I was delighted to see that Andrew Gilligan won the Journalist of the Year award last night. The man is often controversial, and he is certainly no Conservative, but he is relentless and addicted to journalistic investigation.
Characteristically, in the middle of the event to receive his own award, he still took my call to discuss the latest on Ken Livingstone's disgraceful efforts to avoid telling the people of London who is funding his campaign. Other winners might have rested on their laurels - but Andrew came up with this splash in today's Standard, the day after the ceremony.
I have worked with Andrew since around 2000. Often, I will get a few snippets of information, and he fills in the remaining 95% of the story. When Leader of the Opposition on Hammersmith & Fulham Council, I had a handful of unusual letters from "residents" in support of a major planning application to build 1,800 new homes. I italicise in support, because any councillor reading this will know that residents almost never write in support of any planning application, least of all one for a major residential development. To me, this was a strange course of events. A curiosity, nothing more. In the hands of Andrew Gilligan, who went door to door in Fulham looking for these "residents", it opened up a major scandal of how a planning consultant had engaged in sharp practices across the UK, one of which was to forge letters from fake residents in an attempt to sway local Councils.
For the last six months or so, he has been working tirelessly to expose Ken Livingstone. I believe that Andrew Gilligan's efforts to discover the truth on Livingstone's secret funding from property developers, his diversion of grants from the London Development Agency to cronies of Lee Jasper and Livingstone's ongoing deceptions over the funding arrangements of his campaign have played a big part in the plunge in Livingstone's poll ratings on trust. This hasn't been a smear campaign, but an ongoing effort to discover the truth, like a British Watergate 35 years later, and this has been an effort that Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein would themselves have been proud of.
One final thought - where has the GLA been the last 8 years? The body that has been elected to scrutinise the Mayor has hardly laid a finger on him, and certainly not on any of these ethics issues. Did nobody notice that Livingstone hasn't declared a donation for seven years? The GLA even has Board members at the LDA, yet nobody seems to have twigged that corruption there is endemic? I make this criticism of it as an institution, not the individual members, but with a lot of GLA members retiring this year, this could be an opportunity for a real renaissance at City Hall, with Boris Johnson as Mayor and many new Assembly members. London Government needs an ethical revolution.
