the butcher to the babygrow seller wants to stop the Reform UK boss for a picture.
Farage hasn’t got his own social media team in tow — but in this strongly-right leaning town that has staunchly-backed the center-right Conservatives in recent decades, he doesn’t need it.
A steady stream of selfie-takers will flood their own social media with images of themselves grinning with Farage, his own free meme factory.
Romford feels culturally far further from London’s cosmopolitan center than its 14 miles. Havering is becoming more diverse as Londoners leave the crushing costs of the inner city, but it still resembles one of the “forgotten towns” in which Farage’s pledges to slash migration and take on the system are winning him support.
Indeed, the butcher Steve Wickenden yells from over his meat counter that “it was either you or Rupert Lowe” — praising the policies of both the Reform leader and his former MP who’s now positioning himself even further to the right than Farage. But seeing “Nige” he proudly takes out his “Vote Reform, Get Starmer Out” placard and hangs it from the meat hooks above his counter.
Here the Conservatives feel like a dead force — their troubles demonstrated by the MP guiding Farage around the market, Andrew Rosindell, who defected from the Tories to Reform.
Havering is quite possibly Reform’s best bet to gain a council within London, though they are targeting other outer boroughs like Bexley, Bromley, Hillingdon and Barking and Dagenham.
Along with migration, there’s another cultural vein Rosindell is able to tap into here.
Havering was created in the 1960s by bringing Romford, and its leafier neighbor Hornchurch, out of Essex and into the capital. It’s had an uneasy place in London ever since.
Now one of Reform’s big offers here is a referendum to reverse that decision, in what is naturally being termed “Hexit.” Caren Webb, the stallholder selling baby clothes who’s switched from voting Conservative to Reform, reckons that this would give “a bit more power” to stop the pace of change in Romford she says is typified by new blocks of flats popping up in the otherwise low-rise town.
The Brexit parallels are clear. Ray Morgon, who runs the Havering Residents’ Association, warns a post-Hexit Havering would need to negotiate with Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan’s City Hall so pensioners don’t lose their “freedom passes” for transport — something Rosindell calls a “lie.”
Farage doesn’t want to get into the specifics. “It’s about identity, it’s about how you feel, and that actually matters to people,” he says down Romford Market. “Somehow, a London in which Khan has been elected three times just feels a million miles away from life in virtually all, actually, of these outer boroughs.”
The Reform UK leader tells POLITICO he’s considering going further and opening up a debate about whether other outer London boroughs might want to rejoin their former counties. The historic expansion of Greater London was “very ill thought out,” he argues.
“We finished up with places like this, which still feel a strong sense of Essex identity. Similarly, in the south of Greater London, we’ve got areas, where there are sheep farms, who feel much more part of Kent but they feel part of London. And I think this is a real debate for the future,” he says.
“And similarly, I’m even in the West hearing arguments that bring back the county of Middlesex. So I think there may be a big change coming here. I genuinely do.”
‘Eco-populist’ Greens skip in from the left
The following morning a very different mood is ushering Green activists into the Old Church in liberal Stoke Newington. Zack Polanski is such a draw that his speech needs to be moved outside to the park. There can’t be many other preachers overfilling a London church on a Saturday morning.
Younger-skewing, left-wing activists are buzzing from a by-election victory in Gorton and Denton — overthrowing Labour hegemony in Manchester is opening their eyes to doing it just about anywhere.
There’s talk of socialism in the air — or the “s-word” as some offer up to avoid scaring off the wider public. The candidates to take on the borough of Hackney — perhaps the best shot the Greens have of snatching a London council from Labour — are a mix of veteran environmentalists and newcomers who have swerved ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s struggling Your Party and rowed in behind Polanski and his self-styled brand of “eco-populism.”
The Greens threw everything at Hackney the last time the council was contested, back in 2022. They won two seats compared to Labour’s 50. Even that was considered quite the success.
Now polling has the Greens as the largest party in this gentrified inner-London borough — potentially overhauling 24 years of utter Labour domination.
Polanski accepts it’s a big target, but tempers expectations in an interview with POLITICO squeezed into a taxi heading to south London between campaign stops: “If I had two main priorities for these elections, it’s to win the Hackney mayoralty and to win seats in the Senedd [Welsh assembly].”
Aides say Hackney council is their best bet at controlling a town hall, while they also eye gains in the neighboring areas Haringey, Islington and Waltham Forest, as well as Southwark and Lewisham in the capital’s south.
Polanski points to the Gorton and Denton upset as proof that left-wing voters don’t have to vote Labour to prevent a Reform victory. No longer, he reckons, do voters fear plumping for Green is a “wasted vote.”
“Members turning up in huge numbers doesn’t win elections — what wins elections is people voting for you,” he cautions. “But it certainly doesn’t hurt having lots of people on the ground, you’re able to mobilize and excite and I think that’s what you’ll see today.”
When we arrive in Peckham — a gentrifying cultural hub that is to south London what Hackney is to east London — Polanski is met by another groundswell of young and eager activists.
The Greens launched their local election campaign with a pitch targeted squarely at this kind of crowd, living in a highly unstable letting market with little prospect of ownership: rent controls.
Part of the reason the Greens started so big on housing is because it’s one issue Labour is happy to confront them on — arguing the environmentalist Greens are “not in my back yard” NIMBYs who routinely block developments.
Polanski acknowledges the Greens couldn’t actually introduce rent controls — a power well out of the hands of any town hall — if they win councils. But, he argues, his councillors would be a band of “high profile voices” to pressure the government.
He does challenge Labour’s dismissal of a measure that would have debatable effects. “Rent controls are a typical example of one of the most corrosive narratives that Labour often put into discourse — the idea that new ideas are too radical or won’t work, or they’re not pragmatic,” he tells POLITICO.
“I’d say there’s nothing pragmatic about having people not being able to afford their rent, nothing pragmatic about the fact there’s a million households on the waiting list.”
He points out that a form of rent controls did exist before Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher vanquished them, while Labour’s own London Mayor Sadiq Khan is calling for their return. “So it’s a little bit awkward for Labour,” he says in the pugnacious, yet smiley, style that makes him a hit on social media.
Polanski is, for many Greens, the leader they’ve been waiting for. “It’s funny watching this moment. I’ve always been, like, we just got to get someone who can do what Zack is doing, and then this will happen,” one long-standing member says. “And to kind of see it happening now, after so long, sometimes I’m a bit like, what’s going on? It’s very exciting.”
Labour doesn’t know which way to look
No such enthusiasm can be witnessed in the Labour campaign.
A long-time supporter opens her door in Newham to Angela Rayner. The east Londoner bemoans to the former deputy prime minister and hotly-tipped successor to Starmer that she’s sick of Labour’s perceived failures in government and will be snubbing voting entirely on May 7.
But Rayner, as one of Labour’s best communicators, lays out just what has been delivered in the last two years. Exasperated, the voter replies: “why didn’t she know all that?” But Rayner has convinced her, she supposes she’ll vote Labour again this time.
It’s an account of a fairly replicable experience on the doors relayed by party activists. But MP after MP still rebuffed POLITICO’s requests to join them on the campaign trail.
The party even pulled the plug at the last minute on a visit to Croydon — where one small silver lining in the form of a mayoral victory is being tipped. A decision was made that Deputy Leader Lucy Powell could no longer take POLITICO’s questions, just as damaging testimony about the Peter Mandelson scandal that has rocked Starmer was being delivered in parliament.
That row is only adding to the deep malaise felt by Labour activists.
So much has changed since Starmer entered No.10 Downing Street.
When he was opposition leader in 2022, Labour won control of 21 of London’s 32 boroughs, winning 44 percent of the vote. In May 2024, Sadiq Khan was re-elected for a third term as London mayor — increasing his share of the vote.
Today, with Labour in government, the party is struggling to work out how to fight in London when it’s not just their traditional enemy of the Tories.
“Fighting Greens is something we’ve never done before. I could write essays on fighting the Tories, but this is something new,” one official working on the campaign says. “These elections have come too soon for our operational understanding. But it’s something we will look back on because this isn’t going away.”
Part of the reason why Labour’s struggling in this pentagon (or “very patchy donut,” as the official puts it) is because it’s so hard to build a unified message across the capital when they’re trying to fend off threats from every direction — from their traditional rivals in the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, to the shiny new challengers.
The concentration of senior Labour figures in the capital adds to the urgency. Of Labour’s 403 MPs, 58 were elected in the capital, including senior Cabinet ministers like David Lammy and Wes Streeting.
Even the inner-city council of Camden — Starmer’s own backyard — is facing a strong challenge from the Greens. The peril has exposed splits, with Lammy and Khan posturing for Labour to make more noise about closer ties with the European Union.
Such is the urgency in London that MPs are being asked to take afternoons away from parliament to go out on the doorsteps. Some are reluctant to go. They already have extreme constraints on their time, and they fear posting their efforts online might anger their constituents outside the capital. It’s a far cry from Nigel Farage’s army of meme generators.
One downtrodden backbencher described the whole operation as smacking of “desperation.”
“The difficulty will be Labour MPs waking up and seeing us losing to both Reform and the Greens,” they added, forecasting dismal scenarios during a painful few days of results. “We’ll be bleeding from both flanks.”
To staunch the flow, Labour has a team scouring lists of Green candidates looking for questionable track records, with a particularly acute look-out for problems with anti-Semitism that have often dogged elements of the harder left. They’re even using lists of members expelled from Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership to help this, the campaign official quoted above said.
“We’re working on about 500 people we kicked out for those reasons and now comparing candidate lists,” the official quoted above told POLITICO. “The depth of what we are finding is incredible.”
But to look at Labour’s campaign literature, candidates are focusing on their local council’s achievements. It’s the Greens who are more likely to include Starmer’s face.
Labour will want to depict their populist opponents as offering pipe dream policies they can’t deliver even if they do end up winning control of councils. But they are at least articulating proposals resonating with a despairing public.
There will be no shortage of Labour MPs waking up in May feeling more urgently than ever that if their party doesn’t sort out its narrative quickly, they’ll be following a tide of despatched councillors into the jobs market.
Dan Bloom contributed reporting.
