London is going through one of its periodic fits of smugness right now, for which the only real parallel is the US after the election of Barack Obama first time round. I refer, obviously, to the election of Sadiq Khan as the first Muslim mayor of a major European capital. ‘Doesn’t it do us proud?’ one of my friends observed. A nice young colleague told us she had wept – wept – twice in the course of the weekend. ‘He took a bus to City Hall,’ she marvelled. ‘It was a victory over bigotry,’ another friend observed, the bigotry obviously being Zac Goldsmith’s campaign, for raising the whole Islamic extremism thing. I don’t know how many times I heard people observe highmindedly, ‘London’s not like that,’ or ‘They misjudged London’. And that’s certainly true.
As I say, for a comparison with this mood of being on the high moral ground, think Democrat voters after the election of Obama: they felt that his election reflected rather well on them too and basked in the knowledge that they had proved, incontrovertibly, that they were on the right side of history.
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