Credit where credit is due, the official Conservative Party reaction to the Ray Lewis affair appears to be rather more measured and sensible than that of some of the party’s online cheerleaders:

Former minister Francis Maude will chair talks with senior party officials and one of Boris Johnson’s right hand men to learn lessons from the resignation of the deputy mayor …

Team Boris’s takeover of City Hall was seen as a test bed for Mr Cameron’s first 100 days in Government, with vital lessons to be learned. Mr Boles was seconded to manage the launch and report back.

The Ray Lewis affair is seen as having exposed poor preparations. According to MPs and party officials, the main errors include omitting to check Ray Lewis’s background thoroughly, failing to anticipate intense media scrutiny, and terrible handling of media allegations, in particular putting Mr Lewis in front of the cameras where he ended up talking himself into deeper trouble.

In other words, ‘yes, we made mistakes’ rather than ‘it’s all a leftie plot / smear operation / load of nonesense / fault of someone else’ [delete as appropriate].

Two new allegations around London Deputy Mayor Ray Lewis have emerged today. First, that - contrary to his claims - his Academy is no longer being funded by Newham Council and, second, that despite repeated references to Ray Lewis being a Magistrate, in fact according to the Ministry for Justice Ray Lewis “is not and never has been a Magistrate“.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson is increasingly in the firing line over the whole issue because the Evening Standard has documented a series of checks that could have been undertaken before Ray Lewis’s appointment but which weren’t. Given the seniority of Ray Lewis’s post (Deputy Mayor, albeit that he isn’t the only one), shouldn’t Boris Johnson have ensured that full checks were carried out before he was appointed?

If Boris Johnson had been misled by someone, that’s one thing. But if he failed to make sure the right questions were asked, there’s no shirking the responsibility for that.

UPDATE: Ray Lewis has now resigned.

UPDATE 2: Ray Lewis had also said that he was not aware of having been banned by the Church of England from holding office. The Church has now responded by saying that he had in fact appealed against the ban (and therefore must have known about it).

Meanwhile, a war of words has broken out between the Church of England and the Conservative Party. The Conservatives have tried to blame the Church:

In a desperate attempt to ensure that Johnson’s first serious crisis does not undermine Cameron’s own position, Nick Boles, a key member of Cameron’s “kitchen cabinet” and one of Johnson’s most senior aides, accused church leaders of negligence. He said they had failed to disclose that they had a dossier of accusations made against Lewis while he was a vicar. “The church sat on it and suddenly decided to bring it into the public [arena] now. Why?” he said.

But the Church has hit back, saying that Boris Johnson and his team are at fault for not asking questions they should have asked:

Chris Newland, chaplain to the Bishop of Chelmsford, said: “Lewis’s ministry was restricted because of very serious allegations. If you want to employ someone in a high-profile job, you check with their employers, you take up their references. None of that was done.”

And in worse news for Boris Johnson it has now come to light that not only was he written to about Ray Lewis’s past (though this is some controversy over how clear this was made in the letter and whether or not Boris Johnson was told about the contents of the letter) but that in addition that the Bishop of Barking spoke to him personally over Ray Lewis’s background.

Coverage left, right and centre today over the allegations against Ray Lewis, one of Boris Johnosn’s deputy mayors (e.g. The Times).

A few points to note:

1. The Bishop of Chelmsford has said that, ”Between 1999 and 2005 Ray was placed under the formal disciplinary structures of the Church of England and his ministry was restricted.” This is a very different story from Ray Lewis’s own public statements.
2. This however hasn’t stopped ConservativeHome saying that, “the left-leaning media have jumped on this story with relish, pre-judging him with little more than some disjointed insinuations.” Hmm… I think most people would describe having a Bishop give such a different story from the Deputy Mayor on the key issue of whether he was disciplined for past misbehaviour as rather more than a disjointed insinuation. There’s a lot that we don’t yet know but somehow I think that if a Labour or Liberal Democrat blog was trying to defend one of its own against similar allegations and used that phrase they’d be taken apart by ConservativeHome and other right-wing blogs. And quite right too. 
3. And finally, an unfortunate choice of words. In responding to the allegations of, amongst other things, sexual misconduct, Ray Lewis said: “sometimes I rub people up the wrong way.”

London Mayor Boris Johnson held a press conference this afternoon, announcing that he is to hold an inquiry into his newly appointed Deputy Mayor, Ray Lewis, over allegations of sexual misconduct.

The BBC takes up the story:

BBC London learned Mr Lewis, who has responsibility for youth, was barred from working in the Church of England after the allegations were made when he was vicar at a church in east London a decade ago.

Mr Lewis was placed on the Church of England’s Lambeth and Bishopsthorpe Register - the so-called Lambeth List - in 1999.

People on the list are prevented from public ministry and preaching.

UPDATE: Politics.co.uk has a good summary of the allegations against Ray Lewis.

I’ve blogged previously (here and here) about some of the errors which came to light in the London election results. None of these were serious in their own right, but they do cast doubt on how good the checking processes really were. Now a comprehensive review has suggested that up to 41,000 votes went unaccounted for:

Although the glitches are unlikely to have changed the overall result of the mayoral race – Boris Johnson won by almost 140,000 votes after second choices were taken into consideration – today’s report lists a string of potentially serious problems with the counting procedures used in the mayoral and London Assembly elections.

Among the deficiencies highlighted in the report are the counting of blank ballots as valid votes, frequent jams in the scanning machines and a series of bugs and system freezes. ORG’s observers also reported that they were refused access to parts of the process at counts in London Olympia and Alexandra Palace.

In at least two cases, the margin of error was greater than the winning candidate’s margin of victory, leading the group to conclude that there was “insufficient evidence” for it to say that the results were accurate.

That’s not good.

When Boris Johnson set up his Forensic Audit Panel to investigate financial goings on at the London Development Agency, he boasted about how all the people on the panel were working for free and made no mention of any other costs being involved. (Mayor’s Question Time, 21st May, full transcript here.)

Amongst its members is Andrew Gordon of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, where he is Head of Investigations in their Forensic Services group. Given the allegations over the LDA, such expertise sounds very welcome.

But, but, but … it has now turned out that although the panel are working for free, £50,000 is to be given to PriceWaterhouseCoopers to carry out investigations.

This raises a whole host of questions: why didn’t Boris Johnson say anything about the £50,000 before? How were PriceWaterhouseCoopers selected to get the £50,000? Is there any connection between that and Andrew Gordon’s presence on the panel? Was there any agreement at the time at which he was appointed to the panel? And so on. On past form, don’t expect a speedy and detailed response from Boris Johnson though.

In a Radio 4 interview this morning, Boris Johnson was asked about the costs of the Olympics and he said there was a dispute over whether London or central government would cover any extra costs. Asked about a memo between then London Mayor Ken Livingstone and central government saying the latter would cover the costs, Boris Johnson said, “I rather doubt that it exists”. One problem, it does.

So with one mouse click you can be better informed that the Mayor of London about one of the major issues facing the Mayor of London. Just click here.

As mentioned previously, Mayor of London Boris Johnson is running up very big bills for consultations to help him and his team settle into the job. Unfortunately, he now also seems to have forgotten just how much the bills are because he told the BBC today that:

I don’t think we’ve spent half a million so far: I think that may be the total of their annual salaries, something like that.

In short: wrong. Indeed, given how short the period of time is that many of the consultations have been employed for, giving their equivalent full annual salaries would give a figure far, far higher.

Hat tip: Boris Watch.

Exhibit A
Conservative Leader of Dartford Council, Jeremey Kite: “When I spoke to him [Boris Johnson] during his campaign he assured me north Kent was not an option [for a new airport].”

Exhibit B
Boris Johnson’s staff: “It is too early to identify particular sites and to confirm or deny north Kent is an option.”

(Source: News Shopper)

So that’d be saying one thing before polling day and then doing something else afterwards by the looks of it. A bit of a habit really.

Hat tip: Boris Watch

As more details emerge, the costs of Boris Johnson’s transition team are going up and up. As Tory Troll reports, the latest figures are £465,000, which is equal to 70% of the total annual cost of all the Mayor’s permanent staff and deputies. That’s an awful lot of money to be spending just on a temporary transition team.

Hat tip: Liberal Conspiracy

Not only does Boris Johnson not seem that keen on doing the job of London Mayor, what with appointing a plethora of deputy Mayors, but he also seems to be getting into rather a habit of breaking his pre-election promises. I’ve previously blogged about fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square - before the election he said one thing, after the election he’s doing the opposite - and now I’ve noticed that the recent announcement about the MPA (Metropolitan Policing Authority) means there’s another promise he’s broken.

It’s been announced that Boris Johnson will take over as chair of the MPA in six months time. He could have taken over straight away, but decided not to. What’s the problem with that? Well, it flatly contradicts his manifesto promise: [UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, my mistake as the legal change made in 2007 does not come into force until the autumn. That does make his promise to become MPA chair "as soon as I become Mayor" a rather careless choice of words - I guess his grasp of what the law allowed on this point was as good as mine - but granted, that is a different point]

Earlier this year Boris Johnson signed an EDM (a sort of Parliamentary petition open to MPs to sign) calling for

A permanent statue of Sir Keith [Park, who played a leading role in the Battle of Britain] on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

You couldn’t get much clearer than that really could you? So of course now Boris Johnson is Mayor he’s going ahead and keeping his promise isn’t he? Er, no. Now the votes are safely counted, he’s ditched his promise. Whatever you think of the merits of permanent Park statue versus rotating modern art on the Fourth Plinth, it’s pretty striking to make a promise ahead of polling day and then shortly after carry out a drastic u-turn.

London Mayor Boris Johnson has now appointed five deputy mayors in various guises - messrs Barnes, Clement, Lewis, Malthouse and now Tim Parker too. Do you get the feeling that, just perhaps, he’s not that keen on actually doing the job of Mayor himself? After all, it’s not as if he’s given up his journalism commitments and he’s still hanging on as an MP (though for how long, who knows? But the extra money must be nice while you can get it).

I’ve already blogged about how London Elects admitted to failing to count all the votes in the London Mayor election. Now looking through the detailed figures I see that Lambeth has sprouted two extra wards.

What seems to have happened is that some, but only some, of the ballot boxes in Brixton Hill and Thornton wards were reported in to the central number crunching venue in City Hall with typos in their names - and so the official results have votes for both Brixton Hill and Brxiton Hill (note the x and i) and also both Thornton and Thirnton (note the third letter).

Not a huge difference you might think, but what it highlights (again) is the weakness of the cross-checking and auditing process. What these errors means is that the total number of wards included in the official figures is wrong - and you would have expected something like “have we got the right number of wards here?” to feature in any auditing rules.

A letter has gone out today from Anthony Meyer, the Greater London Returning Officer, providing further details of the London election results. In it he admits that the Mayor result as declared at the time was inaccurate, as not all the valid votes were included in it:

The Mayoral 1st and 2nd preference figures for two ballot boxes from Merton and Wandsworth did not transmit successfully to City Hall for aggregation into the London-wide Mayoral declaration. Only the data on rejected ballot papers were received.

In total, 746 votes for Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson were therefore missed out from the final figures. Of course, this doesn’t cast any doubt on Boris Johnson’s victory, but it does show - once again - how fragile electronic counting systems are in the UK and how adequate cross-checks to ensure that no data goes astray are frequently missing from the system.

Credit is due to the London Elects team for having made public their discovery of the error, but we should perhaps all be breathing a sigh of relief that the votes from only two ballot boxes went missing, and in an election that didn’t end on a knife-edge. Imagine the situation we would be in if either of these weren’t the case.

It’s early days, but there have been some interesting write-ups already, including in today’s Sunday Times which, amongst other things, points out that,

At least two ideas mooted by Johnson during his campaign have been squashed by his rigorous new policymen.

Dropping a couple of election promises so quickly is the sort of act which often gets lost in the initial media coverage of “new person in post”, but it is also the sort of act that can come back to haunt you. If Boris Johnson hits bad times and struggles on policy, the early dropping of two promises could become highly symbolic. He has also been attacked in today’s Observer, though on more debatable grounds:

Last Wednesday Johnson installed Westminster councillor Sir Simon Milton as his senior planning adviser, one of the most powerful positions in his new administration. Milton’s life partner is another councillor, Robert Davis, who is also Westminster council’s elected planning supremo.

When grilled by Westminster councillors last Wednesday about the potential for conflicts of interest, Davis flippantly said he looked forward to ‘pillow talk’ and having a ‘word in the ear’ with Milton about how Westminster planning matters would be dealt with by Mayor Johnson.

Senior Labour councillor Paul Dimoldenberg has written to the Greater London Authority’s chief executive and Westminster legal officers demanding reassurances that key planning decisions will be transparent and not made behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, London MP (and former London Assembly member) Lynne Featherstone has given her take on Boris as Mayor in her latest newspaper column.

Here’s the email which Brian Paddick sent out to supporters earlier today:

It feels a bit like waking up with a hangover but without the headache!

Thank you so much for all the hard work and support that was put into our campaign.

It is important to recognise the unique nature of this set of London elections set against the context of the national picture. If the London picture were reflected nationally we would have cause for concern and for being despondent but not a bit of it!

We have had one of the best ever results nationally and this is a major boost for our new leader, Nick Clegg. Four years ago we picked up a lot of support from those who, like me, were disgusted at the illegal war in Iraq.

For us to improve our position nationally, as we did on Thursday, is a triumph for the party and I am immensely proud to call myself a Liberal Democrat despite the London results.

Many Londoners had had enough of Ken Livingstone and believed, encouraged by the press, that the only way to get rid of him was to vote Tory. Many other Londoners saw the imminent danger of having Boris Johnson as Mayor, encouraged by the opinion polls, and defected to Labour. The staggering number of spoilt ballot papers showed that people did not understand the voting system and simply went all out for either Labour or the Tories.

I spoke to Tony Travers last night, the academic and independent commentator on London politics, who told me that we had done very well indeed in all the circumstances and that we should be proud of our performance (and Tony is no friend of the Liberal Democrats).

As I kept saying during the campaign, in the 15 or so London by-elections between September last year and April, right across the capital, what Londoners really feel about us came through:

Liberal Democrats 36%
Conservatives 28%
Labour 25%

We got squeezed between two political monsters in a way we had never seen before. We did our best. We need to get off the floor, brush ourselves down and get back to our usual winning ways. I hope to join as many of you as possible in Crewe - we have a Parliamentary by-election to win! Details are at www.elizabethshenton.com

Apparently the best thing to do when you get thrown by a horse is get back in the saddle as soon as possible, although I wouldn’t know one end of a horse from another!

Thanks again everyone.

With every best wishes,

Brian

The latest figures from http://www.opinion-tracker.co.uk/ about the online coverage being garnered by the London Mayor candidates show Brian Paddick as the only one out of himself, Livingstone, Johnson and Berry to overall be getting more positive then negative coverage. Full details on their site.