With the capital under siege, its mayor has been scrambling to cope. Sadiq Khan tells Decca Aitkenhead about his self-doubt, his hopes for post-lockdown London and why he feels "stitched up" by the government.
City Hall is a great modernist cathedral to the capital's power, and normally teeming with municipal courtiers, but it feels more like a mausoleum now. A solitary aide leads me up eight deserted floors of deathly hush to Sadiq Khan's office, where I find the mayor checking that his trousers still fit. It's only the third time he's put them on in 11 weeks — "I wear a shirt for Zoom, but the bottom half's been joggers, to be honest" — and he's relieved still to get into them. I don't know why he was worried, though, for Khan doesn't appear to have got any bigger under lockdown. He seems to me, if anything, diminished.
The former Labour minister had just been elected mayor when I first interviewed him here. Back then, in 2016, he was fizzing with the new possibilities of high office and breathtakingly articulate; I recall being dazzled by the on-point poise of every answer. When we meet this time, at the end of May, he is still instantly personable, and still talks at 100 miles an hour. But the flurry of words is now missing so many syllables that his meaning can be hard to follow, and a single answer can ricochet between so many subjects that by the time he draws breath I've forgotten the original question.
For example: "I had a phone call this week with the mayor of Berlin and his expert there. The whole aerosol conversation is you're in a choir. Because the aerosol spreads to 50 people, right? There's this whole conversation about aerosol spreading versus particles and droplets. And actually a whole conversation in the scientific world — and by the way, if I were the prime minister, I'd read the science; the problem is he needs to read the science, you can't just spend time with the experts." My question had been: would he argue for reducing social distancing from two metres to one metre? This scattergun of unfinished sentences and non sequiturs feels out of character — so I'm not surprised when he acknowledges that lockdown has taken a toll on him.
"I've found it really tough. So, for eight weeks I didn't leave, literally, my home and Tooting Common. That's it. I thrive on company, on being out and about. And I was struggling." It seriously affected his mental health? "I've got no doubt it did. In the sense of just feeling a bit down. There are days when I'm not providing proper leadership. I definitely … I felt fragile.
"I'm used to stressful situations," he adds quickly. As a lawyer he had represented one client who told him — "and she wasn't joking" — that if he lost the case she would kill herself. "I can deal with stress. I can compartmentalise to get through things. But the past 10, 11 weeks have been the hardest of my professional life, in relation to the loneliness. Because being a leader is lonely. And I've struggled. I also realised I should feel confident talking about it. I shouldn't feel that I've got to be this alpha male who demonstrates his virility by being superhuman. I've got to be honest because, you know, I have struggled."
Khan's first term as mayor has brought more trauma and heartbreak than the 49-year-old could possibly have bargained for. Elected by a landslide with 1.3 million votes, he took office enjoying the greatest personal mandate of any British politician, and the distinction of being the most powerful Muslim in British public life. Since then there has been the Jo Cox murder and interminable Brexit toxicity, the Croydon tram crash, the attacks at Westminster Bridge, London Bridge and Finsbury Park mosque, the Grenfell Tower fire and a horrifying knife crime epidemic. He has clashed publicly with the president of America, who branded him a "disaster" and "loser" doing "a very bad job". But nothing had prepared Khan for a pandemic that would kill thousands of Londoners and close down his entire city.
.@SadiqKhan, who by all accounts has done a terrible job as Mayor of London, has been foolishly “nasty” to the visiting President of the United States, by far the most important ally of the United Kingdom. He is a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me......
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2019
I ask if he has wept. "I'm a crier," he says. "I can cry in a film." His latest tears were for the death of a bus driver, the 29th in London to die from Covid-19. "So [there have been] lots of times when I've been quite sad and quite tearful, yeah. Lots of times where I've felt frustrated. And lots of times I've been angry." What single moment made him angriest? His expression hardens. "It's not vanity, but I think it was stupid for the prime minister not to invite the mayor of London to Cobra meetings."
Back in February, "before we even knew there were Cobras taking place", he had written to the health secretary to demand he be involved in Covid planning. He wasn't invited to attend a meeting until March 16. Did he feel they were deliberately keeping him in the dark? "Without a doubt. Without a doubt."
At his first Cobra meeting, Khan was stunned to learn that half of all Covid deaths had been in London. "So I'm a) shocked, b) astonished at the complacency. From that moment onwards, I'm lobbying for a lockdown. And Johnson and his team, they're not keen. Not keen at all." Khan was so worried that he met Boris Johnson that week to propose a London-only lockdown, telling the prime minister: "You're best placed to know what's right for this country. If you say the country doesn't want it, and you don't want to do it, fine. But I'm the London mayor, and I'm offering up London." How did Johnson respond? Khan looks grim. "That's when you sort of realise that actually there are problems in relation to the way the government's managing this."
It doesn't take long in his company to see that this is a watershed moment for the third incumbent of a relatively new office, one still working out its role in national political life. Up until now, Khan thought he knew how to navigate the constitutional challenge of serving under a partisan opponent in Downing Street. "I put aside my party differences, my tribal allegiances, to try and work collegiately. It's quite important that I don't exhibit my anger in Cobra or with Johnson because otherwise you look like a megaphone politician." He allows a bleak pause. "And then silly things happened. To be honest, I was stitched up."
The mayor is talking about the deal he was forced to strike with Downing Street in May over the funding crisis at Transport for London (TfL) — and he is hopping mad. When he starts to explain what happened ("I'd have to serve a section 114 notice"; "RPI plus one above inflation" and so on), I'm reminded of one of the paradoxes of his role. We tend to think of the London mayor as a quasi-celebrity, but most of his job involves the mind-numbing logistical tedium of local government, to which most of us pay little or no attention. But the TfL deal he struck last month made headlines — and they weren't a good look for Khan.
TfL needed an urgent bailout after its income from fares, the congestion charge and advertising collapsed under lockdown. The government duly issued a £1.095 bllion ($2.1 billion) cash grant and £505 million ($978 million) loan — but only on condition that Khan introduced eye-wateringly unpopular price hikes. "And why? Because next May I stand for re-election." (The election should have taken place this May, but was postponed due to the Covid crisis.) Khan is adamant that the government struck a deal deliberately engineered to damage his re-election prospects. "This was clearly political. But the alternative was me saying, 'I'm going to call your bluff. I'm going to serve a section 114 notice.' Which means having to reduce buses. But I'm not going to take a risk with Londoners' safety. Public health is more important than political fisticuffs. And so, yeah, I blinked."
To add insult to injury, he goes on angrily, "not only did the government do a bad deal, but they then spent the evening and the next day briefing the media that I 'volunteered' to take away kids' free travel, to immediately restore the congestion charge and to restrict travel for older people, when these were their conditions of the deal".
His indignation is understandable, but also surprising. How did Khan expect Downing Street to spin it? His critics always accuse him of prioritising his public image over the slog of policy — but if that were true he'd presumably have made a much better PR job of the TfL deal. The more he talks, the more I wonder if his problem might in fact be the very opposite: a rather naive neglect of self-promotion.
"I've tried to be a serious politician," he huffs. "I've been getting on with the day job." But his predecessors won two terms with big personalities and vanity projects, whereas the Covid crisis has exposed the limits of mayoral power in "the day job", hasn't it? "Yeah, they've been exposed," he concedes. "And that's one of the advantages if you're a prime minister of a centralised democracy. You blame mayors and police and crime commissioners for the bad stuff, and you claim credit for all the good stuff."
Is he worried about the damage the deal has done to his re-election prospects? "No, not at all," he says quickly. "The good news is, Londoners ain't stupid. They can see through this stuff." I'm not convinced by his confidence, though. When I ask what he thinks the inevitable Covid public inquiry will criticise him for, he says softly: "Well, I reflect on it on a daily basis. There's not a day I've gone to bed where I've thought, it's been a perfect day … Should I have been as constructive with Boris Johnson and so collegiate? I've been used as their punching bag for too long. And, you know, I'm fed up. People have said to me, why are you taking it? And maybe that is naive of me. Maybe that's me being a sucker." He breaks off, looking anguished.
"But there are people dying. So yeah, some people criticise me for being too fraternal with the government. Others criticise me for being too antagonistic. I'm damned if I do, I'm damned if I don't."
He brightens when I ask about the environmental opportunity the crisis offers London. In 2015 he was diagnosed with adult-onset asthma and before lockdown he had to use his inhaler morning and night, and before or during exercise. "Now I'm down to just once a day … I feel better."
Will there ever be a better opportunity than this to transform London into a green city? "This is an awful, awful virus, but there are some potential silver linings. I feel really guilty for saying that when so many lives are being lost, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to rethink our city. We've managed to convert people to walking and cycling by rolling out cycle lanes. Sure, they are temporary, but I want to make Londoners see the possibilities. I don't want a car-led recovery, I want a green-led recovery."
He sees an opportunity, too, to find permanent accommodation for the 1,800 rough sleepers who have been housed in London hotels during the outbreak. "We were the first city in the country to use the spare capacity in hotels to get rough sleepers off the streets. But we can only carry on funding them until mid-June." If Johnson's government would fund just two more months, at a cost of about £12 million ($23 million), he claims that would give enough time for his In for Good programme to arrange not just housing but all the wraparound care "to get them off the streets for good".
Whatever happens, he says, "the new normal can't be a return to business as usual. People compare this crisis to the financial crash of 2009 or the recession of the 1980s, but I think it's comparable to the 1930s. My fear is, unless we learn the right lessons we could have a 1930s situation, not just with the recession to depression, but also the rise of problems leading to war."
He's not enthusiastic about a working-from-home revolution, though. "If there are fewer businesses in zone 1, that's less business rates. And the less money coming in, the less good we can do. It also means the bars and restaurants struggle — it's a symbiotic relationship." He thinks the public have "reached the threshold of enjoying working from home", though this may be projection on his part, for he clearly has.
He is very worried, too, about the city's culture and nightlife, on which one in six London jobs depend. "It's the DNA of our city, the glue that binds us together. Also, it's what gives us a cutting edge above the Berlins, the Frankfurts, the Parises and all the rest. It's important for the government to realise we could lose all that. And if we do, don't be surprised if business post-Brexit will go, 'Now we've lost that nightlife, you've lost the unique ecosystem of London, now I will go to Frankfurt or Singapore.' " I ask how a nightclub can realistically reopen before a vaccine has been found. "Really good question," he admits. "In the short term I can't see how we can have nightclubs in their previous incarnation without immunisation or a cure."
Khan still lives in Tooting, his birthplace and former constituency. The son of a Pakistani immigrant bus driver and a piecework seamstress, one of seven boys and one girl, he studied law and worked as a human rights lawyer before his election to parliament in 2005. He has spent lockdown with his wife, a lawyer, and their two daughters, aged 19 and 18, who both returned from university. Photographers have been hiding in the bushes outside their house since March, hoping to catch them breaking the rules, so I wonder about the pressure on his daughters of having a famous father. "Well, the youngest one, none of her friends, including her flatmates, know who Dad is. She doesn't tell them. My eldest one, her lecturers don't know. Not because they're embarrassed for Dad, but because they don't want to be treated differently. I'm quite proud of that."
The day after we meet, America erupts in outrage at the police killing of George Floyd. I call Khan to ask if, had it not been for Covid, he would have joined the Black Lives Matter protests in London. "I suspect I would have," he says. "Yes. I can't but endorse Black Lives Matter — because they do." When he saw officers at the protests kneel on one knee in solidarity, "I was really proud that they had the confidence to express their feelings without worrying about being disciplined. It shows the progress we've made.
"In my previous life I was routinely stopped and searched by the police," he adds. "The reason why my heart beats fast when I see a police officer is because of my experiences growing up." Does it still? "Not any more. But I still get it at border control. And I used to get it before I became mayor, when I'd be driving a car and see police in the rear-view mirror. We used to have a joke, 'What did you get stopped for? Driving while black.' The police force today is very different to the force I grew up with. But the Met is still not perfect. We're not in a post-racial world."
The protests present a moment, he urges, for progressives to unite. He sounds more like his old self — focused and intent. "For the past four years I've been demonised for standing up to Trump. Now people say, 'Oh yeah, Trump's not a good guy.' But he is a good example of the dangers of allowing someone to get into a position of power and [for people to] think, 'It doesn't affect me.' Just remember the arc. It started out anti-Mexican, then anti-Muslim, then anti-women, then anti-LGBT and now anti-black. That's why we've all got to stand up." I ask if he'll set foot in America while Trump is president, and he sighs. "Look, I'm conflicted here, cos I love America. What Donald Trump doesn't appreciate is the sour taste he's left in Americaphiles' mouths. He's exceeded even his own standards using the military against the American public. On the other hand, I don't want him to dictate what I do. That allows him to win. He would like nothing more than Muslims like me not going to his country."
Having had his own election postponed due to Covid-19, how would he feel if America followed suit? "No way!" he erupts. "The idea of Trump having another day in power I find deeply objectionable."
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London