US President Donald Trump departs the Oval Office on November 5. Photo / John McDonnell, for The Washington Post
To United States President Donald Trump, the mayor of London and the mayor-elect of New York are of a piece - Muslim, left-leaning, and easy to blame for urban ills real or imagined in two of the world’s wealthiest megacities.
“He is a stone-cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me,” Trump said of Sadiq Khan, the London leader now in his third term.
“A proven and self-professed JEW HATER,” was his summary of Zohran Mamdani, who this month won the highest office in Trump’s native city.
Trump is not alone in seeing parallels between the two, both sons of immigrants who built careers on progressive ideals, shaped by the politics of diversity and identity.
London and New York, cultural and financial capitals twinned by skyline and temperament and boasting large Jewish populations, soon will both have Muslim mayors navigating the crosscurrents of faith, race and class at a time of political polarisation and fury.
The similarities, however, don’t go much beyond their shared faith.
Khan, 54, is a Gen X native of South London, a veteran of Britain’s Labour establishment, a lawyer and former junior minister shaped by the cautious pragmatism of party politics.
In June, King Charles III made him Sir Sadiq Khan, the first London mayor honoured with a knighthood.
Mamdani, 34, is a millennial democratic socialist from Queens, the African-born son of Ugandan and Indian academics, who won office as an insurgent against New York’s political and corporate hierarchies.
As their trajectories converge in the top jobs of cities swelling with wealthy bankers, low-income immigrant neighbourhoods, mosques and synagogues, Khan’s decade in office offers both precedents and cautions for his New York counterpart.
In particular, it shows that early interfaith goodwill can build quickly and erode just as fast when the shock of distant conflict intrudes.
Both men face tricky relations with their cities’ formidable financial sectors, though with very different tools to respond.
Khan has limited control over the global banking hub known as “the City”, which fills a square mile of London’s medieval core.
He manages transport and some policing policy but cannot set income or business taxes, which remain under national authority.
In New York, Mamdani, who has roiled Wall Street with a call for a 2% surtax on incomes topping US$1 million, will hold more direct sway than Khan over schools, policing and budgets, but will still depend on Albany for approval of major financial moves and on Washington for some financing and regulatory approval.
In London and New York, the political ideals of redistribution confront the same economic reality: prosperity relies, at least in part, on thriving financial centres.
Susan Langley, the incoming lady mayor of London - a ceremonial representative of the City’s financial district - describes the sector’s relationship with Khan as “close, collaborative and constructive”.
“The mayor has shown a willingness to engage with the financial sector and support initiatives that drive inclusive growth,” Langley said. His reputation as a pro-development leader has grown.
“[Khan] has become more pro-business,” said Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics who has tracked both London and New York politics for decades.
“He didn’t send out the vibes Mamdani is sending out. But he’s evolved.”
Travers said Mamdani is likely to face the same pressure to not skewer the cash cows of Wall Street too sharply.
“Mamdani is also going to have to work with business,” Travers said.
“He’s far more dependent on the city’s tax yield than Sadiq Khan”, who gets major funding for transportation, schools and other basics from the central Government.
But New York also depends on Albany and Washington for billions in subsidies. Earlier this year, the federal Transportation Department froze US$18 billion ($31.7b) for projects in the city, and Trump threatened the mayor-elect with more cuts.
“I’m the one who sort of has to approve a lot of things coming to him, so he’s off to a bad start,” Trump said.
The harder test for both mayors lies beyond budgets and bond ratings, in the more rancorous politics of identity that their faiths bring to the fore.
Khan’s early years as mayor were marked by close relations with Jewish organisations.
His first official appearance after his May 2016 election was at a Holocaust commemoration ceremony.
He immediately signed on to a campaign to battle anti-Semitism in his city, which has a Jewish population of more than 145,000.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, a leading umbrella group, said his start set “a very positive tone”.
Mamdani doesn’t take office until January but seems to understand the value of such outreach in a city with the largest Jewish population in the US.
He campaigned hard in Jewish neighbourhoods, took out ads in Yiddish newspapers and pledged to boost spending to combat hate-based violence by 800%.
As only the third mayor of London - a role created in 2000 to decentralise power from the national government - Khan was in some ways the leader many London Jews were most comfortable with.
His predecessor as mayor, Conservative politician Boris Johnson, was never a favourite of largely progressive Jewish voters. And the first mayor, Labour stalwart Ken Livingstone, left a toxic legacy on Jewish issues, including his insistence that there had been “real collaboration” between Jews and Nazis during World War II.
Khan spent years fighting that reputation within Labour ranks, and again under then-party leader Jeremy Corbyn, when allegations of anti-Semitism festered anew.
In 2018, Khan told a Board of Deputies dinner that “it pains me to my core when I hear that many Jewish people now feel that a party that would normally be their natural home doesn’t have their best interests at heart”.
A year later, when Corbyn led Labour to resounding defeat, Khan said British voters “got it right”.
“There’s no question Sadiq Khan produced a sigh of relief when he became mayor among the broader Jewish population in London,” Travers said.
“People who have experience with him find him extremely thorough and a firm friend of Jews of all kinds,” said Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner of the Bromley Reform Synagogue, who is the former senior rabbi of Reform Judaism in Britain.
Then came the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza.
During the war, London saw some of the largest pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Europe.
Almost weekly, thousands filled Whitehall and Trafalgar Square with calls for a ceasefire.
The protests remained largely peaceful, but reports of anti-Semitic chants and harassment near Jewish neighbourhoods unsettled many London Jews.
Community leaders accused Khan and the Metropolitan Police of failing to make Jewish residents feel safe, even as Khan repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism and urged police to act against hate crimes.
Tensions peaked in spring 2024, when Gideon Falter, head of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, was stopped by police while wearing a yarmulke and walking towards a protest.
Officers told him his presence as “openly Jewish” might antagonise demonstrators and blocked him from the area, an exchange captured on video and widely circulated online.
Khan called the incident “completely unacceptable” and apologised to Falter, saying “no one in London should ever feel unsafe or unwelcome because of who they are”.
Falter was not appeased and said Khan has failed routinely to match his rhetoric opposing anti-Semitism with actions to combat it.
“For years the Jewish community has seen little from the mayor but ceremonial appearances and photo opportunities,” Falter said.
“Anti-Semitism has exploded on London’s streets since the Hamas massacre on October 7, yet the Mayor offers only statements.”
Khan also ramped up his criticism of Israel for hampering aid deliveries to Gaza. He was an early Labour voice calling for Britain to recognise a Palestinian state, which Prime Minister Keir Starmer did in September.
That month, Khan went further, breaking ranks with the Labour government to utter the “g-word”.
“I think it’s inescapable to draw the conclusion in Gaza we are seeing before our very eyes a genocide,” he said at a public forum in West London.
The line drew cheers from the crowd but swift condemnation from many of his former Jewish allies.
The Board of Deputies said Khan “risks exacerbating divisions in our own communities” and his position “will alienate large sections of London’s population”. The Jewish Leadership Council was equally critical of Khan’s “inflammatory rhetoric”, saying that “many Jewish Londoners no longer feel represented by their mayor”.
Not all Jewish leaders fault Khan for his stance.
“He’s got a lot of problems with the war in Gaza. Well, join the club,” Janner-Klausner said.
“Would I call it genocide? No. But I don’t think using that word makes him an anti-Semite.”
Still, the chill has deepened. The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and Progressive Judaism are among the organisations that have spoken warmly of Khan in the past.
When asked by the Washington Post to comment on the relationship today, none agreed to speak on the record.
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