Today’s Times has alleged that Ken Livingstone’s 2004 campaign team “instructed public servants to write articles in support” in his bid for re-election.
The paper reports that “One e-mail to the mayor’s former senior adviser on Asian affairs, Atma Singh, sent at 9.30am, explicitly asks that he write two articles in support of Mr Livingstone by noon that day.”
Mr Livingstone has recently denied that staff had campaigned during office hours.
The paper quotes a spokesperson for Mr Livingstone as saying: “Politically restricted staff are permitted to write articles on any topic in their own private time which are then published by Ken Livingstone but they are not allowed to publish any written or artistic work of which he is the author (or one of the authors) and which it appears to be intended to affect public support for a political party. Nor is the politically restricted staff member allowed to canvass or publicly call for support for a particular person.”
