USA TODAY International Edition
BFF? Mayor of London defends Trump dispute
Khan says special ties mean upfront honesty
LONDON – London Mayor Sadiq Khan wants Americans to know that his long-running feud with President Trump has a deeper context: Friends fight; it’s inevitable.
“The reality is that the United States and the United Kingdom have a very special bond,” Khan said Sunday in a phone interview. “And your expectations for your best friend are very different to what you have for an acquaintance or a friend you maybe see only every six months.”
Khan, 47, spoke from Austin, ahead of his keynote speech Monday at the South by Southwest conference. He will be the first British politician to give an address at the annual Texas event that celebrates the convergence of the media, film and music industries.
Khan, the first Muslim elected to lead a major Western capital city, will explain in his speech how social media companies, such as Facebook, working with governments can do more to prevent the spread of hate speech and fake news.
“For a start,” he said Sunday, “these companies need to take more responsibility for this,” saying he regularly receives racist, abusive and illegal tweets.
Yet the mayor’s war of words with Trump — spanning Twitter, media interviews and newspaper op-eds — threatens to overshadow Khan’s visit to the United States this week.
Trump criticized Khan in June for his response to the London Bridge terrorist attack, saying that Khan was “pathetic” for telling Londoners they had “no reason to be alarmed” over the incident that killed eight people.
And the mayor has called on the British government to cancel Trump’s state visit here planned for this year. The two men also have sparred over Trump’s attempts to ban some Muslims from entering the United States.
When Trump claimed in January that he was scrapping a trip to the U.K. because he didn’t want to open the new U.S. Embassy in London that he deemed “a “bad deal,” Khan responded that Trump “got the message” that Londoners didn’t want him there.
Khan is London’s third mayor, a role he took up in May 2016. Boris Johnson, his high-profile predecessor, is now foreign minister in Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative government. Unlike Johnson, who had a privileged upbringing, went to the best schools in Britain and is a distant relative of Queen Elizabeth II, Khan is an ex-human rights lawyer and son of a Pakistani immigrant bus driver.
Since becoming mayor in 2016, Khan has challenged anti-Muslim rhetoric that has dominated European elections in recent years.
Khan also has been willing to challenge the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K.
“One of the great things about having a special relationship is that you stand shoulder to shoulder in times of adversity, but it also means saying to your best mates when you think he or she is wrong,” Khan said.