Sadiq Khan, Labour Party candidate, speaks in front of Zac Goldsmith, Conservative Party candidate, after winning the London mayoral elections, at City Hall in London, Saturday, May 7, 2016.
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He is succeeding the Conservative Party’s Boris Johnson, who has been the capital’s mayor for the last eight years.
Khan studied law and later became a human rights lawyer before being elected as the Labour MP for the London constituency of Tooting in 2005.
He added on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: “I was disappointed that the Conservative party chose to have a campaign that was nasty, that was negative, that was divisive”.
In his victory speech after 16 and a half hours of counting, Mr Khan thanked his “amazing” mum and dad, wife and two daughters – saying his bus driver dad would’ve been proud of him.
The new mayor of London, who was signed in at a ceremony from which Mr Corbyn was notably absent, warned that appealing to “natural Labour voters” alone would not be enough to secure success.
“To have a Muslim mayor seems preferable to me to any alternative regardless of the politics”, said actor Sir Ian McKellen, who greeted Khan at the cathedral gates.
Mr. Khan led an energetic campaign that was turned increasingly toxic by the personal attacks and slander levelled against him by his opponent, the billionaire Mr. Goldsmith, including the smear that he shared platforms with extremists in the past. After Labour lost power in 2010, its leader Ed Miliband included Khan in his shadow cabinet.
Mr Khan’s plans to help ease the capital’s accommodation crisis by building more public housing was also a hit with voters.
The result was the largest mandate for a sole candidate in British electoral history after a campaign marked by attempts to link Khan to extremists.
Numerous attacks publicly fell apart as imam Suliaman Gani, who Mr Cameron named in the House of Commons for meeting Mr Khan nine times, said he was a former Tory voter and wanted to sue the Prime Minister for libel.
Amin said he voted for Goldsmith because he opposes Labour policies, but could not stomach campaigning actively for him – and instead took pride in seeing Londoners vote so strongly for a fellow Muslim of Pakistani background.
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Khan, the whose parents were Pakistani immigrants to Britain pledged to be “a mayor for all Londoners”, and attended a reception as part of the Yom HaShoah ceremony at the Barnet Copthall Stadium in north London.
