Demotix/ Emma Durnford. All rights reserved.Friday 11 September: Sadiq Khan elected Labour candidate for London Mayor with 32,926 votes. Friday 2 October: Zac Goldsmith elected Tory London candidate with around 7,000 votes. Monday 5 October: Jeremy Corbyn attends Manchester demonstration in support of a public post office, a day after 80,000 take to Manchester against the Conservative Party Conference. Meanwhile 50,000 is the growth in Labour membership since Corbyn’s election by 250,000 Labour supporters, itself a figure nearly double total Tory party membership.
On overall numbers, so we keep hearing, Labour wins – right up until the day at the ballot box where people cast their votes and all of the other numbers suddenly become irrelevant. Boris Johnson was nominated Tory party candidate for London Mayor, in 2008, with 15,661 votes. In 2011, 68 per cent of a Labour Party electoral college numbering 435,000 gave Ken Livingstone the nod to attempt retaking office, only for him to lose the election by tens of thousands of votes.
It is hard to find figures that correlate directly with one another; an incumbent Mayor is unlikely to have to be nominated (and wasn’t), and so we can’t compare data on internal support for Livingstone in the year that Johnson won the nomination, nor vice-versa. Similarly, data on the precise turnout of Labour’s old, London electoral college is hard to find, but even if we assume the very low 10 per cent turnout from Labour affiliates, that is still three times more than voted when the Tories made Johnson their candidate for 2008.
