Livingstone campaign instructed Mayor's office staff to undertake political work in taxpayers' time

The Times has a very important story this morning that shows the dishonesty and arrogance of Ken Livingstone's political operation.

Recently asked on the Today programme by Jim Naughtie if his mayoral office and its taxpayer-funded staff had been used to undertake political campaigning Ken Livingstone replied very strongly that they had not.

The Times' Francis Elliott and Rajeev Syal have a copy of an email from Ken4London - his political campaign HQ - to a mayoral staffer demanding completion of an election-focused article in publicly-funded working hours.

The piece ends with a useful summary of the issues currently under investigation within Mr Livingstone's increasingly besieged mayoralty:

• "The Electoral Commission will today be asked to investigate claims that City Hall staff funded by the taxpayer wrongly undertook campaign work in 2004
• If the watchdog orders a full investigation it will join a lengthening queue of probes into the Mayor of London and his adminstration
• The Metropolitan Police confirmed that they were investigating allegations over missing funds given by the London Development Agency to Brixton Base
• MPs have also submitted a complaint to the Audit Commission over allegations that the LDA misused public funds and one Labour MP, Kate Hoey, has written to Gordon Brown expressing her concerns over Mr Livingstone
• The Mayor of London was last week forced to give his full backing to Lee Jasper, his senior aide following the resignation of Mr Jasper's deputy after being caught lying about a free foreign holiday."

Comments

[Pisaboy]

Conway rightly loses the whip for misusing public money, can't Labour remove Ken as their candidate?

There's no love lost between them as Hands pointed out http://conservativehome.blogs.com/centreright/2008/01/gordon-brown-ha.html

[GLA Spokesperson]

As the quote in The Times article correctly points out, politically restricted staff are permitted to write articles on any topic in their own private time which are then published by Ken Livingstone, but they are not allowed to publish any written or artistic work of which he is the author (or one of the authors) and which it appears to be intended to affect public support for a political party. Nor is the politically restricted staff member allowed to canvass or publicly call for support for a particular person.

[Phil Taylor]

Thanks for the update GLA Spokesperson. Most people reading your comment will be flabbergasted that their council tax is being spent policing blogs. But then again if there are 265 people doing these jobs across the GLA family it is no surprise you are reduced to filling your time doing just that.

In case you didn’t actually read the Times article the point they were making is that most people consider the period 9.30am to 12 mid-day prime working hours and would expect their employee to be working during this time. Most employees would be sacked out of hand for doing “foreigners” during these hours.

[Malcolm Dunn]

Interesting story in the Standard today. I think Lee Jasper is finished.