Five years ago, Sadiq Khan was elected London mayor with the biggest personal mandate in British history. He inherited a capital that had recovered from postwar decline to become one of the world’s pre-eminent cities.
But Khan’s fate has been to lead London in an era of permanent crisis: seven weeks after he became mayor the UK voted to leave the EU (with London the only English region to back Remain). Donald Trump’s election followed months later, and Khan’s term has ended with the worst pandemic for a century. As Karl Marx observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances.”
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