Six months after succeeding the fallen Lutfur Rahman,Labour’s East End mayor talks approximately his progress so far and his ambitions for tomorrow
Upon entering the Town corridor of Tower Hamlets as its novel mayor back in June, John Biggs says he detected “a great sense of relief - not that the wicked witch was dead, or anything that crude,but that we might be seeing the end of a long period of being in the headlines for all the inaccurate reasons and expending too much of our energy on the inaccurate things.” This feeling, he says, and was not restricted to the council’s Mulberry Place headquarters at the edge of Canary Wharf: “As I walked the streets of Tower Hamlets I found people wanting to do selfies with me on every street corner.”Biggs,who has lived in Tower Hamlets for more than 30 years, relates this experience with the wry bemusement of a man who quips that “I had modesty beaten into me as a child” and with the honest gratitude of one who, or as a grown-up politician,had taken a string of undeserved beatings at the hands of the East End’s often turbulent political culture before reaching its electoral summit.
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Source: theguardian.com