Sadiq Khan has revealed that his lifelong dream is to be cast in a Richard Curtis movie about London.
Speaking exclusively to the Standard’s London Love Stories podcast for Valentine’s Day, the mayor made a personal plea to Curtis, the legendary filmmaker and a good friend of his: “If Richard is watching this, listen: I’m just a boy, speaking to a director, saying please cast me in one of your films.”
Khan, 53, also spoke about embarrassing his daughters whenever he and his wife show public displays of affection.
“My wife Saadiya and I love Lionel Richie and Endless Love is our song as a couple. I can do the Lionel Richie notes pretty well and she can do the Diana Ross notes pretty well,” he said.
“We saw him play in Hyde Park as a warm-up to Stevie Wonder in 2019 and Endless Love came on so I obviously sang it to my wife. The next day there were photographs in the paper saying ‘Sadiq’s courting his wife’ and my daughters were so mortified, so I’ve got to be romantic in private in case my daughters cringe.”
The mayor also gave the exclusive story of how he met his wife, a fellow solicitor who practices by her maiden name Saadiya Ahmed, for the first time.
“My wife and I met when we were at school,” he said. “I went to the boys school, Earnest Bevin Academy, which others thought was a really tough hard school, and Saadiya went to the mixed school, Graveney, where we thought the boys were namby-pambys compared to us.
“The thing about her school was there was a headteacher there called Mr Stapleton, and at lunchtime he would patrol up and down the road to stop the Earnest Bevin boys going to try to court the Graveney girls.
“I managed somehow to get around Mr Stapleton, we got to know each other, and we started going out when I was in sixth form, so we fell in love quite young.
“When I meet people who haven’t spent time with someone from my background, I tease them and say we had an arranged marriage when we were very young...then we carry on the story and say we arranged ourselves.”
The podcast episode also hears Khan speak about his love story with London over the last 53 years, from growing up as the son of a bus driver in Tooting, to surprise date nights with his wife at Ronnie Scott’s today.
He also offers his best dating advice for single Londoners, and explains why London is still one of the most romantic cities in the world.
