I return from holiday to the sight of John Ross, Ken Livingstone’s bonkers economics adviser staring out at me from the front page of the Evening Standard. Apparently this champion of the working man has been given a six-figure pay-off, which should buy him a nice dacha somewhere in his beloved Russia. Or maybe he will donate it to charity.
It seems the small coterie of Trotskyists that ran London under Ken Livingstone have finally been purged and about time too. Boris should probably have fought harder to stop the last-minute deals set up by Livingstone for his friends but he probably has better things to do sorting out his own shambolic advisory appointments.
It remains astonishing to me that a Labour Party which fought so hard to oust Militant from its ranks in the 1980s allowed Socialist Action to dominate City Hall for so long. These people seriously believed they were establishing a socialist city state in London. Livingstone’s de facto number two Simon Fletcher, green adviser Mark Watts and transport adviser Redmond O’Neill, received an average of £200,000 each, according to Andrew Gilligan in yesterday’s Standard.
O’Neill was probably the most pernicious influence, not in his role as transport adviser, but in his lead role on Islam, where he was the prime mover in encouraging links with radical Islamic groups to the exclusion of other Muslims. He will not be missed. Of course they will cry that they were driven out by a witch-hunt, but two hundred grand should help cushion the blow.
I notice my old adversary, Joy Johnson, also received a tidy sum. As press spokesperson she was always a Labour Party loyalist and found herself in the impossible position of trying to reconcile the increasingly nutty policies of the City Hall Trots with wider party policy. With her experience of justifying the unjustifiable she should have a great future in corporate PR. Good luck to her.
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