Sadiq Khan’s fourth-term bid lays bare Labour’s failures at City Hall and in Westminster, writes Susan Hall

This will have come as unwelcome news to the Labour names – from Dawn Butler to Stella Creasy to Wes Streeting – who had been circling, hoping to escape the disastrous Labour Government and grab the chance to take over from a disastrous Labour Mayor.

Keep that in mind as I share a plan with you. It’s up to you to decide whether or not it’s a good plan, but I’d suggest it has some logic to it. Imagine you are a Labour MP and your Party collectively chooses to make someone completely unsuitable their Leader.

Let’s call him ‘Jeremy’. You don’t want to leave the Labour Party – after all you have ambitions to be Leader yourself at some point – but you don’t want to have to fall in behind Jeremy, who you are confident will be a disaster for Labour. So what should you do?

Sadiq Khan’s answer was quite clever. He sought and became Labour’s candidate for London Mayor and then got himself elected to that office.

There he was perfectly positioned to watch Corbyn’s Labour Party crash and burn before ‘reluctantly giving up the job he loved’ to serve his Party, swoop back to Westminster and become Labour Leader.

Unfortunately for Sadiq, things did not work out that way. The timings never quite clicked into place and he did not have a swift chance to return to the House of Commons.

On top of that – and this is quite a big issue – he has been an appalling Mayor of London. Have you ever seen those adverts promising that a product would perform miracles because of “One weird trick”? For Sadiq Khan that trick was simple, he blamed the Conservative Government for all his failings and relied on the Government being less popular than him. For a long time, this worked well for him, enabling him to get away with a lot.

He got away with an appalling record on housing, failing to build anything like the number of homes London needs. Despite the Conservative Government giving him £8.82bn which was supposed to build 151,000 affordable homes, he has completed just 77,622 houses, barely half of the target.

The Mayor has never apologised for this failure, preferring to repeatedly blame the previous Government for not giving him even more money.

In addition to housing, the Mayor of London has two main roles. He is the Chair of the TfL Board and London’s Police and Crime Commissioner.

As Chair of the TfL Board Sadiq Khan is supposed to set Transport for London’s strategic direction and then hold the Commissioner and his team to account.

Whilst always very happy to take the credit for any superficially popular decisions he makes – even when those decisions, such as partially freezing fares, have not been accompanied by a willingness to make the difficult choices on such issues as gold-plated TfL pensions and the withdrawal of nominee passes – Sadiq Khan has stored up problems at TfL.

He might rightly praise the Elizabeth Line now that it is up and running, but he singularly failed to kick the tyres and ask tough questions on Crossrail whilst it was being built, allowing years of delays and multi-billion-pound budget overruns.

Furthermore it is clearly to Sadiq Khan’s benefit that many Londoners do not realise he is London’s Police and Crime Commissioner. In this role, he is responsible for setting priorities for policing and community safety in London, agreeing the policing budget, and holding the Met Commissioner to account. Since gaining power in May 2016 knife crime has soared in London with the statistics showing that whereas there are 87 instances of knife crime per 100,000 people across England and Wales as a whole, in Sadiq Khan’s London that figure is 182.

Meanwhile London is the rape capital of Europe, with more rapes per 100,000 people than any of Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Madrid, Milan or Rome. Yet whenever I have questioned him on London’s rape gangs he has pleaded ignorance.

Sadiq Khan has failed to get a grip on the Met, which has only just emerged from Special Measures. Despite a manifesto promise to increase the number of police officers by 1,300, this year London will see a drop of 1,700 officers, meaning London’s police service is at its lowest capacity since 2012.

Over the last year, Sadiq Khan has looked increasingly panic-stricken as the realisation has struck that his comfort blanket of blaming the Government for all his failings has unravelled. Perhaps that would not matter if he had a good chance of returning to Parliament any time soon.

However this is looking evermore difficult for a man who really isn’t very popular amongst members of his Party and who, even were he to find a London Labour MP with a safe seat who was willing to stand down, would find himself in a flailing Labour Government which did not want his “help”, with time ticking away and a diminshing likelihood of a second term.

So, whether or not Sadiq Khan does decide to seek a fourth term as Mayor – and I have my doubts – the very fact he’s floating the idea of another term underlines how appallingly Labour is governing our country.

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Susan Hall AM is Leader of the City Hall Conservatives.

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