Mayor Livingstone threatens to sue London evening paper

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, is one man who presumably will not be bidding in the London Evening Standard's Christmas charity auction for Lot 21 - the chance to have dinner with the newspaper's editor Veronica Wadley and the bidder's columnist of choice at the fashionable Wolseley restaurant. If the office gossips are to be believed, given his feud with the Standard, he would be in good company if he did so: the word is that various secretaries and executives fired by Wadley over recent years have been threatening to bid for the prize so that they can attend the dinner and give their former boss a piece of their minds.

Livingstone (pictured above in a rare moment of conviviality with Wadley), were he to follow suit, would be able to choose as his dinner-party columnist Andrew Gilligan, who recently has written a series of stories about the London Development Agency, culminating in a report that the LDA was corruptly pressured to pay a £250,000 grant to a friend of the black mayoral adviser Lee Jasper.

Last week, Livingstone demanded that Wadley fire Gilligan, claiming that a search of LDA records had "demolished" the story. "The release of this information today gives proof of Andrew Gilligan's dirty and mendacious campaign," Livingstone said in a statement. "The '£250,000 payment' was not in fact given to anyone," he added.

But last night Livingstone took the row a stage further, announcing at a reception that he and Lee Jasper were consulting libel lawyers about sueing the Standard and Gilligan. He told guests at the event, hosted by Labour members of the Greater London Authority, that he was prepared to break his personal rule that politicians should never sue. "You dish it out, so you have to be ready to take criticism." But the Standard's report, he said, amounted to character assassination. He strongly defended Jasper who, he said, had played a key role in getting black communities to co-operate with the police to fight gun crime. Two hundred black criminals were in jail as a direct result of his efforts, said the mayor.

If Livingstone wants to bid for that dinner, the online auction closes at mid-day tomorrow. Although the highest bid mysteriously reached £4,000 last week, it was withdrawn after an "administrative cancellation", and this morning it stood at £771.