former London mayor who was kicked out of office for electoral fraud was re-elected today – as the Tories suffered a bloodbath in the capital.
Lutfur Rahman was banned from running for public office for five years in 2015 after being convicted of polling offences when he first ran in Tower Hamlets.
But having served his ban he is running again in the east London borough. He was ahead of the current Labour mayor, John Biggs, by 12,000 votes after the first round of counting, putting him just short of the 50% mark needed to win.
Mr Rahman, of Aspire, eventually won 40,804 votes, with Mr Biggs on 33,487.
A victory for the Bangladesh-born politician in an area with a large Bengali community would be highly controversial.
The former Labour councillor, became the first directly elected mayor of Tower Hamlets when he stood as an independent in 2010. He was re-elected in 2014, but became the first such mayor to be removed when the result was declared null and void.
In 2015 an election court found Mr Rahman personally guilty, or guilty by his agents, of charges including making false statements about a candidate, of administering council grants in a way that constituted electoral bribery and of spiritual intimidation of voters.
Mr Rahman tonight hailed the size of his majority, which he claimed had increased from his previous terms in office.
‘A huge vote came out yesterday, a bigger mandate than I had in 2014 or in 2010,’ he said. ‘A large number of people came and trusted me and Aspire and our activists to deliver for them going forward.’
Mr Rahman suggested that one of his first acts would be to scrap low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs), which limit traffic in residential areas.
Mr Rahman said: ‘Our roads have been closed, blocked up. It’s contributing to more CO2 in the borough when the idea was to reduce it. We’re going to look at our roads, we’re going to consult and reopen our roads.’
One of Rahman’s rivals, Andrew Wood, an independent councillor for Canary Wharf, agreed that Rahman had managed to unite his Bengali supporters and white working class voters unhappy at he LTNs.
‘Elections are won or lost, depending on how the British Bengali community decide to allocate their vote,’ Mr Wood said.
‘If Lutfur wins, it’s because of a combination of that and the white working class votes, because of the LTN issue in particular.’
It came as a string of Labour victories in London turned the capital’s political map even more red – with the traditional Tory strongholds of Westminster and Wandsworth among Sir Keir Starmer’s conquests.
Labour have also snapped up Barnet, which given its large Jewish population may be seen as a sign the party has turned the corner on the anti-Semitism rows which dogged Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
Perhaps the biggest blow to Boris Johnson’s Tories will be the loss of Wandsworth. It turned blue in 1978, a year before Margaret Thatcher’s election and was reputedly her favourite council, noted for its low taxes.
Meanwhile, Labour are in control of Westminster for the first time since its creation in 1964. A triumphalist Sadiq Khan said that ‘history has been made’ as the mayor celebrated the victory in the early hours of Friday morning.
Two other London councils – Croydon and Tower Hamlets – are not due to declare until the early hours of Saturday morning and Saturday evening respectively.
But there was a sliver of good news for the Tories as they took Harrow, in north west London, from Labour late on Friday afternoon. The Conservatives also held the safe borough of Bromley.
But elsewhere, Labour lost Hull to Sir Ed Davey’s resurgent Liberal Democrats. It was a similar story for the Green Party who chipped away at Conservative and Labour seats in England.
The under-fire Prime Minister is now facing a backlash from local Tory leaders as his party lost major London authorities to Labour and suffered setbacks across England to Sir Keir’s party.
Conservatives have blamed the Partygate drama for the party’s electoral losses overnight, with John Mallinson, leader of Carlisle City Council, urging backbenchers to write to Sir Graham Brady to trigger a vote of no-confidence against Mr Johnson after Labour took control of Cumberland.
Mid-term elections are always difficult for a governing party, although as many of the English seats were last contested in 2018 during Theresa May’s chaotic administration, opportunities for opposition parties to make further gains may be limited.
Cabinet minister Brandon Lewis insisted Mr Johnson remained the right person to lead the party, amid speculation that a bad set of election results – coupled with any further revelations about No 10 lockdown-busting parties – could see more Tory MPs submitting letters of no confidence.
The Northern Ireland Secretary told Sky News: ‘I absolutely think we can win the next election, and I do think Boris Johnson is the right person to lead us into that.’