‘I love a fight. I was going to say debate, but it’s more of a fight to be honest.’ Susan Hall is looking forward to taking on Sadiq Khan at the London mayoral hustings. When we meet for her first interview after securing the Conservative nomination, it is five days after the Uxbridge by-election. Hall is buoyed by an unexpected Tory triumph, thanks to discontent with Khan’s plans to extend the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). ‘Out on the doorstep,’ she tells me: ‘I thought the questions would be all around Boris but I had nothing. It was all around the Ulez expansion.’ She hopes to replicate a similar result next May.
‘There aren’t really many policies. I won’t promise anything unless I know where the money is coming from’
‘Fight’ is one of Hall’s favoured words: she uses it 14 times in less than an hour. It explains how she went from being a 100/1 outsider to becoming the first woman nominated for the mayoralty by a major party. What did she make of the Evening Standard splash which greeted that milestone, featuring what one Tory MP called a ‘contemptible’ image of Hall grinning, arms raised theatrically aloft? ‘I thought: I won’t put that picture on Tinder. Can you imagine waking up next to that? No, no. But they’ll throw lots at me and they always will. I’ve got very thick skin – as was evidenced in that picture.’ Was it sexist? Hall declines to use the word: ‘Just get on with the job. They will throw far worse at me.’
She certainly has experienced worse. Her first job after leaving school was toiling away as a teenage mechanic, the only woman in a 1970s garage. ‘In those days, they did not approve of women anywhere near cars.’ She later met her husband – who, in an inversion of the stereotypes of the time, was a hairdresser. The couple ran a Harrow salon, which went on to employ 20 people, and raised two children. They eventually separated. ‘The Tories have unfortunately got too much of a reputation for being the toffs. And they’re not. We’re normal.’
Tackling crime is at the heart of her blue-collar campaign. ‘Walking along the streets, I have never felt as unsafe as I do now. The more these villains can get away with things, the more emboldened they feel.’ Hall says that she has personal experience of these issues: prior to entering politics she received death threats when her business was being terrorised by some local thugs.
London under Khan is ‘absolutely’ in decline, she says. ‘Just look around – we’ve got people marauding around with machetes.’ If elected, she would put £200 million into the Metropolitan Police by clamping down on City Hall’s staff-related costs. The manner of Cressida Dick’s very public sacking by Khan last year appalled her: ‘He is a sexist misogynist. He should never have dealt with her in that way.’ Following recent scandals, she worries that the Met now lacks the authority of old. ‘We’ve got to get the police so they’re not forever apologising for what they’re doing [and so] that they’re more of a police force than a service.’
The lesson Hall took from Uxbridge is the need to curb some of the more ambitious elements of the net-zero agenda. ‘We must be mindful and we must do what we can but things like the Ulez expansion are literally going to hit the poorest in the community.’ Tory MPs are divided over whether current plans to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030 ought to be dropped. For Hall, the answer is clear: ‘I think 2030, while it’s a wonderful aim, is not going to happen. We haven’t got charging points, there are so many issues around it. It’s an admirable aim but I don’t think it will work.’
Rishi Sunak, though, is for now committed to the 2030 deadline. Will Hall be prepared, like Boris Johnson before her, to use the Mayor’s bully pulpit to defy a Tory premier in No. 10? ‘Yes. I’d be speaking up for Londoners 100 per cent. I am a low-tax Tory, so I’m not always very happy. But yes, if you are the Mayor of London you speak for Londoners, end of. Even if that means fighting with the government, fighting with anybody else. I’d be like a mother. I will fight for my London, bloody right I will.’
She backed Truss over Sunak last summer ‘because I’m a massive low-tax Tory’, but says ‘he’s absolutely doing his best and I understand why taxes aren’t coming down yet. I do hope they address inheritance tax.’
Hall is a stark contrast to some of London’s more well-heeled Tories whom she defeated for the nomination. ‘I’m very proud of the fact that I think we’ve done it for less than five grand. And I dread to think about the amount that the others put into it.’ She freely admits that blue-sky thinking isn’t her thing: ‘There aren’t really that many policies. I will not promise anything unless I know where the money is coming from.’
On national issues, she supports the Rwanda scheme, believes migration is too high and argues that ‘Brexit is more of a success than we’re making out’. Should Sunak and the Tories be more vigorous on culture-war matters? She pauses. ‘We are a very broad church. Probably I’d be slightly more forceful in my views.’ Hall has particular contempt for Khan’s Diversity Commission to review the capital’s statues: ‘Don’t pull down our history. I’m proud of London as it is. You want to explain things. Don’t touch it.’
For 20 years, the conventional thinking has been that only by running to the left of the national party can a Conservative win in the capital. Labour have already done their best to depict Hall as a ‘hard-right’ Tory. But she sees it as a backhanded compliment. ‘Clearly they’re concerned – otherwise they wouldn’t have gone so hard. They want to annihilate me in the first place.’ She smiles. ‘Well, they can dream on. I’m not going anywhere.’
Comments