Sadiq Khan's damaging flights of fancy
The mayor of London accepted near-free travel from United Airlines in exchange for endorsement, then tried to minimise the deal he'd made
Let me establish a few ground rules before we start here, because, like so many matters of public controversy, most of the coverage has suffered from the presence of more heat than light.
1) I don’t instinctively warm to Sadiq Khan. I know people who say he’s charming and likeable in person, but I find him too slick, too glib, too elusive. He has yet to master the art of faking sincerity. I also get irritated by (small points, I know) his shunning of neck ties, and the way he says “siddy” for “city”. I wanted to be honest from the get-go.
2) I don’t think he’s been a good mayor of London. Crime is rising, and knife crime has risen particularly sharply, and Khan has been frankly dishonest about the statistics. His vaunted achievements in housing construction conceal some underlying flaws. He has been inconsistent on rent freezes, about which I’m dubious. I’m not sure the divisive ULEZ scheme is the best way to tackle pollution and car usage. And I have an uncomfortable sense that he is at his happiest striding around the world stage, the man with the biggest personal electoral mandate in the UK, rather than working out how we keep the capital prosperous and safe in extremely challenging times.
3) However, Khan has some bitter opponents who will seize on the flimsiest and most absurd allegations against him to find any tiny advantage. I hope I avoid that: being serious-minded and fair is, after all, part of my literal job as a writer and commentator. Arguments without a solid foundation in fact are like the proverbial castles built on sand (unless you have the persistence of the builder of Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail). I flag my instinctive hostility towards the mayor because it makes me more, not less, determined to establish the evidential basis of claims against him. In the words of Joe Friday of the LAPD: all we want are the facts, ma’am.
I realise I have, as proper journalists would say, buried the lede. Here is the essential story. In May 2022, the mayor and eight members of his team undertook a four-day trade mission to the United States, visiting New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It was his first international visit after the Covid-19 pandemic, so he placed a great deal of importance on it, as the press release explained.
I am visiting America this week, banging the drum for London to attract the tourism and investment our city needs following the pandemic. I want to show the world that London is fully open for business once again. Now that restrictions for travellers coming to the UK have lifted, I am looking forward to launching our international tourism campaign and showcasing our amazing city to America and the world. Throughout my visit, my main message will be that London is the perfect destination in the world for international tourists to visit and businesses to invest in.
In New York, he met his counterpart, Mayor Eric Adams, the former mayor Michael Bloomberg and former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Khan launched a £10 million tourism campaign called “Let’s Do London”:
New York and London are global cities defined by our shared energy, innovation and constant evolution. I can think of nowhere better to launch this exciting campaign encouraging our American friends to discover London—particularly during our special platinum Jubilee year of celebration.
The mayor and his staff then travelled to San Francisco to promote investment in London, especially by technology firms, building on moves by giants like Google, Netflix, Amazon and Microsoft. He was joined by 15 female founders of tech start-ups brought together by London and Partners’ BeyondHERizons initiative.
The final leg of the trip was to Los Angeles. There Khan visited the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator with the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti. Khan was in part there as chair of C40 Cities, a global network of urban leaders dedicated to addressing climate change through co-ordinated activity. He also used the opportunity to promote the ULEZ scheme, which had recently expanded to cover Inner London within the North and South Circular Roads. Visiting Universal Studios in Hollywood, he unveiled a scheme in partnership with NBCUniversal for young Londoners from underprivileged backgrounds to have the opportunity to work in film production. In addition, while at a cannabis dispensary and cultivation facility, he revealed that the London Drugs Commission, a just-established manifesto commitment, would be chaired by former lord chancellor Lord Falconer of Thoroton.
On the face of it, the mayor packed a lot into four days. There will be some who are a priori ill-disposed towards Khan and will regard the trip as wasteful and vainglorious for a city boss who should be addressing everyday concerns like crime, transport and planning. They may regard the mayoralty as little more to Khan than a springboard for greater ambitions: when he first sought the office in May 2016, I was inclined to agree. It seemed an obvious sidestep for a young (he was then 45) and ambitious politician who realised that the Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn era would simply have to be endured. I was not alone is supposing that Khan would serve as mayor of London to maintain a powerbase then seek to return to the House of Commons to be able to vie for the leadership of the party when Corbyn inevitably fell.
I am no longer convinced. The timing simply didn’t work for Khan: when Corbyn led Labour to general election defeat in December 2019 and resigned immediately, he was in what he thought was the last six months of his first term (the election was postponed by a year to May 2021 when the pandemic began). He had needed the 2017 Parliament to be longer than its two-and-a-half years so that he could prepare himself to return to the Commons, but he had to watch as Sir Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy put themselves forward. Starmer won convincingly with more than half of the votes.
Even then, Starmer made slow progress. Well into the summer of 2021, beyond Khan’s unexpectedly narrow re-election over Conservative candidate Shaun Bailey, the government was ahead in the polls, Boris Johnson seemingly invulnerable as prime minister and reportedly planning for a decade in power. If anything like that was the case, Khan could see out his second shorter term (it was reduced by a year when the election was delayed) and be able to contemplate a Commons comeback before Labour was anywhere near government.
Then it all went wrong. In 2022, Johnson’s popularity began to collapse and his backbenchers moved against him. He was replaced in September by Liz Truss, who lasted 49 days in Downing Street, then Rishi Sunak took over as the fifth Conservative prime minister in nine years, Labour moved into a commanding poll lead and Starmer began to look like he would get to Downing Street and deny the London mayor. So it will probably prove. In any event, Khan will stand for a third term in City Hall in 2024; if he wins, he will be nearly 58 by the time that term finishes, and a renewed Westminster career seems much less likely than it once did.
In any event, I am relaxed about the mayor of London having an international profile. If we want to celebrate London as a prosperous, vibrant and attractive city—and I certainly do—then it makes sense for its effective chief executive to be visible on a global scale. There is a school of thought that says great urban centres will be the drivers of our progress in the future; see for example The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running The World by Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff then mayor of Chicago, or Age of the City: Why our Future will be Won or Lost Together by Oxford academic Ian Goldin and business journalist Tom Lee-Devlin. Bloomberg’s CityLab has just offered a reading list which may be of interest.
I also think that the mayor of London should have more power, as Khan has argued and indeed as I suggested three years ago. London is far and away the biggest city in the UK, the third-largest in Europe, it accounts for 13 per cent of our nation’s population and nearly a quarter of the UK’s GDP, it is the world’s second financial centre after New York and it is growing more rapidly than the rest of the UK.
The projection of influence requires a supporting bureaucracy. I think a roster of 10 deputy mayors is probably excessive; the Greater London Authority Act 1999, which created the position of mayor and the London Assembly, only makes provision for one deputy, who is therefore known as the “statutory deputy mayor”, must be a member of the assembly and will act as mayor in the event of a temporary vacancy. Perhaps I object just to Khan’s terminology. His deputies are appointed under the section of the Act which allows the mayor to appoint two “political advisers” and 11 “other members of staff”, and Khan is the first to designate so many of them as deputy mayors. Ken Livingstone (2000-08) only appointed a statutory deputy, and was criticised for relying too much on his chief of staff, Simon Fletcher; Boris Johnson (2008-16) had six deputy mayors in his first term, and seven in his second, although he combined the title of “deputy mayor of policy and planning” with the role of chief of staff, appointing Sir Simon Milton (2008-11) then Sir Edward Lister (2011-16).
As I say, this does not worry me excessively. I accept also that with an ambassadorial role must come a degree of expenditure, and this is where the story begins to develop as far as Khan is concerned. In June 2022, City Hall’s response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 revealed the total cost of the trade mission and a breakdown of individual sums. The total spent was £34,263.93; this included flights costs of £2,802.36, accommodation at £9,624.09, ground transport costing £21,108.45 and miscellaneous costs of £572.52.
That seems a very reasonable sum for a four-day enterprise for nine people. The response explained that, in line with the GLA’s Expenses and Benefits Framework, business class flights had been available for journeys of more than six hours. It then added, innocuously enough:
United Airlines supported the visit through a package of flights where only taxes and fees were payable. Costs for all flights were therefore £254.76 per person. The agreement with United Airlines was for business class flights from London to New York, New York to San Francisco and Los Angeles to London, and economy class flights from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
That is a fantastic bargain. For a set of flights from London to New York (business), New York to San Francisco (business), San Francisco to Los Angeles (economy) and Los Angeles to London (business) to cost around £250 is tantamount to it being free. For a very rough comparison, a return ticket simply from London to New York in business class with United Airlines at the time of writing would cost in the region of £3,500.
As an aside, the GLA’s guidelines are less stringent than those for select committees in the House of Commons. The guidance for travelling on committee visits stipulates that business class flights are only appropriate for journeys of more than 10 hours in daylight, or more than three hours overnight. There is an exception whereby flights of between five and 10 hours may be made in business class if Members are going directly into meetings or business in the House at the end of them.
The mayor had made an entry in the GLA register of gifts and hospitality of £6,377 for travel to New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, gifted by United Airlines on 8 May. It listed as his reason for acceptance “travel in support of London’s economic recovery from the pandemic and promotion of the capital to tourists, visitors, students, business and investment”. That figure of £6,377 looks like a more realistic estimate of how much the set of flights would actually have cost on the open market. Unquestionably, then, the arrangement which someone at City Hall had reached with the airline was a very successful piece of negotiation, saving the GLA, and therefore the taxpayer, around £60,000.
It is a hackneyed truth of politics that there is no such thing as a free lunch. United may be the third-largest airline in the world but it is no successful business’s habit to dole out free gifts for purely philanthropic reasons. There were some clues: on 8 May, the mayor had posted on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that he had arrived in New York as part of a trade mission and added, seemingly somewhat incongruously, that he was travelling “with United - who are now flying 22 times a day from Heathrow to the US”.
The same day, the mayor’s office issued a press release giving details of his visit. It was the usual slightly breathless enthusiasm of any announcement from a public authority, but at the end, under the heading “Notes to editors”, there was this curious phrase:
United Airlines is proud to be flying the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and his team on their trade mission to the United States. United Airlines is set to operate 22 flights per day from London Heathrow to the United States for Summer 2022.
So on one day the mayor had promoted United’s expansion of its service between London and the US on social media (where Khan has 1.1 million followers) and in an official press release.
This has not passed unnoticed. When the London Assembly Oversight Committee met on 20 June 2023, Caroline Russell, the leader of the Green Party in the assembly, in reference to the agreement with United Airlines asked the mayor’s chief of staff, David Bellamy, “That looks like a great deal, but what did United Airlines get in return?”
Bellamy was caught off-guard: “I will be honest; I am not sighted,” he replied at first. He continued that his understanding was that City Hall had approached United for a group booking, which was not only for the mayor and his entourage but some members of the media too, giving them a reasonable hand. “We were able to negotiate that, and I am not aware of anything specifically we did for them in exchange.” When Russell drew his attention to the Notes to editors in the press release, Bellamy rejected the idea that this was at all untoward, stating “I would not describe it as a United Airlines sponsored trip”. This was not unusual, he maintained. There was always advantage to be had from doing business with the mayor.
It is a natural part of these trips that businesses doing business with London get some publicity out of it and that to me seems just like one example where clearly United Airlines, post-pandemic, have increased the service that they provide between London and the United States.
Russell asked Bellamy explicitly if there was any kind of “partnership agreement” with the airline. Properly, the mayor’s chief of staff reiterated that “I was not involved in it and do not have the facts”, but that he was not aware of any ongoing relationship with United and the announcement had simply coincided with their increased service between London and the US. Russell asked him to find out whether any partnership agreement existed and, if so, to publish it. Bellamy agreed.
On 15 November, the Oversight Committee wrote to Mary Harpley, chief officer of the GLA, explaining its concern that United Airlines had gained advantageous publicity from the mayor as a result of their provision of flights. The committee recommended:
The GLA should provide explicit guidance on the interaction of external sponsors and business trips. This should include specific arrangements for the timely publication of details relating to such sponsorship and what sponsors receive in return. The guidance should make it clearer to officers about how they should consider the potential adverse implications of accepting funding for trips by external organisations when such funding would reduce the burden on the public purse.
It also requested that the agreement made between the mayor’s office and United in advance of the May 2022 trip be published.
This was an agreement, remember, which the mayor’s chief of staff had promised to publish if it existed, which he suggested it might well not. It does, it was concluded in April 2022, and on 18 December, The Daily Telegraph announced that it had seen the terms of the agreement. These included a commitment that the mayor would provide “recognition” of United Airlines in return for the all-but-free travel, that United could “optimise all appropriate PR opportunities” on the trip, have corporate branding at the mayor’s official events, and have a member of staff with the mayor’s entourage while they were flying.
City Hall responded both aggressively and rather pedantically.
Promoting London at home and abroad is a key part of the mayoralty and Sadiq makes no apologies for travelling to the US last year and saving taxpayers money on the flights. This visit was his first international mission since the start of the pandemic and an opportunity to encourage tourism to London and showcase the capital to businesses, investors, entrepreneurs and students in the world’s largest economy. In order to reduce the cost of the visit, City Hall secured an agreement for a group flight package with United Airlines, where only taxes and fees were payable. This one-off agreement did not result in a formal partnership between the Greater London Authority and United Airlines.
I spent more than a decade as an official, responsible for upholding and observing rules on transparency and propriety, as well as having regard for the expenditure of public money. I really don’t think there is much mileage in regarding the distinction between a “one-off agreement” and a “formal partnership” as a winning card. The agreement was clearly written down and made explicit commitments on either side. I have always in particular fought shy of the phrase “make no apology for”. It is simultaneously provocative and defensive, and implies an unwillingness to listen to any criticism. I would certainly never put it in anyone’s mouth to rebut an allegation of any kind of wrongdoing.
Caroline Russell, unsatisfied with the information disclosed to the Oversight Committee, submitted a complaint in August 2023 to the GLA’s monitoring officer, Rory McKenna, concerning the lack of openness and integrity in Khan’s behaviour. She told the Local Democracy Reporting Service, quoted in a London local newspaper:
Londoners wouldn’t like BP’s logo on the mayor’s SUVs, they wouldn’t like Nestlé sponsoring free school meals, and they won’t like a corporate polluter getting a publicity boost from their mayor in exchange for free flights abroad.
However, Russell revealed at Mayor’s Question Time on 21 December that the monitoring officer had responded, telling her “there is not a case to answer”. However, she asked Khan:
The months’ long delay in responding to our questions is worrying to me and frankly disrespectful to Londoners. So can you inform the Assembly of any other instances where a similar agreement with any other corporation has been made?
He told her he was unaware of any. Meanwhile, Russell’s Green Party colleague Zack Polanski asked the mayor what his future relationship with United Airlines would be, given their generous support for his travel last year. Khan’s response was, I would have advised, excessively prickly.
I’m really proud that United, along with a number of other airlines have increased the number of flights between London and America. There’s nothing in any agreement that dictates what I say or do, but I will speak proudly and proactively about American businesses or British businesses which do good by London.
This seems prima facie a mispresentation. The agreement seen by The Telegraph may not have “dictated” what the mayor should say, but it did commit him to give United Airlines “recognition”. As when his spokesman distinguished between an agreement and a partnership, Khan is splitting hairs. His words may be technically correct but the impression they are obviously intended to give is false, and any reasonable person would see the distinction.
Where does this leave us? What is true beyond contradiction, I think, is that the mayor of London gave privileged status to a commercial airline in return for heavily discounted services. It was at very least advertising, and arguably rather more than that, an endorsement from a highly visible elected public official. Keep that in mind.
Two things here are true: firstly, the money saved—United’s “fee”, one could say—is a small amount in absolute terms, something of the order of £60,000. To give some context, last year United’s net income was $737 million, while the GLA’s total revenue for 2022/23 was just under £15 billion. Therefore the idea that an effective gift of £60,000 would be significant seems an improbable one. The second incontrovertible fact is that, by negotiating this agreement with United, the mayor’s office saved the taxpayer money. There is no suggestion that the visit was dependent on securing a deal with an airline, so the GLA would have paid the full cost of travel for the mayoral party. So £60,000 was not spent, when it would otherwise have been. There was also no concrete expenditure by the GLA to secure the deal with United: every benefit they gained was in kind, almost exclusively publicity and tacit endorsement.
This is not, therefore, a financial scandal in any way. If we compare it to, say, the “aid for arms” scandal of the Pergau Dam in the early 1990s, when overseas development was granted to Malaysia in return for the government in Kuala Lumpur placing orders for military equipment with British companies, that involved an unlawful payment by the British government of £238 million. These are completely different orders of magnitude.
This is instead a crisis about perception. To use an example that I had the misfortune to see at close quarters, the scandal of MPs’ expenses in 2009, that too was not principally notable for the amounts of money involved. When Sir Thomas Legg published his report on the affair in 2010, his recommendation for the total sum to be repaid by MPs was £1.12 million. The individual cases, even the most serious, did not represent dizzying sums. Eric Illsley, the Labour MP for Barnsley Central who stood down from the House of Commons and was imprisoned for false accounting, had committed fraud of £14,000. Jim Devine, Labour MP for Livingston, was convicted for fraudulently claiming £8,385. Despite these modest sums of money, the expenses scandal was the worst to affect the reputation and standing of Parliament for a hundred years or more, and, as I have said again and again since then, I don’t think that reputation will ever be recovered.
Sadiq Khan’s financial dealings with United Airlines are in no way comparable in terms of scale of reputational damage. However, it is not good enough to shrug this off as “one of those things” or “harmless”. It is not harmless: it is dangerous, it undermines public confidence and it is corrosive.
We struggle against a cynical, disillusioned, weary public perception that politicians are essentially self-interested and unreliable. A recent Ipsos poll found that only nine per cent of respondents trusted politicians to tell the truth, while Edelman’s Trust Barometer, published in February 2023, found that only a quarter of people had any trust even in the institutions of government, never mind those temporarily in charge of them. Under these desperate circumstances, we have to be aware that politicians not only need to embrace transparency and integrity, but they must be seen to do so.
Perception matters. A select committee I worked on many years ago turned down the offer of helicopter flights from the company itself to a manufacturer’s site which it intended to visit, despite the fact that it would have cost the company virtually no extar expenditure and was much more convenient than any other mode of transport, because we took the view that it was not worth the risk of someone suggesting that the committee might take a favourable view of the manufacturer on the basis of that helicopter flight.
The agreement Khan reached with United Airlines just looks bad. It looks grubby. It gives the impression of, for want of a better phrase, product placement: a major private sector enterprise can effectively “buy” an endorsement from the mayor of London by giving him some free flights. It is hardly the corruption scandal of the century, but it makes our institutions look that little bit shadier, that little bit more compromised, in hock to moneyed interests.
This is not a resignation matter. However, Khan is standing for re-election next May, seeking another four years as London’s chief executive. His defensive, hair-splitting attitude so far demonstrates he doesn’t accept that he has done anything wrong, but, plainly and clearly, he has. At the very least, the agreement with United should have been made public and properly declared before the visit took place, and his attempts to conceal or minimise it are disreputable. He should apologise for that, accept that there is valid criticism of not only what he has done but the way he has done it, and, as he wants to reign over us for longer, he should agree to have a review of the way these kinds of benefits are assessed, valued and publicised.
I don’t much like Sadiq Khan, and I don’t think he’s been a good mayor. But I do want the mayoralty to succeed, because I love London and think it has a huge part to play in our national life and on the global stage. Khan’s mission to the United States was a good thing, showing one of our largest economic partners that we were open for business after the pandemic and forging relationships which will hopefully mature into political, economic and cultural successes. That is exactly why, if he does shabby things, if he chips away at public trust, he damages himself, of course, but much more importantly, he damages the office of mayor and he damages London. It’s that which is not easily forgiven.
An American friend lives in London. Academic. Married a Brit. Children. Hates Khan. Says London is now more like NYC in 70s than London 20yrs ago. Says he gets elected for 3 reasons and none are talent, luck or graft. I couldnt possibly comment.