Sadiq Khan embodies the worst excesses of the new Left

The official London New Year’s Eve fireworks display this year began in the manner of a party political broadcast. An army of multicoloured drones spelt out the words “The MAYOR OF LONDON Presents…” in the night sky over the Palace of Westminster, soon followed by what might well turn out to be Sadiq Khan’s reelection campaign slogan, “London: A Place for Everyone.” The display went on to cross off every box on the woke bingo card: “Our NHS”, the Empire Windrush, the Pride flag.

Meanwhile, down below, the police were struggling to control a screaming and brawling crowd after mismanagement of the fireworks event led to dangerous overcrowding. A few miles to the north, 16-year-old Harry Pitman was being given first aid on Primrose Hill, having been stabbed in front of hundreds of horrified onlookers just before midnight.

The night’s events offered a grim vignette of Mr Khan’s London: spiralling violence and dysfunction, paired with increasingly unhinged political messaging that tries to conceal the mayor’s failings behind the vocabulary of diversity and inclusion.

Because what is it that “The Mayor of London Presents”, in practice? A 21 per cent rise in knife crime in the year to the end of June 2023, a 56 per cent rise in crime on the London Underground compared to 2022, plus an astonishing 2,533 per cent rise in firearms offences according to one analysis. “I have been on the job for almost 25-years,” one front-line Met Police officer told The Telegraph last month, “and I have never known it as bad as this.”

And Mr Khan’s London is not just a dangerous place, it is also a ruinously expensive one. His insistence that London is “for everyone” is hard to square with the fact that the city is increasingly inaccessible to anyone on a middling income – people neither poor enough to qualify for social housing, nor rich enough to afford a home in what has become one of the world’s most expensive cities.

Since I was born in London in 1992, the average house price in the capital has risen by more than 800 per cent, even as the average salary has risen by just over 200 per cent. “Never forget that you belong and are valued in this city,” Mr Khan tells the viewer, jabbing an index finger at the screen in his latest campaign video, also sporting the hashtag #Londonforeveryone. But it doesn’t feel that way.

And one has to wonder if “everyone” really does mean everyone in Mr Khan’s mind, given his insistence on promoting divisive policies such as the Ultra Low Emissions Zone (Ulez). It has been criticised for making it much harder for certain groups to get around the capital – in particular, poorer families and older people who cannot easily afford to replace their car.

It seems that Sadiq Khan is hoping that Londoners will be so seduced by the image of London as the world’s most progressive city that perhaps they won’t notice that it’s an increasingly scary and miserable place to live. Faced with his conspicuous failings as mayor, his only option is to frantically wave a rainbow flag in our faces.

With the mayoral election of May 2 fast approaching, we will soon discover whether Londoners really are so easily fooled.