We’re at that seductive stage in many election races when a consensus starts to form that one side cannot win and the other is within sight of victory. The London mayor contest now has some of that beguiling quality. It began with opinion polls earlier this month showing Labour’s Sadiq Khan maintaining a healthy lead over the Conservative Zac Goldsmith. It continued with reports of London Tories in despair. And it has strengthened in recent days due to mishaps befalling Goldsmith’s intensified attempts to depict Khan as a useful idiot for Islamist extremists.

Is a Tory defeat inevitable? The very fact that Goldsmith has revved up the most negative elements of his campaign is being characterised by Khan as a sign of weakness and a lack of anything else with which to catch the London electorate’s eye. The Labour man’s favourite words for it are “desperate” and “divisive.” Goldsmith is accused of seeking to mobilise anxiety about Muslims by implying that Khan, who is one, cannot be trusted with Londoners’ security in the face of the terror threat. Former shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has piled in on Khan’s side, writing that “what started as a subtle dog whistle is becoming a full blown racist scream.”

Meanwhile, Goldsmith has used his most aggressive language yet to try to tarnish Khan as unfit for the mayoral task of ensuring community safety. Here are his words from a speech he gave on Tuesday morning:

I will be the mayor who is on the side of the heroes who protect and who keep our city safe. My rival will be the mayor whose career involves coaching people in how to sue our police; a man who’s given platforms and oxygen, even cover, to people, over and over and over again, to people who seek to do our police and our city harm; a man who has tried to silence questions about those events by shamelessly accusing anyone who raises those questions of Islamophobia. There can be no ambiguity at all, no looking both ways when it comes to keeping Londoners safe.

Fierce stuff from a man who, to some, can appear limpid and aloof. And pretty extreme with it. The “coaching” allegation refers to advice Khan produced 13 years ago, when he was a civil rights lawyer, for people who believed they had been mistreated by the Met. Apparently, demanding that the capital’s police conduct themselves lawfully and well is inconsistent with having command of the mayor’s office for policing and crime.

The charge that Khan, the MP for Tooting, has assisted people who want to damage London and its police is an escalation of a strategy of personal denigration, also conducted through the Tory press. This includes the London Evening Standard. Its proprietor Evgeny Lebedev is a friend and huge admirer of outgoing Tory mayor Boris Johnson, on whose coat tails Goldsmith is riding. The Standard’s editor Sarah Sands recently assured the Guardian that its mayoral coverage would be “scrupulous” about giving Khan and Goldsmith equal prominence. Most of it has been very fair. Predictably, though, this concept of equality has accommodated giving unmerited weight to thin and inflammatory “extremist links” stories reflecting badly on Khan.

On the same day as he made his “giving cover” speech (which the Standard reported on its front page), Goldsmith attacked Khan on the same grounds for a second time, citing his support for UK-US extradition treaty cause celebre Babar Ahmad and connections with Tooting mosque imam Suliman Gani, whom Goldsmith told the Standard was “one of the most repellent figures in the country.”

Awkwardly for Goldsmith, it swiftly emerged that he too had supported Ahmad - despite claiming that he hadn’t even heard of him until recently - and has himself attended a political event with Gani, who has made common cause with a number of other Tory MPs in the campaign for the return to Britain of Guantanamo detainee Shaker Aamer. Gani even says he backed the Tory challenger to Khan in Tooting at last year’s general election.

All of this has followed the controversy surrounding tailored leaflets and letters produced by the Goldsmith campaign for Indian, Tamil and Sikh Londoners, each asserting that Khan would not “stand up” for them and that his election as mayor would somehow lead to a wealth tax on their family jewellery. No such bespoke mailshots have been targeted at any other cultural, religious or ethnic group, prompting Khan’s campaign and others, including politically neutral organisations Operation Black Vote and think tank Muslim Engagement and Development, to denounce the material as an attempt to sow and stoke division among London’s South Asian communities to the Labour candidate’s disadvantage.

Even Conservatives have complained about this literature. But despite that and despite the fraying of the “extremists links” attack line, it will be a surprise if there aren’t more of these tactics from Goldsmith and his media allies in the run-up to the election on 5 May. Desperate or not, the Tories clearly think this approach improves their candidate’s chance of winning. Are they right? And does Goldsmith think such methods justified?

After his “giving cover” speech, he took questions from a group of around ten journalists, including me. I asked him about the targeted leaflets. Given the criticism they had attracted from some quarters, did he think they had proved more of a hindrance than a help? And why had just those three groups been favoured with literature specifically for them? Why not also, say, the South Koreans of New Malden or the Latin Americans of Southwark? Why not give the same type of attention to Muslim Londoners? If to Indian Londoners, why not to Pakistani Londoners too, perhaps especially in view of Goldsmith’s having expressed pride back in January in his family connection with would-be Pakistan president and former star cricketer Imran Khan?

“I have sought to reach out to all and I’ve used every tool available to do that,” he replied. “And it’s not true to say that I have not reached out to the Pakistani, the British Pakistani…”

“But not with targeted, tailored leaflets,” I objected.

“With leaflets outside mosques and with mosque visits and public meetings and with all kinds of events,” he went on. “The reality in a campaign of this sort is that time is short – we’ve only got 23 days left. I’ve got to use every second of every minute to talk to as many people as I possibly can, and that’s everyone. There’s no no-go area in London, there are no boroughs I’m not doing meetings in, there are no communities I’m not trying [to talk to].”

I told him I accepted that, for it is true that he has visited mosques and, on the very same day that he delivered his “giving cover” speech, he tweeted New Year good wishes to Bengali Londoners. There is no doubt that he is seeking support from those London communities and many others. But why were those three categories of people - Indian, Sikh and Tamil Londoners - given such dedicated attention, including letters signed by the prime minister?

“But that’s not true,” he began. “I have sought to…the means don’t exist to scientifically reach every single person in London.”



I asked him to say more about that lack of scientific means, wondering of there was indeed a practical, technical explanation. He didn’t say more, though, and neither did his campaign team later. Instead, Goldsmith continued: “My job is to use every tool available to reach out to as many people in London as possible and that’s what I’ve done.”

His next question came from another reporter. It was blunt: “Are you a racist?”

Goldsmith said the question was “absurd.” To me it does not even arise - the Tory is certainly not “a racist.” Did he, though, understand why some might see his “ethnic targeting” as “creating or intensifying ethnic divisions”?

“I can understand why Sadiq Khan’s team might want people to think that,” Goldsmith replied. “But the reality is the opposite.”

His case is that Khan is trying to silence debate about his record by accusing anyone subjecting it to critical scrutiny of Islamophobia. He’s now said a number of times that he does not consider Khan himself to hold extreme views, but that his past attendance at events where people who do hold such views have spoken give grounds for questioning his judgment. “To pretend otherwise,” he told the journalist huddle, “is, I think, deeply irresponsible.”

Goldsmith said he didn’t know about other Tories who have attended or endorsed the very same events that Khan is being attacked for being part of (in one case Mayor Johnson himself sent effusive good wishes) and denied that it was hard to equate the leaflets about jewellery with his insistence that his campaign has been positive. He said its “overwhelming thrust” has been about his action plan, and that this had been “a thread that’s run through every single piece of literature that’s gone out.” He added that “every piece of literature that comes out of my campaign is literature that I’ve read and seen. Of course.”

What do these exchanges reveal? Perhaps the biggest thing is simply that Goldsmith, like all exhausted politicians in the last stages of campaign marathons, is rigidly and automatically “on message.” He’s not alone in that: Khan’s stonewalling has, for months, been in the Hadrian class. I will, though, offer a couple of tentative thoughts.

One is that Goldsmith may truly not grasp why the use of the word “radical” about Khan in an early campaign leaflet and the content of those made-to-measure leaflets to Indians, Sikhs and Tamils could be thought deeply mischievous. The other is that he is genuinely angered by the Khan campaign’s charge that he, passively guided by strategists from Lynton Crosby’s company, is wilfully stirring anxiety and hostility over the prospect of a Muslim mayor.

Part of the problem here is that Crosby’s reputation with the left has preceded him. The man credited with honing the “dog whistle” coded message technique and other forms of negative campaigning, has been accused before of using insinuation around emotive “wedge” issues such as race and security to mobilise voters against rival candidates.

Well aware of this, Khan and his team, savvy operators too, decided from the off to call out Goldsmith over anything done by him or in his name that they believed constituted an example of this. Back in December Goldsmith’s team said it would investigate a claim that a doorstep activist had disparaged Khan as “the Muslim,” but I’ve had no reply to my request to be told what the investigation’s outcome was. In the Khan camp, this will be taken as further confirmation of their view of what Goldsmith’s is up to. A circle of suspicion, allegation and angry denial has turned vicious.

The issue has soured the mayoral contest as a whole in the dazzlingly multi-cultural capital. It is depressing to have to write about it. The effect on London’s voters remains to be seen. Despite the embarrassments Goldsmith suffered last week, his advisers and media supporters may well continue to believe that they can gain at Khan’s expense if the “extremist links” and “judgment” themes are kept alive.

Goldsmith himself stoutly insists that he has a duty to protect London from a Khan mayoralty, which he says would be a calamity. When asked if the Conservatives had, in truth, given up on him in London, he answered a different question: “The Conservatives are completely united in London. I couldn’t ask for more support from Conservatives, the MPs, voluntary groups and supporters.” Yet he insisted he is passionate in his pursuit of City Hall: “You don’t get involved in a campaign of this sort without wanting to win.”

Polls have been wrong before. Negative tactics are nearly always wrong, but they have a history of getting results. There may be London Tories who think Goldsmith’s bid has already failed. Perhaps they are right. But such a conclusion could yet prove premature.