Lime is making big money from e-bikes

As I said last week, sometimes you need to leave London to find out what’s going on in the capital. I’m writing this in Manchester, where I’ve been combining an investigation into a Lancastrian businessman who has substantial interests in London (and one of the wildest stories I’ve ever reported on) with a visit to the Conservatives’ annual party conference.

Read on to find out who is the favourite to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate — or scroll to the end to see just how much money Lime is making from its e-bikes.

Want to get in touch with London Centric? Send an email or a WhatsApp.

Who’s going to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate?

Last week we reported on the race to be Labour’s mayoral candidate, who will become the immediate favourite to end up in City Hall. Any Conservative running for mayor of London in 2028 will be starting with the expectation that they will lose, given the current state of the party’s polling in the capital. Their situation is made worse by Labour changing the voting system back to the old supplementary vote method in a move that should favour the party’s as-yet-unchosen candidate.

All of this means the Conservatives need to find someone the public have heard of who wants to give up years of their life on a potentially-fruitless-but-profile-raising campaign just to have an outside shot of taking over City Hall from Sadiq Khan. But given the state of their Westminster party (and the route to Downing Street of previous Conservative mayor Boris Johnson), there were a few names who were no doubt happy to be discussed as potential candidates in the conference bars.

The most obvious candidate is James Cleverly, the man who might have been Conservative Party leader if his MP supporters hadn’t tried to be a bit too clever in the final round of voting by backing Badenoch in a game of 3D political chess that ultimately knocked their guy out. Returned to the frontbencher as Conservative shadow housing secretary, he’s a former London Assembly Member who now represents Braintree, a constituency that’s just about in the capital’s Essex commuter belt.

“It’s a really, really important job,” he told the BBC’s Newcast on Tuesday night. “My heart is in Essex, but… watching