𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

A mayoral hopeful who wants to end Labour’s grip on the UK capital has a radical plan to combat stress in the city and boost mental health by slashing the cost of gym membership. Alex Challoner is competing with former Home Secretary Sir James Cleverly and ex-Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner Festus Akinbusoye to be the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London. He wants to give Londoners back the VAT on gym membership in a bid to boost the health of citizens. Men in particular, he believes, are more likely to talk freely about their problems at the gym.

Mr Challoner also wants to give a VAT rebate to the city’s independent brewers of up to £50,000 a year. A further flagship policy involves stationing uniformed British Transport Police officers at Tube ticket gate lines to stamp out fare-dodging.

Mr Challoner, who founded Cavendish Communications, insists Labour’s hold on London is “not unbreakable”, despite Lord 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.” The core issues, he predicts, will include the cost of living “which is killing everybody at the moment”, crime and competency.

Mr 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 greatest threat to the capital, he argues, is the “general sense of managed decline” which “seeps into everything” and is “depressing”. Mr Challoner, originally from Taunton in Somerset, contrasts that with the sense of 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.”