In the campaign for the next mayor of one of the most cosmopolitan and diverse cities in the world, the race was expected to be very close between the Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith and the Labour candidate, Sadiq Khan.

Zac Goldsmith was highly regarded among many Muslims. However, the approach of his campaign has been seriously troubling for many of the capital’s Muslim communities. The last two months has seen a turn to the negative, with a series of ill-founded and unjustifiable accusations of links to extremism to slur the character of Khan. And only this week, the Prime Minister of our nation, ramped up the rhetoric by accusing the Labour candidate of sharing a platform with a supporter of IS [Daesh], unfortunately ignoring the fact that this individual was a Tory party supporter with significant interaction with many Conservative MPs, including Goldsmith himself.

His campaign has understandably been accused of being “racist”, “Islamophobic”, “hypocritical”, “appalling”, “disgusting”, “disgraceful” and “demeaning to the office of Prime Ministers” by senior journalists and politicians. The journalist Peter Oborne, who has voted Conservative all his life, called it “the nastiest political campaign since the homophobic hatred of Bermondsey 1983”. What message does this send to British Muslims aspiring to join public life? The ramifications should not be underestimated, and as Oborne says: “If Goldsmith’s campaign succeeds it tells every single British Muslim that there is no role for them anywhere in the British democratic system.”

With Goldsmith’s campaign office saying he was busy with his mayoral campaign to attend The Muslim News Awards for Excellence, and choosing to be the only candidate not to sign Operation Black Vote’s Code of Conduct that pledges not to promote prejudice, we hope that Goldsmith will change approach as polling seems to suggest that Londoners are not falling for this tactic.

Elections should be fought based on policies, not dog-whistle politics and negative character attacks aimed at stoking fear into constituents. I hope that he does not face the ultimate fate as a politician, as George Eaton of the New Statesman, says: “losing with dishonour”.