London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who received re-election Saturday, has risen from humble roots to spar with prime ministers and presidents since taking cost of the British capital 5 years in the past.
The 50-year-old politician from the primary opposition Labour celebration, a former human rights lawyer introduced up in a London public housing complicated, received a second stint at City Hall with victory over Conservative rival Shaun Bailey.
This continues a outstanding journey for the Pakistani immigrant bus driver’s son, who turned the primary Muslim mayor of a Western capital when initially elected in 2016.
He has made a reputation for himself as a vocal critic of Brexit and successive Conservative prime ministers, together with his mayoral predecessor Boris Johnson, as nicely as for a feud with former US president Donald Trump.
The pair turned embroiled in a rare confrontation, after Khan criticised Trump’s controversial journey ban on individuals from sure Muslim nations.
In a sequence of weird assaults, Trump accused Khan of doing a “very bad job on terrorism” and referred to as him a “stone cold loser” and a “national disgrace”.
The mayor in flip allowed an notorious blimp of Trump dressed as a child in a nappy to fly above protests in Parliament Square throughout his 2018 go to to Britain.
“He once called me a stone cold loser. Only one of us is a loser, and it’s not me,” a usually combative Khan informed AFP as he campaigned forward of Thursday’s ballot.
Street fighter
Born in London in 1970 to folks who had lately arrived from Pakistan, Khan was the fifth little one out of seven brothers and one sister.
He grew up in public housing in Tooting, an ethnically combined residential space in south London, and slept in a bunk mattress till he was 24.
His modest background performs nicely in a metropolis that’s pleased with its range and loves a self-made success story.
In his victory speech on Saturday, Khan described himself as “a Londoner through and through”.
“I grew up on a council estate, a working class boy, a child of immigrants, but I’m now the Mayor of London,” he mentioned.
Khan nonetheless repeatedly recollects how his father drove one in every of London’s well-known purple buses, and his mom was a seamstress. One of his brothers is a motor mechanic.
He is a useful boxer, having learnt the game to defend himself within the streets towards those that hurled racist abuse at him, and two of his brothers are boxing coaches. He additionally ran the London Marathon in 2014.
At college, he wished to check science and turn into a dentist. But a instructor noticed his reward for verbal sparring and directed him in the direction of regulation.
He gained a regulation diploma from the University of North London and began out as a trainee lawyer in 1994 on the Christian Fisher authorized agency, the place he was ultimately made a companion.
He specialised in human rights, and spent three years chairing the civil liberties marketing campaign group Liberty.
He represented Louis Farrakhan, chief of the Nation of Islam motion, and Babar Ahmad, a mosque acquaintance who was jailed within the United States after admitting offering assist to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Muslim PM?
Khan joined Labour aged 15 when Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher was in her pomp. He turned a neighborhood councillor for Tooting within the Conservative-dominated Wandsworth native borough in 1994, and its member of parliament in 2005.
He nonetheless lives within the space along with his lawyer spouse Saadiya and their two teenage daughters.
Then prime minister Gordon Brown made him the communities minister in 2008 and he later served as transport minister, changing into the primary Muslim minister to attend Cabinet conferences.
In parliament, he voted for homosexual marriage — which earned him loss of life threats.
As mayor, he vowed to concentrate on offering inexpensive houses for Londoners and freezing transport fares, however — like many in energy world wide — noticed his agenda engulfed by the pandemic.
Khan has mentioned his precedence for a second time period might be “jobs, jobs, jobs” as he bids to maintain London on its perch as a prime world metropolis whereas tackling the disaster and the fallout from Brexit, which might threaten the capital’s important monetary sector.
He is London’s third mayor after Labour’s Ken Livingstone (2000-2008) and Johnson (2008-2016), with widespread hypothesis he might attempt to observe in his predecessor’s footsteps to Downing Street.
Khan predicts Britain can have a Muslim prime minister “in the not-too-distant future” however insists it won’t be him.
“As long as Londoners continue to trust me to be their mayor, I’m currently in this job,” he informed AFP.
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