Mayor of London Sadiq Khan speaks to the media at West Ham bus depot in east London (/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)Sadiq Khan often talks to journalists, but rarely holds press conferences. So it was something of a surprise to be invited at short notice to West Ham bus garage last Thursday, where the Mayor was to give an update on TfL’s bid for a fifth government bailout.
Why a bus garage when you’ve got a brand new City Hall? Because Mr Khan wanted to be pictured in front of some shiny new buses. London’s buses are built in Falkirk, Yorkshire and Ballymena in Northern Ireland. Investing in London is good for the rest of the country, runs the narrative. It’s “levelling up” in action, he says.
Moments before he took to the podium, TfL got a letter from Transport Secretary Grant Shapps extending its current bailout for three weeks.
But Mr Shapps said it would require a “reset of the relationship” with the Mayor before the big prize of a long-term capital funding deal — up to £2 billion a year to repair roads and bridges, buy new buses and order a new signalling system for the Piccadilly line, for example — would be granted.
Mr Khan was not happy. He said Mr Shapps, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, were “treating Londoners with contempt”. He followed it with a salvo on Twitter. It seems a long time since he vowed to use his second term to “build bridges”.
Where does this leave TfL? I’m told the Government is less bothered about how Mr Khan solves the row with the RMT over the threat to staff pensions than it is about the threat to dozens of bus routes. Some 22 routes face the axe but Mr Khan says 100 are at risk.
Mr Khan does not want to “cut his cloth” according to current demand — one in four Tube passengers and one in six bus passengers have yet to return on weekdays. He says maintaining a full service is the way to win people back.
He blames the Government. But it’s been Tory MPs who have been campaigning to save routes such as the 14 and 24, not Mr Khan. The son of a bus driver is being blamed. The narrative is muddled.
Relations between the Mayor and (some) ministers are in a bad place. “He is like a guy who goes into the bank with a sawn-off shotgun and says: ‘Give me your money or I’ll shoot myself in the foot,’” quips one source.
Funny, yes— but the bus that doesn’t come is no laughing matter.
