Conservative hopeful Sara Gezdari is one of three prospective candidates hoping to be selected to contest the 2028 Mayoral race
Sara Gezdari is proud to call London home.
Having fled Albania at a young age for Italy due to the 1997 civil war, she found her way to South West London, where she now lives with her children.
An International Politics graduate, Ms Gezdari worked her way up the Conservative Party and, seen as a rising star by party officials, was chosen as the Parliamentary Candidate for Richmond Park, where she finished second in the 2024 General Election to Lib Dem Mayoral hopeful Sarah Olney.
But it was one fateful day in January when the mother-of-two decided on even bigger ambitions.
Gregory and Co. Jewellers is located on Paved Court in Richmond, which is an iconic filming location for the TV show Ted Lasso.
On January 31 this year, however, three men took to the shop window with sledgehammers before making off with £225,000 worth of stock.
“That’s when I thought to myself, enough is enough,” Ms Gezdari told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).
“When did we in London make crime some sort of acceptable thing, ordinary behaviour? Why are we forced to accept this?”
She is now one of three choices on the ballot paper going out to Conservative Party members in London this month. The arithmetic is elementary – whoever gets the most votes out of James Cleverly, Festus Akinbusoye and Ms Gezdari will have a shot at contesting the 2028 London Mayoral race under the Tory banner.
Her message – delivered passionately in the Westminster cafe where we are carrying out the interview – is based on a simple prospect of returning London to its ‘former glory’.
City Hall would, as ever, fervently push back against this – the Mayor has regularly espoused statistics showing that crime of all different types is coming down under his leadership. For many, however, it is the perception of safety that has disappeared in recent years.
During our interview, the 42-year-old’s phone buzzes to alert her that her son is home safely. No parent in London should need to worry about that, she claimed.
“As a woman walking on the street, after 5pm, you have got some sort of a curfew because it’s dark,” she added.
“And quite frankly, I don’t want my children to walk on the streets with a tracker.
“We’ve gotten to a point where you are constantly worried about your children being on a train by themselves at 13 years old.
“You look when they come back home, when they’re leaving school, and that’s just not what a city like London should be about.
“London gave me a home. London gave me security and safety when I didn’t have one. Why are we accepting this?”
The first step in solving this is to repair the relationship between City Hall and rank-and-file Metropolitan Police officers. In 2022, the Met Police Federation, which represented more than 31,000 rank-and-file officers at the time, declared they had “no faith” in the Mayor after he ousted former Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick.
Ms Gezdari said: “What we have seen in the last decade is a London Mayor who has managed to make the police forces feel unsure of their job.
“I want the police, when they act lawfully, to know that they’ve got the backing of City Hall. I want to show up for them.
“I want to make sure that they know that we are a team, and all their successes are my successes, and everything which is a failure on their behalf is my failure as well.”
She doesn’t go as far as criticising the current Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley – who she notes is also a Richmond resident – but claims he has been “let down” by the Mayor and forced to “tick boxes” and chase targets instead of devising a coherent plan for policing the capital.
While crime will likely dominate much of the lead up to May 2028, it won’t be the “single policy issue” for Ms Gezdari, should she be selected – though it appears to form the basis of her vision for London.
“If investors do not feel safe, they don’t come to London,” she says.
“If people do not feel safe, they don’t send their children to study to London. And as a consequence of it, developers don’t build homes because there is no market for it. Everything is interconnected. It’s about confidence.”
On the capital’s housing crisis, Ms Gezdari says that City Hall also needs to rebuild its relationship with developers, who she thinks have been unfairly demonised as “greedy”. And instead of building on Green Belt sites, she would make use of Transport for London’s 5,500 hectares of land to get the market moving again.
Her ambition, however, depends on her selection, first as the party’s nominee and then as the Mayor in May 2028.
The Conservatives will be second out of the blocks when they announce their candidate on November 27. Reform UK chose Laila Cunningham as early as January, the Liberal Democrat race will conclude early next year, and the Greens are still in “recruitment phase”, according to insiders. Meanwhile, Sir Sadiq has not yet announced whether he will stand for a fourth term in office, with up to five Labour MPs ready to launch their own campaigns if he declares he will stand down.
Pollsters suggest the Tories will be in a tight race to reach the final two – the 2028 race will return to supplementary voting – against the Greens and Reform UK. The party did relatively well in this year’s council elections in the capital, winning Westminster and holding boroughs like Bexley, Bromley, and Hillingdon.
For Ms Gezdari, whoever members choose will have a fighting chance of taking City Hall again.
“The one thing that we all three have in common is a fire to bring London back to its glory days,” she claims.
“We want to make London a success again. We want people to feel proud of being Londoners.”
She may, certainly in her own opinion, be best positioned to win over the “soft Conservative” vote that she claims Boris Johnson successfully swayed, however.
“The success will be appealing to those shy Conservatives that didn’t go out to vote in the last election, and quite possibly get the South West vote from the Lib Dems like we did with Boris. I believe I’m the right candidate to appeal to those kinds of people.”
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