ASK Sadiq Khan for a case study and he gives you seven. Having casually inquired of London’s would-be mayor whether he draws on any particular international example, Bagehot was bombarded with the municipal merits of Detroit, New York, Chicago, Houston, Paris, Berlin and Los Angeles (“The previous mayor wanted to green LA and expand the port, but Barack Obama couldn’t get it through Congress or the Senate...so he jumped in a plane and went to China to get the funding.”). For such is Mr Khan: frenetic, keen to show that he is on top of his brief and—every bit the politician—even keener to say what he thinks his interlocutor wants to hear.

His selection last September as Labour’s candidate for the mayoralty and his subsequent success in the opinion polls have defied expectations. Tessa Jowell, a doyenne of the party’s liberal right (and a member of The Economist Group’s board) had appeared better equipped to win over the centrist suburbs of Britain’s left-wing capital in its election on May 5th, but fell short. Mr Khan’s campaign has since proven too thin-skinned; howling that (admittedly unfair) Conservative accusations that he is a “radical” and a “lab rat” for Labour’s leadership were respectively anti-Islam and anti-London. His bid has been weakened by Jeremy Corbyn, the party’s hard-left leader who in his victory speech last September—horror flitting across Mr Khan’s face—proclaimed: “Sadiq, we’re going to be campaigning together.”

Nonetheless, it seems the MP for Tooting is comfortably ahead of Zac Goldsmith, his thoughtful but posh Tory rival—by 45% to 35%, according to a recent poll by YouGov. It helps that the hard-left Mr Corbyn is driving moderate Labour activists towards Mr Khan, even though he is on the party’s soft-left. And Labour’s candidate has worked hard to distance himself from his leader, pledging to be London’s most pro-business mayor ever and decrying Mr Corbyn’s policies on tax and finance.

Mr Khan’s main strength is that he exemplifies the city he wants to run. His parents moved there from Karachi, in Pakistan. The son of a bus driver, he grew up in a council flat in south London and lived out of a bunk-bed there until he was 24. He trained as a lawyer and subsequently ended up in Gordon Brown’s cabinet (by contrast, Mr Goldsmith was gifted the editorship of the Ecologist, an environmental magazine, by his uncle). “London gave me and my family the chance to fulfil our potential,” argues Mr Khan convincingly. Firmly pro-European, comfortable with immigration and a model of liberal Islam (he backed gay marriage and fought to keep a local pub open), he encapsulates the city’s contradictions: internationalist and parochial, swaggering and insecure, original and clichéd, socialist and capitalist.

Would he make a good mayor? His programme, which he launched on February 2nd, is mixed. He has promising plans to improve Londoners’ skills and to accelerate the construction of Crossrail 2, a new subterranean railway that will run from London’s south-west to its north-east. Most excitingly, he wants to expand the debilitatingly meagre scope of the city’s mayoralty, pledging to lobby for new tax-raising abilities and local health powers to rival those which Manchester will acquire, ahead of the capital, in April.

On the other hand, his “pro-business” programme seems to be more about what firms can do for the mayor (building infrastructure and houses, raising wages, advising on policies) than what the mayor can do for firms (beyond vague talk of the “jobs of tomorrow” and “engines of growth”). Meanwhile his housing policy—introducing rent controls, bolstering tenants’ protections and mandating a larger proportion of “affordable” homes while refusing to countenance building on the often ugly and mostly pointless green belt—does not match the scale of the task (40% of Londoners experience damp and the average house price could reach £1m, or $1.5m, in 2030). His stance on airport expansion is similarly disappointing: London’s probable next mayor opposes new runways at Heathrow, its only hub airport.

London’s turning

The good news is that Mr Khan will probably abandon these commitments if he wins office. When pushed, he struggles to justify his views on either Heathrow or the green belt. Mr Goldsmith may have had a point when he called his rival’s stance on the former “as authentic as Donald Trump’s hair”. That need not be a bad thing: if this, as is often asserted, is the age of mayors, it is thus also the age of pragmatism and ideological flexibility. Youthfully energetic despite his grey streaks, punchily ambitious (he boxes to keep fit) and hyperactive, Mr Khan—who even talks too fast, slamming one word into another—may just be the real deal. “I have heard him speak a number of times and he gets better and better,” says a senior Labourite close to Ms Jowell.

The best argument for him is that, by all accounts, he is a good and likeable manager, aware of his weaknesses and (as his monologue about London’s rival cities suggests) open to external ideas. Unlike Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone, London’s previous mayors, he is a team player. Unlike Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader whose campaign to run the party he led in 2010, he can take criticism. “If there’s a good idea I’ll replicate it; I’m not precious if it’s a Labour idea, a British idea, or not,” he insists. There is one caveat. If—as seems likely—Mr Khan wins on May 5th he will need to build a team that can anchor his mayoralty and give it public-policy ballast. Andrew Adonis, the Labour peer obsessed with detail and currently leading the government’s infrastructure commission, would be an excellent choice of policy chief. With someone like that on board, Mr Khan could prove a fine mayor indeed.

Read a transcript of Bagehot’s interview with Sadiq Khan: Economist.com/blogs/bagehot

