Sadiq Khan

VOTERS should head to the polling stations on any election day with excited enthusiasm about who or what they are casting a vote for.

But after a dire campaign in London over the past few months you can’t blame anybody who felt only a sense of democratic duty brought them to the ballot box this week. Those slavishly loyal to Sadiq Khan – the sort of droid who would burst out in applause even if he said he wanted Manchester City to win the league – never want to hear the following, but listen up and you’ll have heard people talk about who they definitely didn’t want to vote for with far greater energy than those they did.

This election was familiarly debased with the sort of name-calling which thrives on social media, and alarmist button-pressing on trigger issues, earning votes through fear rather than policy.

Tories privately wondered how they had ended up with Susan Hall. By the time you read this maybe she has shocked the capital and begun four years as our new mayor, but if she has it would only be because Sadiq Khan often appears less popular than the Labour Party as a whole.

This idea has been batted away as simply being the result of racism, or stoked by those obsessed with their cars.

But you don’t need to be infected with either of those afflictions to wonder what the London mayor will do now, if he hasn’t done it already after eight years in charge.

It’s hard to dazzle after so long in the role and a two-term rule might be considered healthy for the emergence of fresh takes and the exploration of unseen possibilities.

Under the radar of the Punch and Judy mayoral race, however, goes the never talked about need to reform the drab and toothless London Assembly. This is a chamber which is almost wilfully anonymous to the extent most Londoners simply do not know who their local representative is. If assembly members overcome that hurdle they then face an awkward assignment in explaining how they have meaning­fully made any difference to anybody’s life during the last four years in their fairly well-paid seats.

It was quite silly that they were allowed to queue jump the eight-hour line to see the Queen’s coffin last year, as if London would have sunk into the Thames had they been absent from their desks for too long.

There will have been worthy inquiries by assembly members into many issues and experts take the time to give them evidence at committees. Some of them are sparkier than others in their questions to the mayor, but naturally there is little animation from the Labour seats.

That would mean crossing Sadiq Khan, who like his predecessors Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, enjoys a presidential experience where hand-picked, unelected deputies and czars hold more influence on policy than anybody you cast a ballot for this week. We hear much more about Will Norman or Amy Lame, for example, than people who won an election.

The most alert members find an escape hatch. The ambitious Kemi Badenoch, for example, served only about two years before becoming an MP in Saffron Walden.

Sadly, in this messy system, any mayor – whatever their political stripes – is not pushed into the dynamism which could make having a mayoralty in our city seriously impactful.

Those who have fought for suffrage would have been affronted if you did not use your vote to help decide who should be the mayor this week.

Perhaps they may have been less angry about skipping a vote for the assembly members, and deciding not to sponsor a chamber in such glaring need of reform.