I apologised to Daniel Francis, Labour MP for Bexleyheath & Crayford, when we met. My predictions for July’s general election contained a number of duff calls, but so blithely had I assumed that his seat was nailed-on blue I didn’t give his prospects a second thought. And then, behold, he emerged victorious by 2,114 votes in a part of outer south east London that, on the face of it, was one of the few that looked likely to hold back the red landslide. How, exactly, did he do it?
Francis is quick to correct any first impression that he just slid through a gap caused by right-wing electors splitting their favours between the Conservative, who finished second, and Reform UK’s candidate. The latter came in third with a tidy 22.7 per cent of the vote, compared with the Tory’s 31.3 and Francis’s 36.2.
“There was a combination of factors,” he says, as we sip morning coffee in a café on Bexleyheath’s Broadway. Yes, the deep unpopularity of the Conservative government certainly helped, but it is easy to forget that Labour has prevailed in this suburban constituency bordering Kent before – it returned a Labour MP, Nigel Beard in 1997, the first year of its existence, and again in 2001.
Reform’s strong 2024 showing, too, has an antecedent: UKIP, Francis stresses, did almost as well in vote share terms in 2015. That party was a significant electoral force at the time, which explains David Cameron’s fateful decision going into the general election to promise a referendum on European Union membership. But by 2017, with Nigel Farage no longer its leader and Britain having voted to leave the EU, UKIP was a spent force. In 2019, a different, minor extreme right party made next to no impression. But Reform in 2024 was a far stronger proposition.
Francis’s point is that support for Reform in Bexleyheath & Crayford did not all come from hacked-off Tories. He accepts that Farage’s latest vehicle attracted some, but maintains that, based on “the many conversations I had with those people”, had there been no Reform candidate “they might not have voted at all”. Plus, importantly, a few might otherwise have voted Labour.
That leaves us with a more complex explanation for Francis’s triumph: a broad Tory-to-Labour swing augmented to some extent by Reform attracting former Tories, but also with significant local factors in play to help him pass the finishing post first. One difference was that Sir David Evennett, who won the seat for the Tories five times in a row, had retired. Another was Francis’s very long local service as a Bexley councillor and activist.
He’s been fighting elections in the borough since 1994, when he was 17. He won a council seat for the first time in 2000 at a by-election. He became cabinet member for transport after Labour secured a rare and tiny majority in 2002 – the party had only previously won control there in 1964 and 1971, followed by a two-year spell in governing coalition with Liberal Democrat councillors from 1994.
He represented Bexley’s Belvedere ward from 2000 until 2010 and from 2014 until he stepped down this year having won his House of Commons seat. The four-year gap occurred due to his wife being unwell, though he continued to work for his party during that time.
To add to his local roots, which include attending Bexley Grammar School in Welling, Francis can point to a London ancestry that includes a maternal grandfather who was born in a workhouse hospital in Elephant and Castle and lived off Lambeth Walk. He and his wife later became one of the first families to move into the then brand new Thamesmead estate, part of which lies in Bexley. His paternal grandparents, one of whom came from Belvedere, lived in Plumstead, Woolwich and Abbey Wood.
Francis has made an energetic start as an MP, such as by bringing forward the Aviation (Accessibility) Bill under the ten-minute rule system, advocating stricter regulations for airlines in their treatment of passengers with disabilities. Francis has twin 11-year-old daughters, one of whom uses a wheelchair, so this and related matters are close to his home and to his heart (he is very unhappy indeed with Bexley Council’s record on these issues, a matter to which On London will return).
He has also held a string of what he calls “cost of living surgeries” to help constituents apply for unclaimed, often carer-related, financial support. But he is under no illusions that retaining his parliamentary seat at the next general election will be difficult. And he is clear about what he thinks his party needs to do nationally to help make that come about.
“This constituency is no different to places we call the Red Wall,” he says. Consistent with that is his view that the Labour government’s priorities should be “restoring public services, a stable economy and those concerns about small boats”.
Asked to characterise Bexleyheath & Crayford and the borough of Bexley as a whole, he draws a partial contrast between the neighbouring Old Bexley & Sidcup seat, retained for the Tories in July by Louie French – in his case despite a 21.8 per cent Reform vote share – and his own.
His neighbouring MP, Francis says, has more of the “very Ted Heath type of Tory, of the post-war consensus mould among his constituents, “people who might be lawyers or work in the City”. Conservative Prime Minister Heath was, of course, the MP for French’s seat and its predecessors for decades.
Bexleyheath & Crayford, though changing, is still substantially formed by a different social and economic history. Francis emphasises that the town of Crayford in the eastern side of the seat was the base for the Vickers Company for the whole of the 20th Century, a vital manufacturer of military aircraft and armaments and a major local employer.
Today, he says, the area “has a workforce that is the backbone of London in a different way”. He mentions builders, plumbers and taxi drivers. He also describes parts of it as being among “the poorer parts of London”.
Francis describes a lot of local voters as “the old white working-class”, some of them “Conservative through and through” yet willing to vote for Labour in conducive circumstances under the right leader: “They voted for Tony Blair.” There are also among that group people he recalls telling him in 2019, “I’ve been Labour all my life, but I cannot have Jeremy Corbyn leading the country”.
The borough of Bexley as a whole was one of London’s five Leave-voting boroughs among the 32, with a very decisive 63 per cent wanting out. But Francis’s characterisation of local views about immigration suggests this should not be seen as evidence of hardline opposition to it.
“People absolutely accept immigration when it works and when public services are working,” he says, mentioning long-established Nigerian and South Asian communities. “I think the biggest problem is people are paying more tax than ever but nothing works anymore.” He repeats his recipe for a repeat Labour victory: “Create a stable economy, and people have got to feel that their living standards have risen. We need to have invested and improved public services and we need to show that we have grappled with immigration.”
Francis was drawn to politics when at secondary school, where he studied it at A-level and his Bexley Grammar peers included former Bexley Tory councillor Jo Tanner, a political and communications strategist who worked on Boris Johnson’s 2008 London Mayor campaign. Despite that, Francis received Tanner’s endorsement for his 2024 general election campaign. In his victory speech (below), he paid tribute to his “amazing politics teacher”, the late Doreen Weston, who he says taught him not which party to support but, on the contrary, to “question everything”.
His teenage school days were, though, formative in terms of his political leanings. He cites rising street homelessness and failing public services as problems that were big at the time and have worsened again today. There was another issue, too: “We had the headquarters of the British National Party in Welling. Every day – and I mean every day – my friends and I saw the impact of that; seeing friends beaten up because of the colour of their skin, or their perceived sexuality.”
The BNP had opened what was officially a bookshop in 1989. Four years later, Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racists in neighbouring Eltham. Later in 1993, in Tower Hamlets, the BNP won its first ever council seat. A month after that, a demonstration against the BNP base in Welling became violent. It was the Lab-Lib council leadership formed in 1994 that brought about the shop’s closure.
The interview over, the MP and I catch one of Sadiq Khan’s Superloop high-speed buses from a stop round the corner from the café to Abbey Wood station, where the Elizabeth line spur terminates at the Bexley-Greenwich border. For me, it’s the next part of my ride home to Hackney, for Francis, the next stage of a trip to his new place of work, Westminster.
The Superloop service, he says, has proved popular. Like other outer London Labour politicians, he thinks the Mayor brought in his latest Ultra-Low Emission Zone expansion too fast, increasing opposition, and he adds more public transport improvements to his list of policy priorities, with an extension of the Elizabeth line among them.
But he points out that Khan received more votes – 4,602 more – in this year’s mayoral election than he got first preferences under the old supplementary vote system in 2021, and that, despite the many months of sometimes ugly anti-ULEZ campaigning, there was no swing against him.
Francis would like to see more police on the street in his constituency, but notes that it was under Johnson that two local police stations were closed. He offers a more positive assessment of Mayor Khan than some Labour politicians in the capital’s most suburban territories. “I think Sadiq does understand the aspirations of communities in outer London,” he says. He will hope that goes for Keir Starmer’s government too.
OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. Video footage from The Greenwich Wire.