Sadiq Khan is the new Mayor of London. After what seemed like an eternal wait, withs second preferences counted, he claimed 57pc of the vote to Zac Goldsmith’s 43pc – a comfortable margin of 14pc. So after eight years of Tory control, Labour has retaken City Hall. Khan’s result is Labour’s best of this election cycle. He has won a decisive victory in a contest which has seen turnout go up, and by a wider margin than Boris’s 2012 victory.
There’ll be much criticism of Goldsmith’s campaign in the next few days, but it is worth noting just how relentless Khan was. He hit his key messages endlessly, never missing an opportunity to remind voters that he was the son of a bus driver. He also cast himself as the British Muslim who would take on the extremists, which meant that he was well positioned to parry when the Tories raised questions about some of the people that he had shared platforms with in the past.
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