Sadiq Khan on meeting his wife, embarrassing his daughters and the dating advice he gives to single friends
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Sadiq Khan — Mayor of London, the first ever Muslim mayor of a Western capital and the man who set a new record as our city’s first mayor to secure a historic third term — 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 former editor Dylan Jones into a warm embrace as he arrives at The 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 majority of the last decade and more commonly pressed on subjects from London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) to soaring crime rates.
But this is exactly the point. Khan, 54, is here to take part in a special Valentine’s episode of our her 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, 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.
