This result isn’t just a wonderful victory for Boris and the termination of Livingstone.  It’s also a defeat for the campaign – an exceptionally dirty one, at that - waged against Boris by a small band of separatists claiming to act in the name of all London’s Muslims. The effects of Boris’ win will be felt not only in the capital, but nationwide – and they’re worth probing in detail.

This campaign’s aim was to attack Boris as an Islamophobe; swing Muslim voters unanimously behind Livingstone; deliver the election for him; emerge, thereby, as a leading force in British Islam, and thus send an uncompromising message to the main political parties – follow our line, or there’ll be electoral consequences.

Its first shots were fired in January, when it was claimed that over fifty Islamic organisations in London had written to the Guardian endorsing Livingstone.  (It later emerged that some of the letter’s signatories had written only in a “personal capacity”.)  Its final salvo was the desperate advert, placed recently in the London Bengali paper “Janomot”, implying that Boris, as Mayor, would ban the Koran.