Sadiq Khan: Being London's Mayor is still the best job

It's nearly two years since Sadiq first moved into this office, here at City Hall, taking over from Boris Johnson (who lined it with books and a bust of Pericles) and giving it his own stamp with his Muhammad Ali prints and underground posters in the Gay Pride colours.

When he first arrived he could be heard from a 20-mile radius singing that Mayor of London was “the best job in the world”. He was happy. He had ideas. He was going to change the world.

And instead the world changed. In those two years Sadiq has watched Brexit forced down the throats of a Remain-voting capital. He’s seen David Cameron — a “devolutionist” who gave him power — replaced by Theresa May, with whom it’s been “frustrating” and “an uphill battle” to get any power at all. He’s seen Trump elected and singled him out for his Islamic faith. “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is “no reason to be alarmed!”, tweeted Trump. And he’s seen a succession of atrocities: Westminster Bridge, London Bridge, Finsbury Park, Parsons Green and the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower.

Is it still the best job in the world? “It is still the best job in the world,” he says. “It’s largely been tough, though. We can’t pretend it’s not been a horrible year for our city.” Indeed. It’s a year in which he has felt moved to “incredible anger”, “distress” and “sadness” (he attended the funerals of PC Keith Palmer, Grenfell residents, victims of knife crime and the attack at Finsbury Park mosque).

Today a fair chunk of Khan’s time is devoted to securing the softest possible Brexit for Londoners. We’re here to talk about his strategy to get the 11 London Tory MPs who backed Remain to vote to stay in the customs union, or see their party punished at the ballot box in the local elections on May 3.

But he also talks up Labour’s softening position on Brexit, saying he’s “really encouraged by the national party’s movement over the previous months. I welcomed the announcement during conference season that nothing was off the table… I welcome the evolution of our policy to being as close as we possibly can be to being members of the single market.”

Still, one senses there is a tug of war going on between City Hall and the Labour leader’s office. Khan states that Jeremy Corbyn should be “fleet footed” on the customs union.

They last met one on one on February 2 at the launch of a policy in Barnet, but their offices speak “very regularly”, Khan says, adding “There’s a meeting in the diary which is imminent.”

Although evidently not close — Khan has never been to Corbyn’s house or even tasted his jam — they get on. “Yeah, yeah. And always have done,” he says. “[Corbyn] is funny, he’s actually — and it can’t be said for all my flock when I was his whip — a very, very nice man: thoroughly decent, good sense of humour. Mischievous.”

Mischievous? “He’s got a twinkle in his eye,” Khan observes. “He has a proper sense of humour.” They meet at events, at party conference, “on the way somewhere” and they grab “five minutes privately”.

Momentum, once seen as the enemies of the centre Left, he praises today: “I welcome the fact there are now many young people getting involved in politics, joining the Labour Party. I thrive on speaking to and engaging with new members, including those from Momentum.

“The key thing for me is to turn them into activists to help Labour candidates become councillors, MPs and ultimately to get a Labour government.”

Despite this, he says he doesn’t think Tory-held wards will be overturned in the local elections but that the Tories are claiming they will be to “manage expectations”.

“What the Tories are doing is brilliant tactically, but dishonest, which is to give the impression that they are going to lose all their councils: that they are going to lose Westminster — we’ve never held Westminster — that they’re going to lose Kensington & Chelsea — we’ve never had K&C — that they are going to lose Hillingdon, we last won that in 1994. Wandsworth: we last won that in 1974.

“So what they are trying to do is to manage expectations, so that when they don’t lose those seats they can say, ‘You see we got a good result in London.’”

With no apparent irony he then appears to employ this tactic himself, saying, “I’m working very hard to do well on May 3 — keep what we’ve got, make some gains. Context being in 2014 we had the best results we had in a generation. [But] we’re not going to win these boroughs across London, they are predicting we’re going to win.”

Khan talks at 400 mph, swallowing bits of words so that 80 per cent can sound like eight per cent. His words jab the air. He starts sentences like he is writing signposting notes in the margin of his conversation. He’ll say “Query:” before asking a question, or “Context:” before introducing background. Unless he’s learnt his communications director’s notes by heart, it’s a unique style.

In the course of our hour Khan skips through the topics: other metro mayors (“I don’t think them having more powers and me having less is bad. They should have as much powers as they can — we should too”); his fight to save the capital as a financial services centre in Europe (“I’ve been trying to make the government understand that for the country to prosper and thrive, London needs to prosper and thrive”); and French leader Emmanuel Macron (“a source of optimism and hope. And he’s not too tall as well, which is good”).

On Russia, in the wake of the Salisbury poisonings and the government’s response, he says: “You know we’ve got to be really careful here, and I say this in the context of having friends who are Russian. I also think its a sad indictment of the lack of action from the Government that London is seen as the money-laundering capital of the world.

“I think action should be taken to address issues around money laundering. Action should be taken to make it far more transparent when it comes to buying property, when it comes to getting involved in business. But we’ve got to be careful about not making sweeping generalisations about Russians.

“Many of whom are here lawfully, many of whom create jobs, invest in businesses and many of whom do lots of good as well.”

Elsewhere he’s been fighting online hate. Last week at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, he gave a speech in which he read out some of the appalling tweets he receives. “The crap the public liaison team here [has] to read through in relation to me, they never saw with the previous two mayors,” he says. “The tech companies — they have to raise their game. They have a responsibility to sort themselves out.”

He says he has written to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Susan Wojcicki of YouTube saying, “‘I think the things you do are generally a force for good, but honestly there are some concerns now and I think you need to take some action.’”

He bats away the suggestion he was disappointed that Theresa May didn’t defend him against Trump after the US President criticised his handling of the London Bridge terror attack during the election (although Corbyn’s supportive tweet was Labour’s single most shared communication in the campaign). “I didn’t give it a thought,” he says of May. “It didn’t bother me at all. It wasn’t on the top of my list of things to worry about: has she come to my defence?”

As someone who is always doing 20 things at once, Khan also reveals he’s signed off a raft of public drinking water fountains to counteract the tide of plastic bottle waste. Most will be new, but he’ll encourage the renovation of grade two-listed Victorian fountains where possible. There is also an intriguing project in which lampposts will be adapted for use as electric car plugs.

Khan occasionally gets rattled — for instance when asked if his role under May feels like more PR rather than anything with teeth, he says the question is deliberately “pejorative”. He comes back to this a few times and says he’s teasing me but I feel I’ve hit a nerve.

Certainly an inordinate amount of his time is taken up acquiescing to selfies (it’s written into his schedule). “On the Tube once one person starts it can get a bit kind of…” he trails off. But it’s not always easy. “I was at St George’s A&E with family recently and someone asked for a selfie and I said, ‘Do you know what — it’s not appropriate’.”

His daughters cottoned on to the fact that his profile meant that the best time to ask him for something was in public. He laughs: “My kids are smart.”

The only time Khan slows his machine-gun pace is to tell us about his new dog Luna, a six-month-old golden labrador who is an addition to his family after 16 years of badgering from his two daughters, Anisah and Ammarah. It’s an unlikely choice of breed — a bit Blue Peter, a bit home counties — but Khan describes himself as a fully converted “dog person”.

He’s diligent at dog-training, park-walking, poo picking-up and tells me that Luna is gorgeous and lovely five times and that he loves her twice. His mother kept cats, he says. Does he still like cats? “I love Luna,” he says again.

The story of Sadiq Khan is well known: he grew up on an estate in Tooting, the son of a Pakistani bus driver, (he and Conservative Sajid Javid take it in turns to tell the joke about waiting for a son of a Pakistani bus driver to come along and then two turn up at once). He is one of eight, seven boys, a former boxer, comedian and lawyer turned Labour politician, “a centre-Left progressive”.

Has he aged rapidly in the job? He laughs. “I’m knackered all the time but I was always knackered. The job is all-encompassing. It’s difficult to switch off.” Is he a workaholic, “Yeah I think so, but I love it.”

The only way to cope, he says, is by keeping fit and having “a healthy work-life balance”. He tries to run 10km a week and plays football on Sunday with friends, “who treat me normally and there are no airs and graces..”

Actually, he adds, he’s given up on high sugar and salty food, such as the doner kebab he used to have late in the evening. “From the Tube to my home there is a fish and chip shop, so I used to buy a bag of chips and walk home while eating them. That’s gone.”