The controversial Conservative attack video that portrayed London as a crime-racked hellhole was put together by the central party rather than its mayoral candidate, and has dismayed some around Susan Hall, the Guardian has learned.
The brief but dramatic film features an American-accented voiceover declaring the city the “crime capital of the world” and, using dubious claims, sought to blame Sadiq Khan.
While Hall is the main challenger to the incumbent London mayor in the 2 May election, a Tory party source said the video was entirely the work of Conservative campaign headquarters (CCHQ), and had not been well received.
“It does sometimes make you wonder if there’s a Labour mole working in CCHQ,” they said. “It insulted people’s intelligence, and it has left some people on her campaign notably pissed off.
“This doesn’t help Susan’s case at all,” they added. “There are serious concerns about crime in London, and about the mayor’s priorities, and voters are telling us they’re not happy. But this video doesn’t doesn’t do anything.”
An initial version of the video was taken down after viewers pointed out that one key scene – showing a rush of panicked commuters – was not filmed in London. In fact, it was of people running through New York’s Penn station after false reports of gunfire in 2017.
The replacement video, also posted to X, features occasional statistics on crime accompanied by completely false claims, such as the the city’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) being policed by “Ulez enforcers, dressed in black, faces covered in masks”. The zone is enforced using cameras.
While the rates of some crimes are rising in London, a Guardian analysis last month, based on the Crime Survey for England and Wales, showed that people were less likely to be victims of crime in London than across the country as a whole.
In the capital, 14.9% of people experienced a crime either to their person or their household in the year ending September 2023, compared with 15.7% throughout England and Wales.
A source in Hall’s campaign confirmed that the video had no input from them, but declined to say whether she or her team had been annoyed by its tone.
One party official said that if Hall’s team were annoyed, it would be “odd for them to be displeased at a huge spike in people talking online about Sadiq Khan’s record on crime and Ulez”.
Hall’s most recent video, posted to YouTube two days ago, is a notably more sober affair in which the Conservative candidate also talks about Ulez and crime, but without any false claims.
The CCHQ video appears to be part of a national campaign in which the Conservatives condemn the record of Labour when in power. A follow-up video, posted on Tuesday, was focused on the Labour-run Birmingham city council, but was largely factual.
Some Conservative MPs have expressed worries that CCHQ output such as the Hall video points towards a likely Donald Trump-echoing approach in the general election, in which openly incorrect claims are made to create an impact.
One senior Tory backbencher said: “The frustrating thing is that there is a good campaign to be done against Sadiq Khan’s record, especially on crime, and if we had a decent candidate it could be made.
“It’s fair to say that the CCHQ social media feed has been quite out there for a while. Some MPs used to complain and ask what was going on. Now they just don’t bother, which perhaps tells its own story.
“I do increasingly think, who are these children and what are they doing?”
