Upsets don’t come much bigger than Jeremy Corbyn winning the Labour
party leadership, so it’s unsurprising that Sadiq Khan’s triumph over
Tessa Jowell to be the party’s candidate for London mayor has been
overlooked. Londoners won’t go to the polls until next May, but the
ballot will be a defining moment for the Corbyn project in opposition,
and the first significant bellwether of the likelihood of a Labour
government, of some kind, four years later.
Khan’s most likely opponent from the Conservative Party will be the
MP for Richmond Park, Zac Goldsmith. The two men could not have had more
different upbringings: Khan’s father was a bus driver from Pakistan,
Goldsmith’s a financier whose ancestors include a consul to the Grand
Duke of Tuscany; Khan’s mother was a seamstress, Goldsmith’s an
Anglo-Irish aristocrat descended from the Londonderry family. Khan, one
of eight children, spent his early years in a council flat in south-west
London; Goldsmith went to Eton before travelling the world as a
dilettante environmentalist...
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