Dispatches on Ken Livingstone - the aftermath

Martin Bright's blog on the New Statesman web site is taking a pounding from upset socialists.

Labourhome readers are just as upset by the cheek of questioning Ken.

The Guardian has a leader article including "some of what the film says is true. The mayor has surrounded himself with very well-paid advisers, many friends from before his election, who in some cases appear reckless, allegedly spending large amounts of money without proper scrutiny and using their position to dominate others." and "his unelected advisors have too much power and some use it badly. Mr Livingstone's practice of picking a few issues - climate change, transport and the Olympics - have left other areas unsupervised. He has protected his director for equalities, Lee Jasper, despite sustained and continuing questions about his suitability for office. Under the mayor's oversight, the London Development Agency has squandered money. His dalliance with Hugo Chávez and his willingness to apologise for slavery, in which he had no part, but not for calling a Jewish reporter a Nazi are telling. So was his failure to understand why his defence of the Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi caused such offence."



Meanwhile The Standard have yet another story about Ken Livingstone and sleaze. This time claiming that "A Standard investigation reveals that the 2008 website Re-elect Ken was registered in the name of Mark Watts, a senior publicly-paid adviser to the Mayor.

The site gives its registered address as the offices of a design consultancy given more than £260,000 worth of contract work by the Greater London Authority since 2003...The Standard investigation found that three website addresses - londonforken.org, londonforken.org.uk and londonforken.co.uk, all of which link to the same site - were registered to Mr Watts, the Mayor's adviser on climate change.

Mr Watts's mobile phone number is given on the registration and he is shown as the "registrant" - the official owner of the site.

The registrations were made on Friday 13 July 2007 at 11.37am, when Mr Watts, who is paid around £100,000 a year, was working at City Hall. Any involvement with it by Mr Watts during working hours would be a breach of the GLA's strict rules against the use of publicly-funded officials for election campaigning. During his stint as deputy director of the 2004 campaign, Mr Watts resigned from the City Hall payroll. Mr Watts refused to speak directly to the Standard."



All very interesting...