Asif Hussain, part of London mayor Sadiq Khan’s campaign team for the 2021 and 2024 elections, was a guest lecturer on the Political Arguments In Action course.
LONDON — As far as election campaign hit rates go, you can’t beat a record of fought two, won two.
Asif Hussain was part of Sadiq Khan’s campaign team for the London mayor’s triumph at the polls in 2021 and again for his record-breaking feat in 2024.
Since leaving his job in politics to deliver communications for a fintech startup, Hussain has been imparting wisdom from his time on the campaign trail and working in City Hall to Northeastern University students in London.
“I wanted to give a bit of an insight into practically how we run political campaigns,” says Hussain, who worked in Khan’s Labour Party and government operation for more than four years.
“How you go about actually running a campaign is quite different from the theory that you read in books. I felt it was important to give a bit of an ‘under the bonnet’ view of it.”
Hussain’s mission was to show students in the Political Arguments In Action course that political communication is far more than major speeches or set pieces — it is also in the everyday contact campaigners have with voters.
“I want to impart the fact that it’s not just the great speech, like you might see in ‘The West Wing,’ where you have political communication,” he continues.
“Political communication is across the board — it is on the leaflets that you write and that goes through doors in certain areas, or it can be localized, targeted letters — all those sorts of things, they all count as political communication.
“So the concept of the speech or the op-ed (an opinion-based article) as the only means that politicians use to communicate, I don’t think anyone in politics thinks that’s true anymore, and I wanted to let the students know that.”
Victoria Mincheva, a politics and international relations major, has aspirations of getting involved in frontline politics, having already interned for GERB, the ruling center-right party in her native Bulgaria. She says Hussain’s talks were able to bring to life a topic that cannot be taught using only theory.
“It was interesting,” says Mincheva, “because I actually was an intern during a political campaign, so a lot of the things that he was saying were exactly how it goes in real life.
“These are real things — it is not just hypothetical by-the-book politics. On this course, these are real experiences of real people that someone is delivering to you. That was the most important aspect of the whole course — that it actually took you outside of the classroom.”
Hussain gave two guest lectures to the class, led by Gergana Dimova, associate professor in politics and sociology at Northeastern in London. He detailed his career journey, starting with how he left the world of corporate tax law to get involved with community activism before joining Khan’s team.
He was head of operations and political planning in 2021 — an election that was delayed for 12 months due to the coronavirus pandemic — and took up the role of deputy director in charge of policy, external relations and opposition research ahead of the 2024 contest. In between the elections, Hussain also worked on the mayor’s COVID-recovery plan and tracked progress on pledges made in the election manifesto.
“How you go about actually running a campaign is quite different from the theory that you read in books.”Asif Hussain, a former aide to London mayor Sadiq Khan
“How you go about actually running a campaign is quite different from the theory that you read in books.”
The role in 2021 meant Hussain was part of putting together the plan for where Khan, who is currently serving a third term as mayor, would be each day on the campaign to ensure policy announcements had maximum impact.
“One of the things that we talked about with the students is that you don’t just announce a policy,” adds Hussain. “You want to go somewhere that’s relevant to the policy to make it interesting for journalists to write about it and where they’ll get a good photo as well. It makes the story a nice package.
“So if we’re announcing something about early years, you want to go to a nursery. We did that and had Sadiq playing with the 4-year-olds in the nursery. Afterwards, he goes to speak to a couple of journalists about the policy, which is how you build what we call a ‘visit.’”
Hussain, an elected councilor in north-west London, explains how he told the students that the “optics” behind an announcement or election event are important because, no matter how good the policies are, none of that matters if voters aren’t won over by the candidate.
“There are certain things in the campaign that you as a team are proud of because you did it — you made it happen,” he continues. “Other things just happen — they are like gifts from your opponent.
“And that’s why I told the students that the first rule of campaigning is don’t make any mistakes. Don’t give your opponent any gifts, especially if you’re in the lead with the polls, which we (Labour) were last year.
“Even though politics is serious and policies are things that will change people’s lives, the tactics are really important as well. Because if you don’t win, you don’t get to introduce them.”
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Tendayi Lamothe, who hopes to work in politics after he graduates, says Hussain provided “very helpful insight” about the industry.
“He opened up about the variety of roles during a campaign, whether it’s marketing, data analysis or simply going door to door,” says the politics and international relations major. “There is no way to know or effectively portray that within a textbook. It’s something that you need to see because politics on a campaigning level is simply down to passion.”
Dimova also invited Citizens UK, a grassroots activism alliance, to give lectures and workshops as part of the course. A third guest lecturer, May Robson, lifted the veil on the process behind producing podcasts and journalism for the BBC and her focus on shining a spotlight on marginalized voices.
Afsana Salik, a senior community organizer with Citizens UK, explained to the class how the organization successfully campaigned for the “living wage” — a calculation of the hourly rate needed to meet workers’ basic needs — to be taken up by employers.
The government-set U.K. minimum wage, as of April 2025, is £12.21 ($16.33) per hour for those 21 and older. But the Living Wage Foundation states that cost-of-living demands mean a “living wage” should be £12.60 ($16.85) or £13.85 ($18.52) in London, where costs are higher. More than 16,000 employers are now signed up to pay the “living wage,” Salik says.
The idea behind Citizens UK and Northeastern collaborating, Salik explains, is about encouraging students to see how they can change their community and country for the better. The partnership led to a number of students securing internships with the organization.
“Northeastern has students that are coming from all different parts of the world, with unique experiences, knowledge and understanding of politics, and that can truly contribute in shaping local politics,” says Salik. “They also get to learn (in the course) what local politics looks like, while bringing their own experience from different places in the world.”
Lamothe, from Edinburgh, Scotland, is one of those to have successfully applied for a position with Citizens UK since taking the course, which runs during the autumn semester. He explains that he acts as a liaison between Citizens UK, Northeastern’s London campus, the Student Union and different student societies.
“The idea,” says Lamothe, “is to bridge some of their work and to understand the impact Northeastern has on the local community. It is something Citizens UK and Afsana really stressed during the course, about how they work with multiple different organizations within the U.K. and within local areas to make them realize the impact they have on the local community and then to use that impact.”
Hilla Bruchstein, an Israeli politics and international relations student who has her eye on a career in diplomacy, says she enjoyed hearing from Citizens UK about the process it has for deciding on which campaigns to focus on.
“It was really impactful to hear this firsthand and to really engage with current events rather than just read about them,” she says. “It was definitely interesting to hear what it would feel like if you were to work in this industry and how we can make a change.”
Dimova says what she hopes students take away from the Political Arguments In Action course is that the “power of the spoken word can move mountains in the political world.”
“While the course introduces the students to the science of political manipulation, and how to spotlight it and resist it,” Dimova adds, “it also shines a light on how political language can be mobilized for good causes.”