Luke Black is the Chairman of the LGBT+ Conservatives and founder of the Tory youth organisation Blue Beyond.
The year is 2024 and Amy Lamé, Sadiq Khan’s beleaguered ‘Night Czar’, is having to defend her record and justify her six-figure salary. Again.
For those of you who are unaware, Lamé is the former Labour PPC for Dulwich and close friend of Gordon Brown. A lesbian former ‘it girl’ of the New Labour era, Lamé rose to fame for her award-winning LGBT+ burlesque club night Duckie, winning lucrative Arts Council funding for her many of her highly-successful shows in the 2000s.
Now 53 years old, Lamé is London’s nightlife czar, a supposedly apolitical role that she has held since 2016, and is tasked primarily with growing the city’s nighttime offering. Alongside the obvious perk of working alongside Khan himself, Lamé is paid a staggering £116,000 in taxpayers’ money for the privilege.
Her role is not without controversy. She has been the subject of several petitions to be sacked – or have the role scrapped entirely – with leading industry groups and businesses describing her as ‘non-existent’ and, despite often boasting about her connections in the media, accusing her of failing to be a “powerful, vocal and visible voice for the industry”.
Taking to that platform that we all strongly associate with clubbing and nightlife so well – LinkedIn – Lamé complained that she was ‘under fire’ and sought out to correct the record.
In and amongst the ramblings of a woman clearly desperate to save her job in the face of yet another scathing broadsheet assessment of her record, most of it reads rather incongruously like a CV. As always with Lamé, it is very scant in concrete achievements since 2016.
Lamé says she finds these criticisms unfair and that insists she has ‘supercharged the capital’s life at night’. (So long as you ignore the 1,100 London bars and clubs that have shut since Covid, I guess.) The fact that she needs to write essentially the very same article so many times over her eight-year career in London Labour politics tells you all you need to know.
Yet what she lacks in discernible achievements in a near decade of work, she makes up for in stamina and resilience in the face of mounting industry fury. For all her faults, she has repeatedly picked herself up and carried on, rather like the Black Knight in Monty Python.
Everyone from NME to the Daily Telegraph has questioned her inertia and incompetence. Yet nothing seems to stick: like Khan, Lamé is comfortable blaming everyone else for her record.
One London pub closing permanently on average once a week from 2016 to 2020? Blame Brexit. One in five of the city’s bouncers have left the industry for good? Blame COVID. A shocking 41 per cent of nightclubs closed permanently from 2016 to 2023? Blame it on Hackney’s licensing laws.
Each criticism is but a flesh wound, and instead Lamé’s salary increases. There are gongs too, most recently the Freedom of London in 2023. There really is nothing that can stop this gravy train.
And a gravy train it certainly is. Quite a few eyebrows in the nightlight industry were raised when Lamé flew to Sydney for a nightlife summit.
Sydney, a curious city to visit for nightlife tips, was in fairness once a rival to Ibiza…in the 90s. A once-thriving live music scene, drag acts every night, world-leading sound production and light displays, Sydney was leading the way for many other cities in how to have a good time.
This all came to a grinding halt in 2015, when lockout laws came into place with a variety of punitive measures – including a mandate for all bars to shutter their blinds to punters just an hour after midnight.
Almost overnight, the nightlife culture, enjoyed by so many, changed. Although some of these laws were repealed in 2020, the effect on the city has been permanent. You can’t even buy a bottle of wine from a supermarket in Sydney after 10pm. This is infantilising.
Yet this trip, like so many in Khan’s City Hall, has been defended as a ‘lessons learned’ case study. We are told that Sydney has made a miraculous return to its 90s heyday; thhis is not how it’s being reported in Australia, with many citing the summit as a way to “fix Sydney’s nightlife”.
Perhaps none of this really matters. Lamé isn’t the only supposedly-apolitical appointee on City Hall’s payroll. She is one of many highly-paid Deputy Mayors and officers in receipt of Khan’s political brand – and her £116,000 salary is a drop in the ocean compared to the waste on PR, vaginal moisturisers, and beach parties.
But what does matter is a victory over the sort of presentation-first politics she represents. If her gravy train ends (n her resignation or termination) it is a victory for delivery over rhetoric, presentation, identity politics and vibes, and over Khan’s highly successful but cynical political strategy – the kind that placates concerns over Lamé’s tenure with a few murals she’s had painted to ‘celebrate LGBTQIA+ people’ in Bromley, Woolwich and Vauxhall.
It would be a victory against Khan’s biggest electoral asset: that what matters is not what Lamé or any of his team actually does, but what socio-economic or identity group they represent. Find a way to beat that, Susan Hall, and City Hall is yours.
Luke Black is the Chairman of the LGBT+ Conservatives and founder of the Tory youth organisation Blue Beyond.
The year is 2024 and Amy Lamé, Sadiq Khan’s beleaguered ‘Night Czar’, is having to defend her record and justify her six-figure salary. Again.
For those of you who are unaware, Lamé is the former Labour PPC for Dulwich and close friend of Gordon Brown. A lesbian former ‘it girl’ of the New Labour era, Lamé rose to fame for her award-winning LGBT+ burlesque club night Duckie, winning lucrative Arts Council funding for her many of her highly-successful shows in the 2000s.
Now 53 years old, Lamé is London’s nightlife czar, a supposedly apolitical role that she has held since 2016, and is tasked primarily with growing the city’s nighttime offering. Alongside the obvious perk of working alongside Khan himself, Lamé is paid a staggering £116,000 in taxpayers’ money for the privilege.
Her role is not without controversy. She has been the subject of several petitions to be sacked – or have the role scrapped entirely – with leading industry groups and businesses describing her as ‘non-existent’ and, despite often boasting about her connections in the media, accusing her of failing to be a “powerful, vocal and visible voice for the industry”.
Taking to that platform that we all strongly associate with clubbing and nightlife so well – LinkedIn – Lamé complained that she was ‘under fire’ and sought out to correct the record.
In and amongst the ramblings of a woman clearly desperate to save her job in the face of yet another scathing broadsheet assessment of her record, most of it reads rather incongruously like a CV. As always with Lamé, it is very scant in concrete achievements since 2016.
Lamé says she finds these criticisms unfair and that insists she has ‘supercharged the capital’s life at night’. (So long as you ignore the 1,100 London bars and clubs that have shut since Covid, I guess.) The fact that she needs to write essentially the very same article so many times over her eight-year career in London Labour politics tells you all you need to know.
Yet what she lacks in discernible achievements in a near decade of work, she makes up for in stamina and resilience in the face of mounting industry fury. For all her faults, she has repeatedly picked herself up and carried on, rather like the Black Knight in Monty Python.
Everyone from NME to the Daily Telegraph has questioned her inertia and incompetence. Yet nothing seems to stick: like Khan, Lamé is comfortable blaming everyone else for her record.
One London pub closing permanently on average once a week from 2016 to 2020? Blame Brexit. One in five of the city’s bouncers have left the industry for good? Blame COVID. A shocking 41 per cent of nightclubs closed permanently from 2016 to 2023? Blame it on Hackney’s licensing laws.
Each criticism is but a flesh wound, and instead Lamé’s salary increases. There are gongs too, most recently the Freedom of London in 2023. There really is nothing that can stop this gravy train.
And a gravy train it certainly is. Quite a few eyebrows in the nightlight industry were raised when Lamé flew to Sydney for a nightlife summit.
Sydney, a curious city to visit for nightlife tips, was in fairness once a rival to Ibiza…in the 90s. A once-thriving live music scene, drag acts every night, world-leading sound production and light displays, Sydney was leading the way for many other cities in how to have a good time.
This all came to a grinding halt in 2015, when lockout laws came into place with a variety of punitive measures – including a mandate for all bars to shutter their blinds to punters just an hour after midnight.
Almost overnight, the nightlife culture, enjoyed by so many, changed. Although some of these laws were repealed in 2020, the effect on the city has been permanent. You can’t even buy a bottle of wine from a supermarket in Sydney after 10pm. This is infantilising.
Yet this trip, like so many in Khan’s City Hall, has been defended as a ‘lessons learned’ case study. We are told that Sydney has made a miraculous return to its 90s heyday; thhis is not how it’s being reported in Australia, with many citing the summit as a way to “fix Sydney’s nightlife”.
Perhaps none of this really matters. Lamé isn’t the only supposedly-apolitical appointee on City Hall’s payroll. She is one of many highly-paid Deputy Mayors and officers in receipt of Khan’s political brand – and her £116,000 salary is a drop in the ocean compared to the waste on PR, vaginal moisturisers, and beach parties.
But what does matter is a victory over the sort of presentation-first politics she represents. If her gravy train ends (n her resignation or termination) it is a victory for delivery over rhetoric, presentation, identity politics and vibes, and over Khan’s highly successful but cynical political strategy – the kind that placates concerns over Lamé’s tenure with a few murals she’s had painted to ‘celebrate LGBTQIA+ people’ in Bromley, Woolwich and Vauxhall.
It would be a victory against Khan’s biggest electoral asset: that what matters is not what Lamé or any of his team actually does, but what socio-economic or identity group they represent. Find a way to beat that, Susan Hall, and City Hall is yours.