Council with a history of sleaze

A former Labour council leader who became the first elected mayor of Tower Hamlets was kicked out of office for ballot rigging.

Lutfur Rahman and his cronies used ‘corrupt and illegal practices’ to create an army of ‘ghost voters’, forged postal votes, bribed Muslim voters with money diverted from groups such as the Alzheimer’s Society and wrongly branded his rival a ‘racist’.

They also told Muslims they would go to hell unless they backed him in the 2010 vote. Rahman was thrown out of the Labour Party but established himself as an independent, registering his own party named Tower Hamlets First and going on to win the mayoral contest in 2010 and 2014. But in 2015 a judge stripped him of the title and said he had ‘driven a coach and horses’ through the law during his re-election campaign.

The judge said Rahman had ‘proved himself almost pathologically incapable of giving a straight answer’.