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He took control of the rebuilding project of [[Alexandra Palace]], which had been partially destroyed in a fire. The project had £15,000,000 in cash, but lack of financial control saw this surplus turn into deficit and interest payments eventually took the debt to a total of £80,000,000.{{Citation needed|date=September 2011}}
As council leader during the 1985 [[Broadwater Farm riot]], in which policeman [[Death of Keith Blakelock|PC Keith Blakelock]] was murdered, Grant was brought to national attention when he was widely quoted as saying: "What the police got was a bloody good hiding." Grant claimed his words had been taken out of context, but offered an apology to the family of PC Blakelock. A fuller version of the quotation is: "The youths around here believe the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday and what they got was a bloody good hiding."<ref name="Weekly Worker">{{cite news |url=http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/331/changing-man?searched=bernie+grant&advsearch=allwords&highlight=ajaxSearch_highlight+ajaxSearch_highlight1+ajaxSearch_highlight2 |first=Dean|last= Woodward |title=Changing man: Bernie Grant February 17 1944 – April 8 2000 |work=[[Weekly Worker]] |publisher=[[Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee)|Communist Party of Great Britain (PCC)]] |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://archive.
The controversy, however, did not prevent him from being elected as MP for Tottenham at the [[1987 United Kingdom general election|1987 general election]], one of the UK's first [[Black British people|Black British]] MPs, all of them members of the [[Labour Party Black Sections]] movement, being elected at the same time as [[Diane Abbott]] and [[Paul Boateng]], as well as Britain's first [[British Asian]] MP since the 1920s, [[Keith Vaz]]. Grant later stood for the [[deputy Leader of the Labour Party (UK)|deputy leadership of the Labour Party]], but was unsuccessful.
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