When I accepted Boris Johnson’s offer of appointment as his community relations advisor and announced this on Harry’s Place, I did so in the full knowledge that I was placing myself in a line of fire beyond that which I was accustomed in many years of activism on the left. Naturally it did not take long for accusations and smears to surface and I was barely able to get my City Hall business cards printed before I found myself as the latest casualty in a media witch-hunt. The Mayor of London has as such accepted my resignation with regret (or so Piers tells me).
The allegations are of both a sexual and financial nature and it should go without saying that there is not a single ounce of truth in any of them. Even the most hardened neo-con blogger should be able to grant me that one sole token courtesy. While I have been instructed to keep my own counsel on the matters until the legal process resolves itself, I would like to place on record that contrary to the claims of certain people, I did not:
- drunkenly place my hand on the knee of an SWP women’s committee member at a socialist picnic in Hackney in 1987
- raise my eyebrows in a suggestive manner while suggesting moving on somewhere else in a bar after Marxism 98
- fail to pay back a grant given by the London Boroughs’ Grants Committee for a cancelled ‘Understanding Palestine through Mime and Dance’ event
I shall fight these Zionist smears with the same zeal with which I once sold papers at my pitch in Elephant and Castle. In any case, my forced departure will now allow me ample time with which to once again fight imperialism online and offline, through the emerging phoney liberal alliance between president in waiting Obama and the Zionist SWP. The Leninist Vanguard has awoken.
