Source: The Guardian

By Dave Hill

Dave Hill has been writing for the Guardian since 1984 and its award-winning London commentator since 2008

We’re at that seductive stage in many election races when a consensus starts to form that one side cannot win and the other is within sight of victory. The London mayor contest now has some of that beguiling quality. It began with opinion polls earlier this month showing Labour’s Sadiq Khan maintaining ahealthy lead over the Conservative Zac Goldsmith. It continued with reports of London Tories in despair. And it has strengthened in recent days due to mishapsbefalling Goldsmith’s intensified attempts to depict Khan as a useful idiot for Islamist extremists.

Is a Tory defeat inevitable? The very fact that Goldsmith has revved up the most negative elements of his campaign is being characterised by Khan as a sign of weakness and a lack of anything else with which to catch the London electorate’s eye. The Labour man’s favourite words for it are “desperate” and “divisive.” Goldsmith is accused of seeking to mobilise anxiety about Muslims by implying that Khan, who is one, cannot be trusted with Londoners’ security in the face of the terror threat. Former shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has piled in on Khan’s side, writing that “what started as a subtle dog whistle is becoming a full blown racist scream.”

Meanwhile, Goldsmith has used his most aggressive language yet to try to tarnish Khan as unfit for the mayoral task of ensuring community safety. Here are his words from a speech he gave on Tuesday morning:

I will be the mayor who is on the side of the heroes who protect and who keep our city safe. My rival will be the mayor whose career involves coaching people in how to sue our police; a man who’s given platforms and oxygen, even cover, to people, over and over and over again, to people who seek to do our police and our city harm; a man who has tried to silence questions about those events by shamelessly accusing anyone who raises those questions of Islamophobia. There can be no ambiguity at all, no looking both ways when it comes to keeping Londoners safe.

Fierce stuff from a man who, to some, can appear limpid and aloof. And pretty extreme with it. The “coaching” allegation refers to advice Khan produced 13 years ago, when he was a civil rights lawyer, for people who believed they had been mistreated by the Met. Apparently, demanding that the capital’s police conduct themselves lawfully and well is inconsistent with having command of the mayor’s office for policing and crime.

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