This week I interviewed Sadiq Khan for Byline Times to mark the ten year anniversary of him becoming London mayor.
The full interview will be published next month, but we today publish the first section, in which Khan talks about the upcoming local elections and why he fears the party is set to be punished for a series of “mistakes” made by Keir Starmer.
The fear in City Hall, and across the Labour party, is that they face a generational collapse of support in their Welsh and London heartlands, thanks to natural Labour voters switching en masse to the Greens and other parties.
This switch is thanks in large part to the strategy taken by Starmer towards Labour’s left flank.
The damage caused by the so-called ‘Blue Labour’ strategy, which concentrated on winning over Reform voters, at the expense of Labour’s own core support, has been compounded by Starmer’s dismissive approach to Zack Polanski’s party.
In the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, Starmer urged voters not to embrace the “extremism” of the Greens - something Khan believes was a mistake.
“Don’t call Green voters extremists. They’re not,” Khan told me.
“They’re people who are progressives. They may not agree with us on all these issues, but we should try and court them and win them over.”
Yet despite growing discontent within Labour about the Prime Minister and his strategy, there still remains little chance of an imminent Leadership challenge.
As I told the Byline Podcast this morning (which you can watch in full above) while there is now a consensus in the party that Starmer will ultimately have to go, nobody wants to be the person charged with actually getting rid of him.
The result is that as Labour heads into a set of local elections that could be the beginning of a catastrophic collapse of support for the party, which if left unchecked will result in Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister, nobody in the party yet seems willing to do anything to stop it.
