Up to now, it has largely been an accusation from the radical Right. ‘London has fallen!’ they proclaim on social media, accompanied by a video clip of a bag snatch or some extremist protester. From time to time, the President of the United States likes to join in, too. ‘London’s a different place,’ declared President Trump in one of his recurring barbs at the capital and its Mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan. ‘I hate to see it happen.’

Now, however, the same sentiment is being echoed on the Left, via newly crowned Labour leader Andy Burnham. Last month, the PM-in-waiting heaped abuse and mockery on London and its ways. ‘Westminster’ received eight mentions as he outlined his Mancunian vision for a better UK.

‘Whitehall’ was panned ten times, its ‘disjointed’ culture’ repeatedly given a hefty kick. Though Mr Burnham was too grand to talk to the journalists at the back of the room (and had even debarred the Mail’s own Quentin Letts), his spin doctors let it be known that he has no wish to move to London. He would, instead, be opening a ‘Number Ten, North’ and would not be relocating his family and his extensive collection of black T-shirts to ‘Number Ten, South’ (as Downing Street is about to become).

Nor did he make any mention of his London counterpart. While Labour MPs continue to hail the outgoing Mayor of Manchester as the saviour of the UK, no one at all is pleading for the Mayor of London to come to the aid of the nation. In June, Sir Sadiq Khan announced that he would not be seeking a return to Westminster to join a Burnham administration. No one noticed because it had never occurred to them in the first place. This week it was revealed the Mayor will be entering the House of Lords instead after being handed a peerage parting gift from Sir Keir Starmer.

Has London ever seemed more friendless? Is the capital really finished? Has the erstwhile gilded centre of the imperial world, host of three Olympiads and the point from which the entire planet still sets its clocks, now had its day?

It’s nonsense to say that ‘London has fallen’. As a Londoner, I don’t feel any more nervous walking a street than I did ten years ago. Certain crimes are unquestionably on the up but it is still a relatively safe place with world class cultural attractions. What is much harder to dismiss, however, is the charge that London is failing.

Robert Hardman (pictured) questions whether London has indeed ‘fallen’

Hardman reflects on what years of the Mayor’s rule has done to the city. Stock image used

MPs don’t even need to step outside their falling-down Palace of Westminster (repair estimate: £16-40billion) to sense the problem. Just look out of the window. The parliamentary estate is now wreathed in more ugly steel and bristling spikes than an old RUC police station in Crossmaglen.

Ice-cream vans sit illegally on double-red lines on Westminster Bridge, charging £8 for a hot dog and £5 for a cone (‘Go call Mr Whippy’ says one vendor when I ask if he has a licence). Hungry passers-by step straight into the cycle lane, dodging the bad-tempered cyclists whose cycle lane is reducing the even-more-bad-tempered motorists to a crawl. Parked alongside are a fleet of unlicensed rickshaw ‘pedicab’ operators touting £30-a-mile (or more) rides to gullible tourists. Graffiti is everywhere. Opposite Parliament, the fountain outside St Thomas’s Hospital is broken, its pool empty and peeling in the heat. Decay and disappointment.

I don’t see a single copper. A few are sitting round the corner inside parked vehicles with the air-con running. The atmosphere, it must be said, is neither threatening nor febrile. It just feels like no one’s in charge and no one cares much anyway.

Sclerotic traffic, endemic theft and anti-social behaviour make for a place that feels demonstrably on the down.

House prices are dropping at the upper end, as international investors flee Labour’s punitive tax harvest. Yet, most housing remains way beyond the purchasing power of most young people and supply is chronically behind schedule (by more than 50,000 a year). In October, the Starmer government did its client mayor a huge favour by reducing Mayor Khan’s mandatory quota of affordable housing in new developments from 35 per cent to 20 per cent. Still no change.

Low level crime is normalised. On the hottest day of the year, I see a man in the West End riding an electric scooter on the pavement faster than it is permitted to travel on the road – while wearing a balaclava. Perhaps he just ran out of sun cream. It all seems perfectly commonplace.

Two major arteries over the Thames are closed to traffic. One of them, Hammersmith Bridge, was actually sealed off in the very same week in 2019 when Paris’s Cathedral of Notre Dame went up in flames (no prizes for guessing which is now reborn and in rude health). Further East, Albert Bridge is out for another year.

Figures just out show fare evasion on the Tube has just reached a new high – five per cent – which won’t surprise those of us who regularly use it. It all goes back to that feeling that no one is really in charge, just like those endless reports of free-range shoplifting with the same story: the police are too ‘busy’ to attend a civil matter and supermarket staff are under orders from HQ not to intervene.

And now, even the Left is waking up. London is a Labour citadel. The party boasts a thumping 80 per cent of the city’s 75 MPs – including the (outgoing) Prime Minister – plus its thrice-elected Labour Mayor. But even staunch loyalists are starting to accept that the party can’t go on blaming the ghastly Tories for everything, let alone ghastly Reform (which barely registers on the dial here).

There can be no better illustration of that than last month’s forlorn sight of a Prime Minister being drowned out by an audio mugger with a sound system while delivering the saddest speech of his life.

According to Hardman, both the Right and Left like have no faith in Sadiq Khan 

Chief mourner for the European Union, Steve Bray, a charmless if indefatigable bore has been standing outside Westminster shouting about Brexit for the last ten years. He turned up for Sir Keir’s resignation speech with his amplifier to pump out the European ‘national’ anthem, Ode to Joy, at an industrial noise level. It plainly unsettled Sir Keir, who was struggling to retain his composure as it was.

Afterwards, Sir Keir had many sympathisers, not least Labour MP Jacob Collier who bemoaned a ‘complete lack of respect’ and Leftie commentator Lewis Goodall who called Bray ‘a yob’. The editor of the New Statesman, Tom McTague, offered a shrewder critique when he noted: ‘It is – quite obviously – preposterously antisocial and rude but we just allow it to continue with a shrug.’

I do not recall the same voices rallying around then-Tory PM Rishi Sunak when Bray bombarded his Downing Street valediction with the old Labour anthem, ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. We shall set that aside. The point is that all of the above are correct.

For Steve Bray is not some cuddly eccentric whom we should admire for being a cheeky chappy. He comes with malign intent and he gets away with it. And if he can blast whatever he feels, what’s to stop others from playing their own sounds? There are, in fact, local bylaws which forbid the use of amplified sound in places like Whitehall and Parliament Square without official approval. These are not draconian measures. Self-evidently, the centre of government is going to attract a lot of protests and these have to be managed. The authorities can enforce these rules when it suits them, as they did on Coronation Day, fearful of republicans with megaphones shouting profanities.

However, the authorities now seem to have given up. In 2024, police ordered Bray to stop using amplified music near Parliament. He refused and went to court, pleading that it was his human right. Sure enough, a deputy district judge ruled that Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights kicked in. Bray was thus welcome to carry on. Plainly, the authorities should have appealed but didn’t bother. Pump up the volume, Steve.

On this issue, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is now at one with Sir Keir’s Left-wing sympathisers. She has formally asked the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, why he did not appeal the Bray case and whether he felt he had the powers required to ‘keep good order in Whitehall in the national interest’. She added that if this current interpretation of the ECHR (which she has pledged to scrap) still stands, then ‘we will be left at the mercy of imbeciles with nothing better to do than spend their day terrorising politicians, civil servants and members of the public’.

Bray sets a precedent. It is one which helps explain the exponential rise in borderline antisemitism which is now a normalised, acceptable feature on all those pro-Palestinian marches. ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free…’ and so on.

‘Over recent years, the Metropolitan Police have been slow to use the powers that they’ve got to control protest,’ says former Met inspector David Spencer. ‘A big part of this is that you have these internal stakeholder groups providing advice on things like “what is and isn’t jihad?”. The Mayor has oversight of the Met and therefore there is political encouragement.’ Mr Spencer cites the example of knife crime. ‘We had a message from City Hall from the Mayor that we need to get police stop-and-search numbers down because it’s unfairly used against ethnic minorities. The Met do it and, in response, knife crime goes up. It’s as simple as that.’

Mr Spencer heads the crime unit at the leading think-tank, Policy Exchange, which has produced multiple reports on London’s problems. His colleague, former Tory transport adviser Andrew Gilligan, produced a withering 2023 report, ‘Tarnished Jewel’, on the decline of our central government district. It showed that crime around Parliament had risen two and a half times more steeply than the rest of London. Overall, since 2014, violent crime in the area had risen by 168 per cent and public order offences by 252 per cent. At the same time, the Met had started classifying monuments like Winston Churchill’s statue and even the Cenotaph as ‘contentious’. Mr Gilligan argues that precious little has changed since.

‘If we can’t control the streets around the centre of government, where can we control them? It’s just another sign of our total lack of seriousness as a country,’ he says.

So what’s the solution? Both analysts point to, guess where, Andy Burnham’s Manchester. ‘It is very interesting what Steve Watson, the chief in Manchester, has done up there,’ says Mr Spencer, who worked with Manchester’s robustly no-nonsense senior copper in his days in London’s East End. ‘The reality is that when he took over five years ago, that force was absolutely on its knees. Now he’s turned it around completely. He has shown that you can do proper coppering without the lanyards and the flag-waving and it can be entirely in keeping with a traditional Labour political leadership. I suppose you could call it the difference between a traditional Labour approach and a progressive London approach.’ Chief Constable Watson’s figures in Manchester – burglary down by 21 per cent and robbery by 16 per cent year-on-year – are clear enough. London’s latest stats – including a 54 per cent upswing in shoplifting and record phone thefts – tell a different story.

Ike Ijeh, London architect and author – and Policy Exchange’s head of housing and urban space – points to London’s lack of housing as a trigger for other woes. ‘When people can’t afford homes, they move out. That’s the crux of many of London’s problems,’ he says. ‘It’s not entirely controlled by the mayor. There are other economic factors that affect that. But there are levers our Mayor could have used. He could be a lot more pro-investment.’

Take a vast indoor entertainment project that never happened. The Sphere, was all set to go up next to London’s Olympic Park last year, built by the owners of New York’s Madison Square Garden. They had done their due diligence, a £1billion-plus budget was in play and Sir Sadiq had initially been behind the plan. Then NIMBYs started nobbling the Mayor. It became clear that it might cost him a few votes in the Stratford area. Sure enough, Sir Sadiq threw out the scheme due to ‘light pollution’ (though it was indoors) and a lack of ‘green’ credentials.

‘It would have been the largest space of its kind in Britain,’ says Mr Ijeh. ‘Andy Burnham is always going on about how London gets all the prizes. So where’s the biggest live indoor music arena in the country now? It’s the Co-Op Arena in Manchester.’

The former Tory mayoral candidate for London and ex-minister, Steve Norris, offers an interesting perspective. He knows Mr Burnham well – both are native Liverpudlians and Everton fans – and is not convinced by all the ‘Number Ten, North’ stuff. 

‘London is the greatest city on Earth and has nothing to fear from Andy Burnham,’ he says. ‘He’ll just get a few more mandarins to move to parts of the country they probably don’t even know exists.’ He is surprisingly positive about Sir Sadiq’s Labour predecessor. ‘Ken Livingstone was brilliant as Mayor. He got stuff done and he got the money off Brown and Blair. But Khan is a disaster. He won’t win next time which is why he won’t stand.’

All in stark contrast to the outgoing Mayor Of Manchester as he prepares for his coronation. So now that it’s a musical free-for-all, what should we blast out when Andy Burnham takes to the Downing Street podium? How about ‘Waterloo Sunset’?