When Boris Johnson accepted Ray Lewis’s resignation he did so in order to avoid him becoming ‘the story rather than the solution.’

I, perhaps wrongly, think that Ray Lewis is still the story.

I am not at all comfortable with guilt before trial, and I am even less comfortable with avoidance of process….

What you or I ought to know is whether there is guilt or not. That seems pretty obvious to me?

I think you’re right that it is very important to clear up the facts about Lewis.

This is especially the case now that Boris’s team have not ruled out Ray Lewis still being involved with the GLA in some other capacity. Effectively he could still be running the Respect Academy programme but without the job title.

If that does happen then his guilt or otherwise, will become a big issue and rightly so.

However, that kind of investigation is beyond what the Assembly can really deal with and could only be looked at by the kind of in-depth inquiry that Boris has now cancelled.

In the meantime, this investigation can look at the reasons why not even the most basic of checks were made on a man who was being employed to run a programme for hundreds of vulnerable kids. It may also throw some light on the problems of using voluntary organisations and quangos to manage public services.

It’s not enough really, but it’s the best we’ve got now that Boris has dropped the inquiry.

I find it astonishing that so little has been said about Tim Parker – a man who has effectively become deputy mayor without even being elected to the seat. And on top of that he refuses to declare his interests like the others. It’s such blatant cronyism, and the Tories are amusingly saying nothing about it. Complete silence that the mayor can bring so many of his mates into his own domain without oversight. About time the London Assembly started paying attention to this.

The Assembly will almost certainly be looking at the appointment of Tim Parker as well. Basically there are only a couple of senior posts, which do not have some form of legal or other difficulty facing them. Parker isn’t one of them.

Looks like a fairly serious mess that they’ve got themselves into. Trying to put square pegs into round holes is never the best approach.

http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

I don’t live in London and so can’t be sure, but I’ll bet the Evening Standard has been recently been full of hard hitting espose’s of Boris’ troubles, courtesy of the fearless pen of Andrew “Truthseeker” Gilligan? Right?

The Standard as a whole hasn’t been too bad, but Mr. Gilligan seems to have given up all pretence of being a serious journalist and now just spends his time penning Richard Littlejohn style rants on Politically Correct Britiain and Da Left.

He has also started writing about the dark ‘anti-Boris forces’ that are out to get his Bozza. As far as I can work out, these amount to a handful of bloggers on the interweb. Expect a hard hitting expose along the lines of ‘anti-Boris bloggers linked to Tamil Tigers’ some time soon.