Sadiq Khan — Mayor of London, the first ever Muslim mayor of a Western capital and the man expected to set a new record as our city’s first mayor to secure a historic third term if he wins the vote in less than 80 days’ time — is telling me about his mission to give more hugs.
“I went from having six brothers and a sister, to having two children who are women... I think that more female environment has changed my behaviour for the better,” the former human rights lawyer and Labour MP for Tooting tells me, shortly after pulling our editor Dylan Jones into a warm embrace as he arrives at our Evening Standard offices on Finsbury Square. “Now I make a point of giving hugs to my male friends, to my colleagues, to people I haven’t seen in a while. It’s a way of showing love without needing to say ‘I love you’.”
Love, fatherhood and public displays of affection might not be your regular subject for the man in charge of our capital’s transport, housing and climate policies for the last eight years and more commonly pressed on subjects from London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) to soaring crime rates and how likely he really is to beat Tory rival Susan Hall in the mayoral elections in May.
But this is exactly the point. Khan, 53, is here to take part in a special Valentine’s episode of our new dating podcast, London Love Stories with Katie Strick, and appears to be enjoying a rare chance to talk about these softer, fuzzier elements of his day-to-day, whether it’s date nights with his wife Saadiya, 52, visiting his elderly mother every morning before work, or the weekly games of football and tennis he plays with his friends in Tooting — an example of the non-romantic forms of love that the pandemic taught him were just as important for mental wellbeing as the romantic stuff, and a key element of what he believes to be the real joy of London: the interactions between Londoners themselves. He leans into the brief, posing jovially with a bouquet of roses and cosying in among the pink cushions of our television studio for a more informal chat about matters of the heart.
His own Valentine, Saadiya — his wife of the last three decades, a fellow solicitor and Tooting-raised Muslim who just so happens to be the child of a bus driver like her husband — is at home with the family dog, Luna, and readying herself for date night. The couple have tickets to see Sarah Jessica Parker’s new play, Plaza Suite at the Savoy Theatre, and are looking forward to a night out as a two — though they’ll be being careful not to make any public displays of affection for fear of embarrassing their daughters Anisha, 24, and Ammarah, 22, as they did several years ago, when Khan was pictured serenading his wife at a 2019 Lionel Richie concert in Hyde Park (Richie’s hit, Endless Love, has long been their go-to couple song).
The pair met when they were teenagers and their love story reads like your classic high-school-sweetheart-happily-ever-after: he was at the local boys school, Ernest Bevin Academy, seen externally as the “tough, hard school” in the area, while Saadiya attended the local mixed school, Graveney, where the boys were regarded by Khan’s peers as “namby-pambys” and the headteacher, Mr Stapleton, went to great lengths to keep the girls from being “courted” by other local boys.
A determined young Khan managed to get around that headteacher, somehow, and started dating with his now-wife while they were in sixth form. “We fell in love quite young,” he tells me, looking relaxed under the interview spotlight despite rarely speaking about his romantic life in public. “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.”
Khan talks me through a few of the highlights of his and Saadiya’s love story since then — day dates watching the pelicans in St James’ Park; a recent evening he surprised her with tickets to see her favourite artist John Legend at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club; becoming parents (”I love being an uncle, a husband and a son, but of all the things I am I think my favourite is being a dad”) — and swerves my question about the rumours that he once wooed his wife over a filet-o-fish in a Croydon McDonalds. “There’ll be people listening to this who may not be able to afford fine dining so my advice is: even franchises on the high street can be romantic with the right person,” he says with a knowing grin (those who’ve met Saadiya say she is unwaveringly supportive, so presumably she’s forgiven him for spilling that particular less-than-romantic detail).
Sometimes I tease people and say Saadiya and I had an arranged marriage when we were very young... Then we carry on the story and say we arranged ourselves
The couple live in Tooting in Wandsworth, the borough in which Khan has lived for all-bar-four years of his life (he was born there at St George’s Hospital, grew up on the Henry Prince Estate in Earlsfield down the road and has otherwise spent three years in Islington as well as a year in Surrey for law school) and just a mile from the home his mother Sehrun, a retired seamstress, lives in today (his father Amanullah, a former bus driver, died in 2003).
Khan visits his mother every morning at the moment, on his way to work, and all seven of his siblings live within a mile radius of the “mothership” in Tooting Bec. “My mum has 23 or 24 grandkids and seven or eight great-grandkids so her house is crazy at the weekend, and Eid or Christmas... If you were a martian and you landed at my mum’s house you’d think we were bonkers. It’s like EastEnders on steroids; her home is like the Queen Vic without the booze.”
Khan might be biased (he was MP for Tooting for 11 years), but to him Tooting “the best part of the greatest city in the world” and a microcosm of what he sees happening across the capital more widely. “It changes as new people arrive, and that’s what makes it so exciting,” he explains, citing his parents’ own story (they emigrated from Pakistan to London two years before he was born, after their parents emigrated from India to Pakistan). “I spent a lot of time going to Tooting Market as a boy and those shops there today were always there, but they’ve evolved into newer shops. That’s the joy of Tooting. It’s always changing.”
For a man who can’t go anywhere without round-the-clock security and an almost equally 24/7 army of fans asking for selfies, he certainly paints a wholesome picture of his village-feel life in his corner of south-west London. Again, he might have an unfair advantage as one of the most famous faces in London, but he loves that he can walk to the shop and bump into people he knows, whether it’s a sibling or a school friend, still his closest friends today.
“My daughters have a similar experience because they’ve grown up in and around Tooting,” he says. “I know it’s not Eton or Harrow but my daughters went to the same primary school as me and the same secondary school as my wife. That’s a nice thing to have.”
Khan goes onto walk me through the other parts of London he particularly treasures: the parks, notably Tooting and Wandsworth Commons where he runs and walks Luna the dog; Trafalgar Square, to which he’d ride his father’s bus (the 44) as a child and in which he now helps to host festivals from St Patrick’s Day to the Sikh festival of Vaisakhi; the Southbank, arguably one of the most romantic spots in London and a place his pal and friend of the podcast Richard Curtis likes to set scenes in many of his films.
He still has a dream to star in one of Curtis’ films (”I’m just a boy, speaking to a director, saying please cast me in one of your films,” he teases) and agrees with Curtis that there’s something about the river that offers a sense of peace in the middle of the otherwise crowded, polluted city; a place to breathe.
Khan is passionate about this particular subject given the pollution problem that’s increasingly plaguing our capital. He’s written a book about it, Breathe: Tackling the Climate Emergency, and cites Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, the mother of nine-year-old Ella who became the first person in the UK to have air pollution cited on their death certificate, as the most inspiring Londoner he’s met.
I love being an uncle, a husband and a son, but of all the things I am I think my favourite is being a dad
He says Kissi-Debrah, now a fierce air pollution campaigner, changed his life and that he’ll be sparing a particular thought for her tomorrow, February 15, the anniversary of Ella’s death. “When you’re a parent who is grieving, who is campaigning, trying to find that cause of death, the respect I have is just on a different level. I think the corridors of heaven are going to be lined with campaigning parents.”
As a London parent himself, Ella’s story struck a particular chord with Khan. “I’m not saying you can’t get there without having kids, but my view is that when I became a parent I became less selfish, more grounded, I started thinking about things I hadn’t been thinking about before,” he says. “Without getting too Richard Curtis about this, you start thinking about what you’re going to leave behind, your legacy, what kind of role model you are, what example you want to set. For most of us, the love we have for our colleagues and our friends is transactional. I don’t want to say it’s conditional... but it’s based on the condition of a certain behaviour. With your kids it’s unconditional. It’s quite scary but it’s quite brilliant as well.”
For Khan, part of this brilliance are the things own his kids have taught him and his wife, even his mother. “English isn’t my mum’s first language but my kids have started saying ‘I love you’ to her. When I grew up, it was just a different generation, my mum saying ‘I love you’ wasn’t an everyday occurrence — and now it is. Which is a great example of the impact the younger generation can have on the older generation.”
Khan returns to the subject of his mother when I ask about the other examples of non-romantic love he sees in his job. He talks about the nurses and doctors who cared for her when she was in hospital recently; how their care was a form of love because it couldn’t have simply been down to the pay. He talks about the teachers at his local comprehensive school growing up. “I can say this unequivocally: my teachers loved me. They encouraged me. They opened my eyes to things I’d never thought of.”
He moves onto talking about the runners at the London Marathon, which he ran for the Evening Standard’s Dispossessed Fund in 2014 and his daughter Anisha is running in April, as well as the smaller, weekly examples of love like playing tennis or going for dinner with a friend — things he never even appreciated until lockdown but that he has made a point of building into his schedule ever since. “Those first few months were arguably one of the worst periods of my life, but I didn’t realise at the time that the reason I didn’t feel great, I had mental ill-heath, was that the things I was doing before were good for both my physical and mental health,” he tells me. “Call them whatever, but part of those things is love. We don’t talk about it very much because it’s a very un-British thing. We don’t say ‘I love you’ to our colleagues, to our best friends. But we do.”
All of which ties into Khan’s whole mantra and the very premise of our podcast, London Love Stories: that the joy of London is its people, its diversity, its relationships and interactions. Series one of the podcast hears from everyone from a paramedic and a police officer who fell in love after answering the same 999 call, to two couples who met on the same London bus. As the son of a bus driver, Khan resonated with the bus episode in particular — and was hardly surprised to hear of strangers conversing on the top deck of the number 17.
“[London’s buses] are romantic because they’re iconic around the world — but they’re also a real leveler. You could be sitting next to a multi-gazillionaire or next to a hard-working teacher or a doctor. You hear different accents, different classes, different ethnicities, and often different languages. You can get the entire world on the top deck of a double decker bus.”
Khan is more surprised to hear of the couple from episode one, who first locked eyes on the District Line and have since been married for 15 years. The Tube is harder to begin a conversation on than a bus, in his opinion (no wonder, he’s a Northern Line commuter), but not impossible. “I think it’s really important for us to bust the myth that those outside London have, that we’re some kind of unfriendly city, that no one talks to each other. It’s just not true. There are lots of places where you can have a conversation, whether you’re queuing up for brunch on a Sunday, whether you’re walking your dog in the park or going to the leisure centre on the bus.”
In films there’s this assumption that there has to be a thunderbolt when you first see somebody... But you can fall in love with a platonic friend
So what’s his advice for single Londoners, then, if they’re looking for their own Richard Curtis-style rom-com moment? Khan admits he’s long been out of the dating game, but believes the key is in ignoring Curtis and his fellow movie-makers altogether. “I worry because in Hollywood and even in British films, there’s this assumption that there has to be that thunderbolt when you first see somebody,” he says. “Some people have that, but often you can fall in love with a platonic friend. You can fall in love with a work colleague. You can start dating somebody that you wouldn’t have previously thought about dating. So don’t panic. Be patient and be glass-half-full.”
Perhaps that’s where Khan’s movie moment might come in one day, then: as the mayor who fell in love with his high school sweetheart, who endorses hugs wherever possible, and who champions love in the unlikeliest of places, even on a rainy Tuesday on the top deck of a regular London bus. Richard Curtis, if you’re reading this, the mayor is ready when you are. That’s certainly a film I’d like to watch.
Our very special Valentine’s Day episode of London Love Stories with Sadiq Khan is available now on all podcast platforms. Search London Love Stories with Katie Strick wherever you get your podcasts to listen to the full conversation and all our episodes from series one. Hit follow to make sure you’re the first to know when we’re back for series two.
Love bomb: a quickfire V-day Q&A with Sadiq Khan
The most romantic Tube line is... The Northern Line. I live in Tooting so I have to say that. The Elizabeth Line might actually be a better answer as it’s air-conditioned, spacious, has 4G and 5G, which is probably quite important given how the current generation finds a date.
To me, love means... Respect. It means treating others how you’d like to be treated. It means being patient, it means compromise, in some circumstances it can be passion, it means joy, it means happiness... Hopefully I show my love for people by my actions, not my words, whether that’s how I treat my wife and my daughters or how I treat my friends. I include colleagues in there too. Whatever industry you’re in, whether it’s politics, journalism, medicine or law, you can get to the top by loving people. It goes back to that famous quote: I’d rather be loved than feared.
My go-to love song is... Endless Love by Lionel Richie. My wife Saadiya and I love him and that’s our song as a couple: I can do the Lionel Richie notes pretty well and she can do the Diana Ross notes pretty well. We recently 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.
Lionel Richie speaking with Sadiq Khan.#Coronation pic.twitter.com/Ld5ohV8Yvh
— Steph (@Sapphireblues3) May 6, 2023
My go-to date spot is... London’s Southbank. I challenge you to walk along the river there and not have a great time, from the street vendors to the National Theatre. If your budget stretches, we have the best theatres in the world here in London. But the great thing about London is there is something to do on any budget, whether it’s Michelin star fine dining or pizza or walks in Hyde Park or St James’ Park. Saadiya and I have spent a lot of time there. Where else can you see pelicans just walking around, minding their own business?
My favourite restaurant in London is... Watan in Tooting. It’s a fusion of Pakistani food and Afghan food, and a good example of how the foods in Tooting have evolved and changed as London does — in this specific case, with lots of people arriving from Afghanistan in the last few years.
The most romantic place in Tooting is... the lido. It’s a pretty special place. There’s a tradition that it hosts a swimming race every Christmas Day, so I go along and cheer them on in four layers and a woolly hat because I’m a scaredy-cat. For the swimmers who go there all year round, there’s definitely a romance to it.
A fact I love about Tooting is... there’s a crater on Mars named after it. Few people know this but very soon after I became the MP for Tooting in 2005, we heard the news that there was a scientist at NASA who’d found a new crater on Mars. If you find a crater you get the pleasure of naming it whatever you want and this chap had an association with Tooting, so that’s what he called it. You tell me of another place in London that has a crater named after it.
The place I go when I need to think or unwind is... Tooting Common or Wandsworth Common near my home. Running there helps me to unwind and reflect and be grateful. When I walk our dog Luna there I deliberately don’t wear AirPods. Since the pandemic, I’ve noticed how important it is to appreciate the ambient sounds of nature.
My favourite-ever date was... a time I recently tried to surpriser Saadiya and it (almost) worked. She’s a massive John Legend fan and I got wind of the fact that he was going to be playing a small gig for his mates and a few others at Ronnie Scott’s. I thought I’d surprise Saad and take her there and not tell her it was going to be John Legend. On the day of the gig, Ammarah my youngest daughter was back from university so Saadiya said she’d stay at home with her. I told Ammarah we had a problem and long story short I managed to get a third ticket for the gig.
The trick was to get to Ronnie Scott’s without her discovering John Legend was playing, so I had to hide all the posters and blackboards from her as we walked in. I even had to shield her from seeing John Legend’s wife Chrissy Teigen. It was all working a treat until a manager came out 10 minutes before the performance and said ‘Sadiq, I hear you’re a big fan of John Legend!’. Saadiya was obviously very happy but 10 minutes more and it would’ve been the perfect date.
My dating advice to single Londoners looking for love is... Be patient and be glass-half-full. I worry because in Hollywood and even in British films, there’s this assumption that there has to be that thunderbolt when you first see somebody. Some people have that, but often you can fall in love with a platonic friend. You can fall in love with a work colleague. You can start dating somebody that you wouldn’t have previously thought about dating. So don’t panic. It’ll be less likely to happen if you’re panicking and fretting. You’ll still have that lightbulb moment when you’re meant to have that lightbulb moment. The same thing will happen either way.
