Battle for London One last push for Hall, but has 'cars and crime' campaign fallen wide of mark?

Paul Icely puffs out his cheeks - and then slowly exhales. He is visibly deflating. "I thought there might be a few more of us," the 67-year-old black-cab driver admits, his eyes darting between the students milling outside Barking and Dagenham college. "You seen anyone else?" Icely asks Lisa Prager.

- Daniel Boffey 

Prager, 40, who is unhappy with a Labour council over the loss of her job at a park, appears to be the only other supporter of Susan Hall, the Conservative candidate for mayor of London, to have turned up on this sunny mid-morning in Dagenham, east London. Perhaps of more pressing concern is the fact that the candidate herself should have been canvassing here an hour ago. "I thought they would let me know if the plan had changed," Prager says.

The Tory campaign to end Sadiq Khan's bid for a historic third term could not be described as surefooted. Hall's candidature was born out of scandal when the favourite, Daniel Korski, a former No 10 adviser, quit over allegations of sexual misconduct, and her past tweets or tendency to "shoot from the hip", as one ally generously described it, have been exploited by the Khan camp to highlight her "Trumpian" approach.

She wants the government to delay its commitment to be carbon net zero by 2050, and there was much consternation when comments emerged in which Hall, 69, claimed that there was a "problem with crime" in the black community, something her allies say was born out of concern for people of colour.

She also replied to a social media post in 2019 from the former Daily Mail columnist Katie Hopkins describing Khan as "our nippleheight mayor of Londonistan" with the words "thank you Katie" and was forced to apologise for liking a tweet in 2020 that had a picture of Enoch Powell captioned: "It's never too late to get London back." And there are the more recent campaign gaffes. Criticising Khan's record on crime, Hall claimed to be a victim of pickpocketing on the underground. It later emerged her purse had been found lodged between seats on the Jubilee line with her £40 still in it.