How Sadiq Khan destroyed the capital
Cressida Dick has quit, but how much responsibility does the mayor bear?
In his ruthless defenestration of Dame Cressida Dick, Sadiq Khan pinpointed sexism and racism within the Metropolitan Police as evidence of her failings.
Unimpressed with her plans to tackle the problem, he made it clear that she no longer had his confidence, giving her little choice but to resign.
Curiously, however, Mr Khan made no mention of knife crime, homicides and robberies, all of which have risen on his watch, making the capital a far more dangerous place than it was when he took over from Boris Johnson.
For a while Mr Khan told radio listeners last week he was “the elected police and crime commissioner for London”, a boast that is not strictly true – keeping crime in check is a large part of his own brief.
Housing and transport are among Mr Khan’s other major responsibilities. Londoners have seen a worsening of both since he took up his post in 2016.
Whose fault is it? Certainly not the mayor’s, if Mr Khan is to be believed.
Susan Hall, the chair of the police and crime panel at the Greater London Assembly, said: “Sadiq Khan is a weak leader. He makes sure that when there is mud being thrown, none of it sticks to him.
“Whether it is knife crime, stop and search or problems in the Met it is always someone else’s fault, and rather than get involved and try to resolve the issues he makes sure someone else carries the can.
“He has two main jobs: running transport and keeping London safe. And I fear London and Londoners have been made less safe by the way [Dame Cressida’s departure] has been handled.”
The theory in Westminster is that Mr Khan, 51, has his eye on the Labour leadership, and eventually plans to follow his predecessor Boris Johnson all the way to No10.
Critics believe that as a strict disciple of the woke agenda, Mr Khan feared headlines about racist, misogynistic and bullying police officers were damaging his brand, and so Dame Cressida had to go before she became a drag anchor on his ambitions.
Dismissing such a major public figure may also have been designed to make him look strong and decisive, qualities that the public look for in leaders.
Ms Hall said he had been guilty of “political showboating” and had chosen to conduct his affairs through radio interviews and public statements rather than dealing with the Met’s problems behind closed doors, which might have yielded better results and enabled Dame Cressida to stay on.
Whatever his future intentions, the problem for Mr Khan is that while Mr Johnson was able to point to genuine improvements in Londoners’ lives as a result of his eight years as mayor, the same cannot be said for the current incumbent.
Under Mr Khan, there have been more homicides in London in each of the last four years than in the year he took office. Robberies soared by 86 per cent in his first four years, knife crime rose by 60 per cent over the same period, and 2021 saw the worst-ever annual toll of teenage killings, despite Covid lockdowns reducing the number of people on the streets.
In a classic Khan move, he called a knife crime summit, inviting MPs and community leaders to City Hall in order to give the appearance that he
‘He makes sure that when there is mud being thrown, none of it sticks to him’
was grasping the nettle, but instead of answering questions about what he intended to do, he chaired the meeting, passing on difficult questions to Dame Cressida and the then home secretary Amber Rudd and demanding to know what their own plans were.
City Hall says knife crime, youth violence and gun crime have been falling over the past year but that Mr Khan “is clear there is much more to do to stop young lives being lost to senseless violence” and has put 1,300 more officers on the streets.
In June 2020 he announced that he would be slashing the policing budget by £110million, blaming a cash crisis created by the pandemic. Yet he has consistently faced accusations of wasting taxpayers’ money promoting his own political agenda, whether it be the £30million increase in City Hall staffing costs under his tenure, the £250,000 he spent on a review of the capital’s statues as part of the culture wars, or the £1million his office for policing and crime spent on customer satisfaction surveys.
Then there is the transport network.
The Crossrail project, which was originally due to open in 2018, has been delayed until spring this year at the earliest, with the inevitable cost overruns of billions of pounds.
Mr Khan’s determination to freeze fares for public transport – a purely political move – has meant that Transport for London (TfL) has had to be bailed out three times by the Government, costing more than £4billion, to prevent it going bankrupt.
The resulting cash crisis has meant that Mr Khan has had no money to repair the cross-Thames artery of Hammersmith Bridge, which has been closed since April 2019.
If that was not enough to enrage motorists, Mr Khan, who promised during his 2016 electoral campaign to freeze the Congestion Charge and the zone in which it operates, announced in 2020 that it would be hiked by 30 per cent to £15, seven days a week, and that the zone would be widened.
Once again, this was not his fault. The extra charge “was something the Government imposed on TfL” as a condition for bailing it out, he told the London Assembly. He did not mention the fact that the bailout had in itself been necessary because of his own fares policy.
A spokesman for Mr Khan said the pandemic had had “a huge impact on TfL’s finances”, that Crossrail’s problems had started before he became mayor, and that TfL’s operating deficit had come down by 71 per cent under him. Hammersmith Bridge could only be reopened with a “long term and sustainable funding deal” from central Government, the spokesman said.
Having decided to freeze fares – one of only two sources of funds over which he has direct control – he had no choice but to rely heavily on the other one: council tax.
In 2021-22 Londoners had to swallow a 9.5 per cent increase in council tax, the biggest rise in England (City Hall says he was forced to make the increase “due to lack of government funding for London’s key public services”). For that sort of money, taxpayers are entitled to expect results, but the number of affordable homes completed under him trails well behind Mr Johnson’s record.
Mr Johnson completed 62,387 affordable homes in his first five years as mayor, while Mr Khan has managed 34,659 in the same period. Work had started on another 23,000 homes in Mr Khan’s first five years, but his target was to have 116,000 homes completed or under way by 2023, helped by a £4.82 billion grant from Theresa May’s government in 2018. And a vote-winning pledge to make 50 per cent of all homes on any new development affordable was quietly dropped for a 35 per cent target that he hoped builders would voluntarily agree to. Mr Khan’s spokesman said he had supported a “renaissance in municipal homebuilding” by backing councils to build houses “at a scale unseen since the 1970s”.
There have been some successes. Mr Khan brought in a Night Tube and improved the capital’s air quality through low-emission buses and electric taxis, and even Mr Johnson’s most ardent supporters would admit he, too, presided over some costly failures, such as the doomed garden bridge over the Thames which cost £43million of public money before it was abandoned.
Mr Khan has also won praise for his honesty over his struggles with mental health. He has described his “melancholy” during the pandemic and how lockdown left him feeling “really down”. He said he had “never felt suicidal” but that he suffered from depression, which led to questions from Conservative members of the London Assembly about whether he should have stepped aside “because of my mental ill-health”.
His aim, he said, in talking about his difficulties, was to help destigmatise mental health problems and show that “even somebody who may on some days not have the best mental health can still be a great mayor”.
Mr Khan won a second term as mayor in a delayed election last year. He has proved to his party that he can win at the polls. Yet the belief that Mr Khan wants to become Labour leader has caused tensions within the party.
Keir Starmer’s allies are concerned that obvious jockeying for the position by Mr Khan and Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, will undermine the leader by creating a perception that his own party expects him to lose the next election.
There is a growing belief that Mr Burnham, whose “King of the North” shtick is a turn-off for many voters, may already have overplayed his hand. If Mr Khan is to beat him in the race to become the next Labour leader, he will need to have more to show for eight years in City Hall than a legacy of making London a worse place.