Londoners choose their new mayor on May 5, 2016, after a straight fight between rival candidates Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan dominated by negative campaigning.
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Many analysts say Sadiq Khan’s campaign has also survived a recent media focus on his party’s infighting due to anti-Semitic remarks by two prominent Labour politicians.
A second poll, by ComRes for LBC radio and ITV London news, put Khan on 45% and Goldsmith on 36% on first preference votes, moving to 56% and 44% on second preferences.
Sadiq Khan, a son of a Pakistani migrant bus driver, has become a household name in London and a hot favourite to win.
In a final campaign stop in a street market in a multi-cultural district of south London, Mr Khan joked with stallholders and their customers and posed in the warm spring sunshine for selfie pictures.
“I’ve had a positive campaign from day one, talking about how my experience, values and vision will lead to me being the mayor for all Londoners”.
“Whatever Khan may now say, that gang will come back with a Labour victory”.
Mr Cameron insisted that it was vital to have a Conservative mayor and government working “hand in glove” to deliver for Londoners.
Cameron wants Britain to stay in the European Union but only around half of his MPs are with him.
However, the elections are a much bigger test for Corbyn, the socialist stalwart who won the Labour leadership in September in a surprise landslide.
But in a letter to Mr Corbyn, Israeli Labour Party leader Isaac Herzog said he was “appalled and outraged by the recent examples of anti-Semitism by senior Labour Party officials in the United Kingdom”.
He said in an interview that if he is elected, he hopes it would send a message that “the fact that you might be a son of immigrants, or a poor background, or ethnic or religious minority, isn’t held against you because you are respected for who you are and what you put in”.
The campaign, condemned by Labour for using what it calls tactics worthy of presumptive U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to divide Londoners along faith lines, has swept aside the usual concerns in the capital over high transport costs and a lack of affordable housing.
Along with picking their candidate for the next mayor, Londoners will also be electing 25 members of the London Assembly.
A poll carried out amid the controversy gave the Conservatives an eight-point lead, and experts tip Labour to lose up to 150 council seats in England and face a hard night in Scotland and Wales.
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Polls suggest that the Irish nationalists of Sinn Fein will narrow the gap on the Democratic Unionists, but fall short of overtaking the Protestant side of the house.
