Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Tonight the Standard is all over the Mayor again, this time highlighting next Monday’s Channel 4 Dispatches programme which is going to raise a number of problems for the Mayor. It will be indispensable viewing so make a date for 8pm on Monday night. I know the researchers have been trawling far and wide to get the full Livingstone story – I met them in September.

One piece in the Standard tonight relates how Redmond O’Neill, Neale Coleman and John Ross, three of the Mayor’s senior staff and old buddies from Socialist Action broke the rules to run the Mayor’s 2004 election campaign whilst in politically restricted jobs. According to the The TaxPayers’ Alliance Town Hall Rich List all three were paid £117,882K last year (the same as Lee Jasper and Joy Johnson). How equal!

Sure enough Andrew Gilligan was straight onto the City Hall grants scandal today in the Standard. Three MPs, one from each main party, has asked the District Auditor to review the cases that Gilligan has raised. Quite right too.

On Friday both the Mayor and the LDA issued 1,200 word press releases claiming that the LDA’s own internal investigation had cleared them all of “corruption” charges. Both press releases are, of course a load of twaddle and no doubt Andrew Gilligan will be laying into them in the Evening Standard in the week to come. The press releases are designed to make you read the positive headline and first paragraph and then glaze over without exploring the details. Boris Johnson’s team were pretty quick to cut through the crap and pull out the main point which was that four or five projects are being investigated by the Police, three of which were referred to them by the LDA as a result of Andrew Gilligan’s investigations.

It is much more fruitful to read Andrew Travers’, the LDA’s Group Director Resources and Risk, actual report to the board. It makes it pretty clear that Andrew Gilligan’s columns in the Evening Standard have been hitting home. It is particularly telling that the conclusions of this document (Section 8.) use nothing like the form of words used on the Mayor’s front page.

The Evening Standard’s Andrew Gilligan continues his one man campaign against the egregious Lee Jasper tonight. His latest revelation is that Jasper, who is meant to be a City Hall employee pulling in a £117K salary has, somewhat laughably, been running his own “talent” agency called ibubble25. It seems Jasper’s main talent is promoting himself and lining his own pockets. His latest project, peddled by ibubble25, is a talk show hosted by Jasper on BEN TV, a tiny station you weren’t have heard of which has received cash from … yes, you guessed it the GLA. See full story here.

I guess this is as near as we will get to the Mayor admitting that his young person’s concessions may not be wonderful for everyone, certainly not grown ups trying to get around on London’s buses.

The Zip card seems to be a half-hearted attempt to restore some discipline to young persons’ bus travel.

It is almost certainly also an attempt to counter some of Boris Johnson’s more resonant lines about respect and civility and making it more pleasant to live in London.

Ross Lydall of the Standard seems to agree.

If the Mayor had any sense, or any guts for that matter, he would turn all of the Zip cards off at 9pm. For my money if a young person wants to be out after 9pm they should be using their own cash – not mine.