Sir Sadiq? They’re taking the mick

Finally, Sadiq Khan has unified London. This great if fragmented city is as one this morning. Borough to borough, on buses, in buzzing WhatsApp groups, the same cry goes up: ‘A knighthood for Sadiq?’ So thank you, Sadiq, for bringing together Londoners of all ages, all religions, all sexualities and all classes in a shared experience of utter bafflement that a mayor as useless as you is to be knighted by the king.

Sir Sadiq? They’re taking the mick. ‘For services to what? Knife crime?’, quipped a friend on WhatsApp. Even Khan’s supporters are likely to be a bit miffed. As Andrew Neil asks, why would a ‘self-styled anti-establishment left-winger’ accept such a feudal gong? One envisions mass confusion among Sadiq’s millennial champions in gentrified East London upon discovering that this brave (lol) basher of Brexit and taunter of Trump turned out to be an establishment lackey like the rest of them.

The FT has the skinny. According to insiders who’ve had a sneak preview of the Labour government’s New Year Honours list, Sadiq has secured the highest decoration. As have other Labour heavyweights, like New Labour-era health secretary Patricia Hewitt and long-serving Labour MP Emily Thornberry. She’s already Lady Nugee, now she’ll be Dame Emily too, which is likely to make her even more insufferable, if such a thing is possible.

But it’s the prospect of Sir Sadiq that has most alarmed folk. With good reason. He’s in his third term as mayor and what do we have to show for it? Crime feels worse than ever. In the year ending March 2016 – the year he became mayor – there were around 33,900 incidents of theft from the person. By 2023 there were 66,600. There were 4,200 robberies involving a knife when Khan first rocked up to City Hall. In the year ending September 2023 there were 8,300. Then there’s shoplifting. It’s risen by 20 per cent under Sadiq. I know the head-tilting wets of the patrician left think shoplifting is not a big deal, but normal people prefer to live in cities where armies of scamps don’t nick stuff with impunity.

As for housing – Khan set up a much-trumpeted new Homes for London: Affordable Homes Programme to build cheap-ish dwellings for the less well-off, and to say it isn’t going well is a colossal understatement. It promised 35,000 dwellings by March 2026 but then it slashed that already unambitious number to ‘between 23,900 and 27,200’. Even that’s not happening: the Independent reported in August that in the preceding economic quarter Sadiq’s wheeze completed just 71 new homes. So that’s 71 families out of millions rescued from ceaseless spiralling rents – way to go, mayor.

Transport hasn’t fared well, either. Tube trains are still creaking, hot and crowded. The Standard reported earlier this year that the Central Line needs 71 trains for the peak hours but there have been some weeks when it only had 54. If you’re a Londoner you’ve probably felt the consequences of such mismanagement: your face against the armpit of some equally overheated commuter. Transport for London warns that trains might soon fail on the Bakerloo, Northern and Piccadilly lines too, as a result of financial ineptitude and ‘missed engineering overhauls’. Khan made much of his ‘fare freeze’ to help hard-up Londoners, but as the Standard sniped: ‘10p off fares for a train that never comes?’

Yet maybe us Londoners should be grateful to this soon-to-be Sir because at least when a Tube train does arrive it won’t have any ads for junk food in it. Yes, Khan might not make the trains run on time but he does make sure they aren’t adorned in tantalising images of burgers or pizzas or, erm, jam. He won’t get you to work on time but he will save you from your own gluttonous urges. He does allow ads for assisted dying, though. In the messed-up moral universe of our technocratic overlords, it’s bad to eat a Big Mac but fine to kill yourself.

That Sadiq’s one ‘success’ in transport is his memory-holing of ‘junk food’ ads really sums up his mayorship. This is a man who’s crap beyond belief at improving infrastructure but a world-beater at moralising. The Tube’s signalling system might be a tad rickety but Sadiq’s virtue-signalling is second to none. He’s a new breed of politician. A kind of post-reality politician. A politician who rarely muddies his hands with such trifling, old-world matters as tackling crime, building abodes and getting people from A to B, and who’s infinitely more interested in making a spectacle of his own ethical rectitude. Adverts for junk food? Out. Adverts for the mayor’s own depthless sense of moral supremacy? Very much in.

So he might not know what to do about law-breaking in London but he holds forth on Israel’s alleged breaking of international law in Gaza. He hasn’t done much to address the resurgence of a fascistic hatred for Jews on the streets of his own city since 7 October but he did once let the world know that he thinks Donald Trump is similar to the ‘fascists of the 20th century’. He hasn’t cleaned up London’s ‘shabby’ streets but he did replace the green man on the traffic lights at Trafalgar Square with symbols celebrating same-sex relationships. How gay Londoners knew when to cross the road before their straight saviour Sadiq took power is one of life’s great mysteries.

To Sadiq, London is less a city than a soapbox. He’s turned our brilliant, bustling and somewhat broken capital into his own personal moral fiefdom. Even the New Year’s Eve fireworks display has been bent to his insatiable urge to lord his high-status beliefs over the lower orders. One year he used the fireworks to big up the EU, making me want to dig out my all-time favourite stat: that more Londoners voted for Brexit (1.5million) than for Sadiq (1.08million in 2024). It no doubt kills the mayor that the political idea he hates above all others is more popular than him in the city he rules.

The worst thing Sadiq has done is turn us from citizens to be engaged into problematic units to be managed. Whether it’s his punitive ULEZ scheme that punishes drivers of ‘dirty’ cars, or his advisers’ obsession with which ‘races’ better represent modern London, or his belief that Londoners require moral enlightenment more than we do cheap homes and fast trains, he always seems more concerned with correcting Londoners than with correcting London’s social problems. To him, we’re pollutants and fatties and maybe even racists who must be lifted from our moral stupour. What a dispiriting vision for a great city. London deserves better, and Sadiq doesn’t deserve that gong.

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