Ray Lewis: Dropped, maybe
More news on the Ray Lewis front: the inquiry looks to be dropped. Osborne claimed otherwise on Andrew Marr this morning, but this comes (apparently) from somewhere in the GLA:
But last night City Hall sources said the inquiry would be dropped. A source said: “He wants to clear his name and we would like that to happen, but now he has resigned it is not appropriate to spend taxpayers’ money on an inquiry.”
Even the Express seems unlikely to have made it all up. So, mixed messages at best? Perhaps BoJo hoped nobody would notice if the idea sank into the cess-pool that is the Express - and CCHQ disagreed. Whichever, there’d be reasons why Boris might want the whole farrago to disappear now. Namely:
The mayor’s office repeatedly insisted that Lewis was not aware of allegations of financial and sexual misconduct made against him by parishioners and had not even been told by the Church of England that he was disbarred from holding office in 1999. That appeared to explain why Lewis had not declared damaging facts during vetting for his post.
But that defence was dramatically undermined last night when church sources said Lewis actually appealed against the revoking of his licence in 2000, when he returned to Britain after working overseas.
The Rev Chris Newlands, chaplain to the Bishop of Chelmsford, who was responsible for overseeing Lewis’s parish, said: ‘When Mr Lewis came back from Guyana to England, he knew his licence had been revoked. The licence had been revoked because he was doing things he shouldn’t have been doing. He asked for permission to preach again in 2000, but it wasn’t granted.’
Fairly damning stuff. Fresh guesses, as Friday’s rapidly drop out of use; Lewis is very definitely guilty, as BoJo now knows, so there won’t be an inquiry, and he’ll never work for City Hall again. More Tories will distance themselves like so:
But other senior Tories were distancing themselves. A spokesman for Francis Maude, who sits on the board of trustees of Lewis’s Eastside Young Leaders Academy - an after-school facility for disafffected teenagers - said he had not known about the allegations in Lewis’s past and that Maude’s involvement with the academy had been ‘decreasing’ lately.
The line will become, “Lewis lied to us; we couldn’t help it.” How a liar took them in won’t be mentioned - just that he lied, and it’s not their fault. Assuming, of course, that CCHQ and Boris actually start working together…
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