Sara Gezdari, a Conservative hopeful, says her experience as an immigrant and mother has shaped her vision for London as she seeks her party's nomination for the 2028 City Hall contest. Born in Albania, Gezdari moved to Italy with her family following the country's civil unrest in 1997 before later settling in south-west London, where she now lives with her two children.
The international politics graduate was the Conservative candidate for Richmond Park at the 2024 general election, finishing behind Liberal Democrat Sarah Olney. She is now one of three contenders hoping to become the party's candidate for Mayor of London.
Robbery prompted mayoral bid
Gezdari said a high-profile jewellery store robbery in Richmond earlier this year persuaded her to enter the race to succeed Sir Sadiq Khan at City Hall. Three men took to the windows of Gregory and Co. Jewellers, located on Paved Court in Richmond – an iconic filming location for the Apple TV show Ted Lasso – with sledgehammers before making off with £225,000 worth of stock.
“That’s when I thought to myself, enough is enough,” Ms Gezdari said. “When did we in London make crime some sort of acceptable thing, ordinary behaviour? Why are we forced to accept this?”
She is now one of three choices to be the Tory candidate to run in the London mayoral race in 2028. Ms Gezdari is up against former foreign secretary Sir James Cleverly and Westminster councillor Festus Akinbusoye, with ballot papers having gone out to Conservative members in London this week.
Crime and policing priorities
Her message is based on a simple prospect of returning London to its “former glory”. City Hall would, as ever, fervently push back against this – the Mayor has regularly espoused statistics showing that crime of all different types is coming down under his leadership. For many, however, it is the perception of safety that has disappeared in recent years.
No parent in London should need to worry about their child returning safely from school, the 42-year-old said. “As a woman walking on the street, after 5pm, you have got some sort of a curfew because it’s dark,” she added. “We’ve gotten to a point where you are constantly worried about your children being on a train by themselves at 13-years-old.”
The first step in solving this is to repair the relationship between City Hall and rank-and-file Metropolitan Police officers, she argued. In 2022, the Met Police Federation, which represented more than 31,000 rank-and-file officers at the time, declared it had “no faith” in Lord Khan after he ousted former commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick.
Ms Gezdari said: “What we have seen in the last decade is a London Mayor who has managed to make the police forces feel unsure of their job. I want the police, when they act lawfully, to know that they’ve got the backing of City Hall. I want to show up for them.”
“I want to make sure that they know that we are a team, and all their successes are my successes, and everything which is a failure on their behalf is my failure as well.”
She does not go so far as to criticise the current commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, but claims he has been “let down” by the Mayor and forced to “tick boxes” and chase targets instead of devising a coherent plan for policing the capital.
Economy and housing plans
Reducing crime can have a knock-on positive effect on the city’s economy, said Ms Gezdari. “If investors do not feel safe, they don’t come to London,” she says. “If people do not feel safe, they don’t send their children to study in London. And as a consequence of it, developers don’t build homes because there is no market for it. Everything is interconnected. It’s about confidence.”
On the capital’s housing crisis, Ms Gezdari says that City Hall also needs to rebuild its relationship with developers, who she thinks have been unfairly demonised as “greedy”. And instead of building on Green Belt sites, she would make use of Transport for London’s 5,500 hectares of land to get the market moving again.
Her ambition depends on first being selected as her party’s nominee, and then winning enough public support to become mayor – a tough ask for the Tories, given their current polling numbers in the city. The Tories will be second out of the blocks when they announce their candidate on November 27. Reform UK chose Laila Cunningham in January, the Lib Dem race will conclude early next year, and the Greens are still in “recruitment phase”, according to insiders. Meanwhile, Lord Khan has not yet announced whether he will stand for a fourth term in office, with up to five Labour MPs ready to launch their own campaigns if he declares he will stand down.
Pollsters suggest the Tories will be in a tight race to reach the final two – the 2028 race will return to supplementary voting, with a potential run-off – against the Greens and Reform. The party did relatively well in this year’s council elections in the capital, winning Westminster and holding boroughs like Bexley, Bromley, and Hillingdon.
For Ms Gezdari, whoever members choose will have a fighting chance of taking City Hall again. “The one thing that we all three have in common is a fire to bring London back to its glory days,” she said.
