Labor Sadiq Khan was re-elected for a third term as mayor of London, an unprecedented situation in the British capital, according to data released this Saturday (4).
Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants and the first Muslim mayor of London, aged 53 and in office since 2016, defeated conservative candidate Susan Hill, by an even greater margin than that obtained when he was re-elected for the first time in 2021.
According to the “BBC”, Khan had 1,088,225 votes (43.8% of the total) against 811,518 (32.7% of the total) for Hill, a difference of just over 276 thousand votes. Khan won in nine of the 14 electoral districts
He thus surpassed the two terms that his predecessor and former conservative British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had served.
“It is the honor of my life to serve the city I love and I feel beyond honored at this moment,” Khan told supporters after the results were announced, adding that he set out to “repay the trust” of voters and work for a capital “fairer, safer and greener”.
As mayor, he was a fierce critic of Brexit and successive conservative heads of government and even had a confrontation with the then president of the United States, Donald Trump, who in 2017 accused him of having failed in the fight against terrorism and called him ” loser”.
But he took revenge when Trump was defeated in 2020 by Democrat Joe Biden in the presidential election.
“He once called me a… loser. Only one of us is a loser, and it’s not me,” he said.
Khan, with a very different trajectory from British elites, became a symbol of the country’s diversity.
His father, a bus driver, and mother, a seamstress, emigrated from Pakistan in the 1960s and raised their children in public housing.
He attended a public school in north London and studied law at North London University, a free education for which he was always grateful. “I owe everything to London,” he said.
He wanted to be a doctor or dentist. But one of his teachers noticed his gift for oratory and advised him to study law. He followed the advice, specialized in human rights and presided over the NGO Liberty for three years.
In addition to using books, Khan knew how to defend himself with his fists and from a young age he learned to box to face those who called him “paki”, a pejorative term referring to Pakistanis.
At age 15, he joined the Labor Party and in 1994, at age 23, he was elected as a councilor in Wandsworth, a borough in south London.
In 2005, he abandoned his career as a lawyer to be elected MP for Tooting, where he has lived all his life and now lives with his wife Saadiya, also a lawyer, and their two teenage daughters.
Three years later, then Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered him the position of Minister for Communities, and the following year, that of Transport. He was the first Muslim to hold a ministerial position.
