It’s something every Londoner now does on instinct: I call it the “Sadiq Khan flinch”. First, the vague glimpse of an approaching e-bike in your peripheral vision. Then, the dull whizzing of the wheels. Next, a looming shadow. You blink and an outstretched, finger-gloved hand floats menacingly into sight. So you duck, crouch and pull that iPhone tight to your body. Too slow? It’s gone. A ski-masked thug has access to your bank account, your work email, your digital wallet. Before you know it, you’ve been robbed of the nuclear codes to modern life.
Londoners have lived under the reign of Khan for nine years now. In less than a decade, on his watch, the city has descended from what was once one of the world’s safest large metropolises into a global haven for gangsterism and low-level crime.
You’d better have the reflexes necessary to walk the streets in Khan’s London, especially in the centre, especially at night. Overall, violent crime has soared by 30 per cent during his tenure. Pickpocketing and phone snatching increased by 38 per cent in last year’s figures. From 2022 to 2023, offences on the Tube rose by 56 per cent. A rape offence is reported every hour. The Centre for Social Justice says almost half of women in London have been attacked or threatened with violence in the past five years. Even an innocent trip to the park isn’t without peril. Crimes recorded by the Royal Parks have nearly doubled in two years.
Khan pretended not to understand the question when Tory rival Susan Hall repeatedly tried to get an answer on whether London has a problem with grooming gangs
Too often, he’s proven himself allergic to responsibility — pretending not to understand the question when Tory rival Susan Hall repeatedly tried to get an answer on whether London has a problem with grooming gangs.
Two of my staff recently had their phones pinched out of their hands. Both boast credentials as investigative journalists. They furnished the Met with the precise details. They tracked those responsible — one even advised the cops of the suspect’s address, locating the exact premises. The reply? “We are not able to go in without a warrant.”
The classic theory of urban crime holds that visible signifiers of low-level decay or negligence — such as broken windows — are linked to a deterioration in physical safety. London now plays host to unsightly tent cities and huge piles of rubbish. Recently, the innovative campaign group Looking for Growth took it upon themselves to scrub away ugly graffiti blighting Central line trains. The response? TfL Commissioner Andy Lord — whose remuneration amounted to a staggering £639,164 last year — suggested they could have sprayed it on by themselves, just to make a deliberate stunt out of cleaning.
London’s diminished civic environment and public space is a consequence of exactly this kind of high-handed administration. The chronically absent Mayor, safe in his third term, exudes a basic contempt for ordinary Londoners. It’s all your fault: your fault for waving your phone about while wearing headphones. Your fault for trying to do a good deed on the Tube. Your fault for taking the occasional trip by car and accidentally ramming into an LTN flower box dumped in the middle of the road. It’s not the fault of the man paid £160,000 to take responsibility for the city where daily life should be possible without the need to take up hostile environment training fit for the SAS.
Petty crime is a gateway to and eventually enables rampant violence. One in 20 people now fare dodge on the Tube — a point recently exposed compellingly online by shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick. This crime costs TfL £130m a year. Meanwhile, TfL spends millions trying to clean up graffiti — yet fails so badly that outrage at the daubings has now become a highly galvanised online campaign.
Khan, along with his fashionable friends — and they’re always fashionable — at times appears to fetishise an atmosphere of grime and social deterioration, as if it were an edgy unique selling point. Perhaps it works over cocktails at Cannes, where he was in March, or on other glamorous jaunts. But when I travel — at dinner in Dubai, or even in New York — interlocutors now look concerned for Londoners’ welfare. “I’ve stopped coming,” they say, fearful of taking their Rolex out of the hotel safety deposit box. That’s when you feel the reflex of the “Khan cringe”, less terrifying, at least, than the flinch.
The Mayor of London should be top of the premier league of global mayors; instead, Khan is a global embarrassment
Just a few months back the Mayor backed a tourist tax. A tourist tax? Who could walk through the West End on a Friday evening and possibly conclude London needs a tourist tax? On Khan’s watch there has been an almost 20 per cent decrease in night-time economy businesses from 2020 to 2024. Companies floating in London raised just $1bn (£790m) last year — nine per cent less than the year before. That’s a whopping $40bn behind the US — below Malaysia, Poland and Oman. The Mayor of London should be top of the premier league of global mayors; instead, Khan is a global embarrassment.
Every Londoner — and crucially, every visitor — should enjoy the basic right to pass through the city without fear. It’s time Khan made clear he will not stand again for a fourth term.
He’s said to have told friends he wants to pack it in, and a public announcement should follow, so London can start openly debating its future sooner rather than later. When the Standard breaks that news, it’ll be a notification many will welcome — if they can pull off the flinch, that is, and the phone’s still in their hand.
Ross Kempsell is a Conservative Peer
