Royals ignore Princess
Anne at their peril
Libby Purves
Page 27
The consequence is superficial
politics, jumping from press release
to cooked-up announcement to lame
culture wars jousting.
We the voters play our part in this
cheapening by focusing on the latest
triviality and not on the dull business
of public administration that will
make a difference to our lives. Ask
many young Londoners why they
back Khan and they’ll mumble
something about him being a goodguy or the son of a bus driver, but on
concrete achievements they may fall
silent. Still, until very recently at least
he has remained reasonably popular.
This leads to the specific concern:
Khan mulling a future run for the
Labour leadership and then No 10.
The fact that he is currently
(according to YouGov) the third most
popular Labour politician in the land
will not have escaped his attention.
Sir Keir Starmer could easily lose
in 2024, clearing the way for a
candidate claiming to have more
executive experience, more of the
common touch. Khan’s allies will
persuade him he’s the man — and
which politician can resist the lure of
greater office? It would not be the
first time City Hall has been used
as a launchpad to No 10. Next time,
we would be wise to subject the
candidate’s record to more scrutiny.Khan’s quality: blaming everyone but himself
A wink to the woke has helped the London mayor appear popular but his record amounts to across-the-board failure
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
showman, fix-it; Khan does not fill
any of these shoes.
Those living outside the M25
might wonder why all this matters to
them, but it should, in ways general
and specific. The general concern is
how superficial politics has become
and how lazily voters respond to this
superficiality. Khan is just one of
many politicians (including the prime
minister) who have a tremendous
desire to acquire power but no clear
idea of what to do with it.
They yearn to bang tables and
broker deals and walk the swaggering
walk of great leaders but lack the
bone-deep beliefs that make leaders
great. Unanchored by principles they
go wherever public opinion may take
them. Uncertain about how the focus
groups of Clapton or Doncaster will
respond they are reluctant to make
unpopular but necessary decisions.Sadiq Khan has aquired power but
does not know what to do with ithe has spent in office, the budgets he
has received, or the unilateral powers
he enjoys, failures on Khan’s watch
are always someone else’s fault.
Another canny Khan deflection
technique is to jump aboard any
passing bandwagon, particularly if
it involves taking a side in the
culture wars. With a wink to the
woke demographic he has called
for misogyny to be made a hate
crime, set out plans to effectively
decriminalise cannabis in the capital
and — a sop to Black Lives Matter
— established a Commission for
Diversity in the Public Realm (aka a
drive for more politically correct
statuary to replace the ghastly old
colonialists). Most famously there
was the war of words with Donald
Trump, a row that got the Citizen
Smiths of Tooting going but buttered
no parsnips for the people of London.
Successful mayors tend to fall into
three camps: visionaries, showmen
and fix-its. Though Ken Livingstone
seems to have lost the plot in
recent times he was once a visionary
mayor whose regeneration efforts
had cranes sprouting along the
skyline. Another visionary was
Richard Daley, the Chicago mayor
who over three decades oversaw
its transformation to a shiny,
professionalised metropolis.
Showmen might be weak on the
diligence that drives such change
but they are strong on the optimism
which seeps into their city’s brand.
Yes, Johnson is a prime example.
In the fix-it camp are problem-
solvers and pragmatists, often
former businesspeople such as Mike
Bloomberg of New York or Andy
Street in the West Midlands.
Quietly and effectively, Street has
secured the Commonwealth Games
and extracted a lot of money
from central government for local
transport schemes. Visionary,S
cotland Yard versus City
Hall: the grudge match
continues. Dame Cressida
Dick told colleagues last week
that Sadiq Khan had given her
an ultimatum: ignore due process and
sack the racist, misogynist Charing
Cross WhatsAppers or collect her
P45. Though the mayor denies this,
Dick’s allies have rallied round. Ken
Marsh, chairman of the Metropolitan
Police Federation, accuses
“politicians” of “trying to use policing
and the career of the country’s most
senior police leader to deflect from
their own failings”. First the mayor of
London has no confidence in Dick;
now, we are told, the rank and file
have “no faith” in the mayor. Touché!
Leave aside the question of
whether the Met commissioner’s
time should have been up. Doesn’t
Marsh have a point? To hear
Khan’s imperious dressing down of
Dick — at one point he declared
that this seasoned public servant
had just “days or weeks” to gain his
confidence — you would assume
he boasted an impressive record
himself. He doesn’t. For Khan to
publicly castigate another national
figure for their failures is, to put it
politely, audacious.
The mayor’s big areas of
responsibility are tackling crime,
delivering more homes and
improving transport — and all three
look like failures. Between 2016
and the end of 2019 — the last
figures before lockdowns limited
opportunities for crime — residential
burglary soared by 40 per cent and
robbery by 74 per cent. Going into
the pandemic, knife crime was at a
record level. The mayor blames
government cuts but there was a
£585.8 million increase in the Met’s
budget during his first term. It was
he who failed to recruit enough
officers, repeatedly undermined
morale at the Met, flip-flopped
wildly on stop-and-search.
On housing the record is
unimpressive. His pledge in 2016 was
to build 80,000 affordable homes a
year. Over his first five years the
total number of completions was just
16,744. For this lack of progress, the
mayor has blamed his predecessor
Boris Johnson, the cost of building
materials and, yes, Whitehall: “The
reality is successive governments
have let down our city.” No mention
of the unprecedented £4.82 billion
government grant he received to
build 116,000 homes.
Transport is the most conspicuousfailure. The coffers of Transport for
London (TfL) are perilously low, the
organisation bailed out three times
by government. Khan blames the
work-from-home era and of course
this is significant. But TfL went into
the pandemic in a sorry state thanks
to a string of reckless decisions.
These include Khan’s promise to
freeze pay-as-you-go fares for years,
which meant at least £640 million in
lost revenue. The cost of TfL staff
taking time off for trade union duties
has nearly doubled. Most damagingly,
Crossrail is running four years late.
There’s a theme here: the blame
game. No matter the length of timeHis diversion technique
is to jump aboard any
passing bandwagon
City Hall has been
used as a launchpad
to No 10, after all
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