Laila Cunningham: Who is Reform's candidate to be mayor?
A poem praising London's diversity, a promising Conservative career that suddenly collapsed, and pledge to stop-and-search women in burkhas: We profile the woman who wants to be London's next leader.
Nine years ago a woman attempted to get the attention of Sadiq Khan in an unusual way — by sending him a poem on Twitter celebrating London’s cultural diversity.
In the wake of the Westminster Bridge terror attack, “Dupuy Laila” posted the verse listing areas, nationalities, pronouns, religions, and sexualities that are represented in the capital. It concluded: “I am love / I am strength / I am acceptance / I am resistance / I am diverse / I AM LONDON”.
Laila Dupuy is the former married name of Laila Cunningham, who has just been appointed as Reform UK’s candidate in the 2028 mayoral election, becoming the de facto local leader of the party that’s polling second in the capital.
Cunningham’s spokesperson offered no comment when asked by London Centric whether she wrote the poem herself, which doesn’t appear elsewhere online, but did not dispute that she was the Twitter user sending it to Khan.
Almost a decade later, Cunningham has now declared war on the mayor, intent on portraying the next few years as a battle of “Khan vs Cunningham”, between two British Muslims with very different views on what London should look like.
These days she’s unlikely to be writing any poetry to the mayor celebrating the different characteristics present in the capital, demanding: “No more splitting us into boxes – black, brown, gay, straight. We are all Londoners in one box.”
This week Cunningham has doubled-down on a pledge to expand her policy of introducing an automatic stop-and-search policy for anyone wearing a face covering to include women wearing a niqab or burkha.
“It has to be assumed that if you're hiding your face, you're hiding it for a criminal reason,” she told the Standard.
Her other policy pledges include repealing the ultra-low emission zone charge for drivers, introducing a priority for British people to receive social housing, and an all-out focus on what she considers an unstoppable wave of crime — fuelled by the personal experience of her son being mugged near the family home.
Her version of London in permanent decline will be familiar to anyone who spends a substantial amount of time on Elon Musk’s X, where the most viral takes on London suggest the streets are too unsafe to walk down and residents are too scared to step outside. As for her stop-and-search for face coverings policy, her office told London Centric that in a city with rising violent crime, any face covering poses a potential security risk.
She is hoping that appealing to other Londoners who share that view can bring her into City Hall — and help Reform take control of a number of boroughs in May’s council elections.
Over the last fortnight London Centric has used public records and visits to Cunningham’s council ward in order to bring you this profile of the Reform UK candidate. Our requests for an interview went unanswered but we spoke to more than a dozen people who know her. What emerged is a picture of a woman who has been on a steep but stuttering political career trajectory, which saw her begin the decade as an ambitious aspiring Conservative politician, only to suffer a major career setback. Her defection to Reform UK has rapidly catapulted her into national politics and she is now the first major party candidate locked in for the 2028 mayoral election, which is likely to be the most open contest in a decade.
Cunningham was born in Paddington in 1977 as Laila Ahmed El-Meleigy, according to public records. Her parents had left Egypt the previous decade, at a time when some of the country’s middle classes left due to the socialist policies of General Nasser.
Her family settled in Kensal Rise, then a heavily Irish area, where her parents made their money developing houses while raising their six children, of whom Laila was by far the youngest, later attending the Lycée school in Kensington.
She has described herself as being enraptured by Margaret Thatcher as a child and later being the only Brexiteer in her family. A business owned by her mother and siblings still owns hotels in the area north of Hyde Park, including the New Dawn, which has 2.4 stars on TripAdvisor with typical reviews describing it as “unliveable”. Some news outlets have been digging into the possibility it had been used to provide emergency housing to asylum seekers, given Cunningham has spoken out against this policy — but London Centric found no evidence this was the case.
As a girl, El-Meleigy says she was “5 foot 11” by the age of eleven, becoming a basketball obsessive who covered her wall in pictures of Michael Jordan. Her dream was to be a basketball player and in 1997 she studied at California State University, Long Beach, where she wrote for the student newspaper under the name Laila Meleigy. To this day she remains a basketball obsessive, with her local constituents and colleagues saying she never fails to mention the sport and taught it to local children.
El-Meleigy returned to London and qualified as a solicitor in 2005, at the age of 28, starting in civil litigation before working for the Crown Prosecution Service in Surrey and sometimes moonlighting as a stand-up comic. After marrying a Frenchman she became Laila Dupuy and took possession of a £3.875m flat in Bayswater in 2013, which is now mortgage free. She then stepped back from work to focus on raising her four children.
Her life seemed set. That’s until, as she put it in a Guardian interview, her husband left to “be with a woman in Dubai”.
“Like-minded #BossBabes”
This abrupt and traumatic change in her personal circumstances was followed by a decision to return to work, this time as a start-up founder. Her big idea was Kitchin Table, a tool that connected women with other homeworkers who wanted to share a workspace. It was a buzzy idea that quickly attracted press attention and was profiled in the Financial Times and the Guardian.
Its still-live Instagram account was coated in the very late 2010s language of girl boss feminism, with hashtags about “#Womenpreneurs,” and promises to help women connect “with like-minded #BossBabes that support and inspire you to make your dreams a reality”.
Around 2018 she relocated to Los Angeles and was a regular on the tech circuit, appearing on panels about life as an entrepreneur. She told one interviewer the things she missed about London included Pret A Manger, open parks, and “civilised drivers”. Despite being on the other side of the world she was still hooked on LBC as she was “Brexit obsessed”.
In another interview from that time with a vegan health blogger, which was scrubbed from the internet this week, Cunningham described herself as a “Dharma yoga junkie” who is a sucker for health supplements. Asked what she believed in, she replied “love and equality” and said her priority in life was teaching compassion to children.
Around this time she married Michael Cunningham, with whom she later had another child and also gained two stepchildren — becoming a mother of seven.
Her American husband worked his way up through the music industry and the world of hedge funds, before moving into the cryptocurrency gambling space, with stints at Six Sigma Sports and as founder of EdgeBet.Ai, which promised to use AI to make it easier for people to place bets. His LinkedIn lists him as founder of Exascale Labs, a provider of data centres for AI companies which this week announced plans to list on the stock market at a $500m valuation.
“In Liz we Truss”
Like many start-ups, Laila Cunningham’s Kitchin Table app did not last. Whether it actually made any money is unclear — company paperwork suggests the UK arm of the business never traded and Cunningham would later commit a technical breach of companies law by failing to file accounts in time.
But as her app struggled, she started to enter politics. First she stood as a no-hope candidate in Westminster council’s Queen’s Park ward in 2018. She was clearly ambitious, repeatedly being pictured with leading Conservative politicians, attending events for Conservative entrepreneurs, and interviewing Tory MPs.
In 2022 she was successfully elected as a councillor in Westminster for her home ward of Lancaster Gate, covering the area between Paddington and Bayswater stations, just north of Hyde Park.
The ward elects three councillors and Labour was keen to take all three. Cunningham campaigned hard and topped the poll on a split vote, with two Labour councillors elected and Cunningham for the Conservatives — suggesting her doorstep efforts had been personally rewarded by Labour-leaning voters who lent her one of their votes.
One councillor who spoke to London Centric described Cunningham as chaotic and disorganised, with a tendency to arrive late to meetings without knowing what the agenda was. They said that, while Cunningham had been active on local issues, she could also be combative and difficult to work with. Others said they enjoyed her company but always found her default tone to be aggressive.
During this time she rejoined the Crown Prosecution Service. She mainly dealt with relatively low-level cases in magistrates’ courts, although that doesn’t mean there weren’t some notable incidents. She presented the crown’s case against a man who drove into the gates of Buckingham Palace, while also prosecuting a chef caught upskirting a woman on an escalator at Oxford Street’s TK-Maxx.
“Her card was marked”
She set her sights on a parliamentary seat and began travelling around the UK to join in canvassing sessions in distant constituencies, often with a small baby strapped to her front. In May 2024 she was eighth on the Conservatives’ list for the Greater London Assembly — meaning she had no hope of winning but was doing the groundwork required for a future Tory career.
Then came the Rotherham debacle. Two days before nominations closed for the July 2024 general election, Cunningham was asked by Conservative central office if she wanted to stand as a ‘paper candidate’ in the South Yorkshire parliamentary constituency. There was no way that the Conservatives would win the seat but it was another rite-of-passage for a candidate to prove their commitment to the party machine.
According to Cunningham, she called her boss at the Crown Prosecution Service to ask if she was allowed to stand. Just before nominations closed, she was told she would have to resign as a prosecutor if she wanted to stand, so she pulled out. It was too late for the Conservatives to find another candidate who could get the required local nominations and complete the paperwork in time.
As a result, Rotherham became the only contested constituency in the whole of England, Scotland and Wales that didn’t field a Conservative candidate. The central party was furious, as news headlines highlighted the party’s apparent incompetence.
“She wanted a safe seat and was extremely disappointed she didn’t get a safe seat,” said one Conservative source. “She took Rotherham as a paper candidate as goodwill, screwed up the whole selection process, and her card was marked. She’d pissed off central office and it was pretty unlikely she’d be offered another chance. They don’t like being messed around.”
(Not everyone in the Rotherham Conservative party was as concerned, given it was seen as a no-hope seat. When London Centric phoned one Tory councillor in the South Yorkshire town this week, they expressed shock that they hadn’t actually stood a candidate in the general election and said this was the first they had heard about it.)
“I notice there’s no whites”
Other issues had also caused tensions between Cunningham and the Conservatives on Westminster council.
Multiple sources told London Centric that in 2024 complaints were made by black Labour councillor Gillian Arrindell regarding Cunningham’s comments during a council housing committee meeting.
She was questioning officers on Westminster’s proposed rough sleeping and homelessness policy, which included a section making special provisions for women, LGBTQ people, and those from the “global majority”, including Roma, Gypsy, and Middle Eastern backgrounds.
Cunningham asked: “Have these people been discriminated against in the past? Why do you need extra care for them?”
She continued: “I notice there’s no whites. Does this policy have a plan for white people? The reason why I mention it is that, in your summary of the homelessness review, the majority of people sleeping rough are in fact white. Why are they excluded from the strategy?”
A complaint was made about her comments by Arrindell, which was still being considered when the Labour representative became ill and died, meaning the issue was ultimately dropped.
Sources close to Cunningham argue she rightly asked why the council wasn’t prioritising the largest ethnic group affected by homelessness and she was objecting to a policy that explicitly prioritised people from the same background as her.
“The remarks were not racist, but as with other comments she has made, were clumsily expressed and spoken without sufficient care or judgement,” said an individual with knowledge of the complaint.
“It was very personal to Nigel why I defected”
Then, in summer 2025, Cunningham defected to Reform UK — seemingly taking former Conservative colleagues by surprise.
“The Conservative Party used to be a party that stood for sound public finances, low tax, controlled immigration, and law and order,” she said in her announcement. “On these, and almost every other big issue facing Britain — including women’s rights, net zero, and DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion]— the Conservative Party has let the country down.”
Cunningham later told the Daily Express’ podcast that she had been personally won over by Nigel Farage: “He loves to crack a joke, and he’s great company. I met him before I defected, and it was upon meeting him and having a long conversation with him, that I said, you know what, I want to be part of his party. It was very personal to Nigel why I defected.”
After an incendiary interview in the Standard it was made clear by the Crown Prosecution Service she could no longer work for them.
She quickly became a regular on Reform-friendly media outlets. Sometimes this clashed with her work as a councillor, with former colleagues remembering her turning up late to one council meeting then later realising it was because she had just been live on GB News, whose Paddington Basin studios are a 15 minute walk away from Westminster’s council offices. Cunningham’s office denied this to London Centric, saying she was only ten minutes late and it was not relevant.
Not everyone agrees that she has cut back on her council commitments. The Hallfield estate sits in the middle of her ward. Marta, who has lived on the estate for over 35 years and sits on its residents’ association, said Cunningham was still “very active”.
“Even now she has gone to the extreme, she still comes to our meetings,” she said. “For us she’s still treating us the same as before, nothing has changed.”
The lack of formal internal party democracy meant Farage and Reform UK were able to swiftly appoint Cunningham as mayoral candidate without any contest. Despite becoming the face of Reform ahead of London’s borough elections in May, Cunningham has no intention of standing again in her existing council ward, where she would struggle to be re-elected.
“We’re not a Muslim city”
Cunningham’s Muslim faith is already a point of discussion, given Reform’s rhetoric and the far-right attacks on Sadiq Khan that focus on his Muslim identity. As a Conservative she posted about touring mosques with then prime minister Rishi Sunak and Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall, but she has been critical of radical Islam and has said she would like to end Eid celebrations in Trafalgar Square: “We’re not a Muslim city.”
“Religion for me is spiritual guidance,” Cunningham told the Daily Telegraph’s podcast. “In Islam, it says you have to be charitable. One of the biggest sins is gossiping about someone. For me, it was always like there’s a God watching… I don’t see the hate that some people see. And don’t forget, all religions are open to interpretation. Some people… interpret it in a way that I don’t recognise at all.”
The appointment of a Muslim woman as a Reform UK candidate has upset some of the party’s more extreme online supporters, who already objected to Zia Yusuf’s role as party chair. A false story has been circulating that Cunningham has a “secret Islamic tattoo”, which in reality is a covered-up symbol she had tattooed on her arm after a trip to Japan. The false tattoo claim has been fanned by disgraced former GB News host Dan Wootton and people who wanted Reform to select the financially-stricken former SAS: Who Dares Win presenter Ant Middleton as the party’s mayoral candidate. Party leader Nigel Farage has criticised the “really unpleasant racist abuse” that Cunningham has received on X.
Cunningham says many people “pity” the residents of the city she wishes to lead due to its crime rates. She also argues Londoners would “want to reclaim London as it was, with British values, and British traditions” should vote Reform UK in May’s local council elections. It’s a long way from sending poems to Khan eulogising London’s diversity.
London Centric will profile all the major party candidates to be mayor as they are announced.
Right, so she’s effectively the weirdo divorced Dad archetype but as a middle aged woman.
Like Badenoch she has the problem that the people most like to agree with her positions are the people most likely to object to her existence.
I sort of feel sorry for her.
good profile but I'm left wondering what does Farage see in her?