Reform's tough-on-crime candidate who could save London from Sadiq Khan

Telegraph

a day ago

Parliament sprawls below like a model village underneath Reform's new offices in the heart of Westminster.
The vista acts as a daily reminder of what the growing team of campaigners is working towards and where their desks may one day be located.
But first they must raise their gaze six miles east towards City Hall, where Sir Sadiq Khan is facing growing criticism over the state of the capital and its crime epidemic.
Leading the attacks will be the Reform's latest recruit, Laila Cunningham, a councillor and former public prosecutor who has defected from the Tories.
Already being spoken about internally as a rising star, she is being tipped by some to run as the party's candidate in the next London mayoral election.
It is a contest that is set to be fought against the backdrop of a gathering narrative that the city has been plunged into terminal decline under Sir Sadiq.
Having seen the justice system from the inside, Mrs Cunningham is uncompromising about where she thinks things have gone wrong.
'There's too much emphasis on hate speech in the criminal justice system and it's a waste of the courts' time,' she tells The Sunday Telegraph.
'I've prosecuted so many people who are completely drunk and say horrific things and it's just a waste of time. A lot of them are homeless.
'I just think there are a lot more serious crimes that we need to address.'
As a mother-of-seven, she speaks openly about how 'scared' she is that one of her teenage children could come to serious harm on the capital's streets.
She warns there is an 'epidemic' of knife crime in London and says she cannot understand why tackling it is not more of a priority for the Mayor.
'It's a real dereliction of duty on behalf of Sadiq Khan, what he's done to the city,' she says. 'People are moving out. They're leaving the country.'
'My kids were mugged many times and I had to do the leg work for the police. My husband's always telling me you're going to get killed, but what else are you supposed to do?'
She backs stop and search, which she describes as a 'great tool', and says that any criticism around discrimination should not prevent its wider use.
'It's really wrong to shy away from it, because we really let our youth down,' she warns.
'I see so many teenagers on a hot August day walking down the street with a balaclava and it's ignored. That should be a reason for stop and search immediately.'
Mrs Cunningham speaks fiercely in defence of free speech, admitting that she is worried about the direction it is heading under Labour.
She says that Britain must be 'a symbol of freedom' as it was in the 1960s, when her parents moved here from Egypt to escape Communism.
Calls to cut red tape
As a Muslim she has no time for Angela Rayner's plans to adopt an official definition of Islamophobia, warning it risks a slide into authoritarianism.
'If you want to criticise Islam, then it's up to you,' she says. 'Everyone has their own opinions. People criticise Christianity.
'I don't think there should be any law legislating how and what people can say in relation to different religions, different cultures.
'We don't need more government, we don't need more legislation. We need less.'
Mrs Cunningham is guarded when asked whether she believes Britain now has two-tier justice, saying she was never directly instructed to treat any case differently.
But she says that if such a culture does exist then it 'comes from the top' citing the significant increase in hate crime prosecutions she oversaw.
She is also scathing of Sir Sadiq's controversial campaign to tackle 'microaggressions' in the workplace including at Transport for London, which he runs.
Examples of such behaviour given by the Mayor include asking people where they are 'really from' and complimenting them on their English being good.
'He's really focused on dividing us and creating grievances,' she says, adding that she regularly gets asked where she is from when taking taxis.
'We need to focus on the things that matter, which is what Reform is about.'
Mrs Cunningham was a rising star at the CPS, where she worked as a prosecutor while also sitting on Westminster council as a Conservative.
Everything then changed last month, when she announced that she was defecting to Reform in an interview with the London Evening Standard.
In it she said it was a 'dereliction of duty' that there are not more police on the streets and expressed concerns about new online safety laws curbing free speech.
She also said she was 'very, very angry' that there are 'certain communities in this country that have totally destroyed the image of British Muslims'.
The piece did not mention that she worked at CPS, where employees are bound by rules on political neutrality, but it was brought to the attention of her boss.
Mrs Cunningham says she was swiftly called in for a 'fact finding disciplinary hearing' and was told she may have breached the civil service code of conduct.
'I know what a fact finding disciplinary hearing means,' she says. 'It either means, because the code is so wide ranging, that they're going to drive me through an HR process and then find a reason to get rid of me, or they gag me.
'And I didn't want either of those, because I think what's going on in the country and what Reform wants to do is too important. It means too much to me, to my family, to the country, and I didn't want that.'
Does she believe she was forced out because she joined Reform? 'To be fair to them I don't know, and I don't want to judge,' she replies.
'All I can say is the one thing that changed was that I joined Reform.'
She is now expected to play a leading role as her new party gears up for elections across the 32 London councils taking place next May.
Party officials have high hopes they can make another breakthrough, especially in outer boroughs where anger over policies like Ulez is still strong.
If they do then they will displace many of Mrs Cunninghan's former Tory Colleagues, and take seats from Labour.
Given the scathing terms in which she talks about the party, it is unlikely that she will lose much sleep over the prospect.
She says: 'Mass migration, tax, all the woke agenda, all the DEI, a ballooning public sector, it flourished under the Tories. Net Zero was madness.
'I'd knock on someone's door, and they'd say 'Laila go away, I'm not going to support the Conservatives, they're rubbish.' These are our voters.
'And I'd kind of agree. There's nothing I could disagree with them about.'