Zac Goldsmith’s London campaign has been a toe-curling embarrassment

Zac Goldsmith spent almost every day out on the stump during his London mayoral campaign dressed in the formal dark suit he inherited from his father, and had recut on his death in 1997. At least that is what a member of his team told me as I was out observing proceedings one day.

I think that detail was offered as a bit of journalistic ‘colour’ to show Zac’s sense of filial duty, but that was the only sense in which his painfully understated campaigning could be said to have owed anything to Sir James Goldsmith’s bombastic, manic style when he ran the Referendum party.

Some political campaigns are failures; others are simply tragedies, and Zac Goldsmith’s falls into the latter category. Writing this two days before polling day, one cannot exclude the possibility that turnout could sink as low as the 32–33 per cent mark, and that white middle-class voters in the outer suburbs will turn out while the younger, more liberal supporters of Labour’s Sadiq Khan will stay in bed.