Martin Bright responds to Ken Livingstone’s response to Martin Bright’s response to Ken Livingstone’s response to Martin Bright’s original trailing of his Channel 4 documentary on the New Statesman website today.

It’s a robust response, but of as much interest is the left-wing group think in many of the comments on the piece which really boils down to, ‘Hey left-winger! How dare you criticise another left-winger when there is an election a few months away?’

The question of whether or not the accusations are true doesn’t seem to matter to them, and the resignation of one aide for lying in a failed cover-up attempt is a piece of evidence of wrong-doing at the heart of Livingstone’s administration that his defenders seem to be just ignoring.

There is an interesting parallel with the reaction of many in London Labour to the Miranda Grell case, the Labour councillor kicked out of office for her smear campaign against her Lib Dem opponent. Many Labour members and supporters stuck their heads in the sand, ignored all the evidence and protested until they were blue in the face that she was innocent, never did anything wrong and any evidence against her must be the result of some big conspiracy. We even had the bizarre episode of the imaginary court transcript which was wheeled out to defend Grell, but never actually existed. (Kudos though to the few Labour people who were willing to speak out against her, including one who gave evidence in court).

Loyalty to colleagues is one thing; blindness and indifference to wrong-doing is something else. I guess extra supplies of Gordon Brown’s moral compass need sending to London Labour circles.