Is it bedtime yet?
Even as suspicions were growing that Ray Lewis was not all he seemed Boris Johnson told Andrew Marr last month that his deputy for young people was “one of the reasons I became so determined to become mayor. He just inspired me.” The blond Etonian’s enthusiasm for the black east Londoner and his “respect school” for wayward schoolboys in the Borough of Newham had been a constant theme of his election campaign. Lewis was Johnson’s first appointment to his City Hall team and seemed a perfect lieutenant for a mayor held (unfairly) by some to be racist and routinely ridiculed as a toff. Lewis’s resignation earlier this evening will come as a hammer blow.
It’s a sad business. Johnson’s emphasis on tackling youth crime won him many friends and Lewis’s support gave credibility to his promises. His appearance with Johnson and David Cameron at a community centre in Edmonton, north London, was a major occasion in the campaign. Lewis seemed to embody New Conservatism’s ability to reach beyond its core supporters and demonstrate a desire to heal social ills. Even people who opposed Johnson or had misgivings about the “boot camp” elements of Lewis’s Eastside Young Leaders Academy wished them well. As I write, a succession of callers to BBC Radio London are lamenting Lewis’s departure, believing he knew how to end the cruel epidemic of teenage deaths by knife.But Lewis alone was never going to achieve that. And now his entire reputation is threatened by claims about improper conduct towards parishioners while he was a practising Church of England minister in the 1990s. Johnson stood stoutly by him until today, when it emerged that statements Lewis made at a combative press conference yesterday were inconsistent or inaccurate. The most damaging of these was Lewis’s assertion that was a justice of the peace, a claim flatly contradicted by the Ministry of Justice this afternoon. Earlier, Johnson had kept a promise to hold an independent inquiry into the claims against Lewis, but former Chief Inspector of Prisons Martin Narey had barely been announced as the man who will conduct it when the wheels came off Boris’s bus.
In his resignation statement Lewis likened the media to “an impatient school child” but there had been too many stories floating around to be ignored. It was when my Guardian colleague Matthew Taylor and I discovered we’d been hearing the same ones from separate sources that we decided to dig deeper. We later learned that Channel 4 News and then the BBC were pursuing their own inquiries. It was after Matthew had emailed Lewis a small selection of our many questions about him that Johnson took the decision to launch what he’d hoped would be a pre-emptive strike by announcing the inquiry.
This has now failed completely, handing Johnson’s political enemies a priceless opportunity to question his judgment and competence yet again. All Londoners can do is hope the mayor’s desire to wrestle with the problem of disaffected youth is unimpaired and that he can find other, possibly more suitable people, to help him with the task. This morning, Johnson’s father-in-law died. It’s been a miserable day for him.
Also in original red. Thank you and goodnight.
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