Sadiq Khan’s childish posturing against Donald Trump

Donald Trump must be quaking in his custom-made leather shoes. He may have just been restored as leader of the free world by more than 72million souls. He may have seen off the lawfare of the crazy elites, the gunshots of crazy citizens and hollers of ‘fascist!’ from the crazy media. He may have just staged one of the most extraordinary comebacks of modern times. But an old enemy lurks on the horizon. An ancient foe has drawn his dagger for battle once more with The Donald. Brace yourself, president-elect: it’s Sadiq Khan.

Yes, London’s woke mayor, the man Trump branded a ‘stone cold loser’ back in 2019 when he was king of the Twitter putdown, is on the warpath. He has taken a break from failing to get a handle on knife crime and failing to provide Londoners with a nightlife and failing to fix our shabby streets in order to resuscitate his war of words with Trump. He ‘reignit[ed] his bitter feud with Trump’ just ‘moments’ after Trump’s victory was declared, as Deadline put it. I’m struggling to think of a sadder image than a knackered Sadiq in his jim-jams jotting down some Trump-bashing missive at 3am in an anguished bid for online clout. This is why we don’t have air conditioning on the Tube.

Almost as soon as it became clear that Trump had won, Sadiq was firing out statements. The Labour mayor broke with Keir Starmer’s strategy of congratulating Trump – retweets trump party loyalty for the likes of Sadiq every time – and issued an ‘important reminder’ to Londoners. Our city is still ‘for everyone’, he said. ‘We will always be pro-women, pro-diversity, pro-climate and pro-human rights.’ Don’t be too ‘anxious’ about the outcome of the US election, he said (mate, we’re not the ones crying online in the middle of the night), and instead remember that in London ‘we’re proud of our diversity’. This, he squeaked into the ether, is the value that ‘bind[s] us together’.

It’s hard to work out what’s most tragic here. Is it that the mayor seems to have mistaken himself for a globe-trotting statesman, grandly press-releasing on world affairs as if he were Macron or Xi or Lula? Is it that he fancies himself a modern-day MLK – ‘the lesson of today is that progress is not inevitable’, he ridiculously said – when he can’t even make the buses run on time, far less liberate a people? Or is it that he really thought his silly post would puncture Trump’s elation, when in truth if anyone at Mar-a-Lago did show it to Trump – they definitely didn’t – his response would likely have been: ‘Who? The little guy in London?’ After all, he did once say Khan reminded him of then New York mayor Bill de Blasio, ‘only half his height’.

Actually, the worst thing about Khan’s showy Trump-phobia is the sheer hollowness and hypocrisy of it. London is ‘for everyone’? Tell that to the Jews who avoided the city centre every Saturday for months on end because it was overrun with Hamas fanboys hollering for more holy war against the Jewish State. London is ‘pro-human rights’? You could have fooled me. Over the past 12 months I’ve seen mobs of people celebrating Hamas’s pogrom against the Jews. I’ve seen keffiyeh-wearing Islamists chanting for the return of the ‘Army of Muhammad’ to dispatch yet more Jews. London loves ‘diversity’? It must have been a different city, then, where a kippah-wearing campaigner against anti-Semitism was hounded off the streets by a mob of irate haters chanting ‘Zionist scum, Zionist scum, Zionist scum…’.

London is ‘pro-women’? That will be news to the women who watched in horror as ex-con and fella in a dress ‘Sarah Jane’ Baker told a mob at Trans Pride that ‘If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face’. A TERF is a woman who understands biology – ie, most women. This was an open cry for misogynist violence from a bloke who served 30 years in the slammer for kidnap, torture and attempted murder. By the way, Sadiq sent a message to that Trans Pride gathering, saying ‘I will always be on your side’. I’m not saying that makes him responsible for the vile utterances made there. Of course it doesn’t. I’m just saying a mayor who supports an ideology that damns women as TERFs, allows men to get their knobs out in women’s changing rooms and thinks it’s great when young lesbians have their breasts cut off probably shouldn’t lecture other people about women’s rights.

Sadiq’s depiction of London as a happy-clappy city in which everyone is welcome is, sadly, a lie. In truth, under his rule this past year London has been rocked by hate marches masquerading as peace parades. By Hamas cheerleading dolled up as anti-imperialism. We’ve seen people wave swastikas, call Jews ‘Nazis’, call for more pogroms against the Jewish State. Anti-Semitic attacks sky-rocketed, rising by 1,353 per cent in the weeks after the 7 October pogrom. Jewish institutions were graffitied, a Jewish kid was pelted with stones and Jews were threatened with knives. We have learned the hard way that a city in which it becomes positively fashionable to condemn the world’s only Jewish nation as the most evil nation is also a city in which it will become acceptable to attack Jews.

Again, Sadiq hasn’t condoned any of this vile racism. On the contrary, he has condemned it, though too rarely and too meekly for my liking. Yet the fact is that under his watch, for a year, London came to be colonised by expressions of rank bigotry, by dreams of anti-Semitic violence, by a sea of swastikas mangled with the Star of David, by cries for holy war. Let us speak plainly: our city was not ‘open’ to Jews this past year. If I were Sadiq, I would reflect on this real explosion of hate rather than pontificating for social-media points on the hate he thinks will rock the world now Trump’s been re-elected.

That Khan, mayor of a city shaken by the world’s oldest racism, thinks he can look down his nose at Trump, who’s just forged a new multiracial electoral alliance, is so telling. It suggests some see ‘hatred’ as something that only springs from the right. It is their hatreds we should lose sleep over, not the hatreds of the woke who beat the streets to rage against the Jews’ tiny homeland. So Trump was rightly criticised when he appeared insufficiently condemnatory after fascist filth marched in Charlottesville in 2017 and chanted: ‘Jews will not replace us.’ Yet there is palpably less right-on outrage over the marching through London of radical Islamists openly praying for a return of Muhammad’s army to murder more Jews.

Sadiq, quit the virtue-signalling. London is not the ‘diverse’ heaven you claim it is. Bigotry has risen while you’ve been in charge. Do something about that and leave America to the Americans.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy