London mayor: The Sadiq Khan story By Esther Webber BBC News, London Labour's Sadiq Khan has been elected as London's new mayor - but who is the man who will be in charge of the UK's capital city for the next four years? Age: 45 Marital status: Married with two daughters Political party: Labour Time as MP: Has represented Tooting in south London since 2005 Previous jobs: Human rights solicitor, chair of Liberty Sadiq Khan's life to date has been characterised by beating the odds - which is what he has just done to become mayor of London. When Labour politicians put themselves forward to run for mayor last year, Mr Khan was far from being the favourite. The bookies' money was on Baroness Jowell, a veteran of the Tony Blair years who had helped bring the Olympics to London. But if there is a pattern in Mr Khan's career, it's one of coming from behind. The new mayor did not have a privileged start in life. He was one of eight children born to Pakistani immigrants, a bus driver and a seamstress, on a south London housing estate. From an early age, he showed a firm resolve to defy the odds in order to win success for himself and the causes important to him. That resolve has won him the biggest personal mandate in the UK, a job with wide- ranging powers over London and with enormous emotional significance for him. Some question whether he has the experience or record of good judgement necessary for the role. He insists he is there to represent all Londoners and to tackle inequality in the capital, and now he has the chance to prove it. Council estate beginnings "Son of a bus driver" became one of the most hackneyed phrases in Mr Khan's time on the stump - so overused in his leaflets and speeches that he was eventually forced to make fun of his own campaign, joking he had given the Daily Mirror an "exclusive" on his background. But his parents' story holds real significance for him. Amanullah and Sehrun Khan emigrated from Pakistan to London shortly before Sadiq was born, in 1970. He was the fifth of their eight children - seven sons and a daughter. He has often said that his early impressions of the world of work shaped his belief in the trade union movement. His father, a bus driver for 25 years, "was in a union and got decent pay and conditions" whereas his mum, a stay-at-home seamstress, "wasn't, and didn't". He lived with his parents and siblings in a cramped three-bedroomed house on the Henry Prince Estate in Earlsfield, south-west London, sharing a bunkbed with one of his brothers until he left home in his 20s. He attended the local comprehensive, Ernest Bevin College, which he describes as "a tough school - it wasn't always a bed of roses". The nickname "Bevin boys" was at that time in that part of south London a byword for bad behaviour. It was at school that he first began to gravitate towards politics, joining the Labour Party aged 15. He credits the school's head, Naz Bokhari, who happened to be the first Muslim headteacher at a UK secondary school, with making him realise "skin colour or background wasn't a barrier to making something with your life". Mr Khan was raised a Muslim and has never shied away from acknowledging the importance of his faith. In his maiden speech as an MP he spoke about his father teaching him Mohammed's sayings, or hadiths - in particular the principle that "if one sees something wrong, one has the duty to try to change it". He was an able student who loved football, boxing and cricket - he even had a trial for Surrey County Cricket Club as a teenager. He has since spoken about the racist abuse he and his brothers faced at Wimbledon and Chelsea football matches, saying he felt "safer" watching at home and became a Liverpool fan simply "because they were playing such great football at the time". He studied maths and science at A-level with the idea of becoming a dentist. He was switched on to law by a teacher who told him "you're always arguing" - and by the TV programme LA Law, starring Jimmy Smits as Victor Sifuentes, a charismatic partner in a California law firm. "LA law was about lawyers in LA who do great cases, act for the underdog, drove nice cars, look great and I wanted to be Sifuentes," Mr Khan told Business Insider recently. Image copyright Sadiq Khan Image caption He abandoned the idea of training as a dentist in favour of law after a teacher told him "you're always arguing" Courtroom crusader He studied law at the University of North London and put his degree to good use straight away, becoming a trainee solicitor in 1994 at Christian Fisher under the human rights lawyer Louise Christian. The same year he met and married his wife Saadiya Ahmed, a fellow solicitor and coincidentally the daughter of a bus driver - with whom he went on to have two daughters, Anisah and Ammarah. He also began his 12-year stint as a councillor for Tooting, encouraged by Guyanan-born local activist Bert Luthers. Just three years later, aged 27, he was made an equity partner and the firm was renamed Christian Khan. During this time he worked on a number of high-profile cases: he won compensation for Kenneth Hsu, a hairdresser wrongly arrested and assaulted by the police; teachers and lawyers who had experienced racial discrimination; Leroy Logan, a senior black police officer accused of fraud; corrupt former Met Police commander Ali Dizaei; and helped overturn an exclusion order (later upheld on appeal) on US political activist Louis Farrakhan. The irony of a man who represented people in cases against the Met going on to become the force's chief scrutineer has not been lost on his opponents. Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith, speaking at an event alongside Home Secretary Theresa May, recently characterised Mr Khan's legal career as "coaching people in suing our police". He left his law firm somewhat abruptly in 2004, afterwards telling the Law Gazette: "If you're in government, you're a legislator and you have the opportunity to make laws that can improve things for millions of people." In 2005, Mr Khan fought and retained the marginal seat of Tooting for Labour, one of five new ethnic minority MPs elected that year. Contemporaries on either side of the political divide remember being impressed by a "fiercely bright" and "persuasive" individual who was "impossible not to listen to". He combines that sharpness with what is often called his "cheeky chappy" demeanour. He is fond of calling people "mate" and has even done so on the floor of the Commons. 'Voice of reason' Two months after he entered the Commons, he was thrust into the limelight by the 7 July bombings. When Parliament met to discuss the attacks, he told MPs: "Today Londoners and the rest of the UK have even more reason to be proud of Londoners - proud of the way heroic Londoners of all faiths, races and backgrounds, victims, survivors and passers-by, acted on Thursday; proud of the way ordinary courageous Londoners carried on with their business and stopped the criminals disrupting our life." In a 2010 Guardian interview, he recalled thinking: "I couldn't hide - and I don't mean this in an arrogant way, but there were so few articulate voices of reason from the British Muslim community. "There were angry men with beards, but nobody saying, 'Actually, I'm very comfortable being a Brit, being a Muslim, being a Londoner'." The intervention marked him out as one to watch, but his path to promotion was not altogether smooth. Image caption He felt the attention of the national media over an incident in which police bugged a conversation with his constituent Babar Ahmad Mr Khan wore his civil liberties credentials on his sleeve, challenging the government over ID cards and joining 48 other Labour rebels to vote against prime minister Tony Blair's plan to allow the detention of terror suspects without charge for up to 90 days. He later claimed party chiefs had penalised him by preventing him from visiting Pakistan in the wake of an earthquake there and did not want to give him an office with a sofa. But the rebellion was not altogether to his disadvantage. Tony Blair was on his way out, and Mr Khan was able to position himself on the ascendant "soft left" of the Labour party alongside Ed Balls and Gordon Brown. He would go on to claim during the mayoral campaign that as transport minister he had "pushed" Crossrail through Parliament, but the Mayorwatch website has shown Mr Khan only took on responsibility for the project after the relevant bill had become law. At the 2010 election, Mr Khan's own majority was squeezed to an uncomfortably small margin of just 2,524 votes and Labour was out of government for the first time in 13 years. In the chaotic months of Labour soul-searching that followed, he again showed a canny ability to ally himself with what was seemingly a lost cause and turn it into success. True to his Brownite colours, he was chosen as Ed Miliband's campaign manager and helped steer the less-favoured Miliband brother towards an unexpected leadership election victory. He told the New Statesman afterwards that the night before the result, he told Miliband to "prepare for defeat".