Sadiq Khan’s woeful mayoralty has destroyed London’s once great nightlife

If you venture into central London of an evening for dinner or perhaps a few pints, you better head in early and drink up quickly. The chances are last orders will be called at 10pm and you’ll be turfed out by 10.30. By 11pm on most nights even the busiest areas of our capital resemble a ghost town.

To those of us from provincial England, London’s legendary nightlife was once part of what defined it. It was a 24-hour city. Now it’s the city that always sleeps.

Young professionals, drawn to London not just by jobs but a social lifestyle, lament the decline. And London’s hospitality industry has been crippled by it.

Undoubtedly, the pandemic tipped some businesses over the edge , despite generous support from central government. But that can’t explain why London’s hospitality industry was struggling before Covid, or why Britain’s other major cities have rebounded more strongly after.

For that we must turn to the Mayor of London, and to the coterie of Labour councils that have suffocated the city’s pubs and restaurants in a thicket of unnecessary regulation and taxation.

Most destructive of all are the restrictive licensing rules that have imposed a de facto curfew on vast swatches of London. In Hackney, for instance, all new venues must close by 11pm Monday-Friday and midnight at the weekend.

To make things worse, Tower Hamlets, Camden and Islington are among a series of councils that impose a late-night levy on establishments serving alcohol after midnight, on top of the taxes they already pay.

Elsewhere in London, Labour councils in Wandsworth and Westminster have scrapped pedestrianised high streets and the al fresco dining I established as housing secretary during the pandemic.

At the time, they proved so popular they carried through into the winter and precipitated a national shortage of outdoor heaters, such was the demand. It was a revelation that is remembered now only with nostalgia.

Instead of taking these Labour councils on, the mayor’s “night czar”, Amy Lamé, has been globetrotting around the world. Her most recent attempt to defend her record, a TV appearance which would have made Comical Ali blush, went viral as dismayed Londoners shared it.

She has done nothing to help alleviate the VAT burden, or to make late-night travel more convenient (why, for instance, does the night Tube not run on Thursday, now the busiest night of the week?). From Hatch End to Old Bexley, business appears to be increasingly interested in the predominantly Conservative-run suburbs outside Labour’s writ.

Yet despite presiding over the collapse of London’s night-time economy, the Mayor has rewarded Lamé with a whopping 40 per cent pay rise. The drinks would be on her, if only there were any bars open.

London’s crime epidemic has only made things worse. Knife crime has surged in the capital , leaving too many Londoners wary of going out. But instead of tackling gangs with Susan Hall’s calls for common-sense policing, Left-wing councils are using licensing to respond to London’s crime wave.

It’s a foretaste of what life would be like elsewhere in the country were there to be a Labour government too weak to tackle crime head-on, and eerily reminiscent of those Democratic cities in the US where wokery has been elevated above public safety and the good economic sense.

Like the planning system, licensing laws are devolved to local councils – skewing authority towards nimby councillors and the tyranny of the minority. Time after time, proposals are blocked on the whim of a handful of nearby residents. But if you choose to move to high streets with late-night venues, you have to accept the vivaciousness that comes with it.

With political will, the vetocracy can be overcome. During the pandemic, Boris Johnson and I liberated small businesses and communities from reams of red tape to allow shops, cafés and restaurants to make use of outdoor hospitality, enable every café and restaurant to become takeaways overnight, permit pubs to erect marquees, grant late-night shopping on major high streets, and make it easier for people to hold markets, festivals and street parties. To my surprise, some of the regulations we reformed were literally medieval.

The liberalisations we pursued then were a direct response to overbearing and destructive lockdowns, helping businesses to survive and the public to enjoy themselves in the company of family and friends. But they were also a reaction to an overbearing state that doesn’t value entrepreneurship.

With a stagnating economy, there should be a moratorium on anything that stifles those trying to build businesses or take risks with new investments. We should be focused on making regulation quicker, cheaper and simpler for businesses to navigate. But instead, the extension of the state continues unabated. Almost all of the reforms I pursued to ease the burden of lockdowns and reignite the economy have been quietly dropped, as if the UK today enjoys an embarrassment of riches.

In London, with pubs closing at the fastest rate in the country, it would appear the Mayor of London’s policies and incompetence are producing something akin to prohibition. The Conservative antidote is not to ape this red tape obsessed puritanism, but to scrap unnecessary restrictions, bring our restaurants, pubs, bars and clubs back, and breathe life into high streets.

We might even find that young people are more conservative than we think, if we give them something to vote for. I’ll drink to that.