A cosmopolitan Muslim is set to become London’s next mayor

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His selection last September as Labour’s candidate for the mayoralty and his subsequent success in the opinion polls have defied expectations. Tessa Jowell, a doyenne of the party’s liberal right (and a member of The Economist Group’s board) had appeared better equipped to win over the centrist suburbs of Britain’s left-wing capital in its election on May 5th, but fell short. Mr Khan’s campaign has since proven too thin-skinned; howling that (admittedly unfair) Conservative accusations that he is a “radical” and a “lab rat” for Labour’s leadership were respectively anti-Islam and anti-London. His bid has been weakened by Jeremy Corbyn, the party’s hard-left leader who in his victory speech last September—horror flitting across Mr Khan’s face—proclaimed: “Sadiq, we’re going to be campaigning together.”

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Nonetheless, it seems the MP for Tooting is comfortably ahead of Zac Goldsmith, his thoughtful but posh Tory rival—by 45% to 35%, according to a recent poll by YouGov. It helps that the hard-left Mr Corbyn is driving moderate Labour activists towards Mr Khan, even though he is on the party’s soft-left. And Labour’s candidate has worked hard to distance himself from his leader, pledging to be London’s most pro-business mayor ever and decrying Mr Corbyn’s policies on tax and finance. Mr Khan’s main strength is that he exemplifies the city he wants to run. His parents moved there from Karachi, in Pakistan. The son of a bus driver, he grew up in a council flat in south London and lived out of a bunk-bed there until he was 24. He trained as a lawyer and subsequently ended up in Gordon Brown’s cabinet (by contrast, Mr Goldsmith was gifted the editorship of the Ecologist, an environmental magazine, by his uncle). “London gave me and my family the chance to fulfil our potential,” argues Mr Khan convincingly. Firmly pro-European, comfortable with immigration and a model of liberal Islam (he backed gay marriage and fought to keep a local pub open), he encapsulates the city’s contradictions: internationalist and parochial, swaggering and insecure, original and clichéd, socialist and capitalist.

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