All aboard the gravy train! Next stop: poll for South Norwood

EXCLUSIVE: Streatham and Croydon North MP’s parliamentary aide gets one of the jobs for the boys, and girls, as SPAD appointments are doled out.
By WALTER CRONXITE, political editor

Residents in South Norwood will be asked to go to the polls again, probably in September, for a council by-election caused by a Labour councillor’s personal greed and ambition.

Louis Carserides, who has been councillor for the ward only since 2021, is jumping ship after being handed a “politically restricted” job by his mate, Steve Reed OBE.

With Reed now the government’s environment secretary, Carserides is joining the civil servants at DEFRA as a “special adviser”. Though the special advice Carserides might be able to provide is not entirely clear…

Carserides was imposed on the people of South Norwood by the local Labour Party at a by-election in 2021 in the immediate aftermath of Labour bankrupting the borough. He was already working as a parliamentary staffer at the time for Reed. Carserides’ election, and later appointment as chief whip to the Town Hall Labour group, saw “Steve’s Snitch” provide Reed with additional insight, and potential control, over council matters at that time.

Working for an MP is not an uncommon day job for councillors, of all parties.

But working effectively as a government employee as a SPAD, or special adviser, on a salary of between £70,000 and £100,000 a year (depending on which “band” he is given) is politically restricted, so Carserides will have to relinquish his £11,000 councillor allowances in Croydon.

According to Whitehall, “Special advisers are a critical part of the team supporting ministers. They add a political dimension to the advice and assistance available to ministers while reinforcing the political impartiality of the permanent Civil Service by distinguishing the source of political advice and support.”

This form of jobs for the boys, and girls, is nothing new or unique to Labour.

Indeed, it is just another example where the “change” offered by Keir Starmer’s Labour looks very much like the self-rewarding practices of the Conservatives. The political parties are assiduous in milking the public purse at national and local level for their own purposes.

Westminster’s green benches following the General Election are crammed tight with “nepo babies”: husbands, wives, sons and daughters of various past and present Blairite figures.

There’s front benchers Ellie Reeves (Rachel’s sister), Georgia Gould (daughter of Philip) and Pat McFadden (whose wife was Labour’s deputy campaign director), then there’s Sue Gray’s son, Alastair Campbell’s nephew and Morgan McSweeney’s missus…

McSweeney, the power behind Starmer’s Labour throne, and his wife, Imogen Walker, the one-time Linda Lovelace actress, now MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley, have strong-ish links with Croydon.

McSweeney is famous as the man who ran Starmer’s exceedingly deceitful, and successful, leadership campaign in 2020, who was director of right-wing think tank Labour Together (where Reed has been a significant figure) and now is himself a super SPAD, occupying the newly created job as No10’s head of political strategy. All this from humble beginnings working for Reed at Lambeth Council and for David Evans at the Croydon-based The Campaign Company.

McSweeney and Walker met in Lambeth, where she was a Labour councillor. When Hamida Ali scrambled from the wreckage of Croydon’s financial collapse in 2020 and early 2021 as Tony Newman’s replacement council leader, it was Walker who was hired as some kind of political troubleshooter, the “interim head of the leader’s office”, to look over Ali’s shoulder at all decisions and reports (albeit somewhat remotely, mostly from Walker’s home in Scotland).

Hired at a time of mass redundancies at Croydon Council, the job was never advertised before being handed to Walker, and no records exist of how the appointment was arrived at. It was Walker who was advising Ali when she conducted a series of car crash TV and radio interviews about the council’s finances and then the Regina Road scandal.

There are other backroom Croydon Labour figures alongside Carserides in the jobs-for-the-boys-and-girls SPAD appointments, all paid for with public money, which are beginning to emerge from Whitehall.

Jessica Leigh, who used to work in Sarah Jones’s parliamentary office, gets a SPAD gig under Yvette Cooper in the Home Office (meaning there may need to be a Lambeth Council by-election – Leigh is a councillor for Clapham East), while Tom Hughes, another ex-Jones staffer, will be providing his expertise on… [checks notes]… defence under John Healey.

Carserides still has his personal website live, from the time he was seeking selection and then election as a councillor to serve the people of South Norwood. “Proudly serving the community I grew up in and the community I still live in,” it says.

There’s been no official announcement of Carserides’ resignation as a councillor. Due notice of any by-election has to be given, and the political parties will go through the pretence of “selecting” their candidates. If you can get down to a branch of William Hill this afternoon, we suggest a sneaky fiver on Ben Taylor, the three-time election loser, being “selected” as Labour’s candidate. On the grounds that South Norwood is such a safe Labour ward, even Taylor can’t fuck this one up…

The estimated cost to cash-strapped Croydon Council of staging the by-election as a consequence of Carserides’ expected resignation? Around £10,000…

Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
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