The race to replace Boris

“He didn’t capture the smile Or the forehead marked with human folly But across the mountainous, crooked mile He caught the landscape’s melancholy ”

From Showcase Mey Itna Tho Godown Mey Kitna by Bachchoo

I live in London and in a democratic way involve myself with its politics. The mayor of London, unlike the mayors of Indian cities, if they exist, has powers over the city exceeding those that Arvind Kejriwal, even as the chief minister of the mini-state, has over Delhi.

The London mayor is, in his powers and remit, as Devendra Fadnavis is to Mumbai. He (there hasn’t been a she yet) can plan infrastructure projects, the building of airports, runways, rail and underground networks, roads, housing projects, public transport including buses, taxi supply, sewage, sanitation, etc. He also has charge of the police, some sway in the capital’s educational institutions and had joint control of the Olympics when the city hosted them.

In May this year, the election for a new mayor to succeed the pugnacious Boris Johnson will be held. Mr Johnson has served two terms and will then move on to a ministership in Prime Minister David Cameron’s Cabinet.

The candidates for the mayoral race have been nominated and are beginning to campaign. The Tories have put forward Zac Goldsmith, one of their MPs. Mr Goldsmith is the son of billionaire Sir James Goldsmith and, perhaps more famously, brother of Jemima the ex-wife of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan.

The Labour candidate is the current MP for the London constituency of Tooting. He is Sadiq Khan, and yes, he is a Muslim of Pakistani origin. His father was an immigrant and worked as a bus driver.

Mr Khan trained as a lawyer and practised as a specialist in human rights. He worked his way in the Labour Party as a leftish activist, then a councillor in the Tory-led Council of Wandsworth and in 2005 stood for and won Tooting.

London has 32 boroughs and a population of eight million, of which those above the age of 18 will vote in the next mayoral election. London is statistically deemed to have an in-built Labour majority. At the last general election earlier in 2015, Labour won 400,000 votes more than the Tories in London’s constituencies. Nevertheless at the last two mayoral elections, the Tory Boris Johnson ran a popular campaign and beat Labour.

This should indicate to Mr Khan that he can’t rely on the in-built Labour bias but has to go some way to win over the natural Tory voter. His interviews indicate that he is well aware of this, as he says he welcomes the fact a Labour mayor will have to work with businesses to serve all Londoners. He also welcomed the fact that London has 140 billionaires and 400,000 millionaires and despite having a left-wing reputation he wants their votes.

He should, on his showing in Tooting, which has a 27 per cent ethnic population, mostly of Mirpuri Muslim descent, and a large white working class one, count on a similar demographic to win Inner London hands down. The one factor, a big fat fly in this electoral ointment may be the candidacy of one George Galloway.

Known to sections of the mocking press as “Gorgeous George”, because he sports snappy vintage suits and wears a hat to one side of his head, Mr Galloway has entered the race.

He belongs to a party he invented called Respect. He was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 when he went to Iraq and was filmed bowing and scraping to Saddam Hussein. He then publicly called upon the Arabs to rise up in defence of Saddam and on the British troops to disobey orders. This stance on the Iraq war and his pronouncements of support for Palestine made him something of a hero amongst the Muslim populations of British cities.

He joined a coalition of left-wing and Bangladeshi immigrant groups, some financed by Saudi Arabia, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. He then helped to found this party called Respect and stood as its parliamentary candidate and won the Bethnal Green and Bow seat in 2005. Five years later, using the same pro-Islamic and anti-zionist stance and rhetoric (he is an alluring and powerful speaker) he lost a neighbouring seat in London.

Never-say-die Galloway went to Bradford West, another constituency with a strong Mirpuri Muslim vote and in 2012 again won the seat for Respect.

I met Mr Galloway under unexpected circumstances. Two years ago, I was invited to the Karachi Literature Festival. There must have been 50 writers from all over the world reading and speaking, but the chief guest at the festival was Mr Galloway. Though he doesn’t write books he was invited to give a rousing speech espousing every pro-Islamic, anti-Israeli, anti-American, anti-Indian and anti-UK cliché to a very receptive audience. He has made a business of it.

In the 2015 election Bradford voted him out. Mr Galloway had mounted a vicious campaign against the Labour candidate Naz Shah, accusing her of lying about herself and slandering her family by revealing that she had a very unhappy existence as a child. Her father abandoned them when she was six. Her mother then took a drug-dealer as lover and subsequently murdered him.

Mr Galloway accused her of lying when she said she was forced into a marriage at 15. He waved a certificate at a crowd claiming that she was really 16.

The voters may also have noticed that “Gorgeous George” couldn’t on one occasion remember the name of the town he had been elected in and called it Burnley. They may also have resented the fact that he was never seen in Bradford. Mr Galloway was out earning half a million pounds in MPs wages and expenses and as a weekly commentator on TV for Russia Today, for Iran Press TV and Al Mayadeen TV in Beirut.

Nevertheless, though Mr Galloway has no prospect of winning the mayoralty, his pro-Islamic, anti-Israel stance can possibly dent Mr Khan’s Muslim vote in the capital and let Mr Goldsmith in.