Tower Hamlets in East London may look, sound and feel like a typical inner-city neighbourhood anywhere in Britain. It isn’t.

Politically, the two-party system here has been effectively replaced, not by one party but by one man, the all-powerful directly elected mayor – Lutfur Rahman – who enjoys an almost messianic following.

‘These people worship Lutfur like a god,’ one resident told me on the campaign trail ahead of today’s local elections in which Rahman is up for re-election for his fourth term as executive mayor of the borough.

Rahman has been dubbed Mini-Trump by the local news website and, like the US president, has the authority to make ‘executive decisions’ without needing the prior approval of the council.

In any case, his Aspire party (as in ‘aspiring for stronger communities and a fairer future’), which he helped found, also enjoys an overall majority here.

Rahman has turned Tower Hamlets – an area with one of the largest Muslim populations in Britain (nearly 40 per cent) spanning the historic East End and the glimmering skyscrapers of Canary Wharf – into his personal fiefdom where sectarianism, anti-Semitism and corruption are rife.

One Aspire candidate has been suspended for anti-Semitic social media posts and is being investigated by police – but could still be elected this week.

Facebook posts by Abul Monsur included Holocaust denial and apparent approval of Hitler.

Monsur said he was ‘deeply sorry and ashamed of them’ while Aspire said it was not aware of the public posts when it chose him.

Yet Monsur will still appear on the ballot paper as an Aspire candidate as the deadline for withdrawals has passed.

A ministerial taskforce dispatched by the local government secretary is currently ensconced in the town hall investigating evidence of potential financial malfeasance and concerns over ‘intimidatory behaviour taking place’ on polling day.

One woman I spoke to who criticised the council was too fearful to be identified.

This is not normal politics but it is becoming so – and not just in Tower Hamlets but other parts of the country, too.

Pamphlets and posters, bearing a picture of Rahman, always smartly dressed in a collar and tie, make a string of Trumpian claims, both in English and Bengali, about his record. ‘110 Promises Delivered’, screams one.

There have been some successes. The borough became the first in the country to offer free school meals for all primary and secondary school pupils.

But the line between spin and lies in his manifesto, particularly over housing, is blurred.

This is the man, after all, who was found guilty of corrupt and illegal electoral practices himself in 2015, a rap sheet which included fraud, bribery and a raft of other dirty tricks, shortly after winning the mayoralty for the second time.

‘The town hall was being run by gangsters,’ was the coruscating verdict of the judge at a special hearing of the Electoral Commission, sitting at the High Court, who banned him from public office for five years, the maximum penalty.

One of the first things he did on his spectacular return in 2022 was to install a £50,000 table for meetings in his office in the refurbished town hall in Whitechapel Road – where there is a ‘welcome’ sign in 11 languages inside the entrance – and is just along from the Blind Beggar, the infamous boozer patronised by a different kind of gangster from a different era.

Rahman’s purchase of that table with taxpayers’ cash was regarded by many in the borough, which has the highest rate of child poverty in the UK, as a ‘crime’ in itself.

My attempts to speak to him this week, both over the phone with the Press Office, and in person at the reception desk of the town hall, proved fruitless.

Rahman rarely gives interviews to the mainstream media – and certainly not to the Daily Mail – because he doesn’t need to.

Bonds of kinship and traditional allegiances have been exploited, both legally and illegally.

Lutfur Rahman was born in Bangladesh, like the majority of Muslims in Tower Hamlets, in a city called Sylhet. All the council candidates he fielded in the last election were from Bangladesh.

In the past at least, campaign tactics involved bribing fellow Muslims with money diverted from other groups to deliver bloc votes, as well as spiritual bullying, warning Muslim voters it was ‘haram’ – forbidden or unlawful – not to vote for him.

Might the same be happening again? The ministerial envoys sent into Tower Hamlets, who have now been given additional powers, are reportedly investigating grants being funnelled to Bangladeshi community groups. Also under investigation are ‘challenging behaviours’ inside the council chamber ‘extending to political hostility and, on occasion, intimidation outside the chamber’ which is being ‘normalised by both politicians and officers,’ the envoys revealed in their latest report.

One line was particularly damning. ‘We [the envoys] have heard the comment, “What do you expect? This is Tower Hamlets.”’

Eight candidates are standing against Rahman for executive mayor, the usual suspects plus two independents and Hugo Pierre of the Trade Unionist And Socialist Coalition, who has pledged to forego the £82,000-plus mayoral salary if he wins and donate the money to ‘local campaigns and working class struggles’.

However, Rahman is predicted to strengthen his grip on power with an increased majority forecast for Aspire across the borough at the expense of Labour. ‘Landslide’, is the word whispered to me by a local Tory.

The big question: will Labour’s Red Rose wilt and shrivel into third place, as it did in the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election, or even come behind Aspire, the Greens and the independents?

Two of the candidates vying to be among the 45 ward councillors in the borough are worth highlighting, for different reasons.

One is Stephanie Golder (Green, St Dunstan’s) who was one of three Just Stop Oil activists who threw orange powder across a prize-winning display garden at the Chelsea Flower show in 2023.

What was the environmental message behind the protest exactly? It was a question I put in an email to the party. No response.

The word on the ground, I’m reliably informed, is that the Greens (policies include legalising drugs, leaving Nato, making pornography more accessible) are ‘doing well in more affluent areas’ of Tower Hamlets.

As the youngest borough in the country, where the average age is 30 and more than 20 per cent of the population are under 20, this comes as little surprise.

The smart young woman walking briskly along the pavement in the heart of St Dunstan’s ward fits the age profile but says: ‘I’m not voting at all. What’s the point?’

But many people of her age – she is 30 – are expected to vote Green.

The other candidate worth singling out also has green credentials. Ted Maxwell (independent, Bethnal Green West), is the nephew of Ghislaine, currently languishing in jail for her role in the despicable activities of paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and grandson of disgraced media tycoon Robert.

Maxwell, 39, and a father of four, is in the vanguard of the Save Our Safer Streets campaign to retain Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs). They were installed by the previous Labour regime and are blamed for creating ‘road blocks and displacing traffic to boundary roads’.

Rahman has tried to remove them but the Court Of Appeal ultimately ruled against the council, saying the bid to axe them was unlawful because of a failure to ‘reconsult’. The bottom line is that it’s a battle which is now heading for the Supreme Court and a bill in excess of £250,000 for the taxpayer. 

‘LTNs can be done badly,’ admits Maxwell, 39, a project manager for the development of London’s Royal Docks, ‘but the ones here have been done really well and are worth fighting for’, adding that his family name has not been an issue on the doorstep.

‘All people are interested in is what skills I can bring to bear as a councillor,’ he said. ‘I really want to be inside the council, not on the outside, to make it better.’

Back in Whitechapel Road, the bustling, beating heart of Tower Hamlets – ‘an enclave of Babel in central London,’ to quote one commentator – the phone number of a young Bangladeshi woman with a revealing story to tell is given to me by a contact.

We speak on the phone in a cafe where an Islamic prayer is playing over the speakers.

The woman is 42. She is a single mother from a family of ten in Spitalfields. Her late father worked in a garment factory all his life after emigrating to this corner of the capital many years ago.

At the last election she voted Aspire but no longer because, she says, when she challenged an Aspire candidate who had tried to unfairly smear a rival at a public meeting, he ‘shouted at me and verbally abused me’, and the abuse continued online.

‘Rahman and Aspire promotes female safety but as a Bangladeshi woman I don’t feel safe if I speak out,’ she said.

Her elder brother works for Rahman and has not taken her side. ‘It pains my mother to see disunity in the family,’ she said.

The woman was happy to be identified initially but I later received a text message from her which said: ‘Can I remain anonymous. I am worried the community is going to attack me. These people worship Lutfur like a god.’

She said she would be voting for Tower Hamlets Independents, the party formed by three former Aspire councillors and a previous Aspire party secretary.

‘These are individuals who have the guts to understand what was going on was wrong and it can’t continue like this,’ said their mayoral candidate Zami Ali, who worked as a barrister before entering politics and whose core pledge is ‘offer a different kind of leadership’.

The new party has made a good start, attracting hundreds of people to a public meeting in a banqueting suite behind the East London Mosque.

Near Whitechapel market, I ask three Bangladeshi men standing together on the pavement who they would vote for.

They said they were undecided. I got the same response from a woman in a headscarf: ‘Undecided’; and a bespectacled woman in a burqa: ‘Undecided.’

The man behind the counter of the corner shop was unequivocal, though: ‘Lutfur’ he replies. ‘Because he is the best for us.’

One of the biggest issues in Tower Hamlets, as it is everywhere, is housing.

‘I am delighted to announce that 6,441 affordable homes are in delivery by this May,’ Rahman declared, making it a key plank of his campaign strategy.

His claim was mocked on the ‘front page’ of a pamphlet called The Housing Times, produced by journalist Terry McGrenera, who is standing against Rahman as an independent in the mayoral election, with an image of Rahman and a speech bubble declaring: ‘I’m a traitor.’

The true figure? Only 2,020 affordable homes were completed between April 2022 and December 2025 in Tower Hamlets, according to official figures on the Greater London Authority website.

‘Lutfur Rahman is not delivering the affordable housing he claims,’ said Andrew Wood, an accountant who has analysed the data and who is running as an independent candidate in the Blackwall & Cubitt Town ward.

‘At most he has delivered around half of the affordable homes he promised in 2022 and is now fiddling the figures by including homes on paper that have not yet been built and, given his track record, may never be built.’

An Aspire spokesperson insisted that the mayor ‘has far exceeded his target of 4,000 homes, with over 6,400 homes delivered or in delivery by May 2026’.

Many of the new houses are larger family homes which Peter Golds, the only Conservative councillor in Tower Hamlets, believes favours the Bangladeshi population because they traditionally have larger families ‘when what is needed are smaller properties’.

A waiter at the cafe where I spoke to the woman who was verbally abused by an Aspire candidate tells me he is voting Labour, an endangered species here.

One of the main reasons is council tax. ‘He [Rahman] told us he would be freezing council tax but it’s gone up,’ he said. ‘The cost of living – it’s very hard.’

In fact, Aspire party councillors have approved a 5 per cent council tax rise for the third year running, breaking their original manifesto pledge to freeze rates.

It would be a shock of seismic proportions, however, if Lutfur Rahman was not sitting at the head of his £50,000 table again at the town hall tomorrow morning.

Additional reporting: Tim Stewart