Susan Hall: Sadiq Khan is a misogynist

‘I love a fight. I was going to say debate, but it’s more of a fight to be honest.’ Susan Hall is looking forward to taking on Sadiq Khan at the London mayoral hustings. When we meet for her first interview after securing the Conservative nomination, it is five days after the Uxbridge by-election. Hall is buoyed by an unexpected Tory triumph, thanks to discontent with Khan’s plans to extend the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). ‘Out on the doorstep,’ she tells me: ‘I thought the questions would be all around Boris but I had nothing. It was all around the Ulez expansion.’ She hopes to replicate a similar result next May.

‘Fight’ is one of Hall’s favoured words: she uses it 14 times in less than an hour. It explains how she went from being a 100/1 outsider to becoming the first woman nominated for the mayoralty by a major party. What did she make of the Evening Standard splash which greeted that milestone, featuring what one Tory MP called a ‘contemptible’ image of Hall grinning, arms raised theatrically aloft? ‘I thought: I won’t put that picture on Tinder. Can you imagine waking up next to that? No, no. But they’ll throw lots at me and they always will. I’ve got very thick skin – as was evidenced in that picture.’ Was it sexist? Hall declines to use the word: ‘Just get on with the job. They will throw far worse at me.’

She certainly has experienced worse. Her first job after leaving school was toiling away as a teenage mechanic, the only woman in a 1970s garage. ‘In those days, they did not approve of women anywhere near cars.’ She later met her husband – who, in an inversion of the stereotypes of the time, was a hairdresser.