Why was this man helping Labour candidate scrape to victory?

A knock at the door of a semi-detached house on a street in the East ward of the city of Peterborough.

It's the afternoon of April 22, eight weeks before the June 6 by-election in which Labour will squeak to victory ahead of Nigel Farage's nascent Brexit Party.

Alone at home is a 54-year-old Asian woman with severe health problems.

On her doorstep she allegedly finds Dr Shabina Qayyum, Labour candidate for the ward in the local council elections, along with two male party officials.

What happened next is in dispute. But the resulting allegations were serious enough for the council to call in the police.

Criminal claim was followed by counter-claim; the only certainty is that politics in Peterborough is a dirty business — and has been for some years now.

Labour's victory by 683 votes, in one of Britain's most keenly-fought by-elections of recent years, has been overshadowed by accusations of electoral fraud and voter harassment — centred on the Asian community which is particularly active in Peterborough politics.

These allegations have hardly been silenced by the presence in Labour Party-related social media photographs of one Tariq Mahmood.

Mahmood, a local businessman who runs a large letting agency, was pictured at the count for the local elections with his hand resting, in apparent benediction, on the head of the victorious Dr Qayyum.

He was also photographed in the company of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his candidate Lisa Forbes as they pressed the flesh on local streets during campaigning for the by-election. 

They, too, were pictured with Dr Qayyum. (There is no suggestion that Mahmood was on the doorstep with Dr Qayyum on April 22).

Why was this an issue? Because 11 years ago Mahmood was jailed for his role in one of the worst electoral frauds to be perpetrated in the UK this century.

For those who treasure the sanctity of the democratic process, his continued presence at counts or on the hustings in 2019 is like seeing a wolf in a field of sheep.

It is not as if he is obscure or peripheral. He is a 'kingpin' with many local powerful connections. His brother-in-law is the chairman of the Ghousia mosque where Mr Corbyn spoke during a recent visit, much to the ire of local Muslims who complained that such places should be above politics.

Some within the Asian community call Mahmood 'Wormy', a nickname that is as uncomplimentary as it sounds.

What is the local Labour Party thinking? They have claimed that Mahmood had no role in their by-election campaign. Yet this is not quite the impression we found among his local neighbourhoods.

His continued presence in local politics is perhaps a symptom of a wider problem. When we visited the city this week we found a climate of unease, if not fear.

Opposition councillors claimed they had been targeted with vandalism and violence. Some were afraid to speak openly. There were allegations — denied by those said to be responsible — of votes being bought.

Many of the claims involve the practice of giving people a postal vote on demand, an innovation introduced in the Representation of the People Act 2000. No special reason has to be given for applying for a postal vote and it was not until 2007 that a signature and date of birth were required as proof of identification.

The opportunity that postal votes afford for election fraud has been shown in Peterborough before — by both Labour and Tory activists. And at the heart of the Labour Party plot in 2004 was Tariq 'Wormy' Mahmood.

That year's local elections in the city would become notorious for their corruption. Word of what had happened in city centre wards soon reached the authorities.

Voters claimed they had gone to the polls to be told that their vote had already been cast. The city council went to Cambridgeshire Police. In June 2004, Operation Hooper was launched by its major investigations team.

Detectives focused on the Central, Park and Ravensthorpe wards. By the time the prosecutions were completed in autumn 2008, six men had been jailed, including two former mayors.

At the time of the elections, Mahmood was the secretary of a local Labour Party branch. 

He and his co-conspirators — a failed candidate named Maqbool Hussain and Mohammed Choudhary, Peterborough's first Asian mayor — were arrested and charged with forgery and conspiracy to defraud. They denied the allegations. 

'They got hold of postal and proxy votes which belonged to voters in the Central ward,' prosecuting QC Anthony Leonard would later tell King's Lynn Crown Court.

'They arranged for postal ballot papers to be sent not to the voter but to addresses with which each defendant was connected.'

Such vote-rigging was fairly simple if one knew the bureaucracy. A would-be fraudster might consult the marked registers that were available after every election. These showed who had actually voted. 

The fraudster could note eligible residents who had not used their votes — and so might not in the future — and apply for postal votes in their names. These documents did not need to be sent to the voters' home addresses.

Once received at an address convenient to the fraudster, the postal ballot statements would be marked, before being sent to the unsuspecting Returning Officers. And so democracy was subverted.

All three men were jailed, with Mahmood receiving the longest sentence of 15 months. He was ordered to pay £15,000 in costs.

Later that year, three Tories, including former mayor Raja Akhtar, were jailed for between two and five months over a similar postal ballot fraud.

They had all brought shame on the city. But shame is not something with which Mahmood has been much, if at all, afflicted. 

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