LONDON: London Mayor Sadiq Khan has accused Donald Trump of repeatedly criticizing him because of his “ethnicity” and Muslim faith, in comments likely to renew his long-running feud with the US president-elect. The pair became embroiled in an extraordinary war of words during Trump’s first presidency, initially sparked by Khan speaking out against a US travel ban on people from certain Muslim countries. Trump then accused Khan—the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital when he was first elected in 2016 — of doing a “very bad job on terrorism” and called him a “stone cold loser” and “very dumb”.

The mayor in turn allowed an unflattering blimp of Trump dressed as a baby in a nappy to fly above protests in Parliament Square during his 2018 visit to Britain. Speaking on a podcast recorded before Trump’s re-election on November 5 and released earlier this week, Khan, a son of Pakistani immigrants to Britain, said he viewed the past targeting of him as “incredibly personal”.

“If I wasn’t this color skin, if I wasn’t a practicing Muslim, he wouldn’t have come for me,” he told the High Performance podcast, which interviews prominent people in different sectors. “He’s come for me because of, let’s be frank, my ethnicity and my religion.” Khan added that during this period he was “speaking out against somebody whose policies were sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist” and that he has “a responsibility to speak out”.

His latest comments on Trump are in stark contrast to those of his colleagues in Britain’s Labour party, which swept to power in July. Several Labour MPs now in senior government posts, including Foreign Secretary David Lammy, were critical of Trump while they were in opposition during his first White House term. In 2018, Lammy labelled him a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath”. But Britain’s now-top diplomat last week dismissed the remarks as “old news”.

Meanwhile Prime Minister Keir Starmer has appeared at pains to forge a positive relationship with the president-elect, promptly congratulating him on his “historic election victory”. Starmer said their phone call was “very positive, very constructive” and the so-called special relationship between the UK and the US would “prosper” in Trump’s second term. — AFP