By Adetokunbo FAKEYE
The incumbent Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has won an historic third term election.
The result was announced at City Hall this afternoon (Saturday, May 4) after voters had to wait an entire day for votes to be counted.
According to report by MyLondon, Labour’s City Hall incumbent racked up a significant lead early on, including a huge victory in North East (more than 127,455 to Susan Hall’s 34,099) and from that moment his Tory challenger never looked likely of picking up enough votes to win.
A spokesperson for the Mayor of London said: “This is the first time in the history of the London mayoralty that an incumbent has increased their margin of victory and seen a swing towards them”.
Now he’s been re-elected with the ‘biggest direct mandate in the UK and the second biggest in Europe’, Mr Khan’s spokesperson called for Rishi Sunak to call a General Election, report MyLondon.
As soon as 1.52pm, MyLondon understood that the Labour team thought that it was possible that Mr Khan had ‘done better than anyone could have expected’. It was also said that there had been swings towards the mayor ‘right across London’.
Before then, at 11.30am, the London Labour team was ‘looking confident’ at counts. Despite this, Conservative Andrew Boff, who served as Chair of the London Assembly since 2023, told MyLondon: “I think she’s got it”.
He was putting hope on turnout figures released yesterday. Mr Boff said: “The fact that the turnouts were disproportionately low in traditional Labour areas, it looks to me like Londoners get it.”
But Mr Khan’s first victory in West Central was announced soon after this. It was a narrow one – he attained 54,000 votes to Ms Hall’s 43,000 votes.
Mr Boff was less optimistic about the Tories’ prospects at the Assembly: “We’re going to take a hit. “That’s more to do with what’s going on in Westminster than how we’ve conducted ourselves as a Conservative group.”
On what would be a good result, Mr Boff said anything above seven Assembly Members for the Tories ‘would be good’. He also revealed that he doesn’t think he’s going to be elected this time.
Whoever is elected as the new Chair, the Conservative famous for heckling Suella Braverman at the party’s conference last year, added that they should ‘hold the mayor to account’, whoever it is, and not make it a ‘Glee club’.
Credit: MyLondon
