Yet when the mayoral result was at last announced in the early hours of Saturday morning, this barrage of bad news appeared to have had limited effects. Last November, the Economist dubbed him “ the badshah of Tower Hamlets” and said he’d brought “South Asian politics to the East End.” He was a hate figure for a social media mob. He was pilloried as a personification of rotten borough malfeasance, of cultural corrosion brought about by immigration, of the baleful influence of identity politics and of shamelessly “playing the race card” to deflect such attacks. The cumulative effect had conferred on Rahman a higher profile and a more profound significance than any other local government politician in Britain. He’d been under fire for his desire to sell a Henry Moore sculpture bequeathed to the borough to make up for budget cuts, for his closeness to the local Bengali media, for his relationship with a prominent Brick Lane “curry king”, for the community groups he’d chosen to fund, and for his use of a chauffeur-driven, council-funded Mercedes to get around in. His many enemies had called him everything from an inept empty vessel to a frontman for Islamic extremists. Indeed, he’d been besieged by allegations, denunciations and hostile probes since even before he’d become mayor. A Muslim who was born in Bangladesh and moved to the East End as a young child, Rahman had not been getting a good press. Running under the banner of Tower Hamlets First, Rahman had been defending the mayoral post he’d won in October 2010, the first time it had been contested in the borough. The central figure in the furore was a well-dressed, bespectacled family lawyer in his forties called Lutfur Rahman. Coverage focused on claims about intimidation at polling stations, rowdiness at the venue where the count took place and other forms of misconduct, including vote-fixing and even tampering with ballot boxes. But it wasn’t only the slow pace of the proceedings that attracted unflattering attention. Votes cast on Thursday, May 22 were still being counted and recounted and recounted again the following Tuesday night. The borough was late declaring its results – in some cases, very late indeed. Sadly, in Tower Hamlets it did not go well. Its people, along with those of three other London boroughs, also voted for an executive mayor, a sort of local authority version of Boris Johnson, to be in charge of the Town Hall.
Like the rest of the capital, the borough of Tower Hamlets held elections for local councillors and the European parliament. Last spring, in a rare break from its love affair with Nigel Farage, Britain’s political media turned its gaze to London’s East End.
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