Kashif Taher examines how Sadiq Khan circumvented a lack of public appetite for a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party to become Mayor of London.
As the new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan has the third largest direct personal mandate of any politician in Europe. How did he get here?
Sadiq is one of the more astute members of the PLP. He can sense the direction of electoral winds and navigate this to his advantage. In practice, this involved Sadiq jumping onto the ‘Corbynmania’ bandwagon which engulfed the Labour Party last summer, and eventually allowed him to disrupt the nomination processes to comfortably pull ahead of rival Tessa Jowell, who had once seemed a shoo-in for the candidacy.
However, the need to tack back to the centre to appeal to voters at large, rather than the interests of paid-up members and supporters, would prove just as important. As it turns out, the ‘Corbynmania’ bandwagon is also known as the Titanic to the wider electorate. Sadiq recognised this and knew that staying on the Titanic would prove disastrous for his campaign to become Mayor, regardless of how comfortable it may be. He saw the iceberg in the distance and, in the interest of self-preservation, knew there was a need to distance himself from the new Leader of the Party.
What became clear to me when getting out the vote is that Sadiq won the mayoralty despite his Party’s new leadership. While I was canvassing on a scorching election day last week, a voter in Ilford told me he could not vote for Sadiq because of his links to Corbyn. He was a life-long Labour voter who had worked in the East End Docks for his entire adult life, but was concerned about Corbyn’s weakness on defence and had voted UKIP that morning for the first time. He likened the prospect of having trident submarines without nuclear warheads to sending a soldier to battle with a ‘bulletless gun’. This was a common theme I found not only in Ilford, but also up North – swing voters told me on doorsteps in Manchester weeks before this that they would not vote for a Labour candidate as long as Corbyn is leading the Party. Corbyn’s fellow-traveller Ken Livingstone’s choice of timing to spout his outrageous anti-Semitism undoubtedly created extra difficulties for Labour candidates across the country, many of whom were already on the defensive.
While Zac Goldsmith found his path to the Conservative candidacy much smoother, not much differentiated him from Sadiq on policy. Both recognised housing was the key issue for voters. Sadiq wanted to freeze TFL fares and Zac wanted to freeze council tax, but their policy platforms were not noticeably different to the average voter.
However, Zac ended up running a hugely negative campaign, much to the surprise of many who know him personally. He was once seen as one of the amiable Tories – you could disagree with his politics without being overly disagreeable. This was the man who stuck his neck out on recall of under-performing MPs and was seen as a powerful local MP with the huge majority to back it up – but we saw painfully little of that man in the campaign’s final weeks.
A senior Labour campaigner gave me his insight on Election Day while power-walking between doorsteps. He told me it looked likely Sadiq would win because it was clear he actually wanted to win – much more so than Zac, who ran a lacklustre and divisive campaign; and voters appreciated this.
Perhaps Zac’s campaign relied too much on focus groups. The campaign was convinced that their tactics were working because it was resonating with some voters. However, it is clear that whilst this might have been the case, in practice these tactics distanced rather than attracted more voters – as I found out first-hand. You could certainly accuse Sadiq of poor judgement in his alleged links to Islamism in his early career, but he is undeniably ‘soft-Left’ Labour through-and-through. He has been a vehement advocate for human rights throughout his professional life and, in spite of criticism from many sharing his faith, voted in favour of same-sex marriage while the current Lib Dem leader and Equalities Minister chose not to. The Goldsmith campaign was blowing a dog-whistle that couldn’t be heard in London and the absence of a different strategy to counter Sadiq’s unbridled enthusiasm for London and its future cost it dearly.
So what now for Sadiq? He has a larger personal mandate than Corbyn and is rumoured to have bagged Lord Adonis to work on transport in City Hall and perhaps former Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith into a police and crime role – both Blairites to their core. With strong powers of patronage, moderates in the Party may find themselves flocking to City Hall because, at least somewhere, Labour has been able to reach out beyond its base to win an election, and thus the ability to enact real change – something the ‘new’ politics seemingly doesn’t regard as a high priority. All eyes will be on City Hall for the foreseeable future.
