Davis’s big launch might have been good, if only I could hear it

POLITICAL SKETCH: Ever been invited to a party when you’ve been expected to pay for your food? Or a launch event which is set up so you can neither see nor hear clearly the speakers on stage? KEN TOWL has, after attending Rowenna Davis’s Croydon mayoral campaign launch on Saturday

Benji has a lot to answer for.

It was Benji, we were told, who “made the magic happen”, in that he was in charge of the technology at the official launch of Rowenna Davis’s campaign to win the Croydon mayorality.

When the launch started on the first floor of what used to be the Grants department store, the lights went down and we were told by a very excited backlit silhouette that we would experience “inspiring speeches and moving videos… and most of all, Rowenna Davis”.

There was a cheer and a whoop and some applause. The silhouette continued, “And we have food. Big thanks to Tokia Square.” There was another cheer and another whoop and more applause. We were then informed that “the party” had negotiated a whopping 10% discount on the food, which we were expected to pay for. These days, when the Labour Party invites you to a party, it turns out that you pay for your own food.

There were free (soft) drinks. The days of champagne socialism are clearly over, at lest for party members. I picked up a 335ml bottle of something called Appletiser and found a table occupied by a couple of fellow education union members. Rather than beer and sandwiches, as the unions used to have at 10 Downing Street in Harold Wilson’s day, they had orange and passion fruit J2Os. How times have changed.

I sat down as the silhouette was announcing the first speaker. It was quite the build-up. The microphone kept cutting out but I caught the claim that the speaker was famed for “sharp, powerful and entertaining speeches”.

I couldn’t wait. Who was this master of oratory? It turned out to be Stuart King, leader of the Labour group on Croydon Council.

This was, after all, a Labour Party event, the official launch of the campaign to get Labour candidates for Mayor and council wards elected next May.

The electric signs on the inside and outside of the restaurant featured the “People First” slogan rather than any mention of Labour. All of the council candidates, we would find out as they were introduced to us, had been coached to say “People First” in their recorded addresses, rather than mention “Labour”.

I don’t know how sharp or powerful or entertaining King was. It was difficult to tell from the bits that I heard (Thanks, Benji!), but he did say that the energy in the room was electric and that people had come from “far and wide”. As far and wide as Crystal Palace, it turned out. He built up to a crescendo with a classical rhetorical device. “This campaign has strength,” he said. “It has direction, and it has…”

The last word was inaudible, the “rule of three” thwarted by poor sound quality.

Next up was Policing Minister and Croydon West MP, Sarah Jones. She is usually a good speaker but even she was limited by the poor acoustics of the room and the snap, crackle and pop of the microphone. She did get a whoop and a cheer, though, for describing Croydon as the best place in the world.

The MP’s allotted task was to introduce Labour candidates in the wards in her constituency. She preceded this with a mini-eulogy of Rowenna Davis, in which she described how she had seen Davis giving people hope for change. It felt a little too on the nose, given the national hope for the change that Jones and Labour had promised at the General Election last year.

Ward by ward, the candidates were called up on to the stage and their virtues extolled. They stood and smiled while Jones found a sentence to say about each of them. Here was Chris, standing in Fairfield ward. He was wearing his Crystal Palace shirt. He was “much loved”, apparently.

Which seems at odds with the outcome of the ward selection meeting, where Councillor Chris Clark finished third of four imposed candidates, avoiding deselection by members by a single vote. He will have to hope that he is much more loved by the Fairfield electorate, given that the Greens already have two of the three of the seats and must surely see the third, Clark’s, as a prime target.

When MP Jones got to Broad Green, she described Tom Bowell as “unbelievably active”, which made him sound like a Duracell bunny. On to South Norwood, where we were introduced to crime campaigner, Melanie.

“Where there’s crime,” said Jones, “she’ll ring the police!” Next to me, a disgruntled party member muttered, “Unfortunately, there’s no one to ring when your ward selects someone without giving you a vote.”

Another candidate was described as “good at canvassing”. Poor Jones appeared to be running out of things to say. To be fair, her Croydon West constituency has the most candidates to introduce. So far, only the candidates with, in theory, a decent chance of winning have been selected by Labour.

Next up was Natasha Irons, the MP for the Croydon East constituency. She told us that everyone was, in some vague way, “brilliant!”.

Against the grain, she eschewed the “I’m Croydon, born and bred” claim that is so beloved of Croydon’s incumbent Mayor Jason Perry, and said, flat out, that she was not from Croydon. It was a brave move. She did say, however, that Croydon was London’s “most iconic borough” and that it was “about putting people first”.

When she introduced the Labour candidates for the wards in her constituencies, it was difficult to pick out much more than the names, and sometimes not even that. In one case, I heard that X couldn’t have done Y without the support of Z. And then, some names – “Next up, Maddy” (Henson, candidate for one of the two Addiscombe wards, and one which she currently shares with the Conservatives).

“She will be joined by Chris Galpin, who can’t be here today.” If he wins, that is. And if she wins.

Labour doesn’t have an MP for Croydon South. That role is taken by Chris Philp, the shadow Home Secretary (yes, unbelievable, isn’t it?). It turned out that the candidates for the South Croydon ward within the Croydon South constituency were “Mathew, who is a [inaudible]”, “Bridget, who is a [inaudible]”, and Benji, who is, presumably, not a professional sound technician.

These were the only candidates that have been selected so far for any of the wards in Philp’s constituency, so presumably the party thinks they have a chance.

Croydon Labour has so far announced the outcome of 15 ward selections, naming 42 candidates. These cover mostly what are regarded as “safe Labour” wards. There’s been no news yet, for instance, on Labour’s selected candidates for Purley or Coulsdon, and nor for New Addington’s two council wards. On May 7 2026, in addition to the borough-wide mayoral election, the Town Hall elections will be held across 28 wards for 70 council seats. Labour’s London region office, which has been micro-managing the selections in Croydon, says that their remaining 28 candidates will be named after the party’s conference.

At the campaign launch, there was no sign of Streatham (and Croydon North, if he can be asked) MP Steve Reed OBE, so maybe he couldn’t be bothered to turn up to support his party’s council candidates who will be standing in his constituency. It was a Saturday, though. Maybe the government minister had been given VIP tickets for a football match?

Someone nudged me to whisper that they thought they recognised the silhouette doing the role of master of ceremonies as Tamar Barrett, the Thornton Heath councillor who was deselected by members in her ward after having been exposed as breaking the law on councillor declarations.

Her presence on stage may give some credence to rumours among local party members that Barrett will, still, somehow be handed a slot in a safe Labour ward before the elections, enabling her to continue as a councillor in the borough which has been so generous towards her undeclared private company.

It was around this time that the silhouette exhorted us to, “Go crazy for this young talent from Croydon!” I noticed Rowenna D, dressed in an eye-catching magenta two-piece designer suit heading up towards the stage. What an introduction, I thought.

But Davis stopped about halfway. It turned out the young talent was a rap band. They were pretty good, too, though they would, like everyone, have benefited from a better Benji.

After this we were treated, if that is the right word, to video clips from each of the candidates. They all started their clip with, “Putting people first…” but, in most cases, it was impossible to discern any further words, the sound recording and the amplification in the room being so poor.

Chris Clark was marginally louder than others, so I managed to make out “Putting people first means actually doin’ somethin’…”, which was nice.

The video clips were so bad that Benji played them all over again, this time with boosted volume, but this had the unfortunate effect of creating a chorus of droning sounds from the fridges that reached a very uncomfortable pitch, causing people to cover their ears.

I was left wondering why one of the would-be councillors had filmed her “People first” video in her car. Why does anyone do that?

It got briefly better before it got much, much worse. If Inside Croydon were into dirty tricks like click-bait headlines, the headline of this piece would be something like “You won’t believe what delegates were asked to do at the Labour launch on Saturday”. But, fortunately, it isn’t.

The good bit was an excellent, polished speech by a young man called Jake who described how Davis had provided him with work experience and been kind and helpful and generally lovely. Unlike some others, he had taken the trouble to prepare his speech, and it showed. He spoke with sincerity and it showed. He took the trouble to enunciate clearly, compensating for the shortcomings of the sound system. His speech was to his credit and to Davis, too. It put previous, more experienced speakers into the shade.

He was followed by others, people of all ages who Davis had helped in different contexts over the years. It was truly moving, and it told a story of a decent person who had managed to make a positive difference to peoples’ lives. It gave an impression of a candidate who got things done because she wanted to help people, a candidate with a rare combination of compassion and competence.

Compared to this, the next “guest speaker” was a bit of a let-down.

The silhouette announced that we had a recording from an important government figure.

She announced him as “Wes…” and nothing appeared, so she gave the sound technician a further cue, “Benji!”

It made it sound as if the Health Secretary was called Wes Benji. Which, of course, he isn’t. The sound was just about good enough to hear Streeting trot out his prepared lines about Croydon’s Tory mayor getting rid of lollipop men and women. I mean, it was OK, but everyone knew Andy Burnham would have been better.

And then it got worse, and very, very weird. The screen changed to a blood-red background with words printed on them. The words said:

CREATIVE CROYDON

“When times are urgent

Let us slow down

It’s an emergence”

(Bayo Akomolafe/Liz Terry)

ROWENNA DAVIS

People first.

Someone announced as “Doctor [inaudible]” stood next to the words on the screen and explained that, as we campaign between now and May, we would encounter many people who would disagree with us, and that the way to deal with this was to slow down, breathe and say a mantra to ourselves.

I assumed she was speaking from experience, the bit about encountering people who disagreed with you, at least. So, she said, we would sing these “words of emergence” together.

Of course, as soon as she said the word “sing”, there was a palpable shrinking of the half of the audience who heard the word and a “What did she say?” from the half who didn’t.

But before we sang we had to set up a harmonising droning noise “like the fridges earlier”.

A few people emulated the good doctor, making a humming sound. I imagined these were the council candidates. Most people in the room stayed resolutely silent. I am so glad they did. It would have felt very cultish. People had come to support Rowenna Davis, not to impersonate industrial refrigerators.

And then the singing started. Well, almost. Candidates are good drones, it turns out, but not great singers. “It’s embarrassing when nobody does it,” observed the doctor, “We need the guys singing. Pretend you’re at the football!” Chris Clark, in his red and blue stripes, was pretending he was at the football but he wasn’t singing. Neither was Rowenna Davis. She looked like she wished she was at the football. Steve Reed was at the football.

And so the doctor sang the words “We are in emergence” with the most nugatory support, practically solo. She signed off by asking us to ask ourselves, “How can I just open myself so that I don’t add to the hating?”

I realised I did not know the answer to that. Work hard and be nice to people, maybe?

We had Bollywood dancing to entertain a now restless audience – it was gone 12.30 by which time the event (having started around 11am) was supposed to be long finished.

The young dancers were pulled after a few minutes because, it was announced, a doctor from University Hospital wanted to speak.

His microphone was off.

Then he turned it on and asked if anyone could hear him. We said yes, so he carried on speaking after turning the microphone back off and so he was absolutely inaudible for the entirety of his two-minute speech.

Surely now, we were going to hear from our magenta-clad mayoral candidate?

But no, we had yet another speaker, John Davis, Rowenna’s father, who explained that, although he wasn’t a toolmaker, Rowenna’s grandfather had been.

On the whole, Davis Senior appeared to be in favour of Davis Junior’s candidacy, though his final flourish, that “she is a leader and also a team player who can be a truly transformative Mayor for Croydon” sounded close to the sort of thing that you get from AI when you ask for a mayoral endorsement speech.

It was 12.45.

Finally, the candidate was about to speak, about to put the meat on the bones, to tell us what she stands for.

But what a show it had been, despite Benji’s best efforts.

To find out what was in Rowenna Davis’s speech, check out Inside Croydon tomorrow

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