The London mayor has just faced a terror attack on his watch for the first time. He argues it shouldn’t necessarily change security plans, but does demand serious action on air pollution – and on Labour’s ongoing troubles

Every political leader’s honeymoon period must eventually make way for events that will define their time in office, and when we meet in his City Hall office, Sadiq Khan has the air of a man who hasn’t had an awful lot of sleep. Famously dapper, today he looks careworn; news has just broken that the woman who fell from Westminster bridge during the terror attack two weeks ago has lost her life. The mayor is ashen.

Khan had always said a terror attack in the capital was a case of not if but when, and takes some comfort from the “great thing that all the practice and planning and preparation paid off, everyone worked really well, all the work we’d done in advance worked”. It has, nonetheless, “been horrible”. The debate about what should or shouldn’t now be done to enhance security was still raging this week when he launched the boldest policy initiative of his mayoralty to date – a radical bid to tackle air pollution. From 2019 it will cost £24 a day to drive a diesel car in central London, and the charging zone will expand dramatically two years later. Some business leaders have accused him of going too far, some environmentalists complained he’s been too timid, and while all that was going on, his own party unfathomably revived the circus involving his Labour predecessor and antisemitism.

Would Khan agree, I ask, that this was the fortnight when his mayoralty came of age? “You don’t think about that. The question is: what shall we do? After [the attacks on] 22 March, we needed to show ourselves and the world that we weren’t going to allow this to affect us.” The Trafalgar Square vigil he organised the day after the attack, he is keen to make clear, “was not to show that I’m Mr London. It was to give London a focal point to show that we are united.”

Some believe the best response to the attack is to further upgrade security measures in the capital, but he looks unenthusiastic. “You need to be very careful about that. We evolve all the time, thinking how could the bad guys find new ways to harm us, and we act accordingly.” Following the Nice lorry attack last summer, for example, adaptations were made to the Notting Hill carnival plans. But Khan doesn’t want to see any kneejerk revision of security precautions. “Going back to work on the bus and the tube the next day was the typically London thing to do.”

According to Katie Hopkins and Nigel Farage, the claim that London was carrying on as normal was a propaganda lie, and the capital was, in truth, terrified. Khan rolls his eyes. “Well, I’m not sure what London they go to. We’re savvy, we’re vigilant, we’re never complacent – but I don’t know about being scared. Mr Farage and Ms Hopkins should know their history a bit better. Maybe they weren’t raised in London like I was. We’ve had terrorism for decades, and I’m not saying that makes us blasé, but it makes us resilient.”

Nor does he endorse the demands for digital platforms such as WhatsApp – which hosted a message from the attacker, Khalid Masood, moments before he mowed down pedestrians on Westminster Bridge – to revise their encryption policies. “Let’s just look at the facts – I’m old-fashioned like that. To suggest that, had the security services and police had access to encrypted messages, they could have prevented this attack, is simply not true. Masood wasn’t under surveillance. We’ve got to be a bit careful thinking about this. If you allow the security services and the police a back door into encrypted messages, why couldn’t somebody else get access too? So we’ve got to be careful.”

He does wish Masood had survived, so that we could learn more. “We could learn what the hell was going on there, what was his path to radicalisation. And also, he didn’t face his day in court. The families and all of us didn’t get justice.” On a less pragmatic and more primitive level, was Khan glad the gunshot wounds took Masood’s life? “Of course. The human reaction, the visceral reaction, of course. But it could be argued that dying instantly is the easy way out. And we could have learned stuff.”

Some have suggested that one thing we have learned from the attack is how ineffectual the government’s Prevent strategy has been at combatting radicalisation. I ask Khan if he would say Prevent was working and keeping us safe, and he gives an impatient shake of the head. “No. It needs to be adapted and changed and improved vastly. There is a need for a policy, but as a brand, Prevent is toxic. Many people whose help [we] need won’t touch it with a bargepole. It’s seen by some communities as spying and snooping. Prevent is not a silver bullet.”

I think one of the reasons people like Khan is his appealing mix of statesmanlike calm and unmediated, from-the-hip candour. When I ask if the prime minister is doing enough to tackle air pollution, he says: “No. No. It’s a scandal. I voted for a ban on smoking in public places, and when I saw the evidence that people knew about smoking 60 years ago, it beggared belief that nothing happened until then. I don’t want, in 60 years time, our grandchildren to be saying, ‘What the fuck was Sadiq doing, what was Theresa May doing, what were our politicians doing 60 years ago when they knew the air was toxic in London and they knew the causes were partially diesel?’”

More than 9,000 Londoners, he goes on urgently, died early last year because of poor-quality air. “I don’t think people realise what a crisis we’re at. It’s a public health emergency. There are children in parts of London whose lungs are 10% smaller than they should be. That is the crisis we’re facing, and no one is talking about it. I’m doing all that I can.”



Khan believes the new toxicity charge will deter 40% of the drivers who face it, and predicts that the nitrogen dioxide in London’s air will be halved by 2020. “I’m doing all that I can. Best-case scenario, 50% of the causes is transport. And I can help there. But the other half is beyond my control, and so I’m lobbying the government to do a number of things: to pass a new clean air act, and to support those families who bought diesel cars with a national scrappage scheme.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sadiq Khan at a service of remembrance at Westminster Abbey in London this week. Photograph: Eddie Mulholland/AFP/Getty Images

I’m one of many Londoners who bought a diesel car because the previous Labour government, on the advice of car manufacturers, assured us this was the environmentally-friendly choice. Now that we know that wasn’t true, the debate about what to do has been framed between making drivers like me pay a charge to drive my car in London, and making taxpayers foot the bill by funding a national scrappage scheme. Why aren’t the car manufacturers who built the cars, and lied to us about their emissions, being made to pay the price?

“Good question. People like you were sold a pup when you were told by the experts and politicians to move away from petrol to diesel. So, not unreasonably, you did.” The US government has required Volkswagen, the worst emission cheat offender, to pay £12bn in compensation, whereas our government has managed to extract just £1.1m. “The deal our government got is pitiful. Pitiful. Why isn’t the government taking them to court, why isn’t the government being aggressive, why isn’t the government doing what the Americans have done and demanding billions rather than a paltry sum. Why are you so scared to stand up to VW? So you’re right to ask why the manufacturers aren’t doing more. They should be. The government should be our advocate, saying we’re outraged.”

According to the Greater London Authority, the economic cost to the capital of poor air quality is £3.7bn a year. Khan himself has been diagnosed with asthma; does he put his own respiratory health problems down to the pollution? “Well, I’ve been pretty healthy and fit all my life, and two years ago I was told I have asthma. I use my pump in the morning when I wake up, before I do exercise, and last thing at night. The experts have told me that 40% of adult-onset asthma is caused by pollution.”

His personal polling, however, could not be in ruder health. Among Londoners, Khan is more popular than any other politician; even half the capital’s Tories think he’s doing a good job, as do a majority of its young, old, rich, poor, central and suburban. Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity rating, by contrast, is minus 35, even among Londoners who voted Labour in 2015. Even Ukip leader Paul Nuttal is currently polling higher than Khan’s party leader. Why does he think that is? He pauses uneasily, searching for an answer. “I don’t know. But I don’t think anybody, even Jeremy Corbyn’s team, would say they are the finished product yet. There’s a lot of improvement that needs to take place.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Khan and Jeremy Corbyn at the Labour Party conference in September 2016. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

Are London’s Jews more or less likely, I ask, to vote Labour after this week, when the party found Ken Livingstone guilty of making antisemitic comments, but merely suspended him for 12 months? Abandoning attempts at self-censorship, Khan shoots back: “The answer is: less likely. Look, I’ve got friends from all backgrounds, and it broke my heart during the mayoral election in 2012, having friends – Labour activists – say: ‘I can’t campaign for Ken.’” Because of antisemitism? “Yeah. Then 2015, I’m selected Labour’s candidate, mates were saying to me, ‘Listen, your party’s got a problem. Because the leader of my party is Jeremy Corbyn and there are concerns – fairly or unfairly – about Jeremy among the Jewish community, and of course the association with Ken.’ And then, this time last year, Ken Livingstone said things that are clearly antisemitic. And then the Labour party, rather than showing strong leadership, spends ages in relation to the disciplinary hearing.

“You can rationally understand if the panel finds him not guilty. But the panel finds him guilty – and then gives him a one-year suspended sentence? What does that say about how seriously we take racism? It beggars belief. So I’m not surprised that London’s Jewish community, for good reason, have concerns. Antisemitism is a form of racism, and we can’t have hierarchies of racism. A racist is a racist.”

Has Khan been tempted to pick up the phone and appeal to Livingstone to apologise and be quiet? “That’s not the sort of relationship I have with him. But those who are in positions of power and influence within my party – Jeremy Corbyn, Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, Diane Abbot, John McDonnell – they have got close relationships with Ken Livingstone. They should have been saying, ‘We condemn unequivocally what he said’, not faffing around.”

When I ask if he thinks the Livingstone decision has undone the good done by Chakrabarti’s report on antisemitism within Labour, he looks puzzled. “What good work, what do you mean? You speak to Londoners of all backgrounds on a daily basis, as I do, and no, my observation is that people do not feel Labour has improved on this at all.

“For me personally, as a politician, the good news, selfishly, is that I’m not tarred with the same brush. But it breaks my heart that my party doesn’t feel like a home for Londoners of Jewish faith. It has to wake up to this issue. It’s not for me to tell Jeremy Corbyn how to be a leader, but I think what has to happen is that the NEC, the governing body of the party, needs to step up to the plate.”

As I leave, he asks how my children are enjoying London since we moved back from the countryside. We last met when I interviewed him a year ago, and I’m taken aback by his recall of personal detail. I tell him they’re not loving it, and he looks scandalised. “No! That’s shocking! I’m deeply disturbed.” He really looks it, too, as if their lack of enthusiasm for his city were a personal slight. I must bring them to City Hall, he declares at once, so that their mayor can put them right.