Who's behind London's vigilante tube cleaners?
Plus: More foxes, more red paint, and a pivot into confectionery by Kemi Badenoch.
Yesterday morning London Centric reporter Rachel Rees took the lift down to the platform at Lambeth North tube station, and joined a trio of young men wearing high-vis jackets emblazoned with the words “Doing What Sadiq Khant”.
For the next hour, as commuters stared at their phones and tried to avoid making eye contact, the group (and Rachel) went up and down the Bakerloo line removing the graffiti that has plagued the trains on the route in recent months.
You might have seen their efforts get press coverage this week — but who’s really behind them?
Scroll down for the story of the intriguing Dominic Cummings-backed political campaign group looking to capitalise on London’s disrepair.
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Fox News
Monday’s London Centric story about the foxes who have taken over the rooftop garden of Google’s new £1bn King’s Cross headquarters went around the world.
After stonewalling us for a week, Google’s press team got back to confirm that, yes, there had been the odd issue with foxes. The Guardian, whose newsroom looks out at the Google building, picked up the story and quoted a source who had seen the animals at work: “There’s a little hole in the garden where one lives. We’ve seen her all around the building – one second she’s on the fifth floor, the next she’s on the garden floor. No one has been able to catch her.”
Not so fast, declared animal rights organisation Fox Guardians! The lobbyists for Big Fox took umbrage at the newspaper’s description of the animals as “pests” and said Google should welcome the animals to their new offices. (Foxes are legally not vermin, which is why your local council will not help you with removing them from your garden.) The story was featured on everything from Fi Glover and Jane Garvey’s podcast, to some of the biggest meme accounts on Instagram.
In a triumph of publishing, London Centric failed to either make the story the headline of Monday’s mailout or capitalise on the millions of people who read about it elsewhere. But at least you lot know where you read it first.
Most importantly, we only find out these things because readers like you bother to send them in. So if you’ve heard something intriguing or amusing that’s going on in the capital then please do get in touch via WhatsApp or email.
Kemi pivots to inspirational confectionary
The great and good of the Conservative Party gathered at the Science Museum in South Kensington on Thursday night for their summer party, trying to ignore the threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform.
Ordinary Londoners don’t normally get to see inside the corporate events that take over some of the capital’s biggest venues on summer evenings. But you can tell a lot about the organisation by what’s in the gift bag offered to guests. In this case, attendees were given bars of artisan chocolate with inspirational quotes from party leader Kemi Badenoch alongside her signature, according to one bemused London Centric reader who was in attendance.
The bars, made by West Sussex chocolatier Cocoa Loco, featured quotes such as “Engineers get stuff done, I am an engineer”, “Keir Starmer doesn’t have the balls”, and “I know what a woman is”.
Triad-linked red paint attacks become more brazen
The inside of a west London apartment block was this week vandalised with red paint and ‘brothel’ graffiti – the latest in an ongoing series of attacks against London homes by suspected Chinese triad gangs, with dozens of incidents identified over the last twelve months.
While previous attacks have taken place in the dead of night, often on quiet streets, the incident on Tuesday occurred mid-afternoon inside Tidey Apartments, a large modern block of flats in Acton.
The London Centric reader and building resident who alerted us to the vandalism said that there had been previous security issues in the building, particularly with tailgating and a lack of CCTV coverage of many areas. They sent us footage showing the extent of the problem.
Meanwhile, similar incidents continue to occur in Walthamstow, where local MP Stella Creasy has been engaged in a seemingly fruitless attempt to get the police to prioritise the issue.
The building management company in Acton declined to comment on the incident, but said that they had reported it to the police and the area affected was not covered by the building’s internal CCTV. In an internal communication to residents the building manager said “it appears” that those responsible for the attack “are not residents and are unknown to the site”, suggesting they may have tailgated someone into the property.
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The Dominic Cummings-backed graffiti cleaners who want to build a political movement out of disaffected young Londoners
By Rachel Rees
When footage of Londoners cleaning tube graffiti went viral earlier this week, commentators and journalists held up the story as a symbol of the capital’s decline. The video, designed to shame London’s leaders into action, went viral on X and was retweeted by prominent figures including Elon Musk.
It seems to have worked. Days later the commissioner of Transport for London was discussing the difficulties of cleaning the trains with Sadiq Khan at the transport organisation’s board meeting.
What might not have been apparent to the casual observer is that the people in the video — which included GB News presenter Tom Harwood — are linked to a new political movement called Looking for Growth.
The main person recorded cleaning the graffiti and challenging Khan to take action is Joe Reeve, the 28-year-old co-founder of the organisation.
His seven-month-old political project is dominated by a group of young, mainly male, tech sector-adjacent campaigners who feel London and the wider UK is in a period of decline that requires urgent changes to society. The group, which has been advised by former Downing Street chief of staff Dominic Cummings, is gaining influence across the capital and is now launching local chapters in different London boroughs.
“When everything’s getting worse around you, it’s hard to feel optimistic,” Reeve told London Centric.
“The only way things are going to change is if there is a political force that captures Number 10 and changes it”
Looking for Growth’s message is that the capital and the country can only be saved by rapid economic reforms to encourage growth. This means crushing NIMBYism to enable development, while also pursuing a parallel crackdown on crime and anti-social behaviour.
The group is heavily influenced by US tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, the man behind ChatGPT. They understand the power of a viral video stunt that plays well on social media. They move in the same social circles as the team that made Robert Jenrick’s recent viral clip, in which the Conservative shadow justice secretary confronted fare dodgers on the London Underground.
Speculation around parliament is that Looking for Growth is a front for Cummings’ new “Startup Party”, his longstanding proposal to replace both Labour and the Conservatives.
In this theory, viral stunts around the capital are laying the groundwork for a Cummings-backed candidate to run as Khan’s replacement as mayor of London.
“The only way things are going to change is if there is a political force that captures Number 10 and changes it,” said Cummings in an interview about the group. “And [Looking for Growth] could be something that forces all three of the main parties to shift.”
Looking for Growth denies they intend to run candidates or back a specific party in any election, whether in the capital or nationally. But their graffiti stunts point towards a trend in political campaigning that will dominate the run up to the next mayoral election in 2028. As a result they could shape the way Londoners view their city — and potentially who will run it next.
“Tend to feel quite left out of politics”
Reeve’s Looking for Growth co-founder is Lawrence Newport, the 34-year-old who ran a wildly effective campaign to ban the XL Bully dog, taking the proposal from a small group of online campaigners to government policy within a matter of months. Fresh from this success, after taking advice from Cummings, Newport founded two parallel campaign groups at the end of last year: Looking for Growth and Crush Crime. One of his first stunts was to leave a bicycle locked outside New Scotland Yard, the home of the Metropolitan police, to see how long it would take to get stolen.
Who exactly is funding Looking for Growth, which attracted hundreds of people to an event at a bar in Mornington Crescent earlier this week, is unclear. They told London Centric their running costs are currently met by supporters making donations and buying merchandise.
According to Reeve, the co-founder who spent Friday morning removing graffiti in front of London commuters, the group is a cross-party one that attracts “anti-partisan” entrepreneurs who “tend to feel quite left out of politics”. He highlighted how the former Reform chair Zia Yusuf and Labour MP Chris Curtis both attended its events, while Newport has already been to Labour-run Downing Street to discuss economic growth plans.
Despite this, the group’s language and many of its supporters come from right-wing political circles. One of the volunteers cleaning graffiti on Friday morning is a former political aide to Conservative MP David Davis. Their messaging is heavily influenced by young, heavily online Gen Z men who share memes about how the country is on a downward trajectory, with a particular focus on the state of London’s public spaces and property market.
“That meme is often referenced by us”
As a result, if party affiliation does not link their supporters, then “Nicolas (30 ans)” does.
This is a French political meme about the supposed breakdown of the social contract that has been adapted for a British audience and grown in popularity in some parts of the right-leaning political internet over the last year, especially on the Elon Musk-owned X, previously known as Twitter.
The meme features a young white man dressed for a professional job with his head in his hands. He feels he is unable to live his best life because he is paying heavy taxes towards pensions for the elderly and benefits to immigrants.
Asked about it, Reeve (28 ans) said: “That meme is often referenced by us… That probably does describe quite a lot of our members.”
Some of the waters that the group swim in are also murkier. Reeve this week retweeted Reform MP James McMurdock who suggested taking inspiration from the group’s direct action against graffiti on the Bakerloo line to conduct “some Dinghy Popping” and prevent migrants from crossing the English Channel on small boats.
When asked by London Centric about this, Reeve said he was not endorsing harming migrants and described his interpretation of the tweet as being about “prevent[ing] the people-smugglers from being able to put people on dangerous dinghies”. His tweet was “totally separate” from Looking for Growth, he emphasised.
“Ideas engine”
“The thing that binds everybody [in Looking for Growth] is they want the economy to grow,” said Reeve, positioning the organisation as an “ideas engine” that can suggest simple policies to boost economic growth and improve the country.
He said: “We believe the current government has the right intentions, but not the right ideas.”
As well as “top-down policy stuff,” the group is focusing on the “bottom-up”, such as the graffiti cleaning, to show how quickly change can be achieved.
Transport for London attributes the very real and visible uptick in graffiti on the Bakerloo and Central lines to a shortage of ageing and increasingly broken trains. They say this means there are no spares to enable vandalised trains to be taken out of service for cleaning.
Looking for Growth instead argues graffiti can be removed in seconds and criticises the mayor’s failure to find an alternative solution to cleaning the carriages, despite TfL paying “eye-wateringly large cleaning contracts” to a contractor.
This outsourced deal falls short on “what Elon Musk calls the ‘idiot index’,” Reeve said – the price of a finished good or service compared to the cost of its components.
Musk himself reposted footage of Reeve’s Bakerloo graffiti video – although he seemed more interested in its relevance to San Francisco than the state of the London Underground.
By the end of our Bakerloo line cleaning shift we had removed dozens of graffiti tags in the space of an hour with some off-the-shelf cleaning products.
“It’s nice to start the day with some social good,” said Reeve.
What else counts as “social good” when it comes to the group’s policies? In the wake of his conversation with London Centric, Reeve shared a Keir Starmer tweet about using the VAT charged on private school fees to fund affordable housing.
Referencing the meme about the perceived burden on the capital’s young professionals that defines his movement, Reeve captioned the prime minister’s announcement with a critical comment: “Nick, 30 Ans intensifies”.
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Would be a huge mistake for the left to allow "caring about the state of our public spaces" to become right-wing-coded. This graffiti stunt may be pretty specious, but if it puts pressure on Khan to start taking this stuff seriously, great.
Another point re Bakerloo lines and these global far right: there is this obession with posting examples of litter, graffiti (and often pictures of ethnically mixed groups of people) and equating the latter with the former. All wrapped up in a narrative of decline of public spaces.
But even on the overarching narrarive of decline in the quality of public spaces, it takes barely five minutes to look up pictures of London from the 1980s so see just how much things have improved on that front. The same can be said to a lesser extent for New York.