REFORM has played a blinder pitching fresh-faced Laila Cunningham to take on slippery Sir Sadiq Khan in the battle for London.
She’s clever, good-looking, charming and has the potential to communicate Farage-ism to a whole new younger, female and moderate audience.
Gone are the egg-on-tie, gin-and-Jag, Bernard Manning vibes that many voters still unfairly hark back to when they think of the party born from the ashes of Ukip.
And for Nigel Farage, Laila is a highly electable tank firmly parked on Labour’s prime lawn — one that for too long they have arrogantly taken for granted.
Nobody — bar the Left — wins London without a compelling candidate who can reach across political divides and strangle Labour and their vile sectarian friends’ rotten grip on the inner-city boroughs by turning out the squeezed commuter belt circling the capital.
Just ask the only Mayor of London who was not a Labour guy since the job was invented — Boris Johnson.
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The Tories understood back in 2008 that you have to do things a bit differently in London to have any hope, and that a unique candidate has to build their own broad church beyond party lines.
Poster girl
To do that you also need name recognition — hence why announcing your candidate nearly two and a half years from polling day makes sense.
All of which explains the Reform fanfare in unveiling Cunningham earlier this week — leaving the Tories scrambling for their own star and Labour baffled at how to attack a candidate who, as an ethnic minority member, they too often presume they should automatically own.
A Muslim, Cunningham is resolute on banning the burka, she’s eviscerating of rape gangs and the cover-up and, as she told me in an interview this week: “No one is tougher than me on Islamic extremism.”
With seven mouths to feed, she certainly has skin in the game too.
She is the poster girl for immigrant integration that is so often talked about in lofty terms, but never championed on the Right in personal terms.
The Islamic community and wider Britain need far more Laila Cunninghams than rent-a-gob agitators like Zarah Sultana and the euphemistically named — but often worryingly extreme — Gaza Independents.
Now, I’m not sure even most Londoners are giving much thought to this 2028 race, let alone the rest of the country.
Yet the job has become totemic due to Mayor Khan’s acute Remainiac-itis, horrific handling of crime and allegations of two-tier everything.
Add his smug delight in winding everyone up by ramming his particularly dreary brand of wokeism and dated “Shut up you racists and sing Kumbaya” diversity down our throats at every single opportunity.
Then there is his rolling war of words with Donald Trump making it a global issue, plus his delusional insistence everything in London is tickety-boo while supermarket shelves are cleared into sports bags and phones are snatched every minute across every borough by black-clad marauders on electric bikes.
The charge sheet is long, and the reasons London needs a breath of fresh air endless.
But sadly there is, frankly, a small but noisy subsection of society who simply hate Khan because he is Muslim and brown.
These people are idiots. Don’t be like these people.
So of course Cunningham — who is of Egyptian heritage — has been met online with a sewer of racism.
It’s been led by bedroom-dwelling trolls and washed-up has-beens who have drifted further and further down the far-right rabbit hole as their careers circle the toilet pan.
These puffed-up phoneys have turned on Reform, accusing Farage of “capitulation” or worse, and even raised the bonkers suggestion that Cunningham herself is an “Islamist” extremist.
The evidence is sketchy.
I hope those trying to stir that pot and drum fellow citizens like Laila Cunningham out of politics will find themselves sorely disappointed by polling reality.
Harry Cole
Their big gotcha was a “hidden” Islamic tattoo — despite Laila choosing to flaunt the moon inked on her arm multiple times on TV.
If every girl I know with a moon tattoo is a jihadi then we really are in trouble as a nation . . .
And I’ve seen this battle play out enough already in the US.
Once it was the Left that obsessed about identity politics.
It was the wokies that saw everything through the prism of colour, class and who you share a bed with.
They set policy based as such — and are to blame in large part for the division and strife the West has been beset with for decades as a result.
But suddenly a new strand of thought on the Right started to obsess about heritage and colour too — not who you are and what you do, but where you may or may not be from.
Bout of self-flagellation
Unless you came over on the Mayflower, are you really an American?
American conservatives are currently at each other’s throats as it attempts to surgically remove this weird “woke right” from mainstream conversation.
Having watched this civil war up close, I pray Britain does not have to go through a similar bout of self-flagellation and introspection.
And I hope those trying to stir that pot and drum fellow citizens like Laila Cunningham out of politics will find themselves sorely disappointed by polling reality.
When they emerge blinking from their mother’s basements I suspect they will see a country defined by deeds, not shades.
SIR Keir Starmer says “all options are on the table” when it comes to calls to ban Elon Musk’s X in the UK.
The PM has tasked Ofcom – the country’s self-appointed internet policeman – to force the platform, formerly known as Twitter, to clamp down on AI-generated sexual content.
It should not be beyond the wit of man to stop X’s AI chatbot, Grok, complying with user requests to digitally remove clothing from pictures without the subject’s consent, but we live in an age of cracking nuts with sledgehammers.
And Starmer’s threat has gone down VERY badly in Washington.
Already US politicians are hitting back, vowing to pass legislation to sanction Starmer personally were he to silence all X users in Britain.
The UK’s Online Safety Act is met with laughter and deep suspicion across the Pond.
Ofcom’s impotent boasts that it can regulate American firms and American servers hosting American content are doing transatlantic relations no favours.
I suspect 2026 will be the year the tyre meets the road on that legislation – and it is not going to be pretty for No10.
