Last week Sadiq Khan was elected Mayor of London. This was hailed in liberal circles as an extraordinary and marvellous thing.
I don't find it extraordinary at all. Nearly half of all people living in London were born outside the UK. London is now an international city rather than a British one. Why is it surprising Londoners should elect Khan?
As for marvellous, a barrister friend of mine was once instructed by Khan, in the days when he was merely a stroppy Legal Aid solicitor. He said Khan was "bossy and ranting", at least as interested in pushing the political aspects of the case as acting in the client's best interest.
That might make him a bad lawyer, but it won't necessarily make him a bad Mayor.
The election campaign was, it is said, marred by accusations that Khan had consorted with extremists, and was by implication extremist himself, accusations contested with interest by the Khan camp as "racist" (because obviously if you call someone an extremist that must be because of their "race", right? And Muslims are a race, aren't they?*)
On this subject I recommend an illuminating article by Maajid Nawaz, head of the Quilliam Foundation, entitled The Secret Life of Sadiq Khan. Nawaz is as well positioned as anyone to assess whether Khan is an extremist, because Nawaz really was one himself, and because Khan was his lawyer.
Nawaz's verdict is uncompromising and plausible. Khan isn't an extremist, but he sucked up to extremists in London in order to get votes.
This isn't attractive behaviour, but he's a politician now, not a lawyer. It's a dirty job.
My own least favourite Khan moment came in 2009 when, as Minster of State for Communities in the Gordon Brown government, he described moderate Muslims in a TV interview as Uncle Toms. Now this really was pretty repulsive. It suggests of course that Khan did not regard himself as a "moderate Muslim" (whatever that is), but moreover it implies contempt not just for the Uncle Toms themselves but for the societal values Uncle Toms might be said to have espoused.
Values like free speech, education, democracy, the rule of law perhaps; the values, in other words, which had enabled the son of a Pakistani bus driver to rise to be first a human rights lawyer, then an MP, then a Minister of State in the British Government and then Mayor of London.
Uncle Toms indeed. Amusingly, his own logic appears to make Khan himself an Uncle Tom, a point not lost on Maajid Nawaz. But Nawaz goes further than just pointing out Khan's hypocrisy.
"Today", he writes, "Muslim terrorists kill more Muslims than people from any other faith, after they dehumanize them for being "not Muslim enough". In such a climate, labeling counter-extremist Muslims as "Uncle Toms", "House Muslims" or "native Informants" is comparable to calling someone a heretic during the Inquisition . . . Degrading the "Muslimness" of someone . . . is a prerequisite to their murder by terrorists . . . Khan knows all of this. He really should have known better".
So no, I don't think Khan's election is all that marvellous, and while Zac Goldsmith struck me as a pallid and lacklustre candidate I'm not sure his opponent's victory says anything good about London or Britain.
I suppose though the rest of us should be glad that Khan's self-interest now apparently lies in being the Establishment's lapdog rather than the extremists' poodle.
*My previous post has some reflections on these tired old assumptions.
