Web guidance for Boris

WHERE’S Gilligan? Whenever Ken Livingstone committed a minor indiscretion like this he would be roasted by the Evening Standard. Yet when Boris Johnson gets a ticking off from the Greater London Authority’s Standards Committee, you hardly hear a peep.

Of course, the indiscretion isn’t worth getting too het up about, but neither were a lot of the things the Standard used to splash on during it’s anti-Ken crusade. In the post-Ken-vs-Gilligan world you probably aren’t even aware of what Boris’s crime has been. The answer: a dodgy tweet.

Check the agendas for Wednesday’s meeting the Greater London Authority and you will see Boris has been pulled up for using, or at least letting someone else, use the official Mayor of London tweet feed for a bit of Labour bashing.

Wind back through the posts, and there he is apparently celebrating The Sun’s decision to back the Conservatives, just before Gordon Brown’s conference speech in September. The tweet reads: ‘The Sun has got it’s hat on, hip, hip, hip hooray’ and then provided a web link to the newspaper’s editorial.

A scan of the Standards Committee’s agenda – the body meets on Wednesday – reveals how a member of the public complained about this bit of bravado, upset that Boris was using GLA resources for party political sniping. That’s a no-no, according to the official code of conduct. A panel investigated and found no tough sanction was really needed, although it concluded that a letter to Boris from deputy chief executive Jeff Jacobs reminding him that ‘public money should not be used for the promotion of political opinions’ would be advisable. Knuckles rapped.