Sadiq Khan’s fourth-term bid lays bare Labour’s failures at City Hall and in Westminster, writes Susan Hall |
By Susan Hall
In case you missed it, last week Sadiq Khan revealed to James O’Brien on LBC that he intended to stand for a fourth term as Labour’s candidate for Mayor of London.
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........