I think James Cleverly has a strong chance of taking the London mayoralty, he’s our best hope for the job in years, and he’d be a very good mayor. But I’m afraid his campaign has made an early misstep.

In the Telegraph, he pledged to end Labour’s supposed “war on the motorist” and to launch a full review of Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ), which charges non-compliant vehicles £12.50 a day to drive in London.

Set aside for a moment what you think about these policies.

The most important skill in politics is the ability to count. And the numbers behind scrapping the ULEZ – if that’s what Cleverly ends up doing – simply don’t work.

Even two years ago, in September 2024, only 3.3 per cent of vehicles driven in outer London

had to pay the charge. That number continues to fall like a stone. In the current year, 2026/7, according to TfL, just million will be paid in emission zone charges across the whole of Greater London. At £12.50 a throw this equates to an average of 11,178 vehicles a day which have to pay. Not all of these, of course, will be driven by London voters. Some will be visitors.  (And in reality, the number of vehicles which pay is even fewer, since the £51m also includes income from the separate scheme covering HGVs, large vans and buses, which pay more than £12.50.)

By the time Cleverly becomes mayor in May 2028, and has done his review, the number of London voters who actually have to pay the ULEZ will be able to fit in about ten double-decker buses. Almost no voter will save any money and the political dividends will be almost nil.

The political costs, however, may already be real.

One key swing group in every mayoral election is people in places like Richmond, Kingston and Sutton who vote Lib Dem for parliament and the council but either Labour or, in the Boris years, Tory for City Hall. The non-partisan London politics guru, Professor Tony Travers, has said that the prospect of removing the ULEZ would be “poison” for those voters.

On the subject of motoring in London, there’s a long history of utter Tory refusal to look the electoral facts and numbers in the eye. Guys, I know you all hate emissions charging and LTNs and bike lanes, and your friends all hate them, and the people you follow on social media all hate them and make endless noise about them.

But in London, the voters simply do not agree with you, and never have agreed with you. We ignore the voters of London every time, but there’s now about six elections’ worth of evidence that each time we do that, each time we try to use it as a wedge issue, we fail.

Again, it’s all in the numbers.

Ken Livingstone’s original congestion charge was fiercely opposed by the party, to absolutely no avail – because the number of London voters who drove regularly in the congestion-charge zone was tiny. (It’s even smaller now: only 4 per cent of rush-hour trips in zone 1 are made by car or taxi. Yet we still go on and on and on about the 4 per cent and not the 96 per cent.)

When the ULEZ was widened to outer London, the only time opposing it ever worked for us was at the Uxbridge by-election, before the scheme came in. Once it did, voters realised that hardly any of them had to pay.

Labour, of course, took Uxbridge in the general election.

In the London mayoral campaign of 2021, a good year for us, we underperformed significantly in most wards where we opposed cycle schemes. In Chiswick, our candidate, Shaun Bailey, campaigned strongly against a new bike lane installed by Sadiq Khan and the local Labour council, Hounslow – with visits, literature, and a Facebook video. In Hounslow as a whole, the Tory first preference vote rose by 1.2 points on the previous mayoral election, and Khan’s vote dropped 4.4 points. But in the three (normally strongly Tory) Chiswick wards, it was the Conservative vote that fell, by 10 to 12 points, and Khan’s vote which rose, by 4.4 points.

The 2022 borough elections were similar. In Dulwich Village, a Tory ward until 2018, we campaigned against a new LTN. It was not a good night for Conservatives anywhere, but it was worse in Dulwich Village, with a fall of around 6 points, against a borough-wide drop of less than 1 point.

Perhaps that was the lucky people inside the LTN. What about the wards immediately around it, suffering displacement of the traffic that once went through? In one of those, Dulwich Wood, the Tories did achieve a better-than-average result – but there was no such effect in the other three.

What usually (not always) happens is that through traffic is indeed displaced at the start, but after a few months traffic around the LTN also falls as fewer people make short local journeys by car. Traffic isn’t like water running downhill, where if you block one route, it finds the next easiest. It’s the product of people’s choices. If you make it easier and nicer not to drive, fewer people will drive.

That’s why these things usually (again, not always) go through a controversy-acceptance cycle: opposition at the start, if often from a minority, which disappears after a year or two. And if we campaign on a platform of taking out LTNs, be aware that we’re campaigning to send floods of traffic back down the now quiet streets where many of our voters, and many more of our potential voters, live.

If we actually want to reduce congestion, we have to tackle the real causes of it, which are the same as they always were: traffic, parking, and increasingly stupid, dysfunctional roadworks. Bike-haters point out that congestion has risen even though motor traffic miles in London are about the same as they were ten years ago. But the rise of the delivery van and SUVs – now 60 per cent of new car sales – means that motor vehicles are bigger and wider, taking up more space. The borough of Kensington is the large SUV capital of Britain – which helps explain why it has such terrible traffic, despite almost zero bike provision.

More broadly, these sorts of issues (dubbed “culture wars” by the left, a term I hate – ordinary political disagreements are not wars) enormously excite political activists, journalists and social media junkies, but leave real voters fairly unmoved.

One of the most striking things about all the opinion polling on LTNs and bike lanes is how many voters – usually the largest single group – don’t have a view either way.  Indeed, government research found that 58 per cent of voters in LTNs didn’t even realise they lived in one, probably because they don’t drive anything like as much as we think. In inner London, fewer than half of all households even own a car. That’s households, not people. And even many of those who do have a car don’t use it much.

You don’t have to agree with me on this. You just have to look at the numbers.

So please, let’s start talking about the things the voters of London care about, not the political activists.