Lutfur Rahman: He promised a progressive, unifying politics but delivered the opposite (photo: LNP/Rex Shutterstock)

Mr Richard Mawrey QC, the election commissioner who kicked Britain’s first directly-elected Asian mayor out of office for winning his re-election by cheating, predicted he would be denounced as a racist and Islamophobe.

That is perhaps the only aspect of his judgment that we can be certain Lutfur Rahman, now ex-mayor of the London borough of Tower Hamlets, will not be appealing.

Soon after the judgment, some 2,000 of Rahman’s Bangladeshi supporters and their godless allies on the Left renewed their anti-racist vows with righteous fervour at the Waterlily conference centre in Whitechapel which promotes itself as an “ideal” venue for “Islamic (segregated) wedding parties”.

The court found Rahman personally guilty of making false statements about his main opponent in the 2014 mayoral election, Labour’s John Biggs; bribery; undue spiritual influence; and also guilty through his agents of personation (votes cast by someone other than the registered voter); postal voting fraud; illegal voting after falsely registering as an elector; and illegally paying canvassers. The judge said Rahman had proved himself to be “almost pathologically incapable of giving a straight answer” and was “caught out in what were quite blatant lies”.

The judge also found that Rahman’s “hatchet man” — his bull-necked pitbull election agent Councillor Alibor Choudhury — was “personally guilty of corrupt and illegal practices”. Both men have now been banned from office and a new election for mayor will be held this month.

Addressing Rahman’s supporters at the Waterlily, his mentor Ken Livingstone dismissed the judgment as “a political rant by a judge” who had failed to make “any serious assessment” of the allegations brought by four petitioners. Really? Some 85 witnesses, including Rahman and Choudhury, were questioned over seven weeks in the longest election trial since 1945.

Salivating with self-satisfaction at his own oratory, George Galloway said a “vicious Islamophobic racist coup” had been mounted against the mayor. The now ex-MP for Bradford West thinks Rahman’s fate is to do with appeasing the “the ravenous dogs of UKIP and the Tory Right”.

Full-on blasts from a familiar bunch of highly-politicised characters with minds as narrow as the Socialist Workers’ Party followed. “We are going to take that judgment and shove it straight back down your throat,” said Glyn Robbins, the failed socialist parliamentary candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow.

“In Tower Hamlets we ethnic minorities are in fact the majority and Islam is the main religion, so black people and Muslims should be running this borough,” said Aaron Kiely, Black Student Officer for the National Union of Students. In other words, anyone who doesn’t see the promotion of an ethnic group as their primary goal is by definition a racist. The BNP and English Defence League would, of course, agree. “This is a fight against Islamophobia and racism,” said Kiely, which “every single progressive . . . should support.” A regressive vista of bearded male faces, vastly outnumbering a tiny, separate enclave of women, stretched out before him.

To Unite’s Chief of Staff, Andrew Murray, the judgment was a “work of unabashed megalomania by a preening puppet of the ruling elite”. Then, his voice rising to an hysterical crescendo: “Yes! You [the judge] ARE an Islamophobe! Yes! You ARE a racist!”