Sadiq Khan is “angry”. The mayor of London, who has been reflecting on a decade in office after three election wins, has seen his party suffer “catastrophic” results in the capital.
The Greens won their first councils in London, three of them, plus a mayor, and Reform won its first London council too. The Tories and Lib Dems also increased their number of seats, with Labour losing control of 11 of the 21 London councils it held. The city recently deemed a Labour fortress was breached on all sides.
“My anger is made worse by the fact that we saw this coming. We made these promises in advance of July 2024 and it’s been almost two years, and we’ve simply not delivered the pace of change that people voted for,” Khan told me.
We met at the London Fire Brigade HQ in central London, where his team occasionally squats when working away from City Hall. I waited to meet him in a sun-streaked boardroom, decorated with nothing but a blank whiteboard and an abstract painting of a giant pineapple beside a tiny phonebox and cyclist.
In a perfect-fitting blue suit and crisp white shirt, Khan came pacing in at the speed I imagine he limbers up with on his daily 5k runs. But it was more of the scrappy boxer, who’s been sparring since he was a boy, than the morning runner I met today.
It was the afternoon of Keir Starmer’s make-or-break speech to defend his leadership – considered “too little, too late” by Catherine West, a fellow London politician and backbench rebel collecting MP signatures to call on the Prime Minister to stand down before September.
Instead of going out and selling the party’s national achievements – on renters’ rights, workers’ rights and childcare hours, Khan said “we were talking about Peter bloody Mandelson”, referring to the scandalous US ambassador appointment that made headlines again as postal ballots were sent out to voters.
“That makes me really angry, because good councillors could have kept their seats, and they didn’t, not through any fault of themselves, their councillors or City Hall, but because of the Labour government.”
Khan, who was MP for Tooting in south London for over a decade and served in various shadow cabinet roles – including shadow justice secretary – has been London mayor since 2016, when Britain was still in the EU, the Conservatives were still in government and Donald Trump had yet to grace the White House.
While he told me he didn’t believe Labour should oust its leader, he reflected on the Prime Minister’s position. “I’m not somebody calling for a change in leader, although we’ve got to change,” Khan said. “But we can’t pretend that Keir Starmer was popular or an asset on the doorstep. I mean, we can’t pretend, right? Because if we do so, we can’t address the issue, the importance of change, the importance of a North Star, the importance of sunny uplands, the importance of a vision.”
The beleaguered Prime Minister has insisted he wants to pursue the “decade of renewal” he promised – saying he would fight the next election and serve another term.
Does Khan, as a politician who’s just completed ten years in office, think he should?
“Present company excepted, I think, generally speaking, the life expectancy of a chief executive, a football manager, a political leader, is shorter [now] than it otherwise would be,” he replied.
“Keir won the general election – the first general election he stood in, which is great. I think the key thing now is to focus on delivery and to give people hope and a vision. I think the idea of talking about ten years at this stage is just, just being frank and candid, as I always am, you know, is not realistic, because people want to talk about the next election.”
Khan went further than just naming Starmer as an electoral drag. In his view, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves also needs to change her approach. “There was, without doubt, unhappiness with Keir Starmer, with the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, and with the Labour government,” he said, on what voters in London were saying on the doorstep.
“We should be giving hope. I mean, this doom and gloom stuff, every time I hear the Chancellor speak, it’s doom and gloom for the last two years. People didn’t vote for a Labour government for more doom and gloom.”
Shortly after taking office, Reeves warned that Labour’s inheritance from the Tories was worse than expected – repeatedly referring to a “£20bn black hole” in the public finances.
Khan said in his role as mayor he speaks to many investors, venture capitalists and chief executives across the world. While they feel more certainty and stability in Britain post-Labour landslide, he revealed the Reeves narrative is putting them off.
“What’s bad is talking down our country, what’s bad is not being a great salesperson for this country,” he said. “It’s really important to encourage people to come here, but to keep them when they come here. We are, inadvertently from the noise coming from the Treasury, encouraging people to leave this country to go elsewhere. It’s bonkers,” he said.
“We want wealth creators here, we want people who want to live here, we want to encourage the rights of people and businesses to come here, and when it’s all doom and gloom, why would you choose to come here?”
Not just investors, he says, but tourists and students too.
“You’ve got to support people whose living standards [need to be] increased, invest in public services, but you’ve also got to work with the private sector to help create wealth, jobs and prosperity,” he added. “And I think my party in government has lost the skill, doesn’t seem to have the art of being hopeful, optimistic, upbeat, and that’s what people want.”
Khan has also recently referred to Reeves as a “roadblock” to greater devolved powers in London. Does he think it’s time, as has been rumoured in some quarters, to reshuffle her out of her role?
While he wouldn’t comment on a reshuffle, Khan said Andy Burnham – his fellow Labour mayor in Greater Manchester and a potential leadership contender to Starmer – should return to parliament. “You want the best people around you… It could be a team of rivals, it doesn’t matter, but you should recognise the strengths people have who are outside parliament, and if they want to come back you should be opening your arms to have them back.”
It was “a mistake” for Labour’s ruling body, the National Executive Committee, to block Burnham from running as a candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, according to Khan – who added that “one of the things that No 10 and No 11 could do is to say to the NEC: ‘If Andy wants to stand, don’t stop him’.”
Compared with Burnham, Khan has been more reticent and selective with his critiques and interventions regarding the national Labour Party – but one area where he has always been vocal is on Brexit.
When we spoke, he urged the party to go into the next general election promising to rejoin the European Union. “It’s inevitable at some stage we’re going to rejoin the EU. So why delay the inevitable?” he asked. “In the general election, say in plain English in the manifesto: ‘If Labour wins, we will rejoin the European Union.’ And that is the means to a sunny uplands.”
This is all part of a more “progressive” argument his party should be making, in his view. He revealed he has been complaining privately to Labour’s top team that “there appears to be an obsession with this ‘hero voter’” – put simply, once-Labour supporters who backed Brexit, then voted Tory in 2019 and are now turning to Reform.
“There’s always been a strategy to win one set of voters at expense of another,” he said. “That’s wrong, I think. And the chicks have come home to roost.”
[Further reading: Tracked: the Labour MPs calling for Keir Starmer to go]
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