LONDON: Sadiq Khan, the son of a bus driver and seamstress originally from Karachi, became London’s first Muslim mayor on Friday, beating Jemima Khan’s brother Zac Goldsmith by a clear nine percentage points. Despite a rolling scandal in the last days of the campaign, in which Sadiq Khan’s Labour Party was accused of anti-Semitism, the result was convincing.

Sadiq Khan will now preside over a city that attracts 17 million tourists each year and which remains one of the world’s major centres for finance and culture.

He has overnight become the highest-profile British Pakistani politician in the UK.

His success means that he has eclipsed another British Pakistani politician who has broken through to national level significance, Sajid Javid — the Conservative business minister. Javid’s father also started out in the UK as a bus driver.

Khan’s victory comes as a relief to the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn whose leadership has faced unusually strong opposition from some Labour Members of Parliament who worry that his leftist politics will make it impossible for them to win the next general election in 2020. Had Sadiq Khan lost then Corbyn would probably have faced a leadership challenge. But with Khan’s victory secured, Corbyn is able to argue that his critics are exaggerating the Labour party’s problems.

Sadiq Khan’s victory was emphatic. In his biggest win in 2000, left winger Ken Livingston won 39 per cent of the votes. In 2012, Conservative Boris Johnson secured 44pc of the votes. Khan matched that with 44pc of the votes compared to Godsmith’s 35pc.

The campaign, in one of the world’s most diverse cities, centred on identity politics. Sadiq Khan, a human rights lawyer and parliamentarian, ran a campaign in which he consistently tried to reassure London’s eight-and-a-half million voters that he was not driven by his religious or ethnic background. He condemned Muslim extremism, supported gay marriage and reassured Jewish voters that he would oppose any anti-Semitism among his Labour colleagues.

Goldsmith’s campaign

Zac Goldsmith, 41, by contrast, tried to portray Khan as a man with radical Islamic sympathies. Last weekend Goldsmith wrote that a victory for Khan would give control of London to a Labour Party, “that thinks terrorists are our friends”. A picture alongside the article showed the London bus destroyed by a suicide bomber in 2005.

Some Conservative Party Muslims were unimpressed by the tactics. Former Tory cabinet minister Baroness Warsi tweeted: “This is not the @ZacGoldsmith I know.”

Once the voting booths were closed some senior conservatives lashed out at the Goldmsith’s campaign. “It was effectively saying that people of conservative religious views are not to be

trusted and you shouldn’t share a platform with them and that’s outrageous,” said Andrew Boff, the leader of the London Assembly’s Conservative group. He said that he and many other Tories in the capital were “really troubled” by the Goldsmith tactic of painting Labour’s candidate as an extremist.

Goldsmith said his opponent had “given platforms, oxygen and even cover” to the extremists bent on hurting the British capital. In particular, Goldsmith complained Sadiq Khan had shared a platform with a cleric, Suliman Gani, who Goldsmith described as “one of the most repellent figures in this country”.

Prime Minster David Cameron actively supported Goldsmith’s tactics, saying in parliament, “I am concerned about Labour’s candidate for Mayor of London… Suliman Gani has appeared on a platform with him nine times.” Cameron went on to say that Gani supported the militant Islamic State group – a charge Gani strongly denies.

The focus on Suliman Gani somewhat backfired when the cleric released a photograph of himself standing besides Zac Goldsmith.

The Goldsmith campaign, aided by Imran Khan’s son, 18-year-old Sulaiman Isa Khan, tried to match Sadiq Khan’s support among the 223,000 British Pakistani Londoners by appealing to the estimated 542,000 British Indians in the UK capital. Some of Goldsmith’s campaign leaflets – sent to households with Indian sounding surnames – pledged to give tax protection to families “owning gold and valuable family heirlooms”. The tactic was widely described as ill-judged and patronising.

One of Goldsmith’s leaflets tried to appeal to Tamil Londoners by criticising Sadiq Khan for not having spoken out about Sri Lanka and the concerns of Tamils there. Other leaflets’ mention of only Hindu festivals left many Indian-origin Sikhs and Muslims complaining that a London Mayoral candidate should be aware that not everyone Indian origin voter in the city is a Hindu.

While Goldsmith was chasing the support of various London communities, Sadiq Khan was able to campaign in the knowledge that London now has a natural Labour majority. While the UK as a whole elected David Cameron’s Conservative Party to power just one year ago, in London Labour won 45 of the city’s 73 parliamentary seats.

Another candidate with Pakistani connections, PPP supporter George Galloway won just 1pc of the votes. In previous elections Galloway has stood in constituencies with significant numbers of Muslim voters and relied on rhetoric highly critical of Western policy. The fact that this time he was up against a high-profile Muslim candidate undermined Galloway’s appeal.

Sadiq Khan now has one of the most visible jobs in British politics. The last two, Mayors Ken Livingston and Boris Johnson, are better known than most cabinet ministers. Despite a multi-billion pound budget, however, the Mayor’s powers are quite limited and relate mainly to land development, transport and some aspects of policing.

Published in Dawn, May 7th, 2016