I’m no expert, but from what I can see, Sadiq Khan’s visit to the Capel Manor College of Further Education in Enfield, north London, is going pretty well. It’s a rather lovely place – an old manor house with beautifully planted gardens – and so far, he’s cracked jokes with the sole man in a floristry class full of women and is successfully doing all those things politicians are supposed to do: asking questions, looking engaged, not falling flat on his face. In fact, I’d say he’s mastered advanced level politicianese: he banters, he maintains eye contact and he has gamely hopped into a mechanical cherry picker with a group of would-be tree surgeons.
He’s being jerkily hoisted into the upper reaches of a pine tree when I casually ask the deputy director, Malcolm Goodwin, if Boris Johnson has ever visited. “Oh he was absolutely brilliant!” he says. “He was so engaged. I mean he came in like a whirlwind. Do you know the story? Well, we’d just had a llama born a couple of days earlier and we ended up calling her Borisa. He just made such an impact on the students.”
Boris, the great prankster, had actually pretended to enrol as a student turning up on the first day of term, Steve Dowbiggin, the principal, says, taking up the story. “And then he did about 16,000 selfies. It was very clever. The social media bandwidth he got from that… ” And he shakes his head in disbelieving admiration.
There’s a slightly tragicomic element to this, with just a hint of The Thick of It, because at this moment, Khan is 50ft in the air, his voice drowned out by the sound of a generator, and not 5ft away is a team of three spin doctors from Labour HQ primed to spring into action to prevent precisely this sort of unhelpful metaphor.
If it was Boris in the cherry picker, of course, the mechanism would fail and he’d make the front page of the London Evening Standard, whereas Khan is eventually returned to earth without incident and only looks slightly crushed when I tell him about Boris’s llama. Who wants to be the politician who doesn’t get a llama named after him? Even Ken Livingstone had his newts.
But then, I come to think that the biggest obstacle for Khan might simply be that he’s life-sized, rather than Boris-sized. He’s not that big, flamboyant character we’ve come to associate with the job.
“Oh, you’re very kind to him,” Khan says when I point this out to him later. “My biggest criticism of Boris Johnson – and I like him by the way, I really do like him – is he’s giving the impression that mayors can’t do much. That the role of the mayor of London is to be entertaining and Boris Johnson is very entertaining. But there’s two schools of thought: either a mayor can’t do much so you can’t fix housing crises and you let the developers do what they like.” Or: “They can do stuff.” He believes “mayors can do a huge amount”.
The big question, however, is that if we are so primed for an old Etonian Tory with a full head of blond hair, what’s to stop Zac Goldsmith slipping seamlessly into the space vacated by Boris? Can Khan, the son of a bus driver who grew up in Tooting in deepest south London, rewrite the script? He was the surprise winner of the Labour party’s September election to select a candidate. He came from behind to beat the Blairite favourite, Tessa Jowell. But can he perform the same trick on London in the elections next May? Will we understand who he is and what he stands for to such a degree that he’s just “Sadiq”? As Boris was Boris and Ken was Ken.
That he’s the son of a bus driver is the one fact I managed to retain about him after catching him on Have I Got News for You a week earlier. By the end of it, I discovered he was the son of a bus driver with a sense of humour. But then he needs one. As presenter Sue Perkins pointed out, he was one of the MPs who put Jeremy Corbyn on the leadership ballot but then didn’t vote for him.
“I was quite clear that I was going to nominate Jeremy but I wasn’t going to vote for him,” he says. The plan was to encourage debate within the party. But it does rather give the impression that you’re trying to be both pro-Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Jeremy Corbyn simultaneously, I say. “The point is I have to be my own person. For people to say, as you’re implying ‘You were selected on the coat-tails of Jeremy Corbyn so you should be in thrall to him.’ That’s actually incorrect.”
But then, Khan’s greatest strength, I come to think, as well as perhaps his greatest weakness, is his ability to ride two horses at once. He spins this differently, of course. It’s his facility for finding compromises, he says, a fact that he points out is due in no small part to growing up in a big family. He’s one of eight siblings, seven of whom are boys. Where are you in the pecking order, I ask him, in the car on the way to Enfield.
“I’m bang in the middle. So I’ve got three older brothers, three younger brothers, and a sister.”
My God, I say, no wonder you had to make your mark elsewhere. “You have to talk fast and you have to eat quickly,” he says. And he does. I don’t get to see him eat – since Miliband’s moment with the bacon sandwich it’s unlikely we’ll ever get to see a politician eat again – but the words pour out of him. “It was all about the art of negotiation. I’m not the strongest or the tallest or the biggest. It was negotiation and charm.” Later, I met his youngest brother, Pop, who tells me that Sadiq’s speciality was his “Jedi mind tricks”. What did that involve?
“It would be him saying, ‘Do you fancy a chocolate?’ And you’d say yes. And he’d say ‘When you go to the shop, get us a Toffee Crisp then.’”
In fact, Khan’s family, the story of where he is from, “the London story”, as he calls it – is by far the most compelling thing about him. He has the common touch, he can talk to people, but he’s also got all those terrible modern politician traits: boring you into submission, cranking out
rehearsed answers, not owning his mistakes. At one point, he actually says “I have a big tent”, which sounds like Tony Blair by way of Private Eye.
But what he has, what no one can take away from him, is his story. He is the thing of which he speaks. He is London, or the London that we surely want, the place where anybody can be anything. The city made him. And it’s the key to everything.
It’s not quite Midnight’s Children, the Salman Rushdie novel about the generation born on the stroke of midnight as India and Pakistan split in 1947, but there’s a mythic quality to the Khan family story. As children his parents lived through the chaos of partition when their families moved first from India to Pakistan and then, in their 20s, emigrated to Britain.
They already had three children, all born in Pakistan. But Sadiq, the man who would be mayor, was born in London. It’s a novelistic stroke of destiny that he was born here in the city that he wants to lead. (The way I imagine being mayor of London, I tell him, is that it’s a bit like being in Alan Sugar’s helicopter with the theme tune of The Apprentice blasting out around you looking down on your city. “Our city,” he corrects me.) He is about as close as you can get to a modern-day Dick Whittington and there is something amazing about how far he has come in a single generation. David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham who stood against Khan, tells me that “I can honestly say that what he has achieved in his life so far, coming from where he has, is staggering. He is from a genuinely immigrant, working-class place and London electing its first Muslim mayor would be an extraordinary global story and a huge tribute to the spirit of multicultural London.
“But then he has worked really, really hard. Phenomenally hard. I honestly wonder when he sleeps. And he gets into the detail. He really, really puts the effort in and does not cut corners. He shouldn’t be underestimated.”
What’s marked him out, another insider tells me, is the way he has mastered the machinery of the Labour party. “He’s very skilfully figured out all the elements. He understands Labour HQ and how that works. He got the unions on board. He got the party’s elder statesmen to endorse him.”
And though he benefited from the Corbyn surge, Khan points out that he also helped it. He didn’t concentrate just on existing members of the party, he went out and registered new voters. “I spent three months – I took one day off – going to bus garages, shopping centres, factories, synagogues. Before Corbynmania happened, we were getting people signed up. That’s what makes it exciting. You’re meeting young people who think we’re all the same. We’re all corrupt. We’re all posh. We all went to Oxbridge. We all speak funny. When they meet you and hear your story, there are people who say, ‘If you can do it, then I should try and help you.’ That’s what is exciting.”
It is what I come to think of as his “total warfare” approach. Khan doesn’t do anything by halves. I ask a friend of mine, on the right of the party, who she voted for, though I know it will be Tessa Jowell, and she surprises me by telling it was Khan. “He turned up on my doorstep,” she says. “None of the other candidates did that. And I was just impressed, his family background, the fact that he’d had a proper job.” And then she was dogged by phone calls from his team. “It was quite annoying but I figured he must be able to inspire people to work for him.”
And, most importantly, he has a track record of winning. A senior Labour MP points out to me that he’s always been an underdog. And he’s always won.
“He has the ability to come out fighting. So if you look at it, he supported Ed Miliband for the leadership when the favourite was David. He was the one who organised his campaign and he won. And this time around, he was the head of Labour’s campaign in London. And London was the only place where Labour actually increased the vote. And he did the same thing with the mayoral candidacy. He was far from the favourite and yet he won. He has this amazing ability to organise and he throws everything at it.”
But then, it’s not hard to find reasons for this in his background. He’s never been handed anything on a silver platter. Amol Rajan, the editor of the Independent, who also grew up in Tooting, points out that Khan didn’t just go to a bog standard comprehensive in Tooting: he went to what was then the worst comprehensive in Tooting. Among parents it was “the dreaded second choice: Ernest Bevin school… the staple of local news reports about drugs, gangs and local hoodlums.”
And if you want to put to bed some of the myths about benefit-seeking scroungers flooding here from abroad, Khan’s family are as good as any place to look. From a council estate in south London, they managed to work hard enough to buy their own home and send all eight children to university.
The day before I’m due to meet Khan, his communications director – a role more popularly known as a “spin doctor” – the highly experienced ex-political editor Paddy Hennessy, rings me to tell me that Khan is going to tell me about his mother. Great, I think. A hot scoop. I’ve read about this. It’s never happened to me but dropping an exclusive in the lap of favoured journalists is the bread and butter of political reporting. Unfortunately, the exclusive seems to be that he has a mother.
I rather suspect that they’ve decided that since I’m a lady journalist, they’ll try and focus on lady-friendly issues and tailor the answers toward a key demographic of undecided females (according to the polls, 51% of women as opposed to 36% of men have yet to make up their minds). But then, nothing happens by chance in modern politics. We’re in Enfield because the outer suburbs are a key target and Paddy is there in the room with us with his own Dictaphone making his own recording of the interview – something that’s only happened to me once before – and there’s a terrible moment when Khan attempts to drop an article I wrote casually into conversation. (It’s the one article I’ve written that cites him by name, as I’m sure a quick Google search by a helpful aide would have uncovered.)
Later, he’ll tell me about the “control freakery” of New Labour, the way that all debate was stifled within the party during the years it was in power, but the dark art of political messaging is one of the reasons that people responded so enthusiastically to the unspun Corbyn. And there’s more than a sniff of focus groups coming off some of his policies. But then one well-placed political insider tells me the battle is not going to be “Sadiq versus Zac. It’s going to be Sadiq versus Lynton Crosby” – the rather brilliant Australian electoral strategist, the so-called “Wizard of Oz” who helped Boris Johnson to victory, masterminded the Conservative general election campaign this year, and who has been hired to advise the Goldsmith campaign.
And, in fairness, I enjoy hearing about his mother. “She had to quit school when she was 15. She had no qualifications. She went to a foreign country, knowing nobody. We had no relations here so it was pretty tough on her.” Sometimes even Khan, it seems, has trouble keeping track of his siblings. “She raised seven kids in a council estate with three bedrooms,” he says. “Eight kids, sorry, eight kids including me, in a three-bedroom council flat. At the same time, she was doing piecework. Do you know what piecework is? A bloke comes around with 50 dresses, you get 25p a dress. You saw her at the machine all the time just sewing the dresses. She did the piecework in the corner, cooked and fed the family, all of us together, all while my dad was out working all the hours God sends you, overtime and stuff.”
All the siblings still live in spitting distance of each other, he says, and she’s the matriarch. “We call her Don Corleone.”
What? There’s a horse’s head under your pillow if you don’t toe the line?
“She’s not scared to raise her voice. It doesn’t matter who you are. You could have made the most rocking speech in parliament and you go to your mum’s house and she’ll tear you up for not having visited her for a week or not putting the rubbish out or whatever.”
Housing is the No 1 priority for Khan’s campaign. But then, I’ve also heard Zac Goldsmith say it’s the No 1 priority for his campaign too. It’s still early days, but they’re neck and neck at the moment. The latest YouGov poll has Goldsmith on 28%, Khan on 29%. But then when it comes to the headlines, they have a habit of saying similar things. Yes, to pedestrianising Oxford Street. Yes to Crossrail 2. No to Heathrow’s third runway. But housing is the big issue. The social mobility that Khan’s family enjoyed turned out to be a brief postwar blip. And, for millions of people, a whole generation, the capital isn’t the place where you can build a career, a life, a family. It’s a money trap from which there’s no escape.
It’s Sunday morning and I go to meet Khan in the boxing club in Earlsfield, south London, that he went to as a boy. It’s still a family affair. There’s Pop, his younger brother, who’s a coach, and his nephew, David, another coach, who are both there helping with the training of a roomful of adolescent boys. His oldest brother runs the place on a voluntary basis – he has his own business – though he’s not around and there’s another nephew in photos on the wall who fights competitively.
They all volunteer their time. Pop – it’s a nickname – designs medical devices for the NHS and tells me that his first experience of community work was when Sadiq became a councillor. “We all had Saturday jobs but it wasn’t like that because you don’t get paid. He was doing it for the sake of doing it. It was my first experience of people volunteering, but now we all do it.”
The council estate they grew up on is just around the corner and Khan points out the No 44 bus that runs up and down the road outside; that was his dad’s old route. He died a few years back, and Earlsfield and nearby Tooting where the family moved to are, like most places in London, in the throes of gentrification. “In those days, the No 44 bus driver could live on the council estate with subsidised rent and the kids would go to the local schools. Nowadays, I bet the 44 bus driver doesn’t even live in London. He probably commutes in and lives in private rented accommodation. It’s a very different world, London, now.”
It’s taken a decade for housing to make its way up the political agenda and all politicians have learned to say vaguely the right things about it, even if almost nothing has been done about it, and while I’m not convinced by all of Khan’s housing policies – he goes on about a London-wide, not-for-profit letting agency without explaining why landlords would sign up for it rather than, say, with Foxtons – but I am convinced that he understands the issues.
He recognises his incredible good fortune. And he’s surrounded by family members who had the bad luck to be born just a bit too late. He has two daughters, Anisah, 16, and Ammarah, 14 – he and his wife, Saadiya , who, like him, is a human rights lawyer, were teenage sweethearts – but he has nieces and nephews who are older, nearly all of whom are still living at home.
“My nephew, who’s downstairs, lives with his mum and dad in Streatham. He’s 32. My niece who got married two years ago and is expecting her first child, she lives with her mum and dad. My niece who’s a junior doctor, as is her husband, they’re renting in Eltham. They’d love to buy but they can’t. They can’t get a deposit.
“My other niece who’s married lives with her in-laws. And, not to be horrible, they’re all graduates, they’ve all got good jobs. My mum is blessed because she has eight children living literally a stone’s throw from her. But there’s no chance the grandchildren will be able to stay in the area. They’re moving further and further away.”
The most alarming new demographic in London is the number of children living in poverty in privately rented homes, a quarter of a million of them, rising to an estimated million in 10 years. They’ll be forced to move five, six, maybe more times in their childhoods, to move schools, and, as a leading academic on inequality tells me before my interview with Khan, they’re the ones who need help most. And, actually, some of the suggestions he offers are ones that Khan is pursuing: three-year tenancies, and, most crucially, trying to find a means to control rents.
“I want the government to give me the same powers that Berlin has got, that other places around the world have, for rent control,” says Khan. But how are you actually going to do that? “Lobbying the government. If the government is giving power to Scotland and Wales and Manchester, they should be giving powers to London as well.” If it’d actually happen, though, is another thing entirely.
He’s working out on a punch bag when I arrive at the boxing club, though he’s honest enough to say it’s because his brothers would have taken the piss out of him if he’d turned up and just used the place as a location for the interview. Still, he knows how to throw a punch. What’s boxing taught him in terms of how to approach an opponent?
He launches into a disquisition on how he also played football and cricket and the things children learn being a team player that’s so platitudinous and dull that I interrupt him. Isn’t boxing about sizing up your opponent and figuring out their weak spots?
He blusters a bit but eventually, he says: “Boxing is all about defence. You make sure your face is covered. Some people say that if Crosby is involved, there’ll be lots of attacks on me. The obvious boxing metaphor is to make sure you can defend yourself. When are they going to come after me?” So, when are they going to come after you? “I don’t know.”
But I suspect he has some ideas. A poll conducted on behalf of the radio station LBC found that a third of Londoners were “uncomfortable” with the idea of a Muslim man as mayor. What did you make of that? “I’ve spoken to LBC about it. It was a very leading question. It wasn’t framed the way the way polling experts say it should have been. Even LBC accept that now.”
What did you think when you saw it? “There were four members of my campaign team that are of Islamic faith. Two of them were in tears when they saw that. It was thoroughly demoralising for lots of people. It was very upsetting. I’ve realised that there are people who, through no fault of their own, have never met a Muslim or broken bread with a Muslim and some of them prejudge. The more they meet us or mix with us, they realise that we are very similar to them and there’s nothing to be scared of.”
It is depressing. Khan tells me he supports Liverpool FC because his brothers got chased out of Chelsea by the National Front, “so my experience of watching football was watching on TV”. And there’s a rumour that a newspaper has dispatched a team to Pakistan to try and dig up something to link his family to terrorism and his past as a human rights lawyer is sure to be raked over – he represented a number of people who were accused of terror offences. In 2008, he was bugged while visiting a constituent in prison – a constituent, Babar Ahmad, who was later convicted of extremist crimes.
It’s no wonder Khan’s learned to keep his fists close to his face. Goldsmith’s story lacks the epic qualities of his own (is born, goes to Eton, inherits £300m, gets a job editing a magazine his uncle owns, stands for parliament) and Khan makes the most of the fact that he was a successful businessman before he became an MP. It was while studying law in Guildford, he says, that he met “the Oxbridge lot”. What did you make of them? “It made me realise I was as clever as them.” Was that a sort of epiphany for you?
“I was never worried about my own abilities,” he says. I can believe this. But then he has the self-made man’s confidence. He could have joined “one of the magic circle firms” – a big City law firm – but instead he joined Christian Fisher, which specialised in human rights. There he was mentored by one of the partners, Louise Christian, and when the other partner, Mike Fisher, retired, he became a partner and the company was renamed Christian Khan.
But when he was selected as a parliamentary candidate for Tooting, he walked away. And it’s here that the story gets confusing. The firm had 50 employees and was worth several million pounds, but he left with nothing. Christian felt let down, he admits. She’d been his mentor and he just walked away. And Khan felt he should have had some of the firm’s value. His lawyer told him to litigate. He refused and the net result was that he walked away with nothing.
“Friends have said it was a foolish thing to do,” he admits. “But I didn’t want to be a politician or a candidate where I’m not all in.”
It’s not to be underestimated, though, walking away from several million pounds. And I talk him through it several times, trying to work out the chronology of the events. He thought he’d leave with some sort of payout, he admits, but in the end, it was his choice not to pursue it. “It’s never been about the money,” he says. And, I think, you have to believe him. He could be a rich man if he wanted to be.
For six months, he had no salary and by the time he was elected, he’d run through his savings. And then he started all over again, at the bottom, as a backbench MP. He was, he still is, hungry. You can taste it. And it shows in the shrewdness of his moves so far – after he helped Miliband campaign, he was handed the shadow brief for London which gave him a huge advantage in the mayoral selection – and he’s never been afraid to change his mind. Or flip-flop, as I put it, most spectacularly on the subject of Heathrow’s third runway, which he supported as transport minister, but then turned against this year.
“There’s an argument for increased flight capacity. I’ve accepted the argument. My point is, when there’s an alternative which is less of a problem – the air quality in Surrey and Sussex is not as bad as in London, the noise problem isn’t as bad.”
And there are also fewer people who can vote for you there, I point out.
He claims that he changed his mind because the facts changed and illness caused by air pollution is now a top priority. But I email Professor Frank Kelly, head of the environmental research group at King’s College, London, who’s a leading authority on the subject, and he says that while Gatwick is a better option than Heathrow, it’s also “not the most pressing issue” when it comes to cleaning up London’s air. Diesel buses and taxis are a bigger problem.
I suspect that the thing with Khan is that he just wants to win. And he wants to win because he believes that he will be better than the other guy. That he can make a difference. That he understands London in a way that Zac Goldsmith can’t.
Rocky was the film he remembers watching as a child. Seven brothers, all into boxing: of course they loved the story of Rocky Balboa, the kid from nowhere. The scrappy underdog. What’s he like as a boxer, I ask his cousin David. We’re all standing by the entrance to the gym and Sadiq looks interested – or maybe worried? – about the answer.
“He’s all right for the first minute,” says David. “But there’s two minutes in the boxing round.”
“He’s a little bit aggressive,” says Pop, his brother. “We just need to control that. We just need to work on the stamina.”
I don’t know if the metaphor holds but there’s still six months to go before the big fight. We’re not even in round one of the bus driver’s son versus the billionaire’s son. Tooting versus Richmond. Sadiq versus Zac.
