Arise Sir Sadiq Khan, and enjoy your knighthood. As for the Tories in a rage – ignore them | Hugh Muir

3 days ago 4

Let’s start with an impression. Move towards the window, shake your fist and yell “Aaaaargh”. Then “Waaaaaaaah!” Now scream “Grrrrrrrrrrrr … I don’t believe it”. Well done, that’s the cry of the rightwing Tory/Reformite bird today, reacting to the news that London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has received a knighthood.

We all do it a bit. There never was an honours list to delight everyone. The very fact of an honours list annoys very many people and that’s fair enough, because the system is heroically flawed in terms of who gets them, how the recipients are chosen and what they are called (congratulations to Ken McCallum, director of MI5 – you’re now Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath).

But Khan is the focus of consternation. “Sadiq Khan is knighted as Keir Starmer hands out ‘reward for failure’,” says the Mail. “Starmer knights Sadiq Khan in ‘reward for failure’,” says the Telegraph. If they sound similar, that’s because both are parroting the whining of Chris Philp, Kemi Badenoch’s shadow home secretary. He is a man whose stature would easily allow him to enter the Commons through a political catflap, but no matter – he’s against Khan and his media hitmen hate Khan, so today, they fly in tandem.

What’s this about, you may ask. Is Khan the least-deserving person ever to profit from this flawed system? That can’t be so. In 2014, David Cameron’s barber was awarded an MBE in the new year honours list for “services to hairdressing”, and the raging Tory bird stayed silent.

There’s strategy here. Look at the other headline names. Stephen Fry gets a knighthood. Good for him, he’s a national treasure in many ways: a whole generation of parents will thank him, for example, for enchanting and soothing their children with his masterly readings of the Harry Potter books. The Tory bird gains no advantage attacking him.

Then there is Gareth Southgate, now Sir Gareth. The Tory bird pecked at him a while back, framing a narrative that the then England football manager was far too woke, with all his embracing of multiculturalism and taking the knee. But that didn’t go so well and darn it if he didn’t take a perennially overexpectant, underperforming, afraid-of-its-own-shadow England to two major finals and a semi-final. So as a potential, headline-grabbing target for the Tory bird, he’s best left alone.

In another world, it might be aggrieved about the knighthood bestowed on Ranil Jayawardena, who served briefly as environment secretary under Liz Truss, who – as we know – served as briefly herself in No 10 as the time it takes to burn a match. But he’s a Tory, so no mileage there.

And so to Khan, who is in his third term running the capital city as mayor, and gets the same honour as the Tory Andy Street, who served two terms running the West Midlands.

Khan is a kind of nut feeder for the Tory bird. He’s Labour, of course, and he annoys all the Londoners who want to drive their cars and vans where they like, whenever they like, by saying that they can’t. He’s quite the bore with his mania for cleaner air and imposition of the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) that seeks to facilitate it.

And, of course, he’s Muslim. That fact alone seems enough to irk a certain kind of Tory/Reformite bird, and in terms of political campaigning it dog-whistles well, if not particularly effectively. Tories have deployed the culturally “othering” strategy against Khan during and prior to London elections fought by Zac Goldsmith (now Lord Goldsmith) and then the noxiously absurd culture warrior Susan Hall – and twice they have lost.

The charges against Sir Sadiq, as we can style him now, span an alleged failure to tackle knife crime, congestion charge pricing and rises in council tax. Make of that what you will. But also consider independent analysis that finds more toxic air pollution has been averted by Ulez than is produced by the capital’s airports or its river and rail transport combined; that, according to more independent research, Ulez, so hated by the Tory bird, has “significantly improved air quality”. Against the backdrop of a politics that struggles to achieve tangible change or – as politicos say – “delivery”, that’s a significant public service achievement.

Khan has rolled out free school meals for every state primary school child in London, while people are raving about the Elizabeth line and its transformative potential for the capital. None of this is perfect, nor is his mayoralty. Compared to the razzmatazz of the Ken Livingstone/Boris Johnson years, his approach has been subdued. But it has also been largely effective, which Johnson’s squat at City Hall clearly wasn’t.

If the Tory/Reformite bird had any instinct to judge this fairly, it might even consider that Khan, because of his background, because of all the culture warring, because of all the death threats, is one of the very few public servants we have obliged to live his life and do his job in the shadow of a continuous police detail that ensures no souped-up lame-brain reacts to all the accumulated animosity with an attempt to kill him.

If we are going to give out honours, that alone seems like public service worthy of communal recognition. The rage of the Tory bird, lurking at the window, is neither here nor there.