Cameron and Khan: Three weeks is an extremely long time in politics
Emilio Casalicchio
| PoliticsHome
It feels like only yesterday that David Cameron was being denounced from the Labour benches as a “racist” for trying to link Sadiq Khan to Islamic extremists.
The Tory campaign to hold City Hall was resoundingly rejected as negative - decisively so by the polls that saw the Labour candidate romp to victory with the largest personal mandate of any politician in UK history.
Cameron questioned Khan's judgement for allegedly sharing platforms with those who support (ahem) IS, while Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Fallon all sought to take chunks out of the mayoral hopeful on the same grounds.
Today all that had been forgotten. The Prime Minister beamed as he shared a pro-EU platform with the new London mayor, praised him as a “proud Muslim” and a “proud Brit” and even guffawed at his (slightly tired) bus driver gag.
It was the speed of Cameron's about-face – a world away from the viscous tone that tried to block Khan from office mere weeks ago – that made the event so surreal.
The episode shows how the cut and thrust of a campaign can warp the world around it to push irrational arguments, and that when it comes to crunch time, some politicians might say practically anything to get their way.
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