\u2018When your wife is scared, when your kids are scared, it has an impact\u2019\u2018When your wife is scared, when your kids are scared, it has an impact\u2019<\/p>\n
The mayor receives death threats and racist abuse every day. Last year there were 23,661 mentions of Khan alongside Islamophobic keywords on social media, representing hundreds of messages a week. The scale of the physical risk to him is now so great that he is only allowed to leave his home under armed guard. \u201cI discovered a long time ago, when I was seven or eight, not to cower in front of bullies, but of course it\u2019s frightening,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you\u2019ve got experts telling you that they\u2019re concerned about your personal safety\ufeff so you need to have armed protection, of course it\u2019s a source of concern. No matter how stoic you are, when your wife is scared, when your kids are scared, when your mum is scared, it has an impact on you. You think, hold on a second, all I want to do is be a public servant.\u201d He worries that other people like him will be put off going into politics. \u201cI\u2019m petrified, frankly, that if you\u2019re a minority, if you\u2019re a Muslim, you may think twice, thrice, four times about standing for public office,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
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We meet around the corner from the Earlsfield Amateur Boxing Club, where Khan and his brothers used to go after school\ufeff. Our walk will take us past the Henry Prince estate, where the mayor grew up, and along the 44 bus route that his father drove every day. \u201cThis is my \ufeffhood,\u201d he says, pointing to the adventure playground where he swung on the tyres when he was young. \u201cAll politics is personal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Khan, 55, was MP for Tooting for 11 years before becoming mayor in 2016. As we trudge through muddy puddles in the drizzle, he says this part of south London has been transformed since he was a child. In the 1970s the river was full of abandoned supermarket trolleys. Now the water has been cleaned up, a Gail\u2019s bakery<\/a> has opened on the high street and the local hardware store sells Farrow \ufeff& Ball paint.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the word people would use is \u2018gentrification\u2019. When I was growing up I never saw anybody go to work in a suit. I\u2019d see people going to work with a uniform \u2013 the bus driver, the train driver, the factory worker. The first time I ever saw an Asian man in a suit was when I got to secondary school and met the headteacher, Mr Bokhari. I thought, wow. The word \u2018aspiration\u2019 is overused but I really do believe in the power of role models.\u201d<\/p>\n The son of Pakistani immigrants, Khan \ufeffis the fifth of eight children, seven of them boys, and is fluent in Urdu. He did well at school and became a lawyer, but \ufeffsays he experienced racism from an early age. \u201cWhen I was growing up, it wasn\u2019t uncommon to hear the P-word to describe people like me, or the N-word to describe people who were black, or the Y-word to describe people who were Jewish. That went to the periphery.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s happened over the last 10 years is the stuff that was on the periphery has become normalised. The sort of hate we\u2019re talking about \u2013 racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism \u2013 had disappeared, and it\u2019s come back. People like Donald Trump have given permission for this stuff to be back in the mainstream. People think there\u2019s no consequence to inciting hatred online.\u201d<\/p>\n NewslettersChoose the newsletters you want to receive<\/p>\n Clear, calm analysis on the stories driving the day\u2019s news.<\/p>\n The very best of our journalism, reviews and ideas \u2013 curated each day.<\/p>\n A dispatch from The Observer\u2019s kitchen table \u2013 from Nigel Slater\u2019s recipes to interviews, features and hot tips.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For information about how The Observer protects your data, read our Privacy Policy<\/a><\/p>\n Londoners \u201care generally lovely\u201d when he meets them in person around the city, but \u201cpeople online seem to suddenly become incredibly brave at being rude<\/a>\u201d, he says. \u201cSince Elon Musk<\/a> has taken over X\/Twitter it\u2019s become a lot worse.\u201d The thing he finds \u201cvery troubling\u201d is the way in which discrimination has evolved over the past 40 years. \u201cWhen I was growing up it was the colour of my skin. Now it\u2019s the religion I belong to,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a school of thought now that believes there\u2019s a clash of civilisations \u2013 that it\u2019s not compatible to be a westerner and a proud Muslim.\u201d<\/p>\n He sees the impact on those around him. \u201cI meet women who have chosen to wear the hijab and are scared to do so because they\u2019re worried about being spat on. I meet men with beards who are petrified of keeping the beard because they\u2019re identifiable as a Muslim. Ramadan is coming up and people are really worried about going to the mosque at night time because of the rise of Islamophobia. If you\u2019re a Muslim, you\u2019re the recipient of increased anti-Muslim hatred.\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout history, there has always been a minority at the bottom of the pile, he says. \u201cIt used to be Jewish people, it used to be Irish people, it used be black people, and now it\u2019s Muslim people.\u201d<\/p>\n He points to the White House national security strategy<\/a>, which warn\ufeffs of \u201ccivilisational erasure\u201d in Europe as a result of mass migration. \u201cThink about that. Imagine if you\u2019re not mixing with Muslims you might believe that rubbish; you might believe we are erasing Judeo-Christian civilisation. It\u2019s a problem because what it does is spread animus and hatred,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m afraid Muslims are the new proxy in the culture war. As a Muslim, why am I the pawn? It is incredibly unfair.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump has described Khan as a \u201cstone cold loser\u201d and a \u201c\ufeffhorrible, vicious, disgusting mayor\u201d. Last year he used a speech at the UN to claim London was being steered towards \u201csharia law\u201d. The mayor is baffled by the president\u2019s obsession with him. \u201cI do appear to be living rent-free inside his head and it\u2019s hard to explain why that is,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n There are, however, consequences both for him personally and for the city he represents. \u201cYou can draw a graph from President Trump\u2019s election [in 2016] showing the amount of racial abuse that I have received. You can see spikes. When President Trump was no longer president, it went down, and when President Trump was re-elected, it went up again.\u201d The idea of there being \ufeffcivilisational erasure\ufeff or \ufeffsharia law\ufeff in London \u201cplays into the stereotypes\u201d, he adds. \u201cIf you\u2019re someone whose only source of news is the social media of President Trump or his acolytes, you may mistakenly believe that because of my faith and my name, I\u2019m bringing sharia law to London. Londoners know, of course, that\u2019s nonsense, but there are more and more people who amplify those messages and start believing it.\u201d<\/p>\n Khan thinks there is a reason why Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, seem so determined to pick on him. \u201cLondon is a beacon for diversity, for pluralism, and that\u2019s what they hate. It goes against what they\u2019re espousing because if they\u2019re right we should be a disaster as a city. But we\u2019re doing incredibly well and that\u2019s why they talk us down.<\/p>\n \u201cLondon\u2019s success and the fact that I\u2019m the mayor is the antithesis of what they believe in, which is that you can\u2019t be a progressive, liberal, Londoner of Islamic faith.\u201d He has been in touch with Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim New York mayor<\/a>, by text to compare notes. What infuriates him even more is the fact that British politicians, including Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick, are so quick to denounce \u201clawless London\u201d too. \u201cIt\u2019s the Gerald Ratner school of politics but we\u2019re not talking about cheap jewellery \u2013 we\u2019re talking about a capital city. I can\u2019t think of anything more unpatriotic.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking of patriots, the mayor thinks ministers, and the public, should be more grateful to the billionaire philanthropists who support London\u2019s cultural institutions. \u201cOur ecosystem benefits from having the wealthy here,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen money is tight, our brilliant museums and galleries need philanthropic support. There are people who are incredibly wealthy who want to give back. We shouldn\u2019t denigrate that. We shouldn\u2019t assume everyone is culture-washing. Sometimes they have the best of intentions.\u201d<\/p>\n He worries that changes to the tax system are encouraging the super-rich to flee. \u201cI think the Treasury is recalibrating,\u201d he says. \u201cEven the biggest cheerleaders of the Treasury would say they\u2019ve not got everything right in the first year.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/91067.jpeg\")
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