Ken Livingstone defends Lee Jasper

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, fighting to keep his job against the Conservatives' Boris Johnson in the upcoming mayoral election, admitted on Sunday that he hadn't had the best of weeks after his race advisor Lee Jasper was forced to resign following a months-long war of attrition with the Evening Standard and its reporter, Andrew Gilligan, the former BBC radio journalist famous for starting the 'sexed-up Iraq dossier' debacle in 2003.

During the recent flow of reports from the Standard claiming Jasper misused $2.5m of public funds - by directing grants towards cronies - Livingstone had stood by his friend Jasper. But when it was reported last week that Jasper had been bombarding a 50-year-old female company secretary with emails - Jasper said he wanted to 'honey-glaze' her, among other things - Livingstone finally gave in.

"There was not a shred of evidence against Lee till these new emails," Livingstone insisted to Eleanor Mills of the Sunday Times. "The emails were the first thing that broke our internal codes."

So, what about Gilligan's many reports of financial impropriety on Lee Jasper's behalf? "There is no evidence that he did anything wrong," said Livingstone. "I've been on the receiving end of complete inventions by the Standard for 25 years. And when it's Gilligan, given his involvement with David Kelly [the government scientist who turned out to be the primary source for Gilligan's 'sexed up dossier' report, and later committed suicide] and his failure to take proper notes, which came out of the Hutton inquiry - the idea that I am going to suspend or sack someone because Gilligan writes something would be a travesty."