Meanwhile, Mayor Rahman was able to live a life of considerable comfort. Ferried around in a tax-payer-funded chauffeur-driven car, he tried to arrange a life cocooned from criticism. He financially supported local Bengali media, which reciprocated by providing him with uncritical coverage, and he refused to answer questions from anyone potentially hostile. While missing no trick in attacking his political opponents, colleagues claimed that requests to question him would breach his human rights. All the while, vast quantities of council grants were diverted to organizations that sought to serve only the local Muslim community, from whom the Mayor gained his support. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a considerable number of the groups that benefited from this largesse were connected to the Mayor.

It was not until a BBC reporter, John Ware, did a half-hour program looking into the financial irregularities in Tower Hamlets that Community Secretary Eric Pickles sent in auditors to go over the books. This action – like every other attempt to investigate corrupt activities in Tower Hamlets – was dismissed by a coterie of Rahman's defenders in familiar terms. When investigators entered the council to go over the books, the trade union "Unison" picketed the event with a banner stating, "Eric Pickles – Hands off Tower Hamlets. No to racism and Islamophobia." A diminishing but vocal group of supporters kept this up right to the end, not least the former MP, George Galloway, and the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.

Finally, after a ten-week hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice last month, Lutfur Rahman's run of corruption and sectarianism came to an end. Four local residents, requesting that last year's Mayoral election in the borough should be recognised to have been corrupt and be declared void, brought a case to the election court. After hearing the evidence, the election commissioner, Judge Richard Mawrey, delivered a devastating verdict.

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In all of this, one thing particularly stands out. It is the same glaring question that emerged in the wake of the investigations into the Northern rape-gangs: where were all the authorities? Why had every institution of government failed?