“Growing up, I never dreamt I could be the Mayor of this great city,” says Sir Sadiq Khan as he settles into an office chair in City Hall.
“Every day I have a pinch-me moment, I feel like the boy with the golden ticket.”
For a man who has spent a decade governing one of the world’s most influential cities, through Brexit, Covid, terror attacks, Grenfell, transport strikes and culture wars, Sir Sadiq still talks about London with the enthusiasm of a tourist arriving at King’s Cross St Pancras.
“The joy of my job [is] to fulfil the London promise,” he says. “The London promise is very simple. You work hard, you get a helping hand and you can achieve anything. And my family has benefited from the London promise.”
Sir Sadiq’s outlook can be traced back to a childhood spent in south-west London as one of eight siblings growing up in a three-bedroom council house on the famous Henry Prince Estate.
That his Pakistani immigrant father was a bus driver was a fact tirelessly paraded during his 2016 mayoral election campaign. Before that, Sir Sadiq had been a human rights lawyer and MP for Tooting.
Ten years on from his first election victory, Sir Sadiq has become one of the defining political figures of the capital.
He has remained in office through six prime ministers — David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer — and may well be about to encounter his seventh.
Sir Sadiq dismisses his predecessor Johnson as “a Bollinger drinking buffoon” and an “absentee landlord”. Ken Livingstone, the city’s first mayor, was “very good” but “not perfect” and “stayed in longer than he should have done”.
“Every day I have a pinch-me moment. I have got the best job, not just in politics but in the world”
Sir Sadiq Khan
While the popularity of Labour’s current leader, Mr Starmer, has plunged (as recent local election results and subsequent looming leadership challenges from Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting show), Sir Sadiq, in the capital at least, remains steady.
Polls suggest his approval rating is actually among the highest in his party. A Survation survey for LabourList in February found he had an approval of +74, almost twice that of leadership contender Mr Burnham (+39). But he insists he does not have his Manchester counterpart’s ambition to get back into Parliament, or lead the country.
“I can with 100 per cent certainty say I will not be the next leader of the Labour Party or leader of the Labour Party ever. And I will not be prime minister. That is not something that interests me. We have got a good prime minister. He is doing a good job. It’s not for me. I have got the best job, not just in politics but in the world.”
Over his decade in charge, he’s made friends — and enemies. Famously, Donald Trump is distinctly not a fan. He branded Sir Sadiq a “stone-cold loser”, “incompetent, horrible, vicious and disgusting” and “among the worst mayors in the world”.
During his state visit in 2025, the President claimed that he had requested Khan to be removed from the state banquet guest list.
“On a personal level it’s not nice, right,” Sir Sadiq says. “It’s never nice, no matter how thick your skin is. I learnt as a child you never let people bully you. Whether he’s bigger than you or richer or more powerful.” And, Trump is simply “wrong about London”, he adds.
The President has made sweeping statements about the capital, including during his incendiary UN address last year when he spouted nonsense that Sir Sadiq was planning on introducing sharia law.
“London is the music capital of the world, the cultural capital, and the sports capital”
Sadiq Khan
He’s also brandished damaging statements about crime in the city.
“London is the music capital of the world; the cultural capital of the world; the sports capital of the world; the student capital of the world. It’s safer than Berlin, Brussels, Madrid, Barcelona, Toronto, every state in the US,” says Sir Sadiq.
“Since records began there has never been more Americans coming here to study, go on holiday or invest.”
The more serious concern for Sir Sadiq is not Trump himself, but what he sees as a broader online hostility towards London.
“I realised a few years ago that my experience of London, knocking on doors, speaking to Londoners on a daily basis versus the perception of London you see online doesn’t seem to match up,” he says.
“We’ve done a lot of work, spoken to lots of experts and what’s quite clear is big tech is responsible for a lot of good but some bad as well. There is now an outrage economy that’s built around what I call a division dividend.
“What that means is people and companies are profiting from poison and division and at the core of this is the way the algorithms work on social media. Whether it’s TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube or Snapchat, what it does is it monetises negative messages but also it provides a platform for people who have their own agenda.”
In April, Sir Sadiq teamed up with Met chief Sir Mark Rowley and sent a rallying cry to UK ambassadors based overseas, asking them to challenge the narratives about London being unsafe.
“If you’re somebody who is a nativist, who believes in monoethnicities, who believes that your religion is superior to others, who is a nationalist and then you see London, which is liberal, progressive, diverse, multicultural and objectively the greatest city in the world, that’s a problem for you.
“We are the antithesis of everything they stand for because we have proven their theories wrong. We are the antidote to the stuff they say,” he tells me now.
It is easy to dismiss the warnings as the defensive instincts of a politician accused for years of failing to control crime, but he insists Londoners know there is a gulf between the city experienced by the millions who live here and the version consumed online. Indeed, the truth — as with most things — is nuanced.
Last year London recorded its lowest murder rate per capita, a fact the Mayor has pushed to show the capital is among the safest major cities in the world.
But it is not a view shared by his political rivals who argue he has overseen police cuts and an increase in crimes, such as robbery and phone theft. Police in London recorded 14,860 selected serious offences involving a knife in the year ending September 2025. This was a fall of around 11 per cent since the year ending September 2024, when 16,690 offences were recorded.
But “theft from the person” offences appear to have tripled over the decade. In the year ending March 2016, the Metropolitan Police and City of London Police recorded 34,407 offences. Data for the year ending March 2025 shows 103,931 of these offences.
Susan Hall, leader of the City Hall Conservatives, said: “It is deeply regretful that the tenure of Sir Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London will be nothing more than a monument to failure: a forgotten, lost decade where opportunities to shape the future of our city forever were squandered. By all metrics, it is a decade of failure. Crime is up, positive outcomes are down, our economy is in shambles, and investment and delivery of infrastructure are left wanting.
“And all this is because he chose to focus on himself, rather than our city. Well, when the obituaries on this sorry episode of civic leadership are written, let the epitaph read: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ Anything else will have been window dressing for a useless Mayor.”
Sadiq Khan by numbers
56.8 the percentage of the vote he won in the 2016 mayoral election
40,000 number of new council homes Khan has pledged to build by 2030
15 the age at which he had an unsuccessful trial to play cricket for Surrey
11 years he was Labour MP for Tooting
7 the siblings he grew up with in Earlsfield
£170,282 his annual salary, making him the best paid politician in the UK
Sir Sadiq does acknowledge there have been some deeply controversial moments during his leadership. The decision to extend Ulez (Ultra Low Emission Zone) across outer London became the defining battle of Sir Sadiq’s second term.
It enraged motorists who labelled it a “cash grab”, fuelled anti-Labour campaigns and generated a torrent of abuse online. Even his own party pushed against it. Yet he ploughed ahead. Part of the reason is deeply personal.
Twelve years ago Sir Sadiq was diagnosed with adult-onset asthma at the age of 43 after training for the London Marathon on the capital’s polluted roads. “There are lots of things I have loved,” he says. “I have loved being the mayor that has cleaned up our air.
“I’m proud to have been the mayor that introduced universal free school meals. I am proud to have been the mayor that has led to our city being the safest city on the globe. I’m proud to have been the mayor that has brought in the [bus] hopper fare. I’m proud to have been the mayor that got the Elizabeth Line across the line. The Northern Line extension. The Superloop.”
His opponents argue that despite his optimism, London remains painfully unequal, with housing costs spiralling and public services under pressure. At the same time London sees thousands flock to Right and Left-wing demonstrations almost every weekend.
While Sir Sadiq insists London is “without a doubt” a better city than it was 10 years ago, growing racism across the capital is something that troubles him, particularly after recent attacks on Jewish-owned businesses, charities and synagogues. “Antisemitism is arguably one of the oldest forms of hatred known to mankind,” he says.
“I’ve got friends, colleagues and neighbours who have never been as frightened as they are now. And this heightened fear really took off after October 2023. But the past months have been extraordinary for Jewish Londoners.
“It is palpable. This fear that Jewish Londoners are feeling. And it is heartbreaking.”
He pauses. “There has also been an increase in racism generally. Not just anti-Muslim hatred, but hatred against black people and other minorities. Hatred against people who are from the LGBTQ+ community.
“Diversity for me is a strength, not a weakness. It makes us richer, not poorer”
Sadiq Khan
“Diversity for me is a strength, not a weakness. It makes us richer, not poorer. Stronger, not weaker. But we’ve got to work at it.”
Sir Sadiq, as London’s first Muslim mayor, has faced racist abuse during his time in office and it appears to be getting worse. Analysis by the Greater London Authority found Islamophobic posts aimed at him doubled in 2025.
After 10 years in the hot seat at City Hall, he must have some regrets, I say. He sidesteps and, as all politicians must, focuses on the issues he had little to no control over.
He mentions Brexit first: “I think the campaign to leave the European Union [is a regret]. I had just become Mayor. I think we could have won that campaign with different leadership of the Labour Party. We are paying the price for leaving the EU.”
Then he turns to lockdowns. “Could I have been more persuasive in getting Boris Johnson to have a lockdown sooner or later? I was quite clear that from the evidence I saw that this Covid pandemic could spread very quickly, so I was trying to persuade Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings that we should go into lockdown.
“And what’s heartbreaking is when you see the report from the inquiry, had we closed down our city a week earlier we could have saved thousands of lives. Could I have been more persuasive, could I have gone public sooner? That’s a life and death situation.”
It is one of the few moments in the conversation where the Mayor appears genuinely burdened.
Otherwise, Sir Sadiq projects the disciplined optimism of a man who long ago accepted that criticism is built into the job. Outside politics, he says, his life appears to be fairly vice-free.
His guilty pleasure? “Prawn cocktail crisps.” To relax, he has returned to running. “I play tennis, squash, football, go to gigs, I walk my dog Luna.”
Despite governing a city with seven Premier League clubs, Sir Sadiq remains a devoted Liverpool supporter. And then there is the question hanging over every long-serving mayor: does he go again?
Rumours already swirl around potential successors. Dawn Butler, the Labour MP for Brent East and a friend and ally of Sir Sadiq’s, this week had to deny reports she was preparing a mayoral campaign. Sir Sadiq, predictably, refuses to give much away. “I have had three big jobs in my life,” he says.
“I was a lawyer for 11 years and I thoroughly enjoyed being a lawyer. There was nothing I would have given that up for but being the MP for Tooting, the area I was born and raised in. And I loved being an MP and minister and there was nothing I would have given that up for but being the mayor of this city that I love.
“Maybe Liverpool will get in touch with me and say do you want to take over the [football] club as manager? There are one or two dream jobs I would give up this job to do but let’s wait and see if they contact me.”
