I first started covering London politics almost twenty years ago now and back then it was still big news. A visit to London’s City Hall, which then sat proudly on the South Bank, was to take a trip into the beating heart of the city’s political life.

There was something almost theatrical about covering London politics in those days.

Sitting inside City Hall’s vast glass chamber to watch Ken Livingstone, and then Boris Johnson, face questions in front of the looming financial towers of the City was to play a minor part in its drama.

I wasn’t the only one drawn to its stage. Sitting in the gallery beside me each month were big name journalists from the BBC, ITV and all the major national newspapers, drawn in by the drama of Johnson’s rise to power, as well as a band of so-called ‘citizen journalists’ taking advantage of the pre-social media boom in ‘blogging’ about politics.

Social media as we now know it was then in its infancy, with the only way to Tweet updates about what was happening in the Chamber, being to send an actual text message to Twitter HQ, which was then relayed to their website.

Yet looking back it was remarkable how accessible everything then was for a young aspiring freelance journalist. After every session of Mayor’s Question Time, I would immediately jump into a briefing with Johnson’s spokesman, before descending into the basement cafe where London Assembly members, members of the public and even the Mayor himself would share coffees, sandwiches and plates of curry.

I will always remember the image of Johnson fumbling in his pockets in the queue ahead of us, before turning to ask another blogger and myself to lend him a fiver to pay for his lunch. Some things never change.

Declining Standards

Lots of things have changed in that time, however.

After Johnson left office, the national attention given to London politics gradually drifted away to other stories, before Sadiq Khan ultimately sold up shop and decamped City Hall to a lonely windy spot in the city’s eastern docklands.

The old central London building is now in a process of being dismantled by its private owners and turned into luxury shops and restaurants.

However, it wasn’t just the national attention to our capital’s politics that has drifted away since then, but the very means of holding it.

The Evening Standard, whose screaming sandwich boards dominated political life in the capital for so long, was sold for just £1 to a Russian oligarch who understood little about its journalism, or its city. When the Lebedev family first took over, the Standard printed multiple editions each day and employed almost 400 journalists and staff. By last week that number had been reduced to just 16, with the print edition itself long since shuttered.

Ross Lydall, a vastly-experienced Evening Standard journalist who had covered London politics on and off since the start of the London Mayoralty, was among those to leave. The paper is now in the process of being subsumed into another Lebedev purchase - the Independent.

Broadcasters cut back too. BBC London, which was a constant thorn in multiple Mayor’s sides under its great former Political Editor Tim Donovan, faced swingeing cuts, with Donovan himself taking redundancy last year.

Blogging about London has somehow survived, thanks to the economics of Substack, and the brilliant work of a committed few, both locally and city-wide, yet it no longer feels at the heart of political life in the capital in the same way that it once did. In an era of Tiktok and Instagram, the big stories about London are being told in different ways and by different people, many of whom are based in different countries and even different continents, while the actual local politics of the city has taken a step back into the shadows.

Of course the focus on London is still there in some ways. The fact that the US President and his hangers on still devote so much time and energy to attacking Khan and his city shows the importance London still has on the international stage. Yet the far-right fantasy version of it portrayed in reels, shorts and Tweets is completely detached from the actual politics of a city where eight million people live and work each day.

I was thinking about all this as I visited London’s new City Hall in the Eastern docklands to interview Sadiq Khan this week. Gone were the pulsing crowds of eccentric protesters and tourists that used to buzz around its old central London base, and in its place were a handful of lonely looking figures, taking a break from their desk jobs inside, to sit on a bench, eat a sandwich and stare at the empty docks outside. It felt, in short, like both a literal and metaphorical backwater.

This is reflected inside its chamber. Where City Hall once drew in politicians who went onto become major national figures, like Johnson, Kemi Badenoch and even James Cleverly, the closest the Assembly now has to a big name is Zack Polanski, who will surely not be sticking around for much longer. The Conservative party, which held the City’s mayoralty for almost a decade under Johnson, now appears to have all but given up on the city and its politics, aside from joining in with the MAGA-driven fantasies about its Islamisation.

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Leading the Conservative group on the Assembly now is their failed former Mayoral candidate Susan Hall, who is perhaps best known for losing her purse, and any remaining credibility the party still has in London. At next month’s local elections, the party is forecast to lose control of all but a handful of local authorities in the City. Meanwhile Nigel Farage and Reform UK loom in the wings, with plans to hold referendums for outer London boroughs to divorce from the city.

Of course City Hall still plays a significant part in Londoners’ lives under Sadiq Khan. Khan’s decision to push ahead with the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone to outer London caused huge amounts of controversy, and even an actual act of terrorism. Yet London’s air, which was once the dirtiest in Europe, is now significantly cleaner than it once was, cycling infrastructure has significantly improved, and the opening of the Elizabeth Line has been a triumphant success.

Yet in other ways things have undeniably gone backwards. The pipeline of big future transport projects that was put in place under Livingstone and Johnson has mostly dried up thanks to a decade of austerity, whilst bus routes are gradually being scaled back.

The cost of living in London, which was already high when I first started out, has become completely unsustainable for all but the lucky few. Of the friends I grew up with, most have since moved out of the city to raise their families. Primary schools, which were once full to bursting, are now increasingly closing down thanks to a Londoners feeling they can simply no longer afford to live here and raise kids.

Despite the AI-driven stories told about the city on the new forms of global social media, violent crime is actually significantly down in the city. Yet this still feels to me as being as much about rising security as it is about a city whose social life is gradually being hollowed out from within. When the average cost of a pint is almost £7, it pays to stay out of trouble at home.

I’m conscious here of not falling into a middle aged trap of ‘it was better in my day’. Much has improved in London since I first started covering politics in the city and the constant drumbeat of social media clickbait trying to portray it as an Islamist crime-ridden hellhole are as far from reality as it is possible to be. London is still a great city, albeit one that has many problems.

Yet there was something about the city, its politics and its media back in the mid-noughties that definitely has been lost over the past twenty years. Long before Covid, before Brexit and before austerity, London felt like a city whose political story was at the very centre, not just of the nation’s life, but of Europe and the world.

That feeling has now passed.

What has replaced it bears little relation to the city most of us who still live here experience every day.

The full interview will be published next month, but we today publish the first section, in which Khan talks about the upcoming local elections and why he fears the party is set to be punished for a series of “mistakes” made by Keir Starmer.

The fear in City Hall, and across the Labour party, is that they face a generational collapse of support in their Welsh and London heartlands, thanks to natural Labour voters switching en masse to the Greens and other parties.

This switch is thanks in large part to the strategy taken by Starmer towards Labour’s left flank.

The damage caused by the so-called ‘Blue Labour’ strategy, which concentrated on winning over Reform voters, at the expense of Labour’s own core support, has been compounded by Starmer’s dismissive approach to Zack Polanski’s party.

In the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, Starmer urged voters not to embrace the “extremism” of the Greens - something Khan believes was a mistake.

“Don’t call Green voters extremists. They’re not,” Khan told me.

“They’re people who are progressives. They may not agree with us on all these issues, but we should try and court them and win them over.”

Yet despite growing discontent within Labour about the Prime Minister and his strategy, there still remains little chance of an imminent Leadership challenge.

As I told the Byline Podcast this morning (which you can watch in full above) while there is now a consensus in the party that Starmer will ultimately have to go, nobody wants to be the person charged with actually getting rid of him.

The result is that as Labour heads into a set of local elections that could be the beginning of a catastrophic collapse of support for the party, which if left unchecked will result in Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister, nobody in the party yet seems willing to do anything to stop it.

The public have made their minds up about the Prime Minister.

According to the latest polls Keir Starmer has a favourability rating of minus 48 - the worst of any party leader by some distance.

It’s not all bad news. There is one other senior politician who is even more unpopular.

Unfortunately that politician is his own Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who has an even worse rating of minus 51.

I only set these facts out because whenever I criticise this Government I am accused by Starmer’s supporters of pushing a false media narrative about its unpopularity.

However, the truth is that you don’t actually need opinion polls to work out what the public really thinks about this Prime Minister and his Government.

All you need to do is to look at the results of actual elections that have taken place over the past year.

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Who is really bankrolling Reform UK? In previous eras this would be an easy question to answer. A quick look at the Electoral Commission’s register would tell you the names of any individuals or organisations funding political parties in the UK.

Yet with Nigel Farage’s party the question is now much more difficult to answer.

To start with, Reform appear to be going to great lengths to obscure the actual sources of their funding.

Their decision to accept cryptocurrency donations has made it all but impossible to trace its origins.

And while the Government did recently ban such donations, a loophole in the law has allowed Reform to continue taking them, as long as they convert them into cash first.

This really matters when you consider who has already declared that they are funding Farage’s party.

Among the party’s biggest declared donors is the Crypto billionaire Ben Delo, who was handed a fawning spread in the Telegraph this week to explain why he is giving £4 million to the party.

However, while the paper repeatedly refers to Delo as a “philanthropist” what is not mentioned in the piece, until very briefly in the final paragraphs, is that Delo is a convicted criminal who pled guilty to violating money laundering protections in the United States, before being pardoned by Donald Trump.

According to the court judgement, Delo agreed to pay a $10 million fine for what was described as “wilfully” breaking the law with his BitMex platform, which the court found “was in effect a money laundering platform.”

Delo isn’t the only crypto donor to bankroll the party.

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You wouldn’t know it from reading most British newspapers, or watching the BBC, but Reform are now losing the next general election.

In the last six months alone, the party’s poll ratings have dropped by an average of seven points, with support for the other major parties steadily climbing.

Meanwhile, the Green Party, who were previously judged to be so insignificant that the BBC’s flagship Sunday politics programme didn’t even bother to interview Zack Polanski when he became leader, or led his first party conference, is now in second place in the polls.

And while Reform still maintain a lead, that lead is now shrinking month-on-month.

Here’s why the big untold story of British politics is the decline of Nigel Farage and Reform and the rise of a new alternative on the left.

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The Gorton and Denton by-election result will be remembered as the moment when British elections firmly descended into the gutter of Trumpian lies and misinformation.

The result, a stunning victory for the Greens in an area with no previous history of significant support for the party, was immediately used by the party’s opponents to spread a series of racist lies about the election being “stolen” by Muslim voters.

These lies, which spread quickly across the media, were justified on the basis of a report written by an organisation called ‘Democracy Volunteers’ alleging that there had been “extremely high” levels of what they described as “family voting” in the seat.

The BBC devoted a significant amount of time to discussing these unsubstantiated claims, with their Political Editor Chris Mason telling viewers that the election “might not [have been] as secret a ballot as it should be.”

“In other words,” he told the Newscast show “[the suggestion is] that there is conferring that goes on about how people choose to vote, and that has been leapt on, in particular, by Reform talking about sectarian politics”.

The Daily Mail also leapt on the claims in a series of front pages throughout the following week, alleging that the election had been “stolen” by “foreign-born voters”.

There was one big problem with all this. It simply wasn’t true.

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All it took was a Tweet. Just a single post by a little known Shadow Minister, which this week pushed British politics dangerously to the far right.

The post, by the Shadow Lord Chancellor Nick Timothy, targeted Muslims praying at an annual event in Trafalgar Square, labelling it an “act of domination” that was “not welcome” in the UK.

In any other period such an extreme idea, that British people are not welcome to freely and peacefully follow their religion, would have been a career-ending moment.

Instead, Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative Party this week fully embraced both Timothy, and his policy.

Under a Conservative Government, such events, which have been conducted by followers of all religions in the UK for many years without incident, would be banned.

In a lengthy exchange with Badenoch’s spokesman on Wednesday I tried to get to the bottom of exactly how we got here.

What he told me was extraordinary.

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Whatever other problems Keir Starmer’s Government may have right now, facing an effective leader of the opposition certainly isn’t one of them.

Kemi Badenoch’s dire performance at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, in which she failed to explain her shambolic U-turn on wanting the UK to join the Iran war, while seeking to blame Starmer for the rising fuel prices that war has caused, handed the Prime Minister yet another easy victory.

However, it was the performance of her spokesman after the session that really summed up quite how badly she is now doing as leader of the Conservative Party.

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I’ve been predicting for some time now that the wheels would soon start to fall off the Nigel Farage project.

Now it finally seems to be happening.

Reform’s heavy defeat in the Gorton and Denton by-election has been followed by an extended temper tantrum, in which Farage has sought to claim that he was somehow “cheated” from victory by a shadowy coalition of Islamists and workshy scroungers.

The reality, as contained in some startling new data published this week, is entirely different.

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A campaign which began with Reform as firm favourites, ended with voters in the Manchester constituency roundly rejecting the politics of hate represented by its candidate Matt Goodwin.

In the wake of the result Farage and Goodwin took to Twitter to accuse their opponents of “cheating” and “sectarianism”.

However, as I told the Byline Podcast this morning, the only “sectarian” politics came from Reform itself.

By spending its entire campaign warning about the UK’s “Christian heritage” being under threat, while proposing a visa ban on predominantly Muslim countries, Farage’s party showed how the only real “sectarianism” is now coming from the right.

Their reaction this morning only confirmed this.

After being defeated by a white woman representing a party led by a Jewish man, Reform have instead sought to blame their defeat on Muslims.

It is this divisive and hateful form of politics, rather than anything to do with “family voting” or “sectarianism” that really lays behind Reform’s defeat.

Watch my full discussion of the result with Adrian Goldberg and the Byline Podcast above.

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Who is going to win the Gorton and Denton by-election? That’s the big question this week as voters prepare to go to the polls in the Manchester constituency.

So far we’ve had very little to go on, with both Labour and the Greens insisting that they are best placed to defeat Nigel Farage’s party.

However, this evening Byline Times published an exclusive poll, conducted by pollsters Opinium, which gives us a clear sign of where the contest is going.

The headline figures suggest it is too close to call, with the Green Party’s Hannah Spencer and Labour’s Angeliki Stogia both one point ahead of Reform’s Matt Goodwin.

However, the poll also asked voters a series of tactical questions designed to work out whether they would be prepared to switch their vote in order to defeat Reform.

These questions found that voters in the seat are significantly more likely to switch from Labour to the Greens than vice versa.

So does this mean the Greens will win or could Labour or Reform still clinch the contest given their greater resources, and more experienced get-out-the-vote operations?

Having dug into the data and spoken to those on the ground, here’s what I think is most likely to happen.

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The consensus in British politics is that Reform UK are on the rise, Labour is a spent force and Nigel Farage is almost certainly heading for Downing Street.

But is it actually true?

Next week could help bring an answer to that question when voters go to the polls in the Gorton and Denton by-election.

When this contest was first called, many commentators assumed that Reform would be a shoo-in to win it.

Yet as the weeks have passed, this assumption has come under increasing strain.

The Greens, initially considered a long-shot, are currently the bookies’ favourites, after a poll this week put them narrowly ahead in a three horse race with Reform and Labour.

And while support for Keir Starmer’s party does appear to have collapsed from its previous levels in the area, the party still believes they have a chance to narrowly cling on.

Such optimism cannot be so easily found inside Farage’s party.

Reform’s candidate, an oddball far-right former academic turned GB News presenter, is facing allegations of sexual harassment, while their “interim” campaign manager for the seat has been exposed as a holocaust-denying anti-semite who boasted that he would “never touch a Jewish woman”.

With their odds of winning the seat now drifting, a seat that just weeks ago looked a complete gimme for Farage’s party, looks at real risk of slipping from their fingers.

So how did it go so wrong for Reform, and is this the first real sign that Nigel Farage’s party is starting to lose the plot?

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After a dire couple of weeks for the Prime Minister there’s just a hint that things might finally be starting to improve.

The attempted coup by Labour’s Scottish leader Anas Sarwar fizzled out before it really began, after a rumoured wave of ministerial resignations never materialised.

And despite a continued exodus of staff inside Downing Street, there are signs that the post-McSweeney operation is starting to get a grip.

The first of these signs is the Prime Minister’s response to Jim Ratcliffe’s hateful comments about immigrants “colonising” the UK.

In the past, such comments by a billionaire former ally of the Prime Minister would have initially been met with silence, followed by days of equivocation from Downing Street about voters having “legitimate concerns”, before angry Labour MPs finally succeeded in pressuring their leader into saying something slightly stronger.

Not this time.

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Nigel Farage this week condemned Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as “seriously wrong” and insisted that the Prime Minister should immediately stand down.

“Given all the previous warnings about Mandelson’s behaviour, it [was] a grave error of judgement on behalf of the Prime Minister,” Farage told a press conference in Westminster.

Which is interesting. Because when Starmer first appointed Mandelson as US Ambassador, the Reform leader offered a very different response.

Here’s how Farage’s reaction to the Epstein and Mandelson scandal has been deeply hypocritical, and how his own connections to the story are much closer than he now admits.

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The problem for your opponent, is that while accepting this move may save them from immediate peril, it can also put them into an even weaker overall position.

As I explained in the Byline Times podcast this afternoon (recorded above) and in my latest column for the paper, this is the situation Keir Starmer now finds himself in.

Faced with growing anger amongst Labour MPs over his appointment of Peter Mandelson, in the wake of the Epstein files, Starmer is coming under huge pressure to sack his chief adviser Morgan McSweeney, who pushed for his appointment in the first place.

As I have set out before on these pages, McSweeney is right at the heart of this Government’s failures, on everything from its self-defeating factional attacks on the left, to its more recent haemorrhaging of votes to the Greens. There is no recovery for Starmer’s premiership that does not begin with his departure.

As one Labour MP put it to me: “Getting rid of Morgan is our only way back.”

Yet as some other Labour MPs explained to me this week, there are many in the party who believe it is now simply impossible to separate the two and that if McSweeney falls, then so too will Starmer.

Faced with forcing move after forcing move, it’s now hard to see how this game can end without the Prime Minister being checkmated, with or without his all powerful queen sat beside him.

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“Get out of the way”. That was the message this week from Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch when asked to respond to those calling for her to move back to the centre ground of British politics.

“People who don’t agree with [my] direction need to get out of the way,” she told a press conference in London.

“We have to be a truly conservative party. So I won’t apologise to those [who] don’t like the new direction. We only want conservatives”.

In reality the demands for a shift in direction had actually come from conservatives. Two senior and respected ones.

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Former West Midlands Mayor Andy Street and the party’s former leader in Scotland, Ruth Davidson, both demanded the changes as they launched a new grouping of moderates in the party.

These are serious figures with a serious record of winning actual elections.

Yet when asked directly about their intervention, Badenoch would only say that “I’m the leader of the Conservative Party, not anyone else, and it is what I think needs to happen that they need to support”.

This, to use her own favourite phrase, is simply not serious.

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When America sneezes, the world catches a cold.

And as Trump’s administration starts arresting journalists and shooting protesters in the street, we have to ask how much of what we’re now seeing over in the States, will be heading our way soon.

These fears have only been heightened by the continued rise of Nigel Farage.

The Reform leader is not only a huge admirer of the US President, but also shares much of his political agenda.

At the core of that agenda is his commitment to deport at least 600,000 people in the first years of a Reform Government.

To put this into context, that’s the equivalent of the population of an entire city the size of Glasgow, or Sheffield, being forcibly removed from the country.

The idea that this could be achieved without the sort of violence and chaos currently being waged on the streets of America is for the birds.

Already Farage is refusing to condemn the horrific scenes we are seeing there.

Asked this week about Trump’s ICE immigration agents killing US nurse Alex Pretti, Farage told GB News that while it may have been “over the top”, Pretti was at fault for having a gun on him.

Farage’s reluctance is no accident.

Not only is such state violence the logical conclusion of Reform’s own plans, but it is also something many in the party are now openly calling for.

Here’s how Farage’s Britain could very quickly start to resemble what we are seeing under Trump.

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Reform’s newest MP has backed scrapping the NHS and replacing it with private insurance, saying that the healthcare system needs to be more “efficient”.

Andrew Rosindell, who defected from the Conservative Party last week, told the BBC that he would not oppose a plan previously backed by his new boss Nigel Farage to privatise the NHS.

Asked on Sunday if he backed replacing a freely available NHS with a private insurance system, Rosindell replied that “we need an efficient system that works and we don’t have it”.

Asked to give a yes or no answer to private insurance, he replied “I don’t object to that.”

“We need efficiency”.

Farage said last year that he is “open to anything” when it comes to replacing Britain’s NHS with “an insurance-based model”.

The Reform leader told LBC that the French healthcare system could be a model for Britain’s NHS.

Farage has long flirted with the idea of privatising the NHS.

In 2012 he was filmed telling a private meeting that “I think we’re going to have to move to an insurance based system of healthcare.

“Frankly, I would feel more comfortable that my money would return value if I was able to do that through the market place of an insurance company than just us trustingly giving £100bn a year to central government and expecting them to organise the healthcare service from cradle to grave for us.”

Reform Deputy Chairman Paul Nuttall has also backed scrapping the NHS, writing in a now-deleted post on his personal website that the NHS should not be seen as a “sacred cow”.

“I believe, as long as the NHS is the ‘sacred cow’ of British politics, the longer the British people will suffer with a second rate health service,” he wrote, adding that “the very existence of the NHS stifles competition, and as competition drives quality and chpice, innovation and improvements are restricted.”

Reform UK’s 2024 manifesto called for a tax relief of 20% on all private healthcare and pledged to use more independent (i.e. private) healthcare capacity, paid for by the NHS.

Farage also has ties to the private healthcare industry. In 2024 he became “Co-founder and Chairman” of a company called ‘Action on World Health LLP’, which wants to “reform or replace the World Health Organization” – the international body which helped coordinate responses to the Covid pandemic.

One of its directors is also a director of a consultancy, which advises health care firms.

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Under Keir Starmer, Labour has pursued a strategy of focusing relentlessly on what his Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney calls “hero voters”.

These socially Conservative, Brexit-supporting voters, backed Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019, before switching over to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

At the last general election the party poured huge resources into winning over this group.

Yet despite their best efforts, analysis of the result shows that McSweeney’s strategy was incredibly ineffective.

Far from forming a new coalition of voters, Labour’s support base in 2024 remained largely identical to the mostly younger, more educated, Remain voting coalition that they secured in 2019.

Despite this, Starmer’s advisers have continued to focus on their beloved ‘hero voters’ through pushing a series of ever tougher anti-migrant policies, while resisting anything that might in any way please Labour’s supposedly non-heroic voting base.

So has McSweeney’s strategy worked? The answer, contained in some new data published this week, is pretty extraordinary.

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Robert Jenrick is a fraud and a hypocrite. That’s not just my view, that’s the view of one Nigel Farage, who has spent years describing him as everything that is wrong with British politics, only to this week warmly welcome him into Reform UK.

“The Tories broke Britain,” Tweeted Farage, shortly after inviting not just the former Tory Immigration Minister into his party, but former Tory Chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, too.

So not only does Farage think that the Tories are hypocritical frauds who broke Britain, but now he wants their help to break it all over again.

The Reform leader wasn’t the only one suddenly changing their mind about the former Shadow Justice Secretary.

Kemi Badenoch, who previously praised Jenrick’s “energy and determination” and insisted that he had a “key role to play in our party for many years to come,” has now suddenly decided that he is a “liar” who can’t be trusted with their own child’s lunch money.

“Reform needs to be looking at the type of person they’re taking in,” said Badenoch, who invited Jenrick into her own Shadow Cabinet, despite his own long record of personal scandal, and then kept him in the job despite him steadily transforming himself into an Ocado Tommy Robinson.

So overwhelming has this week’s carnival of shamelessness been, that it would be easy to miss quite how significant it has been for the future of British politics.

Here’s why Jenrick’s defection could genuinely be a turning point in the outcome of the next general election and the key to stopping Farage becoming Prime Minister.

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