Hey! Jack Dulhanty here, staff writer at The Mill. Our local election coverage aims to take readers deeper into the contests for council seats across Greater Manchester, focussing on key characters who are having big impacts on the city region’s politics. Today’s piece is on a fringe figure in Salford’s Reform party, who managed to get a controversial by-election certified by the council, and has allegedly spent months trying to disparage his former Conservative colleagues.
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In late February, not long after the death of England’s longest serving councillor, David Lancaster, Salford’s Labour councillors received an email. It was to confirm that a by-election would be held for Lancaster’s seat — Barton and Winton — barely two weeks before the local elections.
This was unusual. When a seat is vacated so close to a local election, normal practice is to put it to the polls alongside the other seats set to be contested. But, if at least two members of an opposition party call for it, the council is compelled to put on a by-election. This is completely above board, though it does mean an extra cost to the tax-payer. But what most struck the Labour councillors was the speed with which the by-election was called.
“In all my years it has never happened,” says Barbara Bentham, a councillor in Salford who worked closely with Lancaster for years. “We usually wait until after the funeral.” Indeed, Lancaster’s family had hardly begun arranging his funeral when the by-election was called. And councillors who received the email were informed they needed to find a candidate to replace him. “We had to consider replacing a person who we have barely come to terms with having lost,” Bentham remembers.
It didn’t take long for councillors to find out who was responsible for calling the by-election. Those we spoke to said they were not surprised. The name on the paperwork was a recent Reform defector called Lewis Croden, and a relative, Lynne Croden. Onlooking Labour figures, indeed councillors from across the political spectrum, felt the by-election was unnecessary, even disrespectful to Lancaster’s family.
Regardless, triggering the by-election worked in Reform’s favour. Turnout was just 17.82%, with the party’s candidate Michael Felse taking 34% of the vote to become the city of Salford’s first Reform councillor. It cast a dark shadow over next week’s local election for Labour, but has also raised questions about Croden, who has been touted as a potential Reform leader in Salford.
Previously a Conservative Party member, his departure was bizarre and sudden. According to former Tory colleagues of his, Croden had secretly recorded a meeting of Manchester and Salford Conservatives. One Conservative councillor, speaking on the condition of anonymity, tells us the meeting — attended by senior Greater Manchester Tories Liam Billington, Anne Broomhead, Azmat Husain and Croden — was to discuss sensitive “allegations” against another well-known Tory in Manchester.
The meeting was meant to be anonymous, but soon after recordings of it were sent to senior Conservatives, including to the office of Kemi Badenoch. Though the account sending the emails were themselves anonymous, its attendees deduced it could only have been the work of one man: Lewis Croden.
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