In one of the election leaflets put out by the likely next Mayor of London, we learn that Sadiq Khan is the “bus driver’s son who grew up on a council estate and saved up to buy his own house.” Much of the reason why the Labour candidate has an eight-point lead at the time of writing can be found in that short sentence, a little masterpiece of copywriting. Humble beginnings as the descendant of migrants, not ashamed to have lived on a council estate, but aspirational enough to save up and buy his way into the propertyowning democracy. Even the bus is a perfect touch, the big red buses that every visitor to the British capital notices immediately.
Zac Goldsmith’s pitch, on the other hand, has been total continuity with the outgoing Boris Johnson administration, which has, as the Conservative hopeful infelicitously puts it, “put London on the map.” Elsewhere, the candidates converge. There should be much more housing, and it should be “affordable,” and it should be funded through the immense wealth that sloshes through the city, there should be better public transport, and there should be a public-private Garden Bridge crossing from Temple to the South Bank. The only dissonant notes, aside from Goldsmith’s increasingly personal, dog-whistle attacks on Khan, are in their backgrounds—the financier’s son versus the lad from the Henry Prince Estate.
The view upwards from Wellington House, a luxury apartment building in Westminster, London. Opposite: office block in Canary Wharf at night
© VIEW PICTURES/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK, SHOMOS UDDIN/GETTY IMAGES