Sadiq Khan

Sadiq Aman Khan (born 8 October 1970) is a British Labour Party politician who has served as Mayor of London since May 2016; before that he was Member of Parliament for Tooting from 2005 to 2016. ^{1 2}

His 2016 victory made him, as the sources record, the first actively affiliated Muslim to become mayor of a major Western capital, and the 1.3 million votes he received were the largest personal mandate any British politician had then received. ¹ He was re-elected in 2021 and 2024, becoming the first London mayor to win a third term, and he is the only Mayor of Greater London to have been knighted and raised to the peerage. ^{1 3}

Khan was born at St George's Hospital in Tooting, South London, into a working-class Pakistani immigrant family; his grandparents were Muhajirs who migrated from Lucknow in British India to Karachi at the Partition of India in 1947, and his parents Amanullah and Sehrun arrived in England from Pakistan in 1968, his father working as a bus driver and his mother as a seamstress. ^{1 4}

He was the fifth of eight children, raised with his siblings as Sunni Muslims in a council flat on the Henry Prince Estate in Earlsfield, and attended Fircroft Primary School and then Ernest Bevin School. ¹

He studied science and mathematics at A-Level hoping to become a dentist, but a teacher steered him to law for his argumentative temperament, and the television series L.A. Law inspired him; he earned a law degree from the University of North London and completed his Law Society finals at the College of Law in Guildford. ^{1 3}

Khan practised as a human-rights solicitor: he joined the firm Christian Fisher as a trainee in 1994, became a partner in 1997, saw the firm renamed Christian Khan after Fisher's departure in 2002, and left in 2004 on becoming Labour's candidate for Tooting. ¹

He chaired the advocacy group Liberty for three years, and his cases spanned discrimination, judicial review and inquests; in 2001 he represented Louis Farrakhan, leader of the American Nation of Islam, and overturned in the High Court the ban on his entering the United Kingdom, before the government won on appeal. ¹

Khan represented Tooting as a Wandsworth councillor from 1994 to 2006 and was elected MP for Tooting in 2005. ^{3 1}

In Parliament he led the successful opposition to Tony Blair's proposal to detain terror suspects for 90 days without charge, for which The Spectator named him "Newcomer of the Year" at the 2005 Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. ¹ In August 2006 he signed an open letter to Blair by prominent Muslims criticising British foreign policy and the 2003 invasion of Iraq; Home Secretary John Reid called the letter "a dreadful misjudgement" and former Conservative leader Michael Howard called it "a form of blackmail", as the article records. ¹

Under Gordon Brown he became Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Communities and Local Government in 2008 and Minister of State for Transport in 2009, the first Muslim to join the British Cabinet. ^{3 1} In opposition he served in Ed Miliband's shadow cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, Shadow Lord Chancellor and Shadow Minister for London. ¹

In 2008 the Fabian Society published his book Fairness Not Favours, in which he argued that Labour had to rebuild the trust of British Muslims lost over the Iraq War, and that Muslims in turn needed to shed a victim mentality and take greater responsibility for their community. ¹

Khan won Labour's nomination for the 2016 mayoral election in September 2015 and ran against the Conservative Zac Goldsmith; the Conservative campaign and allied newspapers were accused of tarring Khan as an apologist for Islamic extremism, an accusation the article records from the campaign's critics. ¹ He won on 5 May 2016 with 57% of the vote. ^{1 3}

His transport policies include the Hopper fare — two bus and tram journeys within an hour for the price of one, upgraded to unlimited journeys in 2018 — increases to the congestion charge and its area, and new charges on older, more polluting vehicles (the T-Charge and the Ultra Low Emission Zone, ULEZ). ¹ His pledge to freeze transport fares for four years turned out to apply only to single fares, for which he was widely criticised. ¹ During the COVID-19 pandemic he secured a £1.6 billion government bailout for Transport for London and implemented fare rises from 2021. ¹

He was a vocal supporter of remaining in the European Union, marched with People's Vote campaigners for a second referendum in 2018 and 2019, backed the "London is Open" campaign after the Leave vote, and later called for a debate on rejoining the single market and for an EU youth mobility scheme. ¹

In 2020, following the George Floyd protests, he established the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm to review London's statues, street names and landmarks. ¹ Fasting in Ramadan 2016, he said he would use the month to "break down the mystique and suspicion" surrounding Islam in Britain, organising iftars in synagogues, churches and mosques. ¹

He was re-elected in 2021 against the Conservative Shaun Bailey and in 2024 against Susan Hall, the first mayor to win a third term. ^{1 3} The article records that London's homicide rate fell in 2025 to its lowest in decades during his mayoralty. ¹

This section presents differing views as reported in the sources; it is not the museum's verdict on them.

His supporters point to more accessible transport, reduced numbers of polluting vehicles in central London, and recorded falls in serious violence, and to his stance against both Islamophobia and extremism; Khan himself has said: "I am proud to say that I am a Muslim... I am a Londoner, I am British, I have Pakistani origins. I am a father and a husband and a long-time Liverpool fan. I am all of this." ^{1 3}

His critics have attacked his record on crime, fare rises and clean-air charges, and his 2016 opponent's campaign was widely accused of smearing him over extremism. In a recording from the 2024 campaign he appeared to suggest that the Chief Rabbi's criticism of him had an Islamophobic motive; he apologised the next day, saying that as a Muslim mayor he is at times held to a different standard, but that the implication had not been fair. ¹

In September 2025 Khan described the situation in Gaza as a genocide, as reported by the BBC and recorded in the article. ¹

Khan married the solicitor Saadiya Ahmed in 1994; they have two daughters. He is a long-standing Liverpool supporter and speaks English and Urdu fluently. ^{1 3}

TIME magazine named him among the world's 100 most influential people in 2018. ³ He was made a Knight Bachelor in the 2025 New Year Honours for political and public service, the first and only Mayor of Greater London to be knighted. ^{1 3} In July 2026 Prime Minister Keir Starmer nominated him for a life peerage, and he entered the House of Lords as Lord Khan of Tooting. ¹

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• Later translations and edits of this article require periodic review with clear update dates.