A Week in Politics

…is a long time — or so the saying goes.

This last week was dominated by the Ray Lewis business and the Glasgow East by-election (most notably, Labour’s difficulty in finding a candidate). There were also a sprinkling of other issues and happenings, such as the G8 summit — which appears to have had little media or ‘blog coverage.

Possibly the most interesting facet of the Lewis affair is that it all concerned matters from over a decade ago. They are of course still important, and the allegations must be thoroughly investigated — but even if found to be valid (and there is at least one that shows relatively mild dishonesty — the “JP” claim on Lewis’s CV) it has to be said that Lewis (and Boris Johnson) did the right thing by his departure.

Yes, full checks should have been made before he was taken on. My personal suspicion is that — as a “Cameron man” — Lewis might well have been assumed to have had all the checks done by Conservative Party Central Office before David Cameron recommended him (or however it was done) to Boris. Whatever the cause, lessons will need to be learned. It is quite possible that there is an endemic problem at City Hall, which would explain how other seemingly dodgy characters such as Lee Jasper were taken on. I don’t know how far back Jasper’s “history” goes, but it is unlikely to be just eight years.

Fortunately, Boris is sufficiently astute to learn and act to ensure there is no repeat. He is new at the job of Mayor of London and all it entails, so I (and, I suspect, many others) am prepared to cut him a bit of slack in these early times — as long as he tightens up his ship’s operations and procedures. His prompt action in this case — in contrast to the way Ken Livingstone handled the Jasper issue (which went on for many months before Jasper finally departed) — shows that he has a markedly different attitude and takes his responsibilities very seriously.

Interestingly, the mainstream media behaviour in these two parallel cases has also shown differences in how they treated the two cases. Even though the allegations against Lee Jasper concerned what he was claimed to be doing with huge sums of public money at that time (i.e. not from a decade or more ago, and certainly very serious in nature), it was only one newspaper — and initially just one reporter on that paper — who was pursuing the Jasper story.

By contrast, the (largely Left-leaning) British mainstream media came out almost universally, all guns blazing, against Ray Lewis and (as far as they could) Boris Johnson at more-or-less the first sniff of a story. The effort they must have put in between them to get hold of what they have been putting about is vastly (perhaps infinitely?) greater than they did (with the singular exception of Andrew Gilligan at the London Standard) concerning Jasper.

Now there’s a lesson for all of us to learn, in all of this: we really cannot trust the media to be impartial.