Yes, Zac lost. So isn’t it time to stop bashing him?

It’s easy to see the allure of ongoing Zac bashing. Can there be a pleasure more satisfying for all of us, stuck in our daily work-home, bread-butter routine, than watching a public humiliation of a wealthy tree-hugger, son of a billionaire with ‘a face carved out of caramel by angels’. Let’s kick him while he’s down, and again, and again. What? His brother Ben described him as ‘unstoppable’? Does it mean Zac still wants a career? Let’s kick him so that he never forgets, and never gets back into the public life.

Leading the gang of detractors is a wealthy Guardian journalist: Owen Jones. It remains unclear what exactly drives Owen to be so vicious towards Zac. Could it be Owen’s socialist genes? But Zac is remarkably the opposite of how people of his background normally are… Which invites a new criticism: he is so arrogant that he refuses to be as obnoxious as posh people are meant to be.

In the eyes of this gang, Zac is wrong even when he is right. The honourable deed of keeping his word to resign in the event of Heathrow expansion was seen as as ‘an ego trip’, ‘a tantrum’ and ‘a vanity by-election’. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Only a lonely voice of Toby Young was heard in defence of Zac Goldsmith.

The right has never forgiven him for losing the mayoral election. For the Conservative party, Zac made a perfect scapegoat for everything that went wrong. The party will regret making this mistake of not defending him post-election when Sadiq Khan stands against Theresa May in 2025, and uses the same methods then.

Zac Goldsmith’s mayoral campaign was brutally fought, but racist it was not. You will not be able to provide a single quote of his alleged racism, because there was none. I tried to draw attention to the son of a bus driver’s own dog-whistling, but my objections were drowned out in the sea of attacks on Zac.

The main issues were a shocking incompetence of his team, plus Zac’s own inability to sell himself well. He was just not showbiz enough. His inability to hold his beer and the lack of knowledge of Bollywood films was judged as more important for the job of a mayor than Sadiq Khan making a priori false promises that he wouldn’t be able to keep as mayor, and that, as we now know, he didn’t keep.

Zac’s regret about his campaign was mainly about its ‘portrayal’, but can you blame him for that? He’s been scolded for saying that his opponent was ‘sharing platforms with extremists’… The Guardian found this particularly offensive – from a Tory.

On the 13th August, just before the start of the mayoral campaign, the Guardian ran an article with the headline ‘Why is no one asking about Jeremy Corbyn’s worrying connections?’ The sub-heading of that article was: ‘Corbyn may not have an antisemitic bone in his body, but he does share platforms with people who do.’ Now, read that article and be honest with yourselves, does the message sound familiar?

Another piece of ‘evidence’ for Zac’s prosecution is his article in the Mail on Sunday just before the election. That article sealed the victory for Khan. However, the 7/7 bus photograph accompanying the article was a choice of the Mail on Sunday. Zac made it clear he did not pick the photo. Whoever uses that photograph as a confirmation of Zac being a racist is, in fact, doing exactly what they are accusing him of: using a tragedy to score points.

Zac’s six years in Parliament weren’t wasted. In addition to other environmental work, one of his biggest achievements was leading oceans conservation campaign in Parliament, described as ‘the single biggest conservation measure taken by any Government ever.’ His campaign for the right of genuine recall might have been doomed because he was asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. But kudos to Zac for trying to make MPs accountable. He lived by this code – and last week, he died by it. Would it really hurt so much to acknowledge the fact?