London Mayor Gets Suspension Over Argument

The flamboyant leftist mayor of London will be suspended from office for four weeks for likening a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, a British tribunal ruled Friday.

The Adjudication Panel for England, which judges abuse of office by public officials, ruled that Mayor Ken Livingstone had brought his office into disrepute by acting in an “unnecessarily insensitive” manner.

Livingstone, 60, whose history of outspoken campaigning against racism and for underdogs of every kind has repeatedly gotten him into trouble with British governments over the years, said he was considering an appeal.

“This decision strikes at the heart of democracy,” he said. “Elected politicians should only be able to be removed by the voters or for breaking the law. Three members of a body that no one has ever elected should not be allowed to overturn the votes of millions of Londoners.”

Livingstone’s deputy, Nicky Gavron, who will fill in for him if the suspension takes place Wednesday as scheduled, argued that the incident had been “blown out of all proportion” and described the ruling as absurd. Baroness Sally Hamwee, chairwoman of the city’s legislative assembly, said she was “quite taken aback” by the length of the suspension.

The punishment was for an incident that occurred more than a year ago after a publicly funded party at City Hall in honor of former Culture Secretary Chris Smith. The event marked the 20th anniversary of Smith’s coming out as the nation’s first openly gay lawmaker.

Livingstone got into an argument with a reporter for a conservative newspaper, the Evening Standard. The reporter, Oliver Finegold, pointed a tape recorder at Livingstone and asked him how the evening had gone.

“What did you do before? Were you a German war criminal?” Livingstone asked in response.

The nonplused Finegold said he was Jewish and was offended by the remark. “I assumed once he was aware of that he would apologize, the diatribe would cease and that would be the end of the matter,” Finegold wrote Friday in the Evening Standard.

But the mayor didn’t stop. “Well, you might be” Jewish, Livingstone said, “but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard. You are just doing it because you are paid to, aren’t you?”

Before walking away, Livingstone also accused the Evening Standard, owned by Associated Newspapers, of being “a load of scumbags” and “reactionary bigots” with a history “of supporting fascism.”

The mayor said later that he was expressing his honestly held political view of Associated Newspapers, but added that he had not meant to offend the Jewish community.

But the outspoken London leader refused to apologize when a public furor broke out over his comments. The Evening Standard, which had supported the popular mayor through a lengthy falling-out with his own ruling Labor Party, did not publish his remarks the day after the incident, but other newspapers did.

David Laverick, chairman of the tribunal that suspended Livingstone, said he was doing so because the mayor had failed to realize the seriousness of his outburst. Laverick said the complaint should never have reached him, but did so because of Livingstone’s refusal to apologize.

It was that refusal that prompted the Jewish Board of Deputies to lodge the formal complaint that ultimately led to the suspension.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews said it regretted that the episode had reached such a conclusion. But, it added, Livingstone had been “the architect of his own misfortune” by failing to recognize “the upset his comments had caused.” The board said it had never sought anything more than an apology and an acknowledgment that the mayor’s words were inappropriate for “the elected representative of Londoners of all faiths and beliefs.”

The editor of the Evening Standard, Veronica Wadley, was among those Friday who once more called on the maverick mayor to apologize.

But one veteran Labor Party member of Parliament, Gerald Kaufman, doubted that the latest outcry would have much effect on a man whose first job running London was abolished by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s but who later saw it re-created under Labor. He won the post back, despite being cast out from the party until after his victory.

“Perhaps this will just pull him up short a little bit,” Kaufman said. “But who knows if it will? Ken is Ken.”