Zohran Mamdani voters should take long hard look at Sadiq Khan's London

New Yorkers have elected Zohran Mamdani as their mayor - and I can't be alone in feeling an acute sense of deja vu. Electors in the Big Apple may believe they've chosen a fresh, progressive force with new answers. But before they celebrate, they should take a long, hard look across the Pond at London. After nine years of Sadiq Khan our capital illustrates what happens when moralistic politics crashes into the hard realities of governing a global city.

There's a recognisable pattern to this new style of politician. Like Khan, Mamdani speaks fluent virtue. They're both very good at condemning inequality and injustice, and harking on about being on the side of the forgotten and dispossessed. And I understand why this works.

The cost of living is suffocating ordinary people and making everyday life feel unmanageable here as there. New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world: hardworking people on six-figure salaries can barely cover rent and groceries. Crime is rising. For years, the political establishment has prioritised the asset class over the person trying to build a life.

Even politicians with 'proper experience' and stellar CVs have delivered very little for the average voter. Why wouldn't people want to take a chance on someone different?

Yet, the problem is that London already tried a version of this experiment. Khan was marketed as modern, compassionate, progressive, and morally assured. Londoners wanted fairness, better public services, safer streets and more accountability from those in power. What we got was a politician with excellent rhetorical instincts, but with a governing record steeped in decline.

Just look at what has become of our capital. Knife crime is rampant - with 15,000 knife offences recorded last year (nearly 40 a day). Petty theft and shoplifting have, essentially, been decriminalised. Oxford Street is a gaudy embarrassment of money-laundering candy shops and phone snatchers.

Women like me feel less safe travelling around the city. The Met Police has become a byword for scandal and misogyny. And to top it all off, London feels harsher, dirtier, edgier and more lawless than it has in decades.

This is what New Yorkers need to recognise. High-minded moral politics doesn't necessarily translate into competent governance. Both Khan and Mamdani seem to be cut from the same cloth; the same performance of moral virtue while the cities they run (or will run) steadily fall apart.

They've both made the same fashionable enemies: Donald Trump, the police and capitalism itself.

Khan's own obsessions with racial equity would be almost comedic if they weren't so detached from Londoners' lived reality. Still, at least Khan had a job before politics, albeit as a human rights lawyer. Mamdani has never run anything.

Indeed, at the age of 34, he's barely had a proper job. And administrative experience does matter when you suddenly inherit a £120billion operation with millions relying on functioning services.

The mayor-elect's slogans don't survive contact with reality either. Fare-free buses. City-owned supermarkets. Rent freezes. A $30-an-hour minimum wage. These things are great on a poster. But the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs New York's subways and buses, is not under Mamdani's control.

Tax rises need approval from the governor. And rent freezes, in a city that already struggles to build housing, will choke supply even further. Politicians love rent control because the damage takes time to show. But it always does in the end. London is living proof of how quickly things fall apart when symbolism replaces seriousness.

Our mayor spends his energy sermonising about Gaza, climate justice and Brexit, issues he cannot control, while the city he governs has become more dangerous, more unequal, more chaotic and more exhausted. He didn't create every problem but, under him, the rot has deepened.

New Yorkers need to understand this: Mamdani is cut from the same rhetorical cloth. The sort who sees policing primarily as a political enemy. In 2020, he openly pushed for defunding the NYPD.

London's own flirtation with soft policing and moral suspicion of the force has had devastating consequences. A big city simply cannot function if its mayor treats its police force as the opposition.

New Yorkers are right to want a city that works. They are right to feel angry. They are right to demand change. But if they want a preview of what activist-style moral politics looks like when it hits the unforgiving wall of reality, they should look to London.

If politicians refuse to address the concerns people actually have, they shouldn't be shocked, or condescending, when voters seek answers elsewhere. That applies to the left just as much as to the right.