Cllr John Moss is a campaign consultant at the College Green Group, a councillor in Waltham Forest and Chairman of the Chingford & Woodford Green Conservatives
Analysis of May’s election results in London make one thing clear – Reform has no chance of winning the race for Mayor. The rest is more complicated, but the Conservatives can win with the right strategy and the right candidate.
Last month, the Conservatives won 407 council seats in London. Labour won 696 and the Green Party won 279. The Liberal Democrats won 243 and Reform won 79.
However, in an election where there are two or three candidates standing in each ward, it is more difficult to define how many people voted for each party. Having aggregated the votes secured by the top-scoring candidate in every ward, (which I believe is the best way to look at the maximum number of people who might vote for a particular party), Labour secured the most support, the Green Party were second, and the Conservatives a close third. Reform and the Liberal Democrats were a long way back in fourth and fifth respectively, but Reform out-polled the Lib Dems.
The Green Party did not stand candidates in four wards. The Lib-Dems in three and Reform in one. Labour and the Conservatives had at least one candidate in every ward, and there is one ward still to declare, a candidate sadly dying before polling day. With those caveats, these are the total votes cast for each parties’ top polling candidates (rounded):
At first glance this looks very bad for the Conservatives, polling almost 200,000 fewer votes than Susan Hall secured in 2024. However, on a higher turnout just nine weeks after that election, all the Conservative general election candidates together polled just over 685,000. Gaining a handful of seats and control of councils can’t hide the fact that at best this represents little improvement on the general election, though clearly London out-performed compared with the rest of the country. Nevertheless, I am optimistic about our chances in May 2028.
Looking at the map of elected councillors at ward level we can see where each party’s support is concentrated. And from this we can perhaps see the beginnings of a re-emergence of the ‘jam doughnut’ which helped Boris Johnson secure his two terms as London Mayor in 2008 and 2012.
To recap on those two elections, Johnson’s successes were largely attributed to securing votes from the ‘sugar’ of Conservative voters around the edge of London, and from the ‘jam’ in the boroughs of Wandsworth, Westminster, Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea.
It was actually much better than that in 2008. The pattern of wards where Johnson secured the most votes is quite staggering. Johnson topped the poll in almost twice as many wards as Livingstone. Between them, they topped the poll in every London ward. The Liberal Democrats did a little better on the Assembly ballot, as did the BNP, who won wards in Havering and Barking & Dagenham, and the Greens also won a few wards on the Assembly List ballot.
That saw Boris Johnson secure his first win with 1,044,000 first preference votes against 685,000 for Ken Livingstone. Second preference votes of 163,0000 and 143,000 respectively saw Johnson’s winning margin increase. In 2012, Johnson had a majority of just 82,000 votes after polling 972,000 first preferences against 890,000 for Livingstone. That narrowed to 62,500 after the second preferences were redistributed, with Livingstone securing 102,000 to Johnson’s 83,000.
So, how does this help the Conservative cause for 2028?
The first and most important point is that Reform cannot even make the final round based on their performance last month.They are in fourth place and polled 225,000 fewer votes than the Conservatives. With the switch back to second preference voting, the only prospect of a Reform win was to edge the Conservatives out of second place in the first round, then take Conservative second preference votes to overtake Labour. That is a mountain they are not going to be able to climb based on the numbers from last month.
So the Conservative message in London for Conservative-minded voters leaning to Reform is a simple one, don’t waste your vote. If that message lands and enough people who voted Reform in May switch their votes to the Conservatives, then the Conservatives can potentially get into second place.
The other factor at play here is the Green Party vote. Labour dropping from 1,088,000 votes in the mayoral contest to 785,000 last month and the Greens rising from 145,000 to 640,000 is clearly not a straight swap, with the Greens finding almost 200,000 more votes in May over and above the number of votes lost by Labour from its 2024 total. Turnout accounts for some, with 300,000 more votes cast for the top five parties last month, compared with the full ballot in 2024, but the Liberal Democrats also added 220,000 votes. Clearly there is a lot of vote-churning happening!
One scenario is that the Greens continue to eat into Labour’s vote. With an unpopular Labour government, perhaps a new Labour candidate with no incumbency advantage, and no sign of Zak Polanski’s appeal waning, it is entirely plausible that the Greens overhaul Labour and poll highest, especially with Polanski as their candidate. In those circumstances, the Conservatives would need to edge Labour into third place, then secure a huge number of transfer votes to overhaul the Greens. However, transfer potential appears much higher for the Greens. So, if this is how things play out, the Conservatives are unlikely to win.
In an alternative scenario, the gloss does come off the Green Party, perhaps because Labour gets a new leader, and the Conservatives continue to rise in the polls, as they have over the last six months. In this scenario they are comfortably in second and the transfer votes become all important.
If 2.8m people vote, and all transfers go to the top two candidates, 1.4m votes are required to win. However, we know from the previous elections held with second preference voting that the total number of transfers is not equivalent to votes for candidates other than the top two.
In 2021, 686,000 people voted for candidates other than the top two, but there were only 276,000 transfers. The equivalent figure in 2016 was lower with just 246,000 of a potential 539,000 votes transferring to the top two candidates.
So, 1.15-1.2m votes will probably win the election after transfers. That opens up the possibility of the Conservatives winning if they can assemble a coalition of the people who voted Conservative or Reform in May, which totals just over 1.1m, if they can also gain from improvements in the polls, and add transfers from other parties’ candidates who do not make the top two. It is not going to be easy, but it can be done.
Hopefully, there will be a decision soon on the selection of the Conservative candidate. Personally, I’d like to see a long contest over the summer ‘silly season’ to draw candidates out and give members a good look at the options, before finally choosing a candidate later this year. Then we can get stuck into campaigning!