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Prominent Labour candidates in London are shunning Jeremy Corbyn to put Sadiq Khan on their Twitter profile pictures as they seek to cling on to marginal seats.
Traditionally, parliamentary candidates have been keen to feature prominently with their party leader. However, five ex-MPs standing for re-election in London are pictured shoulder-to-shoulder on their accounts with the Mayor, who is seen as an asset, compared with Mr Corbyn’s dismal poll ratings.
The five include Andy Slaughter seeking to retain Hammersmith, Joan Ryan in Enfield North, Ruth Cadbury in Brentford and Isleworth and Karen Buck in Westminster North. Rosena Allin-Khan has an even bigger background picture of her and Mr Khan, her predecessor as Tooting MP.
Asked why she was using him rather than Mr Corbyn, she said: “Sadiq has the biggest political mandate of any politician in British history. He’s Mr Tooting.”
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Ms Ryan said she had Mr Khan on her Twitter account as he was key to fighting crime. There were multiple stabbings in Enfield North over the weekend.
In a further sign of Labour candidates seeking backing from beyond the party leadership, Gareth Thomas, who is seeking to retain Harrow West, put out a video of former Blairite foreign secretary David Miliband backing him. “He knows the risk to our jobs, incomes and living standards if we get a bad deal on Brexit,” said Mr Thomas.
The main challenger to Labour in all the six seats is the Conservative Party. But an analysis by Professor Tony Travers, of the government department at the London School of Economics, points to Labour not being in such danger of losing marginal seats in the capital, as suggested by the Conservatives’ double-digit lead in the national polls. He said the differential between the London and Great Britain vote share of the two parties appeared to have widened dramatically in recent years.
Before 1997, voting for the parties in the capital broadly reflected the national picture. But Labour’s performance in London, compared with the regions, jumped in 2015 and has got even wider, according to a YouGov poll last week. “London is increasingly another country,” said Professor Travers, who compared th trend with a constituency-by-constituency breakdown of the Remain/Leave vote.
Between two thirds and just over three quarters of voters backed Remain in Westminster North, Tooting, Hampstead and Kilburn, Ealing Central and Acton and several other London seats. “It looks as if the Brexit overlay — the Remain vote — may give some protection to marginal Labour seats,” he added.
General Election 2017 Campaign - In pictures
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He stressed that the Labour to Conservative swing nationwide appeared to be seven to eight percentage points, while in London it looked like two to three.
If Labour retains 40 seats in the capital, he added, it could make up around 25 per cent of the parliamentary party after the election, double the 1997 figure.
Mr Khan was campaigning at the weekend in key London marginals and has now visited 10 seats to launch local candidates' campaigns.
In Hammersmith on Saturday members of the public stopped for selfies and to shake his hand, while drivers wound down car windows to shout his name - in echoes of the popularity enjoyed by his predecessor Boris Johnson.
Mr Khan said: “I fought an election last year so the issues are reasonably fresh to me. All the candidates are friends of mine. It’s not a slight on Jeremy Corbyn that I’m on people’s leaflets.”
* The Progressive Alliance was this evening launching its ground campaign, with speeches at an event in the City from Labour’s Clive Lewis, Sian Berry of the Greens and Sophie Walker of the Women’s Equality Party.