Alex Challoner, a Conservative mayoral hopeful, aims to end Labour's grip on London with a plan to cut gym membership costs by returning VAT to Londoners, boost mental health, and restore the capital's "mojo."
Challoner's key policies
Challoner is competing with former Home Secretary Sir James Cleverly and ex-Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner Festus Akinbusoye for the Conservative nomination for Mayor of London. His flagship policies include giving Londoners back the VAT on gym membership, providing a VAT rebate of up to £50,000 a year to the city's independent brewers, and stationing uniformed British Transport Police officers at Tube ticket gate lines to tackle fare-dodging.
Challoner, who founded Cavendish Communications, insists Labour's hold on London is "not unbreakable," despite Sadiq Khan winning the last three contests. He said: "It's an uphill battle but we can win. We just have to deliver a campaign that is flawless, very much focused on effective delivery."
Men's mental health and fitness
Challoner attends a local authority gym and is impressed that "blokes" there "talk to each other about their issues." He said this is "really important because men are pretty rubbish sometimes about talking about their stuff." In the past year, he has shed 10kg as part of an effort to be "completely match fit" for campaigning. "It was tough," he said. "But you do feel amazingly better for it."
The core issues, he predicts, will include the cost of living "which is killing everybody at the moment," crime, and competency.
Restoring London's mojo
The greatest threat to the capital, he argues, is the "general sense of managed decline" which "seeps into everything" and is "depressing." Challoner, originally from Taunton in Somerset, contrasts that with the excitement he felt when he moved to London in 1993. "We've got to get London's mojo back," he said.
He was at the heart of Steve Norris's unsuccessful bid to be the first Mayor of London in 2000 and sought the nomination ahead of the 2024 contest. He now considers that a "dry run" and says he has a "burning passion" for the mayoralty.
Insisting that the capital's success does not come at the expense of the rest of the country, he said: "I think when London succeeds, everybody else succeeds. I genuinely believe that, because of the amount of tax that we're creating here, and that will get redistributed back to the rest of the country."
