Former Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy is eyeing up a move to be London’s mayor, should Sir Sadiq Khan not run for a fourth term, sources have claimed.
Mr Lammy was ousted as Justice Secretary when Andy Burnham took over as Prime Minister, following Sir Keir Starmer’s departure.
Sir Sadiq has said he would decide next year whether he will stand for another election in 2028.
Should he serve another full term, he will have been London’s mayor for 16 years.
He said on Saturday: “My tank is full, I'm still fizzing with ideas.”
Mr Lammy is understood to believe that Labour are back in the race for the London mayoralty thanks to the recent controversies surrounding Zack Polanski’s Green Party.
A minister said to the Daily Mail: “David Lammy's planning to go for it. His calculation is that with Polanski going backwards, the door's opened for him.”
The former deputy PM has called for affordable housing to be linked to average earnings within each borough, when he announced he would run for mayor in 2014.
He also said that he would introduce a cap on private-sector rents and create higher council tax bands for large properties.
It comes on the same day as Sir Sadiq's Transport for London was blasted over its ‘barbaric’ pigeon cull that left 655 birds killed in a London Tube clearout.
TfL has defended the practice, which sees contractors shooting pigeons in its stations with air rifles.
It comes after Freedom of Information (FOI) requests revealed that hundreds of birds have been killed in the past two years.
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Michael Britton, founder of London Bird Rescue, called the culls "an incredibly archaic, barbaric and unintelligent approach to wildlife management".
The FOI requests, gathered by wildlife group Manchester Pigeon Rehab, revealed there were more than 120 organised shootings at Tube depots and stations between March 2024 and March 2026, with 655 birds being killed.
TfL said pigeon waste "carries risks of bacteria and insects, while nesting and waste material creates fire hazards and structural damage".
A TfL spokesman said: "Our approach is focused on prevention, and the avoidance of animal cruelty is taken very seriously.
"We continue to invest in preventative measures as our primary approach, exhausting all appropriate non-lethal methods, and have significantly increased our mitigations on stations and in depots as part of this work.
"Unfortunately, in a small number of cases, preventative measures are not always successful or effective, creating an unsafe environment.
"When this is the case, we work with our suppliers to ensure that the removal of pigeons, or their nests, is undertaken with consideration and only ever as a last resort when other deterrents have failed."
Shootings usually take place in the early hours of the morning when stations are closed to passengers.
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