Interesting take from Torytroll on today’s Daily Mirror splash about London Mayor Boris Johnson apparently appointing a very close friend, Helen Macintyre, to an Olympics-related job.
Adam Bienkov notes that as someone who got elected on a ticket promising to sweep cronyism out of City Hall, Boris has an interesting way of somehow finding jobs for his mates and, err, cronies, however discredited they may be.
But then, also, it is entirely understandable that people in elected office will seek to surround themselves with people they know and trust, to work alongside them. If you accept that as a matter of political life, then what you then require is a proper system to scrutinise all such appointments or publicly funded contracts.
There is a very good example in Croydon of how, unchecked, vast amounts of public money can be misdirected or misappropriated. We will return to this troubling Storey soon.
But back to Bienkov’s bit of Boris baiting… He writes:
“Londoners knew that Boris Johnson was a cheat and a liar when they elected him. Why should it matter now?
“But buried within the story is the claim that Boris gave Helen a job connected to the Olympics which she used to extract a donation from her husband.”
