London's new mayor Labour party leader Sadiq Khan. (AFP Photo)
Sadiq Khan, the new Mayor of the capital of England, London is an example of a modern fairytale.
Born in London in 1970 to parents who had recently arrived from Pakistan, he grew up in public housing with his six brothers and sister in Tooting, an ethnically diverse residential area in the south of the city.
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 London's famous red buses, his mother was a seamstress and one of his brothers is a motor mechanic.
After his victory in the elections, he hailed it as the triumph of "hope over fear and unity over division."
His win was the most dramatic result in local and regional elections that produced few big changes but underscored Britain's political divisions ahead of a referendum on whether to remain in the European Union.
At school, he wanted to study science and become a dentist. But one of his teachers spotted his gift for verbal sparring and directed him towards law.
He became a lawyer specialising in human rights, and spent three years at the human rights campaign group Liberty.
He is also handy at actual sparring, having learnt how to box to defend himself in the streets against those who hurled racist abuse at him.
Aged 15, he joined the Labour Party and became a councillor in the mainly-Conservative Wandsworth local borough in 1994, a post he held until 2006.
In 2005 he gave up his legal career on becoming the member of parliament for Tooting, where he still lives with his lawyer wife Saadiya and their two daughters.
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.
While Conservatives try to establish links between him and Islamic extremists, he points out that he voted for gay marriage -- which earned him death threats -- and he has always denounced radicalism as a cancer.
His fearlessness exhibits clearly in his victory speech, "Fear does not make us safer - it only makes us weaker," he said. "And the politics of fear is simply not welcome in our city."