The London mayoralty needs to be reformed

Who does a capital city belong to? In the case of London tonight, one answer could be ‘Labour’, now that Sadiq Khan has claimed victory, as the party performs disastrously elsewhere.

And clearly Khan’s strong support among the left-wing, the middle class, EU nationals (who are permitted to vote for the mayoralty), and some of the largest ethnic minority communities, shows that his chippy ID politics goes down well among enough residents of the capital to keep the keys to City Hall securely in his pocket.

Indeed, London’s decision to return Khan, when Labour is at such a low ebb, is a telling one. Were we dealing with Manchester or Liverpool or Bristol, that would be the end of it. ‘The public gets what the public wants,’ as The Jam so succinctly put it all those years ago in ‘Going Underground’.