Ken's press officer army triple the size of Brown's

We learn today that contrary to Brown's promises about ending the culture of spin at No.10, he has been hiring a new adviser every week. The annual wage bill of his SpAds now reaches £1.75m - roughly the same level it was under Blair.

Not to be outdone though, Mayor Livingstone has not only matched the Prime Minister with his number of press officers (24) but has hired almost three times the number (70)! In addition to that, he has 105 media staff at TfL and the LDA to promote his policies, although in fairness his record probably needs that many people to put a positive spin on it.

Livingstone has also spent:

• £8m of taxpayers' money on opposing nuclear power
• £2.8m pa on Pravda The Londoner newspaper
• £2.2m on promoting home insulation scheme worth £300k in grants
• £793k on promoting a Oyster card giveaway
• £517k hosting a leftie event attended by Che Guevara's daughter, Gerry Adams and George Galloway
• £4750 of taxpayers' money to Chinese torch-bearer former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq in exchange for appearing alongside him at a press conference
• £4,088 for a rebuttal file answering claims that he should not have met the extremist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi

Boris, who has pledged to put 440 police community support officers on buses and another 50 PCs on station platforms using money from Livingstone's £3.4m "propaganda budget", said:

"This is a man who has more press officers at his disposal than the Prime Minister. Year on year he ups his publicity budget at taxpayers' expense. London needs a value-for-money mayor. I would spend this propaganda money on worthwhile projects that will actually benefit Londoners, not massage egos."

Update: Phil Taylor sends in some other reminders...

• Don't forget the £3 million advertising the start of the Tour de France
• What about the £3.3 million spent on Low Emission Zone and Emissions Related Congestion Charging consultations (which were basically just ad campaigns designed to make the Mayor look green)
• On its own the Met was spending £8.6 million in 2006/7, a 42% increase on the previous year
• I make the total number of communications people across the GLA family to be 265
• The Mayor's total ad bill across the GLA family is certainly at least £100 million
• Central government spent £328 million on advertising through the Central Office of Information on big campaigns in 2006/7 and spent £552 billion overall in 2006/7 - so advertising was 0.06%.  Livingstone spends £100 million on advertising out of a total budget in the order of £11 billion - so 0.91%.  Livingstone spends 15 times as much as even the Labour government.

Comments

[Cleethorpes Rock]

How about £100,000 a year wasted on Lee Jasper?

Add to that the grants and pork-barrel money that has disappeared into the ether thanks to this waste of skin, Jasper.

[ACT]

And nary a specific from Boris on which jobs he'll do away with for good.

[Londonlx]

I lol'd at the pravda line.... I once complained to the mayor about that newspaper as the headline story was about saving the environment - and they printed out millions of newspapers to say that!
the irony was lost and I just got a standard reply saying "the Londoner is produced to provide public information about the range of services provided by the GLA Group. These include transport, policing, activities supporting economic development and tourism. Providing relevant and up-to-date information is key to helping to ensure that all Londoners have equal access to the range of services and opportunities London offers."

If it was purely informative then why is it written in a biased newspaper style?
Particularly annoying was the time the front page headline for 2 months running was about reducing bus prices by 10% when they'd gone up by 20% a few months earlier (without a mention!)

[Conservative Homer]

As you say, If anyone needs them, Ken needs them.

[Phil Taylor]

Londonix,

3 months running, see:

http://philtaylor.org.uk/?p=825

[ramsay]

Boris needs them too - still operating without a press team. Crosby strategy may be low key but Boris needs to rebut Ken and get his policies across.

[Jonathan]

How about the money wasted on the absurd "Clash of Civilisations" Conference in January 2007? It required hiring the QE Conference Centre for a Saturday; catering; flying Daniel Pipes over from the US and putting him in a hotel. It must have cost at least £50,000.

[Cleethorpes Rock]

Not to mention the carbon footprint!!