Bagehot's notebook

THE official declaration has not yet taken place, but already it is arithmetically certain that Sadiq Khan has won London’s election and will be the capital’s new mayor. With over 90% of ballots counted he leads Zac Goldsmith, his Tory rival, by 44% to 35%. The decisiveness of his victory is easy enough to understand. London is a Labour city; in Britain, as across northern Europe, the centre-left vote has held up better in metropolitan areas than elsewhere. And Mr Khan had the local machine, the story (the son of a bus driver from Pakistan, he grew up in a council flat) and the right pro-enterprise, pro-infrastructure, cosmopolitan pitch for his electorate.

A guest-post from one of my predecessors as Bagehot:

WHEN, two years ago, the bones of Richard III, a crippled Medieval monarch, were dug up from a car park in Leicester on the basis of the sketchiest of archaeological hunches, the locals rejoiced. Not many knew much about the 15th-century tyrant and alleged nepoticide; but Leicester, a rather non-descript, former hosiery hub, in the middle of England, was not known for much either, and some fame was welcome.

ANOTHER day, another figure in the Labour Party facing allegations of anti-Semitism. Today it is Ken Livingstone, who went on the BBC to comment on Jeremy Corbyn’s belated and reluctant decision yesterday to suspend Naz Shah, an MP who had suggested that Israel’s population be relocated to America. The former mayor of London, who is close to his party’s hard-left leader and was leading its review into foreign policy, claimed that this was not anti-Semitic and that Ms Shah is a victim of the “well-organised Israel lobby”. He then unburdened himself of the observation that Hitler was “supporting Zionism” before he “went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.”

JEREMY CORBYN opened his overdue anti-Brexit speech this morning by observing that the venue, Senate House in London, was the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984. The comment—playfully questioning the sincerity of the arguments to follow—will have unsettled the pro-Europeans who dominate his Labour Party. For Mr Corbyn seems only recently to have converted to the case for British EU membership.

As a paid-up member of his party’s old left-Eurosceptic wing who campaigned for Britain to leave the club at the last referendum, in 1975, he has a series of stringent criticisms of Brussels to his name.

MY COLUMN this week looks at the Remain campaign in Britain's EU referendum. The main organisation in it is Britain Stronger in Europe, an umbrella organisation encompassing pro-Europeans from across the political spectrum and different fields of public life. It is led by Will Straw, with whom I recently spent a day on the trail. During our visit I sat down with Mr Straw to ask him about how the campaign is going, what Remain's strategy should be and what will decide whether Britain votes for or against Brexit on June 23rd.

Bagehot: Britain is divided on Europe. Some people are extremely keen on it, some are extremely hostile.

DAVID CAMERON completed his EU renegotiation just days ago and yet, as some of us predicted, already it is receding into the distance. As the campaign gets underway, the focus has moved off the prime minister’s respectable but inevitably modest achievements in Brussels and onto the big arguments. What would a Brexit mean for the country, and for Europe? Would it leave it stronger or weaker? What sort of role should Britain seek to play in the world over the coming decades?

DAVID CAMERON returned home from Brussels last night to mixed reviews. The likes of Nigel Farage were always going to pan his “renegotiation” of Britain’s EU membership (and did not disappoint). Less predictable was the gloomy verdict from typically friendlier sources. “Thin Gruel” ran the leader headline in the Times, while the Spectator deemed the EU to have “called the prime minister’s bluff”.