And yet, regardless of the illiberal views he has held or condoned and the vicious company he has kept, London seems bent on electing Khan as its first Muslim Mayor. The symbolism of his election will be understood differently around the world; but for me, as a Londoner who is proud to live here, there is a sense of impending doom. London has a claim to be the greatest city on earth, because we have given the world the cosmopolitan Western values by which London has always lived. But as the ICM survey shows, a substantial proportion of the Muslim community rejects those values. 

Increasingly, British Islam will now redefine London, rather than London redefining British Islam. I shall be astonished if Mayor Khan is strong enough to resist Salafist pressure to transform London into a city as segregated as Paris, Brussels — or Birmingham. One reason why Paris and Brussels have already succumbed to such terrible attacks is that the sheer weight of numbers makes it impossible for the authorities to know what is going on inside Muslim communities. After decades of denial, French demographers now agree that about 25 per cent of school-age children are Muslim. So France faces a cultural and political revolution within a generation. Paris, including its suburbs, is a microcosm of this new France. London, which is home to more than a million Muslims, is heading in the same direction.

Not all European cities are going quietly. In some, liberal Muslims are resisting the relentless radicalisation by the Salafists. The Moroccan-born mayor of Rotterdam, where up to a quarter of the population is Muslim, had a blunt message for Islamists who reject freedom. “If you don’t like freedom, pack your bags and leave,” Ahmed Aboutaleb told them last year after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. If Dutch Muslims didn’t like newspapers or magazines that satirised Islam, he added, they could “just fuck off”.

It would be nice to think that Mayor Khan might send a similarly clear signal to Muslims who reject the spirit of liberty that has always characterised London. But wishful thinking is what has landed us in our present predicament. Unless we — and that includes liberal Muslim Londoners — can face up to and fight what is happening in Islam, here and abroad, I fear for the future of London. Above all I fear that I, and millions like me, may have no place in that future.