James Ford is a columnist for City AM and is a former adviser to Boris Johnson during his tenure as Mayor of London.

The Mayor of London’s dreaded Night Czar is no more. The post has been deleted. Permanently. This should come as no great surprise. The role was an unmitigated failure when occupied by Sadiq’s hapless appointee, Amy Lamé, and the post has sat vacant for more than a year following her resignation. We would probably raise a glass to celebrate this news, but sadly, all the clubs have closed down. (Thanks, Amy!)

Indeed, rejoicing that the Night Czar has gone the way of the Romanovs may be premature. On the recommendation of the Mayor’s Nightlife Taskforce (a committee of industry experts from across the nighttime economy) it is being replaced by a Nightlife Commission (a committee of…wait for it…industry experts from across the nighttime economy). Although the input of genuine business people with real frontline experience must surely be welcomed, it is not clear that City Hall is really taking the Commission, or the nighttime economy, seriously. The Commission has been allocated the rather miserly sum of £300,000 for its initial work, with the intention that it will ultimately become self-funded.

For comparison, £300,000 is what City Hall spent last year promoting al fresco dining. It is equivalent to the combined salary of just two of Sadiq’s nine deputy mayors. It is significantly less than the £958,000 that City Hall spent on providing stewards for the Notting Hill Carnival in 2025. Even more tellingly, £300,000 is slightly less than the total increase in business rates that would have been paid by the three London boozers (the Spread Eagle in Wandsworth, the Beaten Docket in Cricklewood, and the Dog & Bell in Deptford) worst hit by the government’s botched business rates hike prior to the recent screeching U-turn.

Given that the Nightlife Taskforce’s own report found that one in four working Londoners work in the evenings or at night and that the capital’s nighttime economy was worth more than £139bn in 2024, £300,000 now, and an uncertain future funded via GoFundMe and corporate sponsorship, does not really sound like it is going to move the dial much.

Whilst the capital’s overburdened boozers, bars and nightclubs should be concerned (and arguably insulted) that their future has been entrusted to an underfunded, underwhelming City Hall quango with a possibly short lifespan, this is sadly just one example of the indifference that Sadiq Khan’s City Hall has for the hospitality sector.

The sector has faced a torrid time during Khan’s tenure as Mayor. Data from the Night Time Industries Association found that more than 3,000 pubs, bars and nightclubs have closed in London since 2020. In 2024, research by Bonus Finder saw London ranked as the worst city in the UK for a night out because of the prohibitive cost of pints and hotel rooms and the dwindling number of licensed premises per 100,000 population. A further study found that just 24 per cent of all London bars, pubs and clubs were open past midnight on a Saturday night (compared to 44 per cent in Edinburgh and 38 per cent in Manchester). No surprise then that #LameLondon became a popular hashtag prior to Lamé’s departure because of public anger over the lack of late-night options in the capital. Even popular brewing brand Brewdog closed three of its London bars – in Camden, Shepherd’s Bush and Shoreditch – in July 2025. (And you know things must be bad if landlords even struggle to sell overpriced, trendy craft beers to hipsters in Shoreditch of all places).

What has London’s Mayor actually done to help the capital’s struggling hospitality sector during a decade at City Hall? He created the post of Night Czar…but gave it to a Labour Party crony. When clubs and venues continued to close at an accelerated rate, he gave that Night Czar a 40 per cent pay rise. It has taken him nearly a decade in office to get to the point where he has sourced industry recommendations on what the hospitality sector needs.

Was the Mayor one of the many voices that lobbied the Chancellor hard to reverse the business rates rise that licensed premises faced? Nope. Has he spoken out against the national insurance rises that are thought to have destroyed 100,000 jobs in the hospitality sector? Of course not. Is he a critic of the Employment Rights Act or the ‘banter ban’ contained within it? No, in fact he welcomed the legislation.

And it is not like Sadiq to stay quiet on issues of even peripheral relevance to Londoners. He was happy to fly to Los Angeles in 2022 to visit a cannabis farm to make the case for decriminalisation. He never shuts up about Brexit, even though it has been a decade since the referendum. He chose to use his annual keynote address to the City of London (arguably the biggest ‘state of the nation’ moment in the Mayor’s year) recently to warn of the possible dangers posed by AI in the future. But, on the fate of the capital’s historic pubs and the vital jobs they support, our mayor has been conspicuously silent. Other senior Labour figures have had the courage to speak out about the crisis engulfing licensed venues and directly challenge government policy – most notably Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham. But not London’s Mayor.

Where the Mayor has been busy on this issue it is to weaponise the crisis to his own advantage. He has been eager to use the travails of the hospitality sector to acquire new powers for himself. The devolution bill currently meandering its way through Parliament is set to grant City Hall sweeping new powers to call in strategic licensing applications and overrule decisions made by the boroughs. Worse still, he is one of many mayors set to impose a tourism tax on visitors to his city. This is set to clobber tourists visiting the capital to the tune of £350m a year.

All this is despite a lack of evidence that giving Sadiq Khan extra powers will make a positive difference. Afterall, City Hall was granted significant additional planning powers in 2010 but it has not prevented the collapse of housebuilding in London on the current mayor’s watch. And Sadiq Khan has not indicated that he will reinvest any of his tourism tax windfall in initiatives that will boost profits or ease burdens for tourism businesses.

When it comes to taking credit for the achievements of others when things are going well or grabbing additional powers to intervene, Sadiq Khan is always at the front of the queue, enthusiastically shouting “me, me, me”. But, when times are hard and his intervention could make a real difference to Londoner’s livelihoods or quality of life, the mayor is nowhere to be seen or heard. His much-trumpeted existing powers go unused, his high public profile remains unleveraged, and his lack of influence within his own party is vividly exposed. The crisis engulfing the capital’s hospitality industry and destroying essential jobs is not easing up or going away. If anything, it is accelerating. London needs a mayor that will roll his sleeves up and get stuck in or is at least willing to speak out on Londoners’ behalf. It’s a pity that we don’t have one.

That smug phrase, “the right side of history”, has always had a tiresome ring to it. It conflates winning with being morally superior. It also conveys a hubristic assumption of those using it that, as their cause is bound to triumph, there is no need to bother giving due consideration to objections. However, it is certainly true that historians will look at the current efforts to secure regime change in Iran and will offer verdicts on the actions taken by countries and their political leaders. Or not taken, as the case may be.

The British Government has got into a muddled position. It accepts that the Iranian regime and its unlamented “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were a source of evil, not just to the Iranian people but to the rest of the world. Yet it has refused to take the necessary action to remove that evil. Or even offer support to those – the Americans and the Israelis – who were prepared to do something about. Other allies, such as the Canadians and the Australians, have expressed support. The best our government can manage is not to actually condemn our allies. Our Prime Minister has offered vacillation and equivocation when the time came for evil to be confronted. We can put the UK down as a “don’t know”. We will sit this one out. In an epic international battle by the forces of freedom and civilisation, we are passing by on the other side.

What painful viewing it made when the Defence Secretary was interviewed by the BBC yesterday. Laura Kuenssberg asked of the US/Israeli strikes:

“Does the government back what they’ve done?”

John Healey replied:

“Britain played no part in the strikes on Iran. We share however the primary aim of all allies in the region and the US that Iran should never have a nuclear weapon.”

Kuenssberg persisted, of course:

“This is a moment of history and everyone watching this morning will want to know, and will expect to know from their government, is Britain on the side of those two countries who have killed Iran’s supreme leader?”

Healey just wittered on about the need to “prevent further escalation” and to “return to the path of diplomacy.” It has been 47 years since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, during which the “path of diplomacy” has been given a pretty fair try. It has run parallel to an ever more brutal path of terrorism and oppression.

What of our other political leaders?

Sir Ed Davey for the Lib Dems offered a characteristically disingenuous response. He said that “the Iranian people deserve to live free from a brutal regime” but he opposes the liberation they have been so desperately waiting for.

At least, the Green Party and the Corbynistas don’t pretend.  The Deputy Leader of the Green Party, Mothin Ali, took part in a pro Iran regime demonstration. In an absurd twisting of reality, Jeremy Corbyn claimed that the United States and Israel were “rogue states” for taking action. He used to be paid to broadcast on behalf of the Iranian state broadcaster.

What of his neighbouring MP, Dame Emily Thornberry? She tweets:

“I am pleased to see the UK is not involved in these strikes on Iran. They are ill-advised and illegal.”

Ah, yes. International law. Subcontracting your conscience to that bunch of gangsters at the United Nations. No problem, providing you can get UN Security Council authorisation including from those epitomies of moral rectitude, China and Russia.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” Thus it is with international law. Human rights? Rely on Cuba and North Korea to arbitrate such matters.

The legality of military action for the purpose of “eliminating imminent threats” – as covered by Article 51 of the UN Charter? What took the rest of the world so long? When hasn’t Iran been not merely threatening, but carrying out hostile actions, whether directly or via proxies? The Israelis have become rather familiar with the challenge. But not just them. There was an incident involving the murder of 29 Jews in Argentina, among so many other atrocities. Lord Hannan has noted that the UK, designated by the regime as “Little Satan”, has also been a target of the regime’s terrorism. That is why the contention of Rupert Lowe MP that “Britain has enough problems” and we should leave them alone is so misguided. We can not rely on them to leave us alone.

It’s not as if the Iranian regime’s denials of malevolent intent hold much credibility. “Death to America!” is a familiar approved chant which scarcely lacks ambiguity. How ridiculous that anyone should seriously claim that the rules of law is better served by allowing that criminal regime to continue wreaking havoc.

So Conservatives should be pleased that Kemi Badenoch has been robust. She says:

“I stand with our allies in the US and Israel as they take on the threat of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its vile regime. The same regime that carries out attacks on the UK and on our citizens, that seeks to build nuclear weapons that would threaten our country and that brutally repressed pro-democracy protests only months ago and murdered thousands of its own people. Under my leadership, the Conservative Party will always put our national security first and work with our allies to make the world a safer place.”

Reform UK supporters should similarly be proud that Nigel Farage says:

“As the American attacks against this evil regime in Iran begin, I pray for the right outcome for the wonderful Persian people…The Prime Minister needs to change his mind on the use of our military bases and back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran!”

Of course, I understand that Tony Blair’s debacle in Iraq has given regime change a bad name. It still remains a valid question as to whether leaving Saddam Hussein would really have saved lives or meant a better outcome. I think there is a danger in trying to define a “doctrine” that Donald Trump might be adopting, in terms of “America First” isolationism or neo-Conservative interventionism. Really he looks at the deal. The cost-benefit analysis. What would advance US interest without too heavy a cost in blood or treasure? US interests do not mean hiding under the duvet and hoping the rest of the world will go away. The chants in support of Reza Pahlavi, the Iranian Crown Prince, offer hope that restoration of a constitutional monarchy offers a prospect of unity and stability, while a transition to a Parliamentary democracy and market economy is pursued.

Given the shameful and pitiful irrelevance of our own Government during these momentous events, it might seem parochial to focus on the thoughts of our own politicians. But it does clarify what they stand for. Those appeasers of the Ayatollahs who are self-styled “progressives” should be treated with derision. Those are not a cohort unique to our generation or our country. The present endeavour is to remove Jimmy Carter’s legacy, after all. Still, they deserve to suffer what those in HR call “reputational damage.” However uncertain history may be, they will be on the wrong side of it so far as the long-suffering Iranian people are concerned.