Who will rid us of this turbulent Mayor who’s turned London into gridlocked anarchy on our roads

It’s all descending into anarchy. No, not the Middle East – Britain’s roads.

Yesterday, I stood by the main junction in my part of West London and watched as three cars sailed through a red light.

The last of them almost wiped out a cyclist, who was himself ignoring a red while wearing noise-cancelling headphones and scrolling his mobile.

At another nearby junction, a minor road descends from a flyover and crosses a main road. It is a counter-intuitive set-up: It looks as though traffic on the bigger road should have priority but signs and road markings tell a different story.

In rush hour, drivers take risks, tempers are short, near-misses are rife. Why? Getting from A to B is so hard now that all the joy has been sucked out of driving in London. Hesitate for a moment when the lights turn green and you will face a cacophony of tooting.

Drive an ageing car and you will likely be fined for taking your old banger into a Low Emission Zone (LEZ) or an Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ). Take the direct route to your home and you could fall foul of a Low Traffic Neighbourhood.

These are areas supposedly designed to discourage cars from taking short-cuts and allow pedestrians and cyclists to move around safely. A laudable enough aim until you consider that they probably raise £400 million a year in fines for councils.

Such measures are almost universally detested by drivers, and residents, too. And I haven’t even mentioned the congestion charge, under which drivers must pay £18 a day to drive into the centre of London.

American diplomats hate it so much that they have classified it as a tax. And since they do not have to pay taxes in the UK, they refuse to pay the congestion charge. The charge has little effect on air quality, despite claims from City Hall. People have to drive into town. They have business to do, deliveries to make.

Many of the problems can be traced back to one man: Sir Sadiq Khan, 55, the Mayor of London, who is destroying the fabric of one of the world’s greatest cities. As Mayor, though, he is shielded from some of his own draconian policies.

He moves around the city in a £300,000 chauffeur-driven, armoured Range Rover Sentinel boasting a V8 engine. He is exempt from ULEZ and congestion charges – but not from the traffic jams his war on cars has provoked.

I was trapped on a bus in a traffic jam the other day. A woman got on and started complaining that all this was because Albert Bridge was closed. “I don’t think we’ll get it back,” she lamented.

She might be right. Hammersmith Bridge, a few miles upriver, has been closed since 2019 when dangerous structural defects were found. Only cyclists (of course) and pedestrians have been allowed to use it since.

Meanwhile, as with Albert Bridge, which joins Chelsea on the north bank to Battersea on the  south, surrounding roads face chaos at rush hours as mothers try to get their children to school and workers are forced to take the long way round to reach the office.

Albert Bridge, the responsibility of Kensington and Chelsea Council,  will take a year and £8.5 million to fix. Hammersmith Bridge belongs to Hammersmith and Fulham Council and they don’t have the money to repair it.

Khan, the chair of Transport for London, has stumped up almost £3 million to help to make it safe and the Government has paid £13 million. But the total cost of repair to a Victorian bridge weakened by an IRA bomb is currently estimated at £250 million.

Khan, a controversial and sometimes authoritarian figure, has approved plans to part-pedestrianise Oxford Street. But this is one of the city’s main arteries and he must know by now that traffic problems don’t just disappear – they move somewhere else. Surrounding streets are braced for the mayhem.

London’s Mayor is approaching a watershed moment in his political career. The leadership of the Labour Party will soon be up for grabs. Does he leave the Mayor’s office behind and go for it?

It is the dilemma faced recently by Andy Burnham, Mayor of Manchester. Burnham needed a seat in Parliament to qualify for the race and a safe seat became available. But Starmer’s chums on the National Executive Committee barred him from standing.

Khan, born and raised in Tooting, South London, has served three terms as MP for his birthplace and  became a Minister (ironically, a Transport Minister). Now he must decide whether he has the support in the Labour Party to win the glittering prize.

Khan is a short, scrawny figure. He is not blessed with charisma and he is no orator, either. He tends to gabble his words and speaks with a pronounced South London accent.

While he might be unprepossessing, he has finely-honed political instincts and rivals underestimate him at their peril.

He certainly has unwavering support in the Muslim community. Just over a week ago, he took part in a prayer event in Trafalgar Square to mark the end of the day’s fasting during Ramadan.

Tory Nick Timothy, Shadow Chancellor, called it “an act of domination… straight from the Islamist playbook.” And Reform’s Nigel Farage called for it to be banned.

Though Khan, who is from a Pakistani family, is no doubt a devout Muslim, it is hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to burnish his credentials within that community.

Their votes made him Mayor and might keep him in power if he decided to run again in May, 2028. But yesterday the landscape changed with private polls suggesting that Lord (Sebastian) Coe would beat him in a race for Mayor.

Coe is an Olympic gold medallist and arguably the finest athlete of his generation – though Steve Ovett might dispute that assessment. He is a former MP and organised the 2012 London Olympics.

Tories are urging him to run against Khan and see him as a better bet than James Cleverly, who is touted as a likely Mayoral candidate.

So Khan has a dilemma: Does he bet the house on the Labour leadership and risk ending up as a backbencher with little real influence? Or does he stay where he is and hope to carry on running London?

My guess is he will choose to remain a big fish in a good-sized pond containing 9,000,000 smaller fish. We’ll see after the May elections.

*****

I don’t give up easily on books, films, TV shows. Someone worked hard to entertain us and I try to see the good. I really do.

But I have just finished watching possibly the worst piece of television ever to hit our screens. Oh, the relief!

It was Scarpetta, a series based on the Patricia Cornwell books, about forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta. She takes on the job of Virginia’s chief medical examiner and probes a case with echoes of her first big investigation.

I liked the books. The cast was good and included Nicole Kidman as Scarpetta; Jamie Lee Curtis as her older sister Dorothy, who writes children’s books; and the ever-reliable Bobby Cannavale as Detective Pete Marino.

How bad could it be? Well, very.

The story was told in two different time frames, requiring two casts, the second to play their younger selves. The script was confusing and contained weird sub-plots such as the daughter of Dorothy communing with her dead wife on a computer screen.

Liz Sarnoff was the show runner, did much of the writing and is credited as an executive producer, so she takes the blame for this garbage. We kept watching for all eight episodes, willing it to get better. It never did.

It’s on Amazon Prime. Don’t make the same mistake as us.

RICHARD DISMORE

25 March 2026