Labour’s Sadiq Khan will lead the city for another three years.
Amongst the many elections taking place on Thursday, May 6 was one of great significance for London and Londoners: the race to become Mayor of London. And whilst the results weren’t finalised until late on Saturday evening, the final tallies revealed a result long expected by pre-election polling: Sadiq Khan has won a second term as Mayor of London.
Despite pre-election confidence that Khan would win a second term, the result was closer than many forecasts predicted. After no candidate won 50% of the vote in the first round (rather unsurprising, given that 20 candidates were running this year), the run-off vote between Khan and Conservative rival Shaun Bailey saw the Labour Mayor prevail with 55.2% of the vote, with around 1.2 million Londoners casting a ballot for him. Bailey earned 977,000 votes, with the Green Party’s Sian Berry in third place at a shade under 200,000 votes, and Liberal Democrat Luisa Porritt in fourth with 111,000.
The result means Sadiq Khan will serve a new three-year term as Mayor of London, having been first elected to the post in 2016. His term was initially due to end in May 2020, but with local elections postponed a year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and first lockdown, the polls were moved to this year and consequently meant Khan’s first term was five years long. He becomes the third consecutive Mayor of London to win a second term in office, after Labour’s Ken Livingstone (2000-2008) and Conservative Boris Johnson (2008-2016), now Prime Minister of the UK.
In his victory speech, Sadiq Khan vowed to “strain every sinew to help build a better and brighter future for London after the dark days of the pandemic”. He also pledged to be an advocate for all Londoners, including those who didn’t vote for him, and will look to enact progress on policies including job creation, helping London’s economy to rebound from the pandemic, and fighting knife crime in the capital. Other planned policies include a pledge to name London’s Overground lines, whilst other pressing TfL business for Khan’s second term includes the long-running Crossrail project.