2021 London mayoral election


The 2021 London mayoral election will be held in May 2021 to elect the mayor of London. It will be held simultaneously with the elections for the London Assembly and other local elections. The mayoral and Assembly elections were due to be held on 7 May 2020, but in March 2020 it was announced the election would be postponed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The change in election date is to be ignored when calculating the four-yearly election cycle, so the following election will be held in 2024, and the term of the mayor election in 2021 will accordingly be reduced to three years.
The position of Mayor of London is currently held by Sadiq Khan of the Labour Party, who was elected in 2016 with 44.2% of the first-round votes and 56.8% of the second-round votes.

Background

The mayor of London has a range of responsibilities covering policing, transport, housing, planning, economic development, arts, culture and the environment, controlling a budget of around £17 billion per year. Mayors are elected for a period of four years, with no limit to the number of terms served. Under the Greater London Authority Act 1999, mayoral elections are held on the first Thursday in May in the fourth calendar year following the previous election, unless varied by an order by the Secretary of State. The incumbent, Sadiq Khan, a member of the Labour Party, was elected in the 2016 election, defeating the Conservative candidate, Zac Goldsmith.
In the 2018 local elections across Greater London the Labour party increased its number of council seats to the highest level since 1978. Both the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party also gained seats. In the 2019 European Parliament elections, the Lib Dems came first in London; winning the most votes in the London region with 27% and gaining three MEPs, their best result in the party's history. The Labour Party came second, with 24% of the vote, losing two seats and ending up with two MEPs. The Brexit Party gained two MEPs and Greens won 12.5% of the vote, holding their one seat. The Conservative Party failed to get a single MEP elected in London for the first time in the history of the party. In the 2019 general election, there was no net change in the number of seats for each party, although several seats changed hand. The biggest changes in vote share were for Labour, who saw a fall of 6.5%, and the Liberal Democrats, who were up 6.1%.
On 13 March 2020, the government announced the election would be postponed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Electoral system

The election will use a supplementary vote system, in which voters express a first and a second preference for candidates.
This means that the winning candidate has the support of a majority of voters who expressed a preference among the top two.
All registered electors living in London aged 18 or over will be entitled to vote in the mayoral election. Those who are temporarily away from London will also be entitled to vote in the mayoral election. The deadline to register to vote in the election will be announced nearer the election.

Campaign

The incumbent mayor Sadiq Khan announced in June 2018 that he intended to stand for re-election. Later that year, he was automatically re-selected to be Labour's candidate after receiving sufficient nominations from local party groups and affiliated trade unions to avoid a selection process in which other candidates would be able to stand against him for the nomination. His re-selection followed speculation that a figure from the left of his party could challenge him for the candidacy given Khan's disagreements about the "direction of the party" with the then national party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Khan announced in early 2020 that part of his election platform will be to deliver a "green new deal for the city", by making London carbon neutral by 2030 and opposing building a third runway at Heathrow Airport.
The Conservative Party selected Shaun Bailey as its candidate in September 2018. In his selection, he emphasised fighting crime, and proposed "maximising" CCTV coverage of London as an alternative to increasing the number of police officers, as well as automatic jail terms for those who commit acid attacks. In the weeks after his selection, Bailey was criticised for sharing an Islamophobic tweet attacking Sadiq Khan, as well as controversial views he had previously published on multiculturalism, Islam and Hinduism. He will be the first Conservative mayoral candidate to simultaneously stand in the concurrent London Assembly election.
The Green Party chose Siân Berry, who had previously been their mayoral candidate in the 2008 and 2016 elections and who had served as co-leader of the party since 2018, as their candidate in February 2019. She launched her campaign with a focus on housing, calling for a "people's land bank" which would let communities bring empty buildings and land back into use.
Siobhan Benita was selected as the Liberal Democrat candidate on 21 November 2018. Benita had run as an independent candidate in the 2012 London mayoral election, coming fifth with 3.8% of first preference votes, behind fourth-placed Liberal Democrat candidate Brian Paddick, who received 4.2%. Benita criticised Khan's response to knife crime in London. Benita launched her campaign for the London mayoral election on 13 February 2020. She said she wants to legalise cannabis in London in a bid to tackle rising levels of knife crime. She stated she would like to see pilots for legal regulated cannabis across London in order to remove power and money from gangs, free up police time to tackle serious crimes, and raise millions of pounds in tax, which could be invested in youth services and support those addicted to harder drugs. She has also pledged to cut violent crime, cut air pollution, declared an aim to reach zero-carbon by 2030 and reopen closed police stations.
The former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage announced in August 2018 that he was considering running as the UKIP candidate, claiming that he would be more successful than the Conservatives. However, he subsequently left UKIP in December 2018. He became the leader of the Brexit Party in March 2019.
On 4 October 2019, Rory Stewart, who had been a Conservative MP and came fifth in the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election, but was then expelled from their Parliamentary group for his opposition to a "no deal" Brexit and was sitting as an independent MP, announced he was standing as an independent candidate for the London mayoralty. He left the House of Commons when he did not contest a seat in the December 2019 general election. However, he withdrew from the campaign in May 2020, saying the delay in the election meant it was impractical to sustain a campaign as an independent. He chose not to endorse any other candidate.
On 27 July 2020, Benita also withdrew from the campaign citing the financial difficulties of sustaining her candidacy. The Liberal Democrats will select a new candidate.

Candidates

Labour Party

The incumbent mayor Sadiq Khan became Labour's candidate after more than half of local parties and party affiliates in London voted to automatically reselect him. The comedian Eddie Izzard and Tottenham MP David Lammy had previously been suggested as potential candidates.

Conservative Party

was selected as the candidate of the Conservative Party in September 2018. Bailey has been a member of the London Assembly since 2016, having previously worked as a youth worker and as a special adviser to David Cameron.
The party had started the process for selecting their candidate in June 2018. The Guardian reported that more than twenty prospective candidates applied, mostly from local government. A longlist of ten was published in July 2018. Following interviews, the party produced a shortlist of three for London members of the Conservative Party to vote on using a preferential voting system. To vote, members needed to reside in London and to have been members on 26 June 2018.
Bailey had been endorsed in the party's selection process by the Evening Standard, as well as Conservative Police and Crime Commissioners Anthony Stansfeld, David Lloyd, Matthew Scott and Roger Hirst.
Selection process

Shortlisted
Longlisted but not shortlisted
Applied but not longlisted
Previously discussed as potential candidates

Liberal Democrats

, a former senior civil servant and 2012 independent candidate for London mayor, was selected to be the Liberal Democrat candidate on 21 November 2018. The other shortlisted candidates were the anti-Brexit campaigner and former and 2020 London Assembly candidate Rob Blackie, Ebookers founder Dinesh Dhamija, and former parliamentary candidate, consultant and 2020 London Assembly candidate Lucy Salek. Benita came first among first preferences, but with less than half the votes. After last-placed Lucy Salek was eliminated and second preferences among her voters tallied, Benita had a majority of the votes cast and was chosen as the party's candidate.
The former Conservative parliamentary candidates Azi Ahmed and Kishan Devani had previously been discussed as potential Liberal Democrat candidates for the mayoralty, as had Rachel Johnson, a journalist and sister to Boris Johnson, the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and a former mayor of London.
However, on 27 July 2020, Benita announced her withdrawal from the candidacy, saying she was unable to commit to another year of campaigning following the election's postponement to 2021 given the unpaid nature of the role. The party will select a new candidate.

Green Party

, who has been co-leader of the Green Party since 2018 and a Member of the London Assembly since 2016, was announced as the party's mayoral candidate on 14 February 2019. She had previously been the party's candidate for mayor of London in 2008, when she came fourth with 3.2% of the first preference vote, and in 2016, when she came third with 5.8% of the first preference vote. Nominations had opened in November 2018 and closed in January 2019, with four candidates duly nominated. The other nominated candidates were former deputy leader and candidate for the UK Parliament, London Assembly and European Parliament Shahrar Ali, actor and Cities of London and Westminster Dec 2019 candidate Zack Polanski, as well as former senior civil servant, general election candidate and London Assembly candidate Peter Underwood.

Other candidates

The following have announced their intentions to stand, all before the year's delay in the election:
The polls below were taken when the election was expected in May 2020.