Sadiq khan

Sadiq Khan starts his first day as Mayor today, and has spent more of his weekend distancing himself from Jeremy Corbyn than he has been talking about London. He made a series of pointed references to the need for his party to win elections and that ‘we only do that by speaking to those people who previously haven’t voted Labour’. And the Labour leader didn’t attend Khan’s swearing-in ceremony at Southwark Cathedral due to ‘capacity problems’, which is probably an excuse those in charge of seating in the Cathedral don’t hear that often. It is clear that Khan doesn’t think there is much merit in appearing close to Corbyn in

It’s rare that an election result leaves you with a sense of giddy, disbelieving glee, but there it was in black and white. Galloway, George, Respect (George Galloway) Party, 37,007 votes. Walker, Sophie, Women’s Equality Party, 53,055 votes. Once you took second preferences into account, Walker and her newly formed feminist movement beat Galloway and his band of Islamists by almost 100,000 votes. This result is so striking, and so perfect, because Galloway is one of those old-fashioned socialists whose attitudes towards gender equality are distinctly retrograde: it is the man’s job to further the revolutionary cause and the woman’s to provide dutiful comradely support. Indeed, while he may not be

As Isabel Hardman wrote yesterday, many interpret Labour’s failure to fail on a bigger scale in yesterday’s election results as the worst possible result for the party.  Sadiq Khan, who had nominated Corbyn for the leadership, won comfortably in London.  Predicted to lose 150 or more council seats, by midday Labour was down a net 26 seats.    This neither puts them in an encouraging position from which to build towards the 2020 election nor signifies a disaster which might provoke Jeremy’s Corbyn’s defenestration and replacement with a more electable leader. But the Conservatives would be very unwise to take comfort from the results. Instead they should ask themselves why Corbyn’s Labour

Following Thursday’s elections, Sadiq Khan is on course to be the new mayor of London, with his rival Zac Goldsmith trailing a distant second. With Goldsmith’s campaign billed as ‘racist’ and ‘divisive’ by critics, the Tories will now need to work out who is at fault for his disastrous mayoral bid. However, while Goldsmith could do with all the friends he can get right now, even his own sister is unimpressed with his efforts. As Khan was crowned mayor, Jemima Khan took to Twitter to congratulate the Labour MP: Congratulations to @sadiqkhan-1st Muslim Mayor of London- a city for all cultures, backgrounds & religions. A great example to young Muslims — Jemima Goldsmith (@Jemima_Khan) May 6, 2016

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;

Britain goes to the polls this week, as electoral contests take place in London, Scotland, Wales and across England. They’re the elections which James Forsyth described in the Spectator last week as the ones ‘no one has even heard of’. So what will happen on Thursday night and when will the results be announced? Here’s The Spectator’s run-through of the May 2016 elections: London Mayoral election: Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan go head-to-head in the London Mayoral contest. In 2012, Boris and Ken ran a close-fought race, with Boris getting 971,000 first-round votes to Ken’s 889,918. The relatively small margin between the two meant the result didn’t filter through until

Trailing in the polls with three days to go until the London mayoral elections, Zac Goldsmith continues to attack his rival Sadiq Khan by accusing him of having links with extremists.   It is a pretty desperate strategy, reduced to making the charge that Khan has ‘shared a platform’ with extremists.   It is also somewhat undermined by the revelation that Goldsmith himself has been photographed smiling alongside Suliman Gani, the Tooting Iman who is subject of many of the claims.  Gani also appears to have shared platforms with Conservative MP for Battersea, Jane Ellison, on a number of occasions. But one thing puzzles me.  While Goldsmith’s campaign has stooped to a relentlessly negative

Zac Goldsmith came in for a fair amount of criticism yesterday after writing a piece in the Mail on Sunday that, among other things, pointed out that Sadiq Khan criticised Labour’s decision to suspend Ken Livingstone in 2006 when he compared a Jewish Evening Standard journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Reviewing the papers on Marr, Owen Jones called it ‘another example’ of a ‘poisonous’ and ‘disgraceful’ campaign that had tried to brand Khan as an extremist simply because he’s a Muslim. He called it ‘an attempt to tap into anti-Muslim prejudice’ and urged Conservatives to tackle Islamophobia as vigorously as his own party is tackling anti-Semitism. But is

Throughout his London mayoral bid, Sadiq Khan has been at pains to distance himself from Jeremy Corbyn. Although Khan was one of the 35 MPs to help get Corbyn onto the ballot paper, he has since gone on to declare that if elected mayor, he will not be ‘Corbyn’s representative in London’. His comments have led his mayoral rival George Galloway to accuse Khan of ‘stabbing Jeremy Corbyn in the back’. Happily, Corbyn’s team still seem happy to support Khan’s mayoral bid despite. With less than a week to polling day, Khan’s official campaign Twitter account has shared a photo of their bustling phone bank in action: 8 days to

In recent weeks, Labour’s Sadiq Khan has faced flak over his decision to share platforms with extremists. In a recent Evening Standard article, Khan was criticised for sharing a ‘platform with five Islamic extremists’ at an event organised by Friends of Al-Aqsa. At the 2004 conference titled ‘Palestine — the suffering still goes on’, both Khan and Jeremy Corbyn spoke alongside the event organiser’s founder Ismail Patel — who once said ‘Hamas is no terrorist organisation’ — as well as the Imam Suliman Gani — who says women are subservient to men — and Dr Daud Abdullah, who led a boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day in 2005. Defending his decision to

As Sadiq Khan continues to lead the polls in the mayoral race, the Labour candidate has managed to brush off much criticism over his links to unsavoury characters by putting it down to ‘dog whistle’ politics. However, the MP for Tooting may have greater difficulty fending off the latest line of attack to come his way. Writing in the Sunday Times, Lord Sugar — the former Labour peer who resigned from the party after the general election — has launched a blistering attack on Khan. Sugar accuses Khan of having ‘single-handedly wrecked the Labour Party’. The Apprentice star says he cut up his party membership card after Labour turned anti-business under Ed Miliband —