![Sadiq Khan](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2023/08/21/TELEMMGLPICT000345214993_16926447558250_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqA7N2CxnJWnYI3tCbVBgu9T0aesusvN1TE7a0ddd_esI.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![Sadiq Khan](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2023/08/21/TELEMMGLPICT000345214993_16926447558250_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqA7N2CxnJWnYI3tCbVBgu9T0aesusvN1TE7a0ddd_esI.jpeg?imwidth=680)
The mind boggles when it comes to Sadiq Khan. In many ways, he is a faceless phantom – a fascinatingly bland Labour apparatchik incapable of an original thought or phrase. And yet somehow he has managed to build himself into the consummate dictator-bureaucrat, London’s own answer to Leonid Brezhnev or Raul Castro.
For conservatives he is the ultimate source of irrit-ainment, a figure that is constantly triggering animated outrage over his provocative social media posts and controversial schemes. And yet he is a genuinely disturbing political figure, spinning his own universe of deception out of London’s dystopian hellscape.
The mayor’s triumph at forcing through his Ulez expansion project brings home all this chilling force. It is the most egregious kind of vanity project. As an exercise in green gesture politics that is set to hit low-income residents with steep charges, and penalise communities that are already beleaguered by poor public transport, it smacks of bourgeois dogmatism.
Ulez also offers a masterclass in post-truth politicking. The Tories allege in vain that Khan made “false” and “dishonest” claims to the London Assembly over the scheme’s consultation. It ought to be a full-blown scandal that Khan’s office funded scientists who published studies on Ulez’s effectiveness and then sought to “discredit” those whose findings contradicted grandiose claims about its impact. Nonetheless, by loudly and relentlessly blaring about a “public health emergency”, Khan has reduced the complex truth to just another version of reality.
His obsession with Ulez is truly baffling. It is hardly an election winner, with polls revealing that London is largely split over the policy. Given that most cars in the capital are already Ulez compliant, Khan has essentially launched a pious eco-war against some of London’s most deprived areas for little electoral gain.
Yet in one sense, for a politician like him, it fits perfectly. Having spent a good part of tenure dabbling in BLM iconoclasm, calling for the removal of statues of slavers from public squares, he has moved into the more spiritually ambitious business of constructing a cult of the self.
As his recent book Breathless attests, Khan wants nothing less than to position himself as Britain’s most environmentally enlightened leader – a born again green “activist” who has made the journey from Land Rover driver to electric car evangelist.
Having decided to make the green revolution the centrepiece of his political brand, the mayor has had his work cut out to upstage his no less radical predecessors. After all, the red congestion charge paint splattered across London’s roads serves as a constant reminder of Comrade Livingstone’s reign of terror against motorists. And whatever name anyone else gives then, the capital’s rented wheels will always be known as Boris bikes.
Naturally, then, Khan has set a target for London to be net-zero carbon by 2030. The extensive green Ulez signage will serve as a constant symbolic reminder of his guiding role in pointing everyone towards green utopia.
We are talking about more than mere vainglory here. A canny Labour operator, Khan knows that the dark political arts of concealment and self-aggrandisement work best in symbiosis. His political strategy is grotesquely brilliant: hide the capital’s decay under a giant inflatable legacy puffed up by inane virtue-signalling.
This is made all the more vital by the fact that London is teetering on the brink of something frightening. Rough sleeping, for instance, has soared 20 per cent in the past year.
Since the pandemic, the capital has started to exude the same air of squalid menace as 1980s New York. As the streets become densely tattooed with graffiti, drug addicts lie slumped in broad daylight in the gutters. There are pockets of London that are starting to resemble San Francisco with its makeshift homeless mini-villages.
Increasingly, this Left-wing-held city also has something of the Soviet Union about it, with its flagrant squandering of public funds on the luxuries of officialdom and stupendous metro stations designed to elevate even the most dispirited ordinary worker’s soul. The vaunting, futurist Elizabeth Line stations gives Moscow’s gold mosaic subterranean palaces a run for their money.
Nowhere are London’s USSR vibes stronger than in Tower Hamlets, with its wide, filthy boulevards, rampant child poverty and resplendent town hall, freshly refurbished for £120 million.
Khan is a clever cookie. He knows that the more debate foams over his green agenda, the less people will ask why London is disintegrating under his watch. He knows that that the more he frames politics not as an exercise in problem solving, but a matter of “representing”, the less voters will interrogate whether one-party Labour rule in his city is actually harming the prospects of people of colour.
He knows that the more he reduces political discussion into market-segmented “appeals”, the less people are inclined to get a big picture view of the capital city’s pathologies. Take his “Say Maaate” campaign which challenges men to fight sexual harassment of women – by yes, you guessed it, disapprovingly saying: “Maaate”.
Most alarming of all, though, Khan knows that reality is open to manipulation. When he ludicrously insists that London is “safe”, that tackling violent crime is his “top priority” and that he’s “smashing” housing targets, he is not simply indulging in the most brazen kind of denialism, but constructing a hypernormal world in the late Soviet tradition.
The outspoken Russian anthropologist Alexei Yurchak famously coined “hypernormalisation” to describe a paradoxical dystopia – one in which leaders go to great lengths to pretend the society they preside over is as intrinsically benevolent as it is reassuringly stable – even though deep down everyone knows the system is so rotten and mutilated by falsehoods that it cannot sustainably go on.
The question is whether London can face hard reality or simply continue to be sucked into Khan’s dangerous post-truth version of it.
London has crashed and burned under Sadiq Khan’s mayoralty
He is a master at spinning reality to favour his legacy, while driving the city into a dystopian quagmire