Fourteen months ago, the election of Sadiq Khan, who is forty-six, to be the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital was seen as just another stride in London’s giant, unstopping swagger. The rise of a local boy, the son of a Pakistani bus driver, to govern the seat of a former empire was proof of the same unsentimental indifference toward race and religion, good money and bad, and a past that is gone that has enabled London to more or less detach itself from the reality of its circumstances—the capital of a once great nation in decline—and become a universe unto itself.

Seven weeks after Khan took office, however, Britain unexpectedly voted to leave the European Union. The decision revealed a chasm in the country and the way it perceives itself. London was on the losing side. By coincidence, a series of calamities followed. Between March and June of this year, London suffered three terrorist attacks and a fire in a high-rise that killed more than eighty people. Sirens filled the streets. The city felt ill-starred and unsure. There was a fractious general election, in which Theresa May’s Conservative Party barely hung on to power, and the slow, grimly momentous process of leaving the E.U. began. I spent time with Khan during London’s recent disastrous months and I asked him if he had thought that running the city would be this hard. “Nothing prepares you for this,” he said. “I didn’t campaign to be the mayor of London and go to funerals.”

On a gray, gusty morning in late June, Khan was in the main chamber of City Hall to take questions from the London Assembly, a quasi-legislative body that oversees his activities. Although London has had a form of self-government since the twelfth century, Khan is only its third directly elected mayor. (The first, Ken Livingstone, took office in 2000.) The newness of the role and the somewhat limited nature of its power is embodied in the form of City Hall, a modest, pebble-like structure on the South Bank of the Thames which both of Khan’s predecessors compared to a testicle. From the chamber, a large window looks across the river to the macho-finance architecture of the Square Mile and, a little to the east, the Tower of London, which has stood for martial authority and the city’s protection since the time of the Norman invasion.

Khan was a few minutes early for the session. A small man with a beaky nose and silver hair scraped left to right, he wandered to the back of the room and the public gallery there, which was about two-thirds full, to greet parties of students and schoolchildren who had come to watch. “You O.K.?” he asked each group. “Where you from?”

On camera and in interviews, Khan is an overprepared A student, cramming neat answers into the available space. In ordinary conversation, he punctures any formality with self-deprecation and a voice that is fast and London-inflected. He drops the “g” from words like “talking” and “walking.” Before he became mayor, Khan used to perform standup comedy, and laughs followed his progress through the gallery. “Are you a troublemaker?” Khan called out to a large woman in African dress who was taking his photograph. She doubled over in embarrassment. When Khan sat down at a desk, his feet did not quite touch the ground.

The first forty minutes of the meeting were taken up by statements from Khan, recounting London’s latest emergencies. The previous Wednesday, June 14th, Khan had been awoken by his staff at 2 A.M. Grenfell Tower, a public-housing block in West London that was home to some three hundred and fifty people, was on fire. Footage shot by firefighters, and later broadcast on the BBC, caught their astonishment as they confronted the scene: “Mate, how the fuck are we going to do that?” The fire rose from the tower’s fourth floor to the twenty-fourth in around fifteen minutes, apparently fed by the building’s cheap, flammable cladding. The temperature inside reached almost two thousand degrees. The final death toll in Grenfell Tower is still not known, but it was the worst fire in London since the Second World War.

The magnitude of the disaster was compounded by its political aspect. When I arrived, at around 10 A.M., the building protruded from the neighborhood like a dead tooth. Flames lapped out of the seventeenth floor. Families in their bedclothes sheltered under trees. “They want us out of the borough,” a girl in her late teens said. “It’s money, money, money.” Kensington and Chelsea, the local authority that owned the tower, is among the richest in the United Kingdom, and within hours the accident, which killed refugees, disabled people, and children, became an indictment of London’s stark inequality and of the austerity policies of May’s unpopular government.

Khan, who is a member of the Labour Party, spent part of each of the following five days at Grenfell Tower, meeting firefighters and police, whom he oversees; attending church services; and talking in the street with residents who were distraught and frustrated by the local government’s response. (The leaders of the Kensington and Chelsea council resigned.) The weather was hot, and Khan worked twenty-hour days. Because it was Ramadan, he was also abstaining from food and water until sunset, at around 9:15 P.M.

Five nights after the fire, Khan was woken again, this time shortly after midnight, because someone had driven a rental van into a group of Muslim worshippers returning from late-night prayers in Finsbury Park, in North London. One man was killed, and eleven others were injured. The attack was part of a surge in anti-Muslim hate crime after London’s two previous terrorist incidents, which had involved Islamic extremists driving vehicles into crowds. While Khan delivered his statements to the assembly, ten schoolgirls in blue summer dresses and straw hats filed into the gallery. It was painful to watch them listen to the details of each new horror, each fresh social failing in their city. Khan did his best to counter the mood. “I know Londoners will remain strong and united,” he said. “I know we will come through this.” But he sounded exhausted.

A great deal of Khan’s power as a politician comes from the hopeful possibilities that he symbolizes. There were times this summer in London when the fact of his election seemed like one of the city’s only graces. “The almost one good thing that people consistently can feel is that they don’t have to believe the worst inevitability on all sides,” Harriet Harman, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, told me. “Because actually London elected a Muslim mayor, elected Sadiq.” Opponents and skeptics, however, view Khan as an opportunist, vicious at times, who thinks only in terms of his own advancement. “Yeah, it’s a great symbol,” Andrew Boff, a senior Conservative member of the London Assembly, told me, referring to Khan’s election. “I don’t get the sense there is a profound vision.” Khan’s political career before he became mayor was marked as much by shrewd positioning as by meaningful achievement. “He doesn’t like the difficult questions,” Boff said. “It’s as if he is thinking, If I answer this question, it might damage me in the future.”

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Even people sympathetic to Khan often admit that they underestimated him in the past, and have been forced to adjust their view since he became mayor. “Metaphorically—definitely not literally—he seemed to grow several inches,” a former senior Labour official told me. Khan and his advisers, meanwhile, enjoy his image as an underdog, a realist, and a competitor. (Khan is one of seven brothers, all of whom learned to box.) “His politics come from his experience,” a former aide said. “None of it is in that sense ideological or idealistic.” Khan’s visibility as mayor of London, and his sure-footedness, have led to his being frequently talked about as a future Labour leader, and Britain’s first Muslim Prime Minister. “He is absolutely stardust now,” Harman said. “He knows that, and he respects that.”