Far-left London Mayor Sadiq Khan was knighted at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday by King Charles III for his supposed contributions to politics and public service.
Sir Sadiq, who was put up for the knighthood by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in his 2024 New Year Honours list, took part in the official ceremony on Tuesday. After bending down on one knee, King Charles tapped both shoulders of the London mayor during the investiture.
Responding to the honour, Sir Sadiq said per the BBC that it was “a great day for the family”, adding that his mother has been “emotional since it was announced.”
“Obviously, from my background, being the son of immigrants, my parents coming here from Pakistan, it’s a big deal for us,” he added.
The decision to bestow a knighthood upon Mayor Khan was controversial given his track record of presiding over a crime wave in the British capital since coming to power in 2016.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, MP for the London constituency of Croydon South, said that citizens of the capital “will rightly be furious his track record of failure is being rewarded.”
Indeed, between 2016 and 2023, London saw a 38 per cent increase in knife crime, with 14,626 offences recorded in 2023 compared to 9,086 in the year before he came into office.
This trend continued to rise last year, with the Metropolitan Police recording 16,789 offences involving a bladed weapon in 2024. This would equate to around 46 per day, or one instance every half hour.
Nevertheless, Mayor Khan has been at the forefront of Britain’s draconian speech policing, having invested a staggering £15.9 million to combat so-called hate crimes and to police the spreading of “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation” on the internet.
Khan has also led calls for the government to enshrine Islamophobia as a criminal offence in British law, which critics have warned will serve as a de facto blasphemy law.
In addition to his failures to tackle knife crime, Khan is perhaps best known internationally for his frequent feuds with U.S. President Donald Trump, previously demanding that Trump be refused a state visit to the UK over his supposed use of “xenophobia, racism, and ‘otherness’ as an electoral tactic”.
Responding in typical fashion, Trump branded Khan a “stone-cold loser“.
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