Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said that if Donald Trump won the US presidential election he and his family would leave the UK due to the “rise of the far-right and Islamophobia”.
This isn’t true. We can’t find any evidence Mr Khan ever made this pledge, and his office says it is “nonsense”.
A baseless claim that Mayor of London Sadiq Khan vowed to leave the UK if Donald Trump won the 2024 US presidential election has been circulating on social media.
Posts making this claim have been shared extensively across Facebook groups since the 5 November election, particularly in those opposed to the London Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) and 20mph speed limits.
Many are a screenshot of a post on X (formerly Twitter) which says: “London Mayor Sadiq Khan has said if Donald Trump wins the election his family will leave the UK due to the rise of the far-right and Islamophobia.” A screenshot of the same post on TikTok has been viewed over a quarter of a million times.
But we can find no evidence that Mr Khan ever said this.
When asked about the claim that he had pledged to leave the UK if Mr Trump beat Kamala Harris to the presidency, a spokesperson for the Mayor said: “He has not said this. It is nonsense.”
Earlier this year Mr Khan did say that he was worried “about what a second Trump presidency would mean for me and my family” after he said there had been a “massive increase in hate crime towards me” during Mr Trump’s first term in office.
Mr Khan has also commented on the result of the election, in which Mr Trump won 312 electoral college votes to Ms Harris’s 226, saying many Londoners would be “anxious” about the outcome.
Misinformation spread online about politicians and the political process can undermine trust in democracy. It’s important to consider whether what you are seeing is genuine before sharing it on social media.
We have fact checked a number of misleading claims about the US election, including that Donald Trump did not call Republicans ‘the dumbest group of voters’ and other quotes falsely attributed to Sadiq Khan, including that he said people should learn Arabic to “create harmony”.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there is no evidence that Sadiq Khan had pledged to leave the UK following a Donald Trump win in the US presidential election, and a spokesperson for his office says the claim is “nonsense”.
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