Leaving aside those who have parted with a right old wodge of dosh over the years, there are mainly two kinds of life peer: those who are no longer a threat to their party’s leader, and those who still are. For the former, the House of Lords is a retirement home; for the latter, the most ornate gulag in all the world. Sadiq Khan is being lined up for this gulag, with reports that No. 10 has considered offering him a life peerage. Khan is becoming a problem for Sir Keir Starmer, of whose leadership he grows more critical by the day.
In particular, the mayor laments Labour’s failure to get bold on Europe by applying to rejoin the customs union and single market, positions that play well in London and among Labour’s core vote. With that vote haemorrhaging to the Greens, MPs and party activists are looking for ways to re-confirm Labour as the primary vehicle for centre-left politics in Britain. A senior party figure speaking in these terms will look a lot more appealing than Starmer’s technocratic caution.
With the local elections around the corner, buying off key Starmersceptics is no bad idea. Perhaps even more pertinent for Downing Street, Lord Khan of Tooting would be under intense pressure to be a working peer, attending and speaking regularly while conducting his day-to-day duties as mayor. He has complained that the mayor’s powers are too limited. Handed the chance to influence, amend and vote on legislation affecting the capital, it would be politically untenable for Khan not to participate fully. Overstretching a critic means he has less time to criticise you.
The mayor would be a fool to go along with any ennoblement. Taking a peerage from Starmer ties him to the PM, which is like handcuffing yourself to the Titanic. A polite ‘Thank you, prime minister, but I want to focus on leading London’, is the only sensible response should Starmer come calling. Andy Burnham wouldn’t walk willingly into the gulag, and though Khan is a less strategic thinker, he has enough nous to discern between a step up and a set up.
Tories are unhappy at the prospect of Khan being rewarded for his inadequacies as mayor, not least on crime, housing and social cohesion, with his victimhood multiculturalism particularly galling to right-wingers. This is a prime example of the limits of the conservative imagination. They look at the damage a dilettante progressive has wrought on London thanks to devolution and object to him being handed a peerage, rather than resolving to prevent further damage by reversing devolution and scrapping both the London mayoralty and the assembly. Goodness, conservatives would gasp, we can’t do anything so radical as rescind one tiny part of Tony Blair’s constitutional vandalism. We’re Tories, not revolutionaries!
Keir Starmer might be a godawful prime minister but at least he’s not a loser. He knows what power is and is willing to use it without compunction to pursue his own political and strategic priorities. Right-wingers, and this applies to Reform just as much as the Conservatives, are implacable losers, hidebound in their insistence that power should only be used sparingly, to minimal disruptive effect, and in furtherance of the pretence that Britain is governed by rules and institutions whose chief purpose is the public good. Politics is the exercise of preference by those with the power to do so. Nothing more. That’s how Sadiq Khan operates. Conservatives will gripe about the consequences, but they cannot bring themselves to do anything about it. Which is how you end up frothing over a peerage for an opponent who has used the London mayoralty to destructive effect, and never stop to consider simply abolishing the mayoralty next time you are in power.
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