The next vote to elect the mayor of London does not take place until 2028. But the newly fragmented and unpredictable nature of British electoral politics means it is shaping up to be a more interesting contest than previously thought.
In 2024, the Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, cruised to his third election victory against a relatively weak Conservative candidate, Susan Hall, an easier victory for him than his 2021 reelection against the Tories’ Shaun Bailey. Khan has settled into a strange position as London mayor: disliked nationally and locally but comfortably ensconced in office thanks to Labour’s structural strengths among the London electorate.
It had been believed that he wouldn’t seek a fourth term in office—perhaps retiring into the globalist NGO job market, or potentially returning to Westminster as an MP—but the rise of Reform UK in Britain and the resurgence of Donald Trump in America appears to have changed his thinking. Readers may know about the longstanding animosity between Khan and Trump. Khan approved of anti-Trump protests in London on 2017—which included the infamous balloon effigy of the president—and the two have indulged in an acrimonious war of words in the press in the years since.
The rise of Reform has also offered a new purpose to Khan. Even though he cannot achieve a huge amount as mayor of London—the office holds few of the executive powers that the mayor of New York has, for example—he can use his platform for a new purpose: being the Anti–Nigel Farage. From a right-wing standpoint, Khan is an avatar for everything wrong with progressive politics: vain and superficial, using his position to engineer redistribution and the advancement of diversity above all other concerns, stitching together a coalition of progressive liberals and organized Muslims, similar to the groups that voted in Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City. This makes the politics of London a much more national affair than simply a vote over the management of local transport policy.
And this is why Laila Cunningham has suddenly emerged as a national political figure. Reform UK have selected her to be their mayoral candidate more than two years ahead of election day. Cunningham is a local councillor in Westminster who defected from the Conservatives last year. The party has put Laila up in lights, and it is not hard to see why. She is charismatic, a confident and pugilistic media performer, and while she is not so ideological as figures in Reform like Farage or Richard Tice, she has been campaigning on a robustly right-wing platform in the city. While she has made a point of the fact that she is a Muslim—though a liberal one—descended from parents who escaped tyranny in Egypt, she has criticized the effects of mass immigration on the city, specifically attacking the rise of official gatherings to mark Ramadan and Eid, telling the Evening Standard in January that “London is not a Muslim city” and it should recognize Britain’s Christian history and culture instead. She has also made a point of speaking out on behalf of London’s Jews, a group that for good reasons feels increasingly menaced and unwelcomed. She recently spoke at a Prosperity Institute panel devoted to the grooming-gangs scandal and advanced many of the same themes in the debate, though some in the audience left wanting a little more detail to accompany the broad brush strokes of her rhetoric.
At the heart of Cunningham’s campaign is crime. She is running on a tough-on-crime platform, stating that London is unsafe and lawless thanks to Khan’s progressive policies and poor approach to policing. As a mother of seven, she places her children’s safety at the center of her anti-crime messaging. Cunnigham has called for the police to use stop-and-search powers more aggressively, particularly on people wearing face coverings in public. Many Londoners will sympathise. Since the pandemic, there has been a growing trend for criminals to wear surgical masks in public, an unhappy consequence of the culture of masking that emerged during COVID
Lawless London has become an international sensation in the last couple of years. It offers Reform a rich seam of opportunity to exploit. The party launched a media campaign last summer called “Lawless Britain,” in which it debuted a range of tough-on-crime measures, with a large amount of focus on the everyday crimes that have angered the public so much: theft, muggings, antisocial behavior, and vandalism. Much like the current debate over whether Britain is “broken” or not, this is a potent subject for a right-wing populist subject to take on.
Dishonesty and obfuscation run through both sides of the argument around crime in London. The international image of the city is one of descent into ethnic conflict and random violence, overseen by a police force which goes soft on left-wing or immigrant protest groups while deploying batons and helmets against anyone who waves the Union Jack. The mayor and his progressive allies, by contrast, paint a picture of multicultural harmony in the city, where people from the whole world unite as “Londoners”, an identity separate from the rest of Britain’s reactionary prejudices and flag-waving.
The reality is more complicated. When it comes to violent crime, the city is remarkably safe. Murder is at its lowest level in more than a decade, with the city seeing 97 homicides in 2026. This equates to 1.1 homicides per 100,000 people, which is significantly lower than other large western cities, including New York, Paris, Berlin, and Los Angeles.
But violent crime is not the whole picture, and focusing on this aspect of life in London misses the wider picture and pervading sense of danger that many believe hangs over the city these days, even if those dangers are not strictly mortal. Phone theft, for example, is rampant. In 2024, around 120,000 mobile phones were stolen in London. This equates to around one phone stolen every five minutes in the city. Thieves commonly ride around the city on illegally-modified e-bikes, travelling at high speeds to steal the phones from peoples’ hands on busy shopping streets. With only 1 percent of reported phone thefts resulting in criminal charges—let alone a conviction—in 2024, it is hardly surprising that many think modern London is a city creaking at the seams and tipping into dysfunction. This is a particularly potent cocktail when combined with the city’s exorbitant living costs, stagnant wages for its middle classes, new levies on driving in the city, and a mayor who takes every opportunity to present London as an international city that should be back in the European Union, rather than the British people’s capital.
Is Cunningham going to be the secret to Reform’s success in London in 2028? It is hard to know. British politics is a swift and turbulent affair these days; the country advances through newly widened Overton windows every month. Reform has been the main beneficiary of this so far. Despite his poor approval ratings, however, Khan is well positioned to take advantage of the left’s structural and demographic advantages in London, as the city has a disproportionately liberal and non-white British population. Reform UK needs to replicate Boris Johnson’s “donut” strategy of targeting the outer boroughs of London with their higher proportion of more right-wing, non-immigrant voters, while making inroads that the Tories cannot in the city’s inner boroughs. This is where a few wild cards appear, however, and they may favor Reform. Since 2023, the British left has fragmented, and parties like the Greens have started eating into Labour’s votes from the left, with issues like Gaza and the cost of living at the heart of their messaging.
If the hard left continues to chip away at Labour’s left flank, exploiting the disillusionment with the status quo among left wing voters, and if Reform succeed in replacing the Conservative Party as the hegemonic voice of the British right, there is a chance that the capital falls to Nigel Farage’s army in 2028. London had a Tory mayor just a decade ago: Boris Johnson, who won two terms.
Reform has a steep and narrow path to climb to get there. The Conservatives have retained a reasonable amount of support among London’s center-right upper middle classes, many of whom still dislike Reform, and Cunningham remains untested under serious pressure and scrutiny thus far. Her appointment as candidate for London is part of Farage’s strategy to appeal to a wider, center-right audience while attempting to hold on to Reform’s core right-wing support. This has drawn criticism from some on the right, especially those who hoped that former special forces soldier, Ant Middleton, would be selected instead of Cunningham. We can’t know for sure yet if Farage’s gambit will succeed, but without a doubt, 2028 will be the most consequential London mayoral election in a generation.
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