At a time when there are wars and rumours of wars, as well as bullets, rockets and artillery rounds flying and bombs dropping, there are also opinions about such wars, opinions almost as numerous as the ordinance expended on the battlefield. There are also those who want to use the fear that Russias invasion of Ukraine creating a wider conflict, to self aggrandise themselves, play the big ‘I Am’ and insert themselves into issues that have little to do with their day job in order to give the impression that they are more competent and powerful than they really are.

One such self-aggrandising individual is the Greater London Mayor Sadiq Khan. He’s popped up to tell the world that London has an effective civil defence system that can be deployed should Cold War II suddenly turn hot in a nuclear way.

According to Guido, Khan said of London’s preparedness for the remote chance that there is a nuclear conflict that London:

… has a resilient and well-established system in place to ensure key agencies work closely and effectively together to keep us all safe – this includes keeping Londoners fully informed about any emergencies.”

What utter and complete bollocks from Khan. Quite apart from the fact that a modern thermonuclear weapon would do far more damage to London than the old style fission bombs did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Khan is the very worst person to have in charge of London during some international conflict even if that conflict is carried out with conventional weapons and involved as did World War II and allegedly in the Ukraine, area bombing with HE and incendiaries.

Kahn is the worst possible leader for the Greater London area in wartime because he has proven his incompetence. This man cannot even, with his Police and Crime Commissioner hat on, stop London’s streets turning in to a bloodbath. His transport policies including ULEZ and other charges are, as I’ve been told by contacts in London, killing off small businesses and charities which need to drive in the capital. He has allowed Transport for London to head towards financial ruin and seen it beset by strikes. He has wasted hundreds of thousands of not millions of pounds on worthless shit including one million pounds on public relations in order to boost his own image. Khan has also overstepped the bounds of his competencies and responsibilities by involving himself in foreign policy controversies and taking sides in other friendly nation’s politics which have to say the least been unhelpful and have stoked division.

I suspect that the last we would see of Mayor Khan, at least in a corporeal sense, in the event of London being bombed with conventional weapons let alone nuclear ones, would be him getting into one of a motorcade of Range Rovers and buggering off somewhere safer. There from the safety of the Khanbunker the current Mayor could ululate loudly and insincerely about the damage done to the city. He’d blame Trump for the disaster, claim that diversity is the key to rebuilding, virtue signal (obviously) and tell those living in the ruins of London that being on the end of a Blitzkrieg is nothing to do with him. In other words he’s behave very similarly as he does now but from a bunker instead of City Hall or the expensive monstrosity that Khan wants to move the seat of London’s governance into in Newham.

You only have to compare a political leader of London who really had to deal with Blitzkrieg and area bombing with all that goes with that form of war to get some idea of just how crap Sadiq Khan truly is and would be if a similar emergency occurred in London today. It’s frightening to think that at a time when war threatens there should surely be someone competent at the head of Greater London’s government. Unfortunately there is not. There’s Sadiq Khan.

Competent is however the first word that I would choose to describe Charles, later Lord Latham, the former leader of the London County Council who held office at the height of the Nazi bombing blitz on London. Lord Latham was a Labour councillor, who helped to found the London Labour Party and represented Hackney South in what is now the area covered by Diane Abbott’s constituency. He fought in World War I and had a wealth of knowledge and political nous gained from his trade union and other areas of experience and was chosen by Labour LCC leader Herbert Morrison to succeed him as LCC leader when Morrison joined the War Cabinet.

Latham from what I can gather was ferociously competent and organised and set about building up London’s civil defence capabilities as a matter of priority. He properly prepared London as best he could to deal with the death and destruction that the Germans were raining down on the capital. What’s more he did this at the time when the LCC leader had responsibilities that the likes of Khan do not have such as the public hospitals in the LCC area. Even a read of Latham’s Wiki gives some idea of just how key he was in managing the fire, civil defence and medical services that London needed to cope with both the human and material damage done by the Germans. He was not perfect, for example he championed the Abercrombie Plan that would have seen what was left of London after the Germans had finished with it bulldozed and replaced with planned communities, concentric motorways and all of this centrally planned and run, a socialist wet dream. Thankfully the Abercrombie Plan never got out of the discussion stage.

Any detailed and honest comparison between Lord Latham and Sadiq Khan would not leave Khan looking good. Can you imagine Khan in charge of for example hospitals or an auxiliary fire brigade or dealing with the carnage caused by area bombing? I can imagine this and it is a very unpleasant thought indeed. The man’s barely competent at running the city in peacetime let alone if there was a war on. The man’s a self-serving clown and his statements on London’s preparedness for conflict and its aftermath illustrate that fact with extreme clarity.