Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Are the Tories trying to trash their reputation in London?

(Getty images)

Shaun Bailey pulled off an amazing trick this week: he managed to unite Twitter. Left and right, Tory and Labour, Remainer and Brexiteer, all piled into a wondrously crass post by the Tory London mayoral candidate:

‘As a father and husband it breaks me to think that my wife and daughter have to live in fear in their own city. It doesn’t have to be this way. As Mayor, I‘ll ensure that we are working to deliver for the safety of women and girls in London.’

The message would have been in poor taste no matter what the timing. After all, why make crime in London about himself and his family? But coming at a time when a young woman had vanished from the streets of the capital, it looked like Bailey was making a bid to cash in politically on the tragedy.

If this had been the first blemish in an otherwise well-run mayoral campaign, Bailey could be forgiven. Except it’s been terrible from the very start. Bailey is such a bad candidate, it makes you wonder whether the Tories have given up on London completely.

In their obsession with the Red Wall, have the Tories given up on London?

What makes the Bailey candidacy particularly galling is that it shows the party has learnt nothing from the Zac Goldsmith debacle. I remember wandering through Westminster in late 2015 when I bumped into one of Sadiq Khan’s lieutenants.

‘The Goldsmith campaign is going to run heavily on Sadiq’s religion,’ he postulated. ‘It’s going to be Muslim this, Islam that.’ 

I remember thinking how naïve that was. Surely the Conservatives weren’t going to go anywhere near Khan’s religion. How wrong I was. The Tory campaign used dog whistle attacks to suggest London wasn’t safe in the hands of a Muslim mayor. Mohammed Amin, chairman of the Conservative Muslim Forum, said the intention was to paint Khan as a ‘closet extremist’.

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