Is Sadiq Khan’s Tory rival for London mayor a Labour secret agent?

One day, we may learn the truth about the historically underwhelming Conservative candidate for mayor of London, Susan Hall. Some years into the future, Peter Mandelson, or one of his cohort, will leak the story, or make a death-bed confession, that, all along, Hall was a plant.

We will learn, and then be not terribly surprised, that this apparent Poundland version of Liz Truss (and, yes, that is saying something) is actually a Labour mole, a sleeper agent recruited by the socialists to help destroy the Tory party in the capital, and the country as a whole. We may speculate on how this came to pass.

Perhaps she was recruited by a skilful female Labour spy masquerading as a client at Susan’s old hairdressing salon in Hounslow. The Labour secret agent and her beehive installed safely under the dryer, she would have engaged Susan in casual conversation, before bringing up the exploitation of working people, and how only a radically changed society run on the principles of social democracy could be truly fair and sustainable, just like a well-fashioned perm. Susan was brainwashed while she was doing the shampooing.

Gradually, over a long series of monthly appointments to maintain the Labour operative’s highlights, Hall would be “turned”, and persuaded to infiltrate the Tory organisation in Harrow until such time as she was in a position to inflict maximum damage on the ruling classes. That moment is now. The Conservative enemy in London must be smashed from within, by getting them to select a candidate who hates the place and those who live in it. This is Hall’s clandestine mission and motivation.

How else to explain Hall’s dismal performance as a candidate, but as a Labour secret agent?

Hall was surely recruited deliberately for her unprepossessing style, her apparently scatty approach to facts and reason, and her talent for associating herself with extreme causes, with her habitual cover of “Sorry, I’ve forgotten why I did that”. Her Labour handlers have instructed her well in how to like pro-Enoch Powell tweets, hang out with hateful extremists, and praise Suella Braverman’s description of refugees as “invaders”, all the better to destroy the Tory party’s chances of ever winning control of the most diverse cities in the world.

In one elaborate exercise, she was instructed to leave her wallet on a Tube train and pretend to be a victim of crime. Then, to complete the vote-repellent image of paranoid idiocy, when the wallet was found, handed in and returned to Hall, she acted like it was the supposed pickpocket who was so stupid as to hand it in with all the money inside.

In the same celebrated interview with LBC’s Nick Ferrari where she performed this routine, she also said she didn’t know who owned Hammersmith Bridge (and sounded like she didn’t care, either), wasn’t aware of how much a bus fare costs, nor a copper’s starting salary. Ferrari, roughly in the position of a counter-intelligence officer interrogating a suspected spy, couldn’t penetrate her carapace of insolent ignorance. Hall didn’t crack. Exasperated, all he could do is puff out his cheeks and enquire why she thinks she’s qualified to run London. Answer came there none. Mission accomplished.

Her slogan is that she “listens to your concerns”, but never explains how competing concerns, such as air quality versus congestion charges – can be reconciled in her world. Her campaign team produced a video for social media that portrayed London as a post-apocalyptic hell hole where you’d be lucky to emerge alive from a ride on the Jubilee line. Notoriously, scenes of people running on the New York were used to persuade Londoners that it was more dangerous than Helmand province. In a clever twist worthy of any Bourne movie, she alleged that she had had nothing to do with the production.

In a city where the citizens greeted Donald Trump’s visit with a giant inflatable “blimp” of the guy in a nappy, Hall expresses her admiration for the convicted offender and wannabe dictator. She complains that the media uses images of her pulling bizarre faces and posing next to Second World War Spitfires – but this is exactly how and where she launched her campaign, and did so deliberately, just to look even more unreal, atavistic and out-of-touch.

She produces made-up images of “pay-per-mile” signs and then gets corrected on X (formerly Twitter), and has to withdraw them for breach of copyright. She liked Truss’ kamikaze budget, which made it even more difficult for young Londoners to raise a mortgage. She is a proud Leaver in the most anti-Brexit region of the UK. She gives the distinct impression that she doesn’t like the people who live there. She is a consummate political disaster. She must be doing it deliberately.

So far from being “the candidate Khan most fears”, as she claims, Susan Hall is actually Sadiq Khan’s greatest asset and secret weapon. In truth, London does have serious challenges, and Khan is a not particularly popular, let alone loved, mayor. He’s never won on first preferences that handsomely, and is in fact eminently beatable. The right Tory candidate fighting the right sort of campaign could conceivably have unseated him after his two unremarkable terms of office.

The example is of Andy Street, Tory mayor of the West Midlands who sells himself as a pragmatic, independent-minded individual, rather than a Tory. Another would be Boris Johnson, who took on the candidacy in 2008 when no one else wanted to do it, but, in the half-forgotten days when he was pro-Europe, liberal and funny, he managed to defeat Labour’s Ken Livingstone, long the dominant personality in London politics. He bicycled around and purported to love buses; Hall seemingly never uses them.

As long-time Johnson associate Guto Harri remarked the other day, Khan will win “by default”: “I am astonished that we didn’t find a stronger pool of prospective candidates, and I am shocked that they whittled them down to such a poor choice. How did the party – one of the most successful election-winning forces in the history of politics – end up picking such a weak opponent to a mediocre incumbent mayor?”

But they’re lumbered with Hall, and the possibility of a hugely significant, morale-boosting Tory win in London against the odds has been squandered. Labour will hold on to London.

No doubt, in a few days, Hall will blame her defeat on the media (though she’s never off the cult-like GB News), or the migrants, or claim the election is rigged, only making her look like a Trumpian bad loser. But we know better, don’t we? It’s all in her script.