London Tory mayoral candidate: I can still defeat Sadiq Khan

Susan Hall has placed a digital countdown clock by the kettle in her kitchen, showing the days, hours, minutes and seconds to polling day in the London mayoral election.

Rising early each morning, the Conservative candidate for mayor makes herself a cup of tea and contemplates the clock. She tells The Telegraph that each time the same thought occurs: “One day less to save London!”

With just a week and a half remaining in the race, Ms Hall knows she has her work cut out to deny Sadiq Khan an unprecedented third mayoral term.

A YouGov poll on Friday suggested that she was 19 points behind her Labour opponent, on 27 per cent of the vote to Mr Khan’s 46 per cent.

Ms Hall acknowledges the scale of the challenge. “Look, I’m the underdog,” she says. “There’s no question, I accept unreservedly I’m the underdog.” But she holds out hope that Londoners’ dissatisfaction with Mr Khan’s “abysmal” record might result in the mother of all political upsets.

“I’m just hoping that people that want my policies, want a stop on the war on motorists, actually want us to be safer… I’m hoping they think, ‘yeah, we’re in with a chance of getting Sadiq Khan out’.”

Ms Hall meets The Telegraph for her interview in a Westminster pub, but with her eyes on the electoral prize and packed days of campaigning ahead, she orders a Diet Coke. She has abstained from alcohol throughout the campaign, but will allow herself a tipple once polls have closed.

Setting out a tour d’horizon of what London will be like in four years if she wins on May 2, it is perhaps no surprise that Ms Hall starts with motorists.

Tory strategists have viewed the ultra low emission zone (Ulez) as Mr Khan’s soft underbelly since he controversially expanded the charging zone to outer London in August.

Ms Hall says that in four years, Ulez expansion will be a “bad memory” because she will stop it “on day one”. She believes scrapping the expansion will have a revivifying effect. “Small businesses on the outer outskirts of London will start to thrive again... people will start coming back over the border...  the war on motorists will be over.” Needless to say, pay-per-mile charging of drivers – something which she has accused Mr Khan of plotting despite emphatic denials – will never see the light of day.

Ms Hall says she has heard “heartbreaking” stories about the toll of Ulez. “It’s making poor people really suffer… seriously, if you saw some of the emails I get, you’d literally cry.” On a campaign stop to Romford market that morning, she talked to “three elderly ladies” about the scheme. “They said that it’s dreadful, because their family couldn’t come in and see them anymore... their kids can’t afford to keep coming in and out of London because it’s £12.50 a shot.”

The Tory candidate also plans to ring the changes in London’s transport policy by stripping out “floating bus stops”, where pedestrians must cross cycle lanes to reach a stop, which she says forces blind and partially sighted people to take “their lives in their hands”. And she wants to clamp down on low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs). “I’ve always said a successful city is a moving city,” she says. “We’ve got to get London moving again.”

Moving on herself, the next stop in her tour of London in 2028 under Mayor Hall takes us to crime.

Ms Hall says that while she is frequently pigeon-holded as obsessing about Ulez, her “big passion in life” is policing. She promises a return to borough-based policing with two more bases in each council area, along with 1,500 extra officers on the streets and a £200 million cash injection for the Met. A huge focus will be on the experience of women in the capital, who she says “are just not feeling safe”, with the appointment of a dedicated women’s commissioner. She says that fears about crime have helped crush the capital’s nightlife, which is now “really bad”. “All the changes I’m seeing now under Sadiq Khan break my heart because people don’t feel safe. We’re getting young people murdered on our streets with over 1,000 murders since he’s been in charge.”

Again, she paints a picture of London springing back to life after the Khan years. “At the end of the four years, I want people to say, ‘oh my god, yeah, I do feel safer’... If we make our streets safer it has a feelgood factor. It’s like a stone in a pond, isn’t it? It’ll resonate all around.

“At the end of four years, I hope people think things are fairer, because they’re not being taxed to the hilt for driving a car. I hope people won’t feel oppressed, really, as they do now. But most of all, I want mums and dads to be quite happy that their kids are going out at night because they know that they’re safer.”

On planning - the third major area that sits within the mayor’s control - Ms Hall has clashed with her Labour rival over house building statistics. In the last quarter of 2023, the number of new house starts in London slumped to a record low. “He’ll say he’s going to build tens of thousands of houses or properties, one and two-bedroom flats,” she says. “He won’t. He won’t build family homes.”

Mr Khan’s supporters have accused Ms Hall of talking down London – pointing for example to an attack ad in which the capital was presented as a crime-riddled Gotham-like metropolis. But she insists that people will be “desperate” if he wins a third term.

“If you look at his policies, where is the change in policing that will make a difference? There isn’t any. Where is the change to make London moving again? There isn’t any. It’ll be more gridlocked... I don’t care if people like me or don’t like me, but if they say after four years, ‘my god, she’s made a real difference,’ that is the only thing I want.”

The campaign has been acrimonious at times, with Mr Khan accusing her of being “Trumpian”. “He’s thrown around a load of personal insults,” she says. “Carry on if you like, because it makes him look pathetic… Surely they’ve got political arguments against me as opposed to trying to personally attack me?... He should be standing on his record. But his record is so abysmal that he can’t do that.”

On the subject of Donald Trump – whom Mr Khan has feuded with on social media – Ms Hall says she would be willing to work with him if he is re-elected. “Whoever the Americans decide is their president, I will work with,” she says. “It is not for the Mayor of London to decide whether they like the leader of the biggest democracy in the world or not. I don’t know whether [Mr Khan] thought that would make him more popular or not, it’s inappropriate… It makes me really cross because he gets himself involved with other things, and you know why? Because everything in London is going wrong.”

Firing some of her own barbs at Mr Khan, she claims he has been using the mayoralty as a “stepping stone into something else. I think he thought he’d be leader of the Labour Party. But they’ve seen what a disaster he’s made of London and he’s lost that opportunity.”

With the days running out, Ms Hall is honest about her own strengths and weaknesses. “I won’t come out with the right words. I may make gaffes. I’m not polished, she says. “But I care, I genuinely care. And I want to make a difference to London.”

Above all, she says there will be a shift in accountability if she is elected.

“If you listen to Khan over the years, his rhetoric is all around…‘it’s the government’s fault’,” she says indignantly.

“If you’re responsible for something, good and bad, when things go wrong, bloody well take it on the chin… you can’t just go through life blaming everybody else for everything.”

Whatever the result on May 2, it seems unlikely that Ms Hall will try to shirk responsibility.