The tension between Sadiq Khan and Susan Hall has finally erupted into real rancour. As the London mayoral race enters its final, critical week, the incumbent Labour mayor made a silly, hyperbolic claim on LBC.
“I’ve thought long and hard about this,” Khan said. “I’ve fought three council elections. I’ve fought three parliamentary elections. This is my third mayoral election. The Tory candidate is the most dangerous candidate I’ve fought against.”
Hall retorted he was being “outrageous” and pointed to many of his policy failings, especially on crime.
Is this normal political knock-about, or something else? Khan’s language was carefully crafted to slur his rival as something of an extremist – someone who sits outside the bounds of normal politics, someone diametrically opposed to Londoners’ values, someone who Londoners cannot trust, even if there’s zilch evidence to back it.
The exchange probably won’t have changed a single mind about the mayoral race, but it highlights a trend that is coarsening and worsening our discourse: the rapid inflation of political invective. Not for any serious critique or purpose, but to win by disparaging opponents. It’s not all from the left, as we saw with the recent Conservative attack ad that seemed to paint London as an example of “British carnage”.
But why did Khan feel the need to say what he did? From the start of this race it has felt to some like a foregone conclusion, with polling and bookmakers’ odds suggesting that he was a shoo-in.
That sense was compounded by the shambles around the Conservative candidate selection. Hall, a longstanding London councillor and assembly member, emerged as the surprise winner while ex-London minister Paul Scully was denied a spot on the ballot.
She has since faced scrutiny for her past conduct online, including a series of posts that praised Enoch Powell and made insinuations about Khan. Hall has rightly apologised – several times – for liking things without due consideration and for the offence caused. Yet her Labour rival is eager to return to it again and again, in a clear attempt to tar her whole candidacy.
What Khan is doing, by describing her in such coarse terms, is part of a growing trend on the left for labelling their opponents as “far right” or “hard right” with little evidence to back it up.
At one early juncture during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, for example, one of his communications aides mooted that Labour should stand on a platform labelling their Tory rivals as “the real extremists”. It was rapidly shot down as a ridiculous thing to campaign on, not least as it alluded to confirming some extremism existing in their party. Khan has form on this too, labelling Ulez protesters as “far right”. The result is to cheapen the meaning of such terms.
To see how superficial Khan’s approach is, look at the Evening Standard’s front page from 26 February. The paper’s splash read: “Don’t let hate win”. Inside, both candidates called for a zero tolerance approach in the capital. Together the pair sent out a message that “no matter our backgrounds or our political beliefs, we are all part of the same London community” and that “fear, division and hatred” should not be allowed to fester.
Khan seemingly had no qualms about joining forces with Hall when governing London, but has taken a nastier approach when it comes to electioneering.
This is not to say we should be prissy about robust debate. In the days of the gladiatorial battles between Gladstone and Disraeli, the great rivals could be exceptionally rude. The latter once said of the former, “Gladstone has not a single redeeming defect”, that he was an “unprincipled maniac”, and so on.
Gladstone said of Disraeli in return that, “as he lived, so he died – all display, without reality or genuineness”.
Parliamentary history is littered with deeply personal attacks (think of Lord Tom Watson describing Michael Gove as a “miserable pipsqueak of a man”). Yet introducing the threatening language of danger is different in one critical way: it seeks not to maim character or pride, but to shut down debate.
The real reason Khan may have gone to such depths is desperation. Opinion polls earlier this year consistently gave the Labour candidate handsome leads of around 25 points. Since then, it has gradually declined, with the latest survey this Thursday showing Khan is on 46 per cent and Hall on 33 per cent, a lead of 13 points.
Despite much sneering, Hall is outperforming the party’s national standing and a closer-than-expected result might be around the corner. Khan’s only hope to race ahead is to squeeze the Liberal Democrat and Green vote by making ridiculous statements like the one he made on LBC, and taking advantage of the new first-past-the-post rules he has so loudly decried.
It’s also crucial to remember that the tweets Hall’s account liked were woeful, but they are of a different order from what we’re seeing on London’s streets – with the Met unable to demonstrate accountability for one of their officers calling the leader of an antisemitism charity “openly Jewish”, warning his mere presence on a march constituted “breach of peace”.
Now that is a truly dangerous atmosphere, if Khan wants to debate such notions. London deserves better than simplistic invective and come next Thursday, voters should make their judgement based on the reality of what life is really like in the capital.
Sebastian Payne is the director of the centre-right think-tank Onward and writes a weekly column for i on policy and politics.
He was previously a journalist at the Financial Times, The Spectator and The Washington Post, and is the author of two books, Broken Heartlands and The Fall of Boris Johnson
