Last night, Tom Pridham was selected as the Conservative candidate for Battersea. A former sommelier, current public affairs consultant, and a councillor in Wandsworth, Pridham said he was “delighted” to have been selected and that he is “really looking forward to the campaign”.
Pridham had been up against Aarti Joshi, a senior tax lawyer in a technology firm and a 2022 council candidate in Camden, and Mehreen Malik, a lawyer with Mayer Brown and a candidate for Kensington and Chelsea Council in 2022, with experience working with the UN.
According to one local Conservative source, Pridham was “always the frontrunner” but they were three “high-quality candidates” who brought “different backgrounds and perspectives”. Pridham gave “the best performance on the night” and “knew the seat well”. However, all gave “interesting” presentations, with Joshi in particular offering “red meat” about tax cuts.
Although Battersea currently has a Labour majority of 5, 668, it was Tory between 2010 and 2017, with Jane Ellison winning a majority of 7, 938 in 2015. Whilst making gains next year in a city trending towards Labour seems unlikely, my local source was keen to stress that Battersea is a seat that “thinks Rishi Sunak is a good thing”, being towards the liberal, “Cameroon” end of the Conservative spectrum.
Working in Pridham’s favour was that he won a marginal council seat last year against the broader trend. As one prominent Conservative put it to me, Pridham “did that rare thing – he gave up a fun life as a sommelier to get involved in public service”, is both “smart” and “hugely compassionate”, and “turned out his voters against the odds”. We wish him all the best.
As ever, if you have any information about candidates and selections in your own constituency, please e-mail me at william@conservativehome.com.