Sadiq Khan thinks that I’m ‘thick’. That, at least, is what he told me during a fractious Mayor’s Question Time last week. The Mayor lashed out after I said he was ‘a bit slippy’. Khan then responded by saying: ‘Honestly chair, for someone who reads a lot, he ain’t half thick is he?’.
To be fair to the Mayor, he has since said sorry – and I’ve accepted his apology. But the exchange was a telling one: it reveals that Khan, who has been London’s Mayor since 2016, is rattled. And the backlash over Ulez (Ultra Low Emission Zone) is to blame.
I’ve been digging away on Ulez for months. Khan has done a fantastic political job coupling the Ulez expansion to perceived improvements in air quality. I get that, it seems a no-brainer. Get polluting cars off the road and, hey presto, clean air! The trouble is the evidence on this is not as clear cut as Khan might like people to think. But what is already apparent is that the financial burden imposed on people and small businesses in outer London is significant.
Khan, unfortunately, does not take kindly to be told as much: if you try to get into that kind of detail, the Mayor deploys avoidance tactics, his modus operandi being to start hurling insults. There will be accusations that you’re a climate denier, far right, in the pocket of big business, a bit ‘thick’. You get the drift.
The Mayor has become a master at deploying such tactics during the monthly meeting with the London Assembly. Usually, it works well. Each political group is given a proportion of time relative to its number. The Conservative group has nine of the twenty-five Assembly members and so we get around 54 minutes, or only around six minutes each.
Questions are sent to the Mayor’s office two weeks in advance, so on the day he’ll spend at least a third of your time reading out preprepared statements in answer. That leaves each Conservative member with roughly four minutes a month to scrutinise the Mayor on his £21billion budget. This is less than ideal.
In those few minutes, you have to try and follow up on whatever question you’ve asked. It could be about the Met being in special measures, poor performance on housing delivery, Transport for London in desperate need of reform, the London Fire Brigade in special measures or, the cause celebre, the expansion of Ulez to outer London.
As you sit, listening to the Mayor dodge your question and throw insults, you watch your time slip away. You plead with the chair to make Khan answer the question. The Mayor interrupts, explaining it’s Mayor’s Question Time and he can answer however he pleases. Another thirty seconds gone.
It’s clear what his plan is. Ever the political pugilist, it’s the verbal equivalent of the ‘rope-a-dope’. He wants you to waste your time complaining or returning insults. It takes all your energy to stay calm and use the time you have effectively. To get the answer your constituents deserve. If you push on regardless, staying polite but focused, he gets increasingly annoyed. When he can’t wind you up with verbal jabs he goes for the uppercut.
What the Mayor doesn’t appreciate is that we see through it. We see the desperation to avoid proper scrutiny and the obfuscation. We see a Mayor who is increasingly panicked. A Mayor who is wildly unpopular in London and even more so in the Labour party. A Mayor who could lose London for Labour.
So, when Khan called me ‘thick’, I just smiled and pushed on. Sticks and stones may break my bones, as they say, but names mean Khan’s in trouble.
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