London’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, has gone from a public housing estate in the British capital to running the city, a remarkable rise for the Pakistani immigrant bus driver’s son.
Born in London in 1970 to parents who had recently arrived from Pakistan, Khan was the fifth child out of seven brothers and one sister.
He grew up in public housing in Tooting, an ethnically mixed residential area in south London, and slept in a bunkbed until he was 24.
His modest background plays well in a city that is proud of its diversity and loves a self-made success story.
Khan regularly recalls how his father drove one of London’s famous red buses, and his mother was a seamstress. One of his brothers is a motor mechanic.
He is a handy boxer, having learnt the sport to defend himself in the streets against those who hurled racist abuse at him, and two of his brothers are boxing coaches. He also ran the London Marathon in 2014.
At school, he wanted to study science and become a dentist, but a teacher spotted his gift for verbal sparring and directed him toward law.
He gained a law degree from the University of North London and started out as a trainee lawyer in 1994 at the Christian Fisher legal firm, where he was eventually made a partner.
He specialized in human rights, and spent three years chairing the civil liberties campaign group Liberty.
He represented Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam movement, and Babar Ahmad, a mosque acquaintance who was jailed in the US after admitting providing support to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Khan joined the Labour Party aged 15 when then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher was in her pomp.
He became a local councilor for Tooting in the Conservative-dominated Wandsworth local borough in 1994, and then went on to become its member of parliament in 2005.
He still lives in the area with his wife and two daughters.
Former prime minister Gordon Brown made him the communities minister in 2008 and he later served as transport minister, becoming the first Muslim minister to attend cabinet meetings.
In parliament, he voted for gay marriage — which earned him death threats.
Khan is London’s third mayor after Labour’s Ken Livingstone (2000-2008) and Conservative Boris Johnson (2008-2016).
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