Sadiq Khan has been elected Mayor of London, defeating Zac Goldsmith in the second round of voting with 57% to Goldsmith’s 43%.
Labour candidate Sadiq Khan has defeated the Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith in London’s mayoral election today. Khan, had long been the favourite in the election, but tonight it was announced that he had defeated Goldsmith by an unprecedented margin of over 13 points.
The London Mayoral election is determined by preference voting: if no candidate receives over 50% of the first preference votes then the top two candidates go through to the second round. The second preference votes of all the eliminated candidates are then re-distributed.
With over 200,000 more votes than Goldsmith in the first round, it was all but guaranteed that Khan would win with second preference votes. However it was after midnight that the final result was declared due to a discrepancy in counting the votes.
With 1,310,143 Londoners having voted Sadiq Khan the new Mayor of London, this eclipses the numbers who voted for previous Mayors Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone. Given we don’t directly elect our Prime Minister, this means that Khan has the largest popular mandate of any politician in UK history.
In his acceptance speech in the early hours, Sadiq Khan praised his campaign team and said that the “politics of fear is not welcome in our city”. This was a reference to Zac Goldsmith’s widely criticised campaign that opponents say tried to prejudice voters against Sadiq Khan due to his religion.
While the 2016 local elections weren’t as disastrous for Labour as some commentators had predicted, it is without a doubt that Sadiq Khan’s victory is the biggest of the day for them.
But it also presents a problem for the Labour Party of how to consolidate their base in areas like London and the North, while still gaining enough support from the wider public to win a general election. With Labour in free fall in Scotland, this is becoming an even harder task.