RECLAIM EC1

In the City’s 4 June 2026 Coleman Street common councillor by-election, how do you tell eight unpromising ‘independent’ candidates apart and discover what they stand for? Possibly with difficulty – but we’ve tried to make things a little easier by providing a rundown on all the candidates. The election is due to Sushil Saluja vacating his seat after winning the election – in February this year – to become alder (senior councillor) of the ward.

RANDALL ANDERSON

Randall Anderson was a councillor for Aldersgate for a number of years before failing to be re-elected last year. For reasons best known to himself, he decided to stand in Bassishaw in March 2025, where he lost and was left without a council seat. He is a Barbican resident with no obvious connection to Coleman Street, which (like Bassishaw) is very much a business ward. He is a mason (although not, we understand, a high-ranking one), and when he was a councillor he followed the establishment.

On the positive side, he is diligent, having mastered his brief when he was Chair of Community and Children’s Services Committee (unlike his successor Ruby Sayed). Since leaving the council, he has also been active in residents’ activities as Vice Chair of the Barbican Association and Co-Chair of the Barbican and Golden Lane Neighbourhood Forum, and has used his knowledge of the City Council to guide strategy and help the development of the Neighbourhood Plan.

While far from being an ideal or even suitable candidate, we consider him to be better than any of the others – although as we show beneath, they set a very low bar indeed.

RONNIE BARKER

Ronnie Barker, following in the footsteps of his famous namesake, is something of a comedian, to judge by his campaigning in the councillor elections in Castle Baynard in March 2025.

The main protagonists in that election were the Oxymorons , a bogus political party of 8 pro-establishment candidates, 5 of whom were incumbent councillors, and all of whom were decisively defeated by the Iceni, a group of 8 women candidates following the lead of establishment critic Alder Martha Grekos.

A sideshow in this election was the participation by Alpa Raja (more on her below) and Ronnie Barker, whom we collectively named the Kamikazes due to their having no hope of winning, which they didn’t. In one of our posts covering this election (scroll down the link ), we wrote this about Barker:

Raja has found someone to stand with her in the coming election. He is Ronnie Barker, a self-described “Mergers and Acquisitions Specialist” (but we don’t think that J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs will feel threatened), and – rather cryptically – an “ex-soldier”. (Rank? Unit?)

We’ve heard that he and Raja sent a flyer to voters inviting them to a coffee shop in the ward on Saturday 8/2/25 at 10 am to introduce themselves. Our observer spotted only one person turning up from 10.00 to 10.30. That made two people in total, because Raja herself wasn’t there. We heard afterwards that tables which had been booked for this event had to be released after the first half hour for the use of other customers, as they remained dolefully empty.

In another attempt to engage voters, Barker has set up the “Castle Baynard Community Group” on LinkedIn (below). This is an echo of Saluja setting up the fake “Castle Baynard Business Forum” in his misconceived campaign to become Castle Baynard alder in July 2023. Unfortunately, the number of people comprising Barker’s community appears to be just one according to the LinkedIn page below. Did Raja forget to turn up again? A community of one is an intriguing philosophical concept – like the sound of one hand clapping in Zen – but it isn’t the way to win an election.

The main problem with Barker’s candidacy is that he is, well, a bit strange. In the LinkedIn post below, he supported the loser Saluja in 2023, but also felt it necessary to tell anyone with access to the internet that he had visited the College of Arms “on a number of occasions, and was once snubbed by Christopher Biggins at a birthday buffet, but that’s another story”. Why was a “birthday buffet” being held at the College of Arms? Is Christopher Biggins the actor of that name who appeared in the television series “Porridge”, in which Barker’s more famous namesake starred? (This is getting confusing …) And why did Barker tell the world that he had a grudge against Biggins? That is indeed “another story”, but maybe not one that we all need to know.

Barker’s tendency to veer towards the negative emerges from this short video that he posted on LinkedIn, apparently to support his candidacy. He begins by saying that on the previous night he attended the Lord Mayor’s Banquet – but why is that a reason to vote for him? Within 20 seconds, he mentions that City council mowers “are cutting back the gorse” in Epping Forest, where he films the video, and this “looks quite destructive from one point of view”. By the end of the video he seems to have convinced himself that it’s OK to cut back the gorse, but he doesn’t really sound happy about it. Is he happy about anything?

Our advice to the voters of Coleman Street ward: give this candidate a wide berth. As we noted in our previous post quoted above, there is something odd about Barker. One of those things is that various online sources (see here and here) suggest he was a director of Blackthorn Capital (London) Ltd (company number 11173450) from 2018 to 2021, despite the fact that Companies House lists it as incorporating in 2018 and doing nothing beyond that, before being dissolved via compulsory strike-off in 2019.

The only director of Blackthorn Capital (London) is listed as Robert Brian Barker (born October 1973) – a name similar to but not synonymous with Ronnie Barker, although possibly Ronnie is an army nickname. Ronnie Barker and Robert Brian Barker share an address – 35 Forest Road, Leytonstone, London E11 1JT – as shown on the official Statement As To Persons Nominated both for the current election (see below at end of piece or click on this link) and the previous one in which Barker stood in Castle Baynard last year, and on the incorporation document of Blackthorn Capital (London) Ltd (follow this link and then click on Incorporation PDF; see also immediately below).

Likewise at the bottom of Ronnie Barker’s election website, it states: “Promoted & Published by Robert Barker, 35 Forest Rd, London, E11 1JT” – which does rather make it look like Robert and Ronnie Barker are the same person.

Barker’s current ‘business’ Quantum Capital looks as insubstantial as Blackthorn Capital (London) Ltd, and other businesses he’s listed online as having an involvement with – such as Moreways Group Ltd, which Companies House records suggest were never active operations. We sought but couldn’t find any evidence of Barker having clients or business successes. His financial services experience seems to have been five years as a mortgage broker. The endorsements on Barker’s election website are a few military and livery people, not faces from the financial city.

Barker appears to be bigging himself up because he wants to join and feel part of something special – why he picked on the City of London council and not a ping pong club we’ll probably never know. He doesn’t seem to have any interest or experience in local government and his councillor priorities won’t cut the mustard with electors. “Showing up” and “getting things done” don’t impress as a political strategy for a City of London councillor, although these slogans probably earned him praise in some of his voluntary activities.

And if you want to know a little more, we’ve added information on the lesser known candidates, such as who nominated Barker, in the notes at the end of this piece.*

ALPA RAJA

Whereas Raja stood with Barker in the election in Castle Baynard in March 2025, she is standing against him in the upcoming election in Coleman Street. Neither of them has any evident connection with either ward: they just want to be City councillors.

And Raja very much wants to be one (again). While this will be Barker’s second time to stand  in a City election, it will be her eighth. Six of her previous attempts were unsuccessful. We suspect that’s a record, at least in modern times. Here’s what we wrote about her in one of our posts covering her last election bid (scroll down the link):

Raja has a long history of trying to get elected to the City council. After standing unsuccessfully in five elections in three wards (Billingsgate twice, Castle Baynard twice and Coleman Street once), she was finally accepted by the Oxymorons and elected in Castle Baynard in March 2022.

Grekos, after being elected as alder of that ward in July 2023, used the alder’s prerogative to replace Packham as the ward “deputy” (= most senior ward councillor) with Raja. It isn’t difficult to guess the reason: Packham had been an implacable opponent of Grekos, and Raja was presumably seen to be the least worst of the Oxymorons.

If Raja had followed Grekos’ example of working tirelessly for her constituents and fearlessly holding the Guildhall establishment to account, she would now be well placed to be re-elected, and would surely have been asked by the Iceni to join them.

But she didn’t do those things. Instead, she kept company with two establishment types, Alders Emma Edhem and (as Raja weirdly calls him) “Uncle” Charles Bowman. It’s ironic, incidentally, that Edhem is so committed to the establishment, because the establishment isn’t committed to her: no-one but herself believes she’ll ever make Sheriff, although it isn’t for want of trying on her part.

Raja, having thus disqualified herself from being one of the Iceni, also found herself ejected from the Oxymorons. Packham was presumably resentful that she’d accepted the appointment to his old role of “deputy”. So she’s ended up in a no man’s land. There have long been rumours in the members’ room in the Guildhall that she’s been trying to assemble a third slate, but she doesn’t seem to have got far: to date, only one person is standing with her [who was Ronnie: no-one else joined their slate].

In the Castle Baynard election, Raja and Barker polled second and third last out of 19 candidates. So it won’t take much for them to do better in the upcoming Coleman Street election. But for the sake of the Coleman Street voters, it would be better if they didn’t.

JOHN GRIFFITHS

John Griffiths was one of the pro-establishment Oxymorons in Castle Baynard, where he was a councillor for three years before being booted out by Grekos’ Iceni in March 2025. We wrote this about him in one of our posts covering that election:

Griffiths sent the email below to some voters in the ward on 25 January 2025 using his City of London council email address.

His email raises two issues:

(1) he presents the three non-incumbents as members of the “Castle Baynard Ward Team” through the newsletters linked to his email, which is misleading … ; and

(2) he is consequently using his council email account for electioneering – and thus political – purposes, which is not permitted by the Members’ Code of Conduct.

Paragraph 2(j) of the Code provides that a member must ensure that:

 “when using … the resources of the Corporation, such resources are not used improperly for political purposes (including party political purposes) …”

That provision applies whether or not a member belongs to a political party. Griffiths is listed on the Electoral Commission’s website as the Treasurer of the “Castle Baynard Independents Party”. (All the other party offices, consisting of the Leader, Nominating Officer and Deputy Treasurer, are shown as held by Packham, and the party is registered at Packham’s home address.) If the Oxymorons do use the name of this party on the ballot paper, Griffiths should additionally be caught by the words in parenthesis quoted from the Code.

Griffiths mentions ward surgeries in his email. A flyer for those surgeries prominently displays the names and photographs of all eight of the Oxymorons. It reveals a slight awareness, though, that this is misleading, because (unlike the newsletters) it refers to the “Castle Baynard Ward Team and Councillors”, and omits “CC” (= “Common Councillor”) after the names of Godfrey and Witt). But what are three people who are not councillors in the ward doing in this surgery? The two who are not councillors at all – Godfrey and Witt – have no authority to take up within the council matters raised by constituents. Why are they electioneering (which is all they can be doing, since they aren’t elected) on the council property where the surgeries are held? And shouldn’t Singh, a councillor in another ward, be representing his constituents there?

We think that the Oxymorons are engaging in wishful thinking about holding any surgeries after the election, as the flyer indicates, because we don’t expect them to be elected.

None of this did Griffiths and his fellow Oxymorons any good: Grekos’ Iceni defeated them decisively.

Instead of graciously accepting the will of the electorate, however, Griffiths and four of the other Oxymorons trolled the victorious Iceni online.

Then Griffiths went too far. He turned up to a residents’ Q&A with senior Council members and officers on 10/9/25, where – under the guise of asking a question – he vented his spleen in a long and unhinged rant against those who had defeated him. His thesis seemed to be that he must have lost because of a defect in the electoral system (which was the same one under which he had been elected three years earlier and under which all current members were elected).

It seems not to have occurred to him that he lost because the voters weren’t impressed by the Oxymorons tugging the forelock to the establishment, and they may have been put off by his intense and unsettling manner. For more about this incident, see here.

Griffiths’ election conspiracy theory and his obsession with telling everyone about it struck a jarring note in the Q&A, and on the following day caused Council Leader Chris Hayward to condemn his behaviour in this email to some of the members whom Griffiths had berated:

“I wanted to quickly write to apologise for what you were subjected to during the meeting by an ex-Member. I think, on reflection, that the panel were caught by surprise and the comments that were made about members on the patch are regrettable.

To ensure there is no repeat of such behaviour in future, we will be drawing up rules of engagement prioritising our residents and will be far more vigilant in intervening should respectful behaviours we expect are not adhered to.”

Incidentally, “rules of engagement prioritising our residents” (in fact, limiting engagement solely to residents) had been drawn up before the meeting and were announced at the outset. The panel couldn’t have been “caught by surprise”, because it knew that Griffiths wasn’t a resident. He shouldn’t even have been present. As soon as it became apparent that he was abusing the occasion to verbally attack those who had defeated him, Jacqui Webster as the chair of the session or Hayward as her boss should have intervened immediately to stop him. They did the opposite: they let him speak to the end, and Hayward warmly indulged him. 

8 days later, Hayward’s email quoted above was distributed to all 125 members. On 2/10/25, Hayward sent an email to all members which included the following upgraded apology:

“At our most recent City Question Time in the Castle Baynard Ward, a former member, who is not a resident in the City, attended what was advertised as a resident-only event. That former member made a statement and comments directed at the members for Castle Baynard, several of whom were present, which were inappropriate, offensive and unacceptable. In retrospect, this should have been handled differently, and he should have been prevented from speaking.

I am also clear that that individual should not have been permitted to attend the event, and I have been working with Officers and the members in question to review our processes to ensure that a similar situation will never arise again and that these events are open to residents and elected members only (with the exception of Finance City Question Time, to which business ratepayers are also invited).

I have apologised on behalf of myself and the Corporation to the members concerned and I think it is important that I repeat that apology in writing for the benefit of the whole Court of Common Council.”

So Griffiths is not in good standing even with the Council’s political establishment whom he had supported.

We’re not surprised, though, that he’s trying to get back on the council, because he seems to have a compulsive desire to be involved in politics. And that’s a type of candidate voters should avoid.

ANDREW TYLER

Andrew Tyler is involved with commercial property and in his capacity as Partner at Knight Frank was paid to assist our local authority develop its rogue planning strategies by contributing to a report on the future of office space commissioned by the City of London council in 2023. In a press release about the report, Tyler is quoted as saying:

Employers must deliver the very best workplace experience and amenities for their staff in a more flexible hybrid environment, while at the same time become more sustainable to meet their ESG and Net Zero objectives.

Our recent (Y)OURSPACE research shows that 47% of multi-national firms are looking to replace their corporate HQ in the next three years, with talent attraction and retention their top priority.

This ‘flight to quality’ is driving a supply shortage and competition for the very best space, while also leaving older buildings at risk of becoming stranded assets and requiring significant upgrades. The City needs to be able to quickly deliver more of what works best for employers and create the right conditions for the upgrading and retrofitting of older office stock.

Tyler’s rhetoric immediately became more grist to the mill in the justification of unjustifiable City planning decisions. Although his work at Knight Frank isn’t the only thing that has provided him with an ‘in’ to the council ‘leadership’ headed by Chris Hayward. More recently he has been working at Cushman & Wakefield. That company’s website describes Tyler on a profile page in this way:

Andy has an in-depth knowledge of the central London office market.

His expertise includes advising on all aspects of new office developments and refurbishments, the sale of buildings and sites, pre-letting campaigns and leasing and marketing advice. Previous winner of CoStar’s ‘Dealmaker of the Year’.

Passionate about design, Andy also spent 4 years as part of the BCO’s London Judging Panel providing him with unrivalled insight on office design across London.

Andy is Head of Offices, UK for Cushman & Wakefield.

Andy has been fully involved in a number of major signature office schemes including the likes of Central Saint Giles, White Collar Factory, St James’s Market, 2 Television Centre, Soho Place and Marble Arch Place amongst others.

Given that the White Collar Factory is just a few minutes walk from the City’s Cripplegate ward the building is familiar to many square mile residents, who are more likely to regard it as an example of crass and cynical development designed to maximise the profits from the site rather than ‘a signature office scheme’.

Indeed the current and ongoing wave of dissatisfaction with the City council in Cripplegate dates back to planning permission being granted for Taylor Wimpey’s The Denizen AKA Clarendon Court on the site of Bernard Morgan House. There were a number of conflicts of interest around permission being granted for the development of the site. These included current council ‘leader’ and then planning chair Chris Hayward being a director of Indigo Planning, whose clients included Taylor Wimpey, and James Thomson – the man poised to succeed Hayward as council ‘leader’ – having formerly been deputy chief financial officer and chief operations officer of Cushman & Wakefield, which marketed and sold Bernard Morgan House to Taylor Wimpey. Scroll down our about page for more on this ten year-old scandal.

Other contentious planning permissions, including 1 Golden Lane AKA the Cripplegate Institute, have kept at boiling point resident anger in Cripplegate and other residential wards about the City of London council acting as a rogue planning authority. If Andy Tyler joined the council, which in our view would be to the benefit of square mile property developers and no one else, it would add to these negative perceptions. Item 7 on the agenda for the next full council meeting on 21 May includes the following resolution from the annual wardmotes (scroll down here):

Ward of Cripplegate – 18th March 2026

This Wardmote declares that the residents of Cripplegate Ward have grave concerns about the transparency, fairness and accountability of the City of London Corporation’s current planning process and calls upon the City of London Corporation Court of Common Council to:

(1). prevent those councillors who are members of committees responsible for the Corporation’s extensive property interests from also being members of the Planning and Transportation Committee and, hence, the Planning Applications Sub-Committee, in order to avoid conflicts of interest; [Policy and Resources Committee]

(2). prevent those councillors who have professional associations within the property development industry from also being members of the Planning and Transportation Committee and, hence, the Planning Applications Sub-Committee, to avoid a perception of bias; and[Policy and Resources Committee]

(3). set up an independent design review process within the Planning and Development Division of the Environment Department, in order to ensure that only the highest quality, peer reviewed, architecture is approved by members of the Planning and Transportation Committee and, hence, the Planning Applications Sub-Committee. [Planning and Transportation Committee]

Relations between residents and the City council are currently particularly fraught after the closure of the Golden Lane Leisure Centre. Without City residents there would be no rogue local authority able to grant a greater percentage of planning permissions than anywhere else in the UK (approaching 100% of applications). Therefore it seems possible that not even property developers in Coleman Street would want to risk angering residents further by voting for Tyler – since his election would lead even more residents to demand that the government abolish their local authority AKA the last rotten borough.

Finally Cushman & Wakefield trumpeting Tyler as a one time ‘winner of CoStar’s Dealmaker of the Year’ on his company profile makes him sound more like a Poundshop Donald Trump than someone suitable for election to a UK local authority. We name the persons nominating Tyler in the notes below.** One of them – Rosali Pretorious – is the wife of Alder Greg Jones, who was a Sheriff, aspires to be Lord Mayor and is best known to our readers as the City’s own Ollie Hardy. This connection is another reason not to vote for Tyler. 

PHILIP BALDWIN

Philip Baldwin (born May 1985) stood for Tower Hamlets council as a Conservative in 2018 but failed to get elected. He appears to have trained as a lawyer but doesn’t seem to practice as one. His X account states he writes a column for Gay Times – but he has also written for Conservative Home on how to sustain the City of London. His X account indicates he is a member of the General Synod of the Church of England. Baldwin’s biography appears remarkably similar to that of Edward Lord – who has had a long and disastrous career in square mile politics (scroll down here, here, & here).

Baldwin’s address on his election papers is given as The Spur – according to Hotel Direct: “a selection of modern… one and two bedroom luxury apartments in the heart of the City of London. This is an ideal location for both business or leisure travellers within walking distance of the historic St Paul’s Cathedral, Farringdon and Smithfield and also within a short walk of plenty of fashionable shops, bars and restaurants…”

Baldwin looks like a candidate who would be happy to continue to the City council’s habit of throwing Community Infrastructure Levy and other money at its wealthy friends in the square mile’s Church of England churches, when the funds could be much better deployed elsewhere. Voter beware!***

RICHARD FENNER

Richard Fenner is, according to his LinkedIn profile, Senior Director for Corporate Affairs & Public Policy for Euroclear in the UK. Fenner’s comment on a post about Anglo-Luxembourg financial services dialogue in London sums up why his attempts to attract attention ought to repel voters. Some higher profile individuals are named in the post but he isn’t, so he chips in: “Delighted to participate – a very important corridor for Europe”. We’ve highlighted his comment at the bottom of this screen grab in blue – and feel we need to say no more about Fenner or those who nominated him.

SUYI OPEBIYI

Suyi Opebiyi is according to his LinkedIn profile a financial services professional engaged in tax-efficient investments, custody & securities operations and also a common councillor candidate. He works or worked for Brown Shipley – a private bank for high net worth individuals in Moorgate in the Coleman Street ward. He is described as a colleague on a Brown Shipley webpage from a year or two ago devoted to thoughts on International Men’s Day. His thoughts, particularly on what men can do to stay mentally healthy, make him sound a little like his rival candidate Ronnie Barker:

Who are the men who have had the biggest influence in your life and why?
Muhammad Ali stands out for me. For breaking so many barriers and constantly setting new standards throughout his life against all odds. I find it exemplary that he was able to pull off so many successes in the face of so much adversity during his time. And to do so with such supreme self-confidence will no doubt remain an inspiration to many young boys/men as it was to me.

What three things do you think men can do to stay mentally healthy? 
(1) Physical activity. Get outside and get active. Doesn’t have to be anything spectacular. Regular short jogs, cycling, walks, or even an evening stroll or chats with complete strangers can help keep body and soul together.
(2) Keep an open mind, believe in yourself, and try to do things differently, there isn’t just the conventional way of doing things.
(3) Most of all, be kind and respectful to each and every other person.

Not inspiring and if you want to know about Opebiyi’s nominees scroll down through our notes below.**** That said, breaking with tradition Opebiyi appears to have nominated himself – what are the chances that his proposer shares his name? It’s either a bold move or a desperate one, since it might be interpreted as indicating a lack of support for Opebiyi’s candidacy.

As we stated earlier in this piece, Randall Anderson looks like the best option for Coleman Street voters in their 4 June 2026 by-election. Anderson may not be inspiring but in a ward like Coleman Street, which has a rotten borough sized electorate, let’s hope the majority of voters have the common sense to vote for Anderson to keep patently unsuitable candidates out.

The header shows charcoal-burners (AKA coal men) at work. Coleman Street is believed to have housed the operations of charcoal-burners in the past, who created this fuel by a process of slow combustion.

Notes

*Ronnie Barker‘s LinkedIn lists the typical interests of civic city obsessives – membership of Worshipful Company of Carmen, Guild of Freemen and Honourable Artillery Company. Those who nominated Barker to stand for Coleman Street councillor are:

Alfred Xhameni: who if we have identified the correct individual seems to be a director of Biza Limited and involved with unlicensed restaurants and cafes. It is also appears possible they work or also work as a window cleaner.

Kumar Thakerar: nominated Richard Thomas for Alderman in Coleman Street Ward in February 2026. See our post of 22 January 2026 where we state: “Thomas’ proposer Kumar Thakerar was a subscriber to Saif Masood’s candidature for Coleman Street in March 2022. Search hits for this name land mainly on a director of care homes and services registered in Enfield.”

Ilaz Islami: nominated chancers Camilia Kaerts and Diego Morales in Coleman Street Ward in March 2025 (scroll down here). He also Nominated Richard Thomas for Alderman in Coleman Street ward in February 2026 (scroll down here and here). Islami appears to run a coffee shop in the Coleman Street ward, and to have previously run similar operations elsewhere in London. For more about him see here and here.

Adam Bovingdon: has a property development job at United Trust Bank. For his LinkedIn see here. Note: Katie Wright of United Trust Bank nominated Philip Baldwin in the current Coleman Street councillor by-election.

Christopher Coleman: Wikipedia states a British investment banker and corporate director with this name was born on 25 June 1968: “He is the managing director and group head of banking of N M Rothschild & Sons. He is also the chairman of Randgold Resources.” More recently he seems to have been appointed as Group Head of Sales and Account Management at London Stock Exchange Group – see here. It seems possible this Christopher Coleman could have a business vote in Coleman Street ward, either through a business involvement or a livery company, but he also seems incongruously high profile in financial City terms compared to Barker’s other nominators.

And for anyone curious about Barker’s College of Arms (CoA) fixation, which also provides further circumstantial evidence that his legal name is Robert Barker, the CoA’s April 2024 Newsletter (no. 75) states: “A grant of Arms, Crest and Badge was made to Robert Brian BARKER of Leytonstone, London Borough of Waltham Forest by Letters Patent of Garter and Clarenceux Kings of Arms dated 22 February 2024.”

We recently covered the Golden Lane Estate location shooting in the film Two-Way Stretch, which provided inspiration for Ronnie Barker’s famous namesake’s role in his best known television series Porridge.

**Andrew Tyler was one of the subscribers nominating Tijs Broeke in the  24 March 2022 election for Cheap Ward. Companies House records show Andrew Leslie Tyler (born October 1970) as having four appointments, three of which are still active. Those who nominated Tyler to stand in Coleman Street are:

Rosali Magaretha Pretorius: one of the nominators of Shahnan Bakth and Dawn Wright, CC election Coleman Street March 2025. She is a partner at law firm Simmons & Simmons and her profile on the company website states: “Rosali Pretorius is a partner in our London-based financial markets group. She has more than 25 years’ experience advising users and providers of financial market infrastructure, banks, broker-dealers, and other regulated entities.”

Andrew Petry: is a partner at law firm Simmons & Simmons and his profile on the company website states: “Andrew, a partner based in London, is a finance expert within our Energy, Natural Resources and Infrastructure team. His recent work spans a wide array of sectors including renewables (such as wind, solar, biogas, EfW and green hydrogen), conventional power, PPPs, mining, industrial processing, digital infrastructure and LNG.”

Oliver Irons: is a partner at law firm Simmons & Simmons and his profile on the company website states: “Oliver is a partner in our financial services regulatory practice in London. As a specialist in the regulation of payment services and electronic money, Oliver works with major banks and payment service providers as well as firms looking to get into the payments space. He has a particular focus on advising around the regulatory perimeter and the development and implementation of new products and innovative payment solutions.”

Cem Usta Zorlu: appears to be a hairstylist, who was formerly a director of Re-Style Moorgate Grooming Ltd, and is currently a director of Restyle Barbers Ltd. See his Companies House entry here. He is also the owner of the Usted Barbers trade mark – see here.

James Adam: we weren’t able to identify this subscriber to Tyler’s election but readers might like to provide some information in the comments or to DM us via our web contact form.

***Those who nominated Philip Baldwin to stand in Coleman Street are:

John Benjamin: according to his booking agency for public speakers to Rotary Clubs &c. Easy Speak, this Baldwin subscriber is a retired International Director of Jewellery at Phillips Fine Art Auctioneers, belongs to the Goldsmith’s Company and is a Freeman of the City of London.

Melena John: A 2024 LinkedIn post indicates Melena John may have worked at that time for Deutsche Bank Corporate Bank at their new offices at 21 Moorfields in the Coleman Street ward.

She may or may not also be a trainee Counselling Psychologist of that name currently in her second year of the Doctorate in Counselling Psychology and Psychotherapy by Professional Studies (DCPsych) at the Metanoia Institute, in collaboration with Middlesex University. Scroll down here.

Karen Guenzl: according to RocketReach she is currently a Director – Risk and Internal Controls at Deutsche Bank.

Sophie-Anne Brown: according to her LinkedIn profile she is an Associate in the Projects, Energy & Infrastructure team at Stephenson Harwood of 1 Finsbury Circus London, EC2M 7SH – in the Coleman Street Ward.

Katie Wright: according to her LinkedIn profile she is a Credit Director and Risk Leader at United Trust Bank Limited, who operate from 1 Ropemaker St, London EC2Y 9AW in Coleman Street ward. Note: Adam Bovingdon of United Trust Bank nominated Ronnie Barker in the current Coleman Street councillor by-election.

****Those who nominated Suyi Opebiyi – aside from the candidate himself – to stand in Coleman Street are:

Ahamed Nowshad Mohamed Musthafa: He was a nominator for Richard Hugh Thomas in the Coleman Street Aldermanic election of 5 February 2026. But the odds suggest Musthafa didn’t vote for this one time Bracknell conservative councillor – who quit the tories to join UKIP – since Thomas only got two votes, so clearly the majority of his nominators didn’t support him at the poll (scroll down here). Musthafa is involved with Moorage Retailers Ltd (see here), Fusionend Spices Ltd (see here) and 3N Consultancy & Services Ltd (see here).

Jonathan Croome: is, according to RocketReach, currently a Head of Facilities at Brown Shipley.

Robert Kitchen: is, according to Endole Open, a director at Brown Shipley and has worked at a number of other financial companies (see here).

Andrew Flegg: is, according to his Bleb CV, an experienced technology executive & board-level advisor and Chief Technology Officer (2019 – present) at Alfa Financial Software (Global). He can be heard talking about his career on Spotify here.

Back in February we reported on the outrage around the announcement that Devyani Saltzman would be stepping down from her role as Director for Arts at the Barbican Centre at the end of this month. But while still in post she visited this year’s Venice Biennale. Many readers of this blog will be aware of the protests and turmoil at the Biennale, including the resignation of its jury, mainly triggered by the inclusion of Israel and Russia. 

However, while global coverage of these protests and scandals has been focussed on principled opposition of genocide in Palestine and Ukraine, the paucity of Italian artists in the current iteration of Venice Biennale seems to reflect the fact that they understand that the event is being played for its soft power potential by Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia government and its fascist friends.

The current president of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, is a far-right ideologue who aligns himself and his cultural activities with traditionalist figures from Europe’s interwar fascist and fascist-adjacent ‘cultural’ scenes who took up political positions to the right of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. The likes of Julius Evola (a self-styled super-fascist and traditionalist influenced by René Guénon) and Ernst Jünger (Hitler’s favourite author but a national bolshevik rather than a traditionalist) viewed mass fascist movements such as the nazis and the Partito Nazionale Fascista as too plebeian and insufficiently aristocratic from their self-romanticising perspectives.

Saltzman using the Venice Biennale to promote the Barbican Centre in London on Instagram. This post shows Ibrahim Mahama’s Purple Hibiscus installed at the Barbican.

Unlike the mainstream European far-right, traditionalists often have a positive view of Islam and even convert to it (its key early figure René Guénon did just that, as did Biennale president Buttafuoco more recently).* Much of the information about Buttafuoco’s political evolution is to be found in Italian language sources, but academic historian Mark Sedgwick provides a useful English language summary in his blog post Traditionalist Takes Over At The Biennale:

The… appointment of the Italian Traditionalist Muslim Pietrangelo Buttafuoco… as president of the distinctly avant-garde Venice Biennale draws attention to the career of a major figure on the Italian Traditionalist scene and a prolific writer.

Buttafuoco was born in Sicily in 1963 into a family that supported the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), in which he himself became active as a young man. It is not clear when he became a Traditionalist, but in 2001 he published a collection of his articles as Fogli consanguinei (Kin Pages) with the Edizioni di Ar, which was run by Franco Freda, an Evolian who had created a Gruppo di Ar named in honor of the Gruppo di Ur to which Julius Evola had once belonged. Buttafuoco also contributed to a volume on Evola and Spengler published by the Edizioni di Ar in 2004. He became known as a Muslim in 2015, but had probably converted earlier, to judge from his literary output…

Buttafuoco’s Traditionist book, Cabaret Voltaire. L’Islam, il sacro, l’Occidente (Cabaret Voltaire: Islam, the Sacred, the West) was published in 2008. It attacks modernity and the false worship of rationality and science and the illusions of freedom and democracy in true Guénonian fashion. It further argues that Islam is misunderstood as a result of what is written in the “false liberal” and American-dominated press, and is in fact where one can still find “the sacred, the primordial forces of nature, the original bond.”

Following this came a somewhat different type of book on woman and how to seduce them, Fìmmini. Ammirarle, decifrarle, sedurle (Women: Admire them, decipher them, seduce them), before Buttafuoco returned to Sicily in 2011 with Il lupo e la luna (The Wolf and the Moon), in which a young Sicilian is captured by the Turks and brought up by the Sultan as a military commander. He later returns to Sicily and comes into conflict with his faithfully Catholic brother…

It is not clear that Buttafuoco has succeeded in making the Italian right more sympathetic towards Islam. It is clear, though, that his Islam has sometimes been a problem for his own political career. After the MSI in which he started his political career had become the Alleanza Nazionale (AN) in 1995 and the AN had merged into Silvio Berlusconi’s Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL), Buttafuoco joined the Lega Nord, previously allied to the AN. Giorgia Meloni, later Italian Prime Minister, who had also been a prominent member of AN and PdL, is said to have vetoed Buttafuoco’s attempt to stand as the Lega Nord candidate for the post of Governor of Sicily in 2015, given that having a Muslim stand for that post would send all the wrong signals. Keeping a little quieter about Islam may have improved Meloni’s view of Buttafuoco when it came to the Bienale.

Saltzman (right) Instagram post about Venice Biennale showing her with Emma Ridgway (left). Saltzman hadn’t tagged these posts at the time of writing and we haven’t identified the person in the centre (if any readers know who this is please comment below or PM us via our contact form).

A broader perspective on what’s been happening to the Venice Biennale can be found in the essay Laboratory Italy: The Meloni Government and Postfascist Intellectuals by Marco Baravalle in the Winter 2025 issue of Field: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism:

When it comes to culture and art institutions, however, aided by a clumsy recovery of Gramsci and the theory of cultural hegemony, the government has begun to “hegemonize” all available seats. From the public TV, renamed “TeleMeloni”, to museums, theaters, and the Venice Biennale. The current Minister of Culture, a well-groomed journalist named Alessandro Giuli, boasts in his curriculum his youthful militancy in Meridiano Zero, a neo-Nazi formation with esoteric-pagan tendencies. Before being appointed, Giuli was assigned to the direction of the MAXXI, Italy’s leading contemporary art museum. He will not be remembered for anything other than inviting two idols of Italian trash TV (beloved by the right), who engaged in a long conversation with vulgar and openly sexist tones, provoking protests from the museum staff. Fratelli d’Italia (Meloni’s party) also imposed Luca Fusco as the director of the Teatro di Roma. “Vogliamo Tutt’Altro,” a network of theater workers formed in response to this blitz, points out that in the theaters directed by Fusco, female directors and playwrights invited are less than 7%, while authors under 40 account for just 2.5%.

Despite this rush toward cultural hegemony, there is one fact. The government recently cut 90% of the funding promised to the Ministry of Culture. It has thus aligned itself with a historical trend of underfunding the cultural sector, this time coupled with a concurrent surge in military spending. In Venice, the situation is perhaps even more complex. For over a year now (since early 2024), there has been an assembly of self-organized art workers called Biennalocene. It is an almost unique example of artistic autonomy, as it was born out of a performance (co-curated by the Institute of Radical Imagination and Sale Docks), which developed into a real assembly against the endemic precarious working conditions of the city’s cultural workers. In the meantime, the government appointed writer Pietrangelo Buttafuoco as president of the Biennale. Years ago, during a television appearance, he performed a monologue about Piazzale Loreto, the square in Milano where Mussolini’s body, his partner’s, and those of several fascist leaders were hung (upside down) after the Liberation. Buttafuoco’s indignant argument was: “look at what Italians are capable of!”. Now, while desecrating a corpse is never a source of pride, wouldn’t it be more urgent to continue asking the same question in relation to the invention and the affirmation of Fascism?

The Biennale under Buttafuoco’s leadership, so far, has shown a double face. On the one hand, a complete alignment with Meloni’s Zionist agenda; on the other, some choices not in line with the fears of a reactionary shift. One example of the first case is the response of the Venetian foundation to the mobilization of ANGA (Art Not Genocide Alliance), an international campaign that called for the withdrawal of the Israeli pavilion from the exhibition. The goal was achieved, but only thanks to pressure and a direct action during the opening of the exhibition, when more than two hundred pro-Palestinian activists flooded the Giardini. [this refers to the previous Biennale, not the current one] For its part, the Biennale did not even waste a word in solidarity toward the Palestinians, as it had rightly done toward Ukrainians, condemning the Russian invasion. The Biennale had limited itself to responding laconically that it was not in its power to exclude any country, leaving the burden of political positioning to Gennaro Sangiuliano (now former culture minister of the Meloni government) who labeled ANGA’s request as an “Unacceptable diktat”, reiterating Italy’s and the Biennale’s “solidarity with Israeli artists and citizens”.

Baravalle goes on to suggest the Venice Biennial ‘as an institution, remains completely closed to real alliances with workers, movements, and subaltern subjects, but the curatorial choices move in the direction of meeting the demands of the global art circuit of liberal democracies…’

Our take is somewhat different, we see the current biennale as propaganda of a type that many involved in the culture industry are incapable of easily identifying as fascist because they are not familiar with traditionalist ideology and the far-right ideologues associated with it. Many of those involved in the art world are probably also unaware of the historical alliances between white supremacists and black nationalists – such as that between the UK National Front and the US Nation of Islam in the 1980s, with both parties ideologically ‘uniting’ around their desire for separate development from each other in a broad front of racists of all colours.

Saltzman (left) Instagram post about Venice Biennale showing her with Zoé Whitley (right).

While we don’t think art world figures from the global majority – or for that matter culture industry white liberals – would have involved themselves with Buttafuoco if they’d been aware of his his far-right ideology, he’s nonetheless successfully exploited a good number of them for his own ideological ends. This includes Saltzman who was at the biennale representing the Barbican Centre and the City of London council which owns, runs and massively subsidises it.**

The City of London council has a history of appeasing fascism (and inviting nazi appeasers like Neville Chamberlain to address it) and being unable to recognise Italian fascists when they come to London to hold events at its Guildhall HQ. Our guess is that the City council was unaware of what was going on in Venice and was thus unable to warn Saltzman about the nature of the event. A Barbican board that isn’t stuffed with City councillors and is autonomous of our local authority is required to end the non-stop scandals at this arts centre (which also, of course, include Saltzman’s departure).

Saltzman Instagram post about Venice Biennale, showing work by Lubaina Himid that fits well with Pietrangelo Buttafuoco’s far-right traditionalist ideology, although the artist wouldn’t have been aware of that when she made it, and Saltzman wouldn’t have known this when she posted it.

Notes

*It is not just traditionalists who embrace Islam, some hardcore neo-nazis have converted, while maintaining their nazi beliefs. The most notorious among these is probably David Myatt. See for example the following abstract from the essay Secret Identities in the Sinister Tradition: Political Esotericism and the Convergence of Radical Islam, Satanism, and National Socialism in the Order of Nine Angles by Jacob C. Senholt:

The Order of the Nine Angles (ONA), a Satanist group which for the last three decades has moved in and out of the public sight, while its main ideologist David Myatt has actively participated in violent neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorist groups, hoping to bring down the “old order”. A manual on Aryan revolution by Myatt inspired nail-bomber David Copeland’s deeds, and a text by Myatt defending suicide attacks was featured on Hamas’ website. Both his Nazism and Islamism, the chapter demonstrates, are however merely instruments for the ONA’s underlying sinister esoteric plots, ultimately aiming to create an “Imperium” based on a species of satanic god-men. Myatt’s writings contain a blueprint for fusing disparate ideologies such as National Socialism, Satanism and Radical Islam, resonating with similar ideas in the larger context of religion and politics—such as the critique of modernity and the West as it has been presented both by the European radical Right and by fundamentalist Muslims—which makes it potentially dangerous to ignore a group like the ONA…

**On LinkedIn Saltzman liked Coline Milliard’s gullible post about this year’s Venice Biennale, which began:

It’s easy to be cynical about the Venice Biennale’s opening week: the sheer glut of art, the flamboyant excesses, the inevitable compromises – the apparent futility of hopping from church to palazzo when the world hurts so hard.

But Venice also has a way of puncturing cynicism. I found myself looking for moments of grace – and found many.

The late curator Koyo Kouoh’s theme, In Minor Keys, was a powerful invitation to pause and seek out the subtle and the overlooked. Anchoring the show in two giant novels of the 20th century, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, felt programmatic. It proposed magical realism not as a style, but as a tool – a way to harness imagination to cope with the harshness of reality and, perhaps, to reinvent it too.

Traditionalism, of course, in its own magical realist way attempts to reinvent reality into a fascist shape – such as a swastika or a uruz (strength) rune. Likewise, rather than accepting an ‘invitation to pause and seek out the subtle and the overlooked’ it would be more prudent to confront the jackbooted threat immediately before us.

Below: Saltzman’s LinkedIn profile showing her as having liked Coline Milliard’s naive Venice post.

Three months ago we noted a reference to the City and Guilds (C&G) sell off scandal during a meeting of the General Purposes Committee of Aldermen – and added a footnote on it here. The scandal hasn’t gone away but as what we quoted from the council meeting illustrates, our local authority has attempted to keep its discussions of the matter private.

Last month The Guardian ran a story about the ongoing C&G scandal. Fee hikes, big bonuses, then bosses exit: the curious case of City & Guilds privatisation. Sale of vocational training brand and million-pound executive pay deals now subject to Charity Commission inquiry by Simon Goodley, 19 April 2026, provides a good summary of the matter.

That said, it’s a pity The Guardian has yet to delve into the involvement of the City of London council and its livery companies on the C&G board. The City council’s role did not include monitoring C&G commercial activities but members must have known about the privatisation plan. Apparently nobody intervened despite the obvious risks to the charitable purpose of C&G.

Last month the C&G Foundation members voted for a motion demanding an independent inquiry into the sale, but the C&G board/council members voted against the same resolution in their separate meeting. FE Week reported on this as follows:

City & Guilds Foundation members have backed an independent inquiry into the sale of its commercial awarding business, after an action group refused to “accept secrecy”.

At the foundation’s annual meeting, members voted in favour of the Save City & Guilds Action Group’s resolution to launch an inquiry into “all aspects” of the sale of the business to PeopleCert last year.

About 100 attendees, including the charity’s advisory council and a wider group of members, heard the statement that outlined “grave concern” about the decision-making of trustees, large post-sale bonuses to senior executives, and transparency.

FE Week understands 67 of the 100 attendees supported the resolution, which would require the inquiry to be overseen by three councillors and be completed within six months.

The meeting, held at Drapers’ Hall in the City of London, over-ran by two hours.

Attendees said many members, including representatives from City & Guilds’ founding livery companies, expressed frustration to trustees about the sale…

In a separate bi-annual meeting of the charity’s advisory council, the same resolution for an independent inquiry did not pass, with a minority (six) understood to have voted in favour.

The council includes about 50 councillors who are either elected, co-opted from industry or appointed by the City of London’s livery companies – although it is unclear how many attended.

Inquiry vote backed as City & Guilds members demand answers. Trustees face anger over commercial-arm sale amid claims that concerns were ‘brushed aside’ by Josh Mellor, FE Week, 15 April 2026.

Understandably, the FE Week coverage doesn’t mention that the livery companies provide the unelected members of Common Hall, the third and lowest chamber at the City of London council – or that the Lord Mayor of London is not just the ceremonial head of the square mile’s local authority, but also the capstone of its livery guilds. However, a page on the C&G’s website (which appears to have been taken off-line – but is archived here) explains that:

The City and Guilds of London Institute (CGLI)was founded in 1878 by the City of London Corporation [the City of London council] and 16 Livery Companies… Today, 108 Livery Companies are classed as Founder Members for the CGLI.

The City & Guilds Group continues to have a close relationship with the Livery Companies today:

• 18 Livery Companies have a representative on the Council of The City and Guilds of London Institute
• Livery Companies play an active role in electing Trustees of The City and Guilds of London Institute, who ensure our charitable objectives are met…

We maintain our connection with the City of London Corporation to this day. Currently: 

• The Lord Mayor holds an ex-officio place on the Council of The City and Guilds of London Institute
• CGLI holds 22 voting places at the City of London Corporation elections*

What is of interest here is not who currently represents the City council on the C&G board but who was on it in the period during which its ‘commercial arm’ was sold off. Obviously Alastair King was Lord Mayor at this point in time and so had an ex-officio place on the board. An archived City council webpage suggests that its other representatives in 2025 were Henry Colthurst, Greg Jones and Florence Keelson-Anfu. Agenda item 4 of the General Purposes Committee of Aldermen of 3 December 2024 states that Greg Jones was appointed as a City council representative to the C&G board from the end of that year until April 2026 – see this archived page from the City council website. It seems Colthurst, like Jones, is no longer on the board – according to the City council website Keelson-Anfu currently still sits on it, while King has been replaced by the current Lady Mayor Sue Langley.

The members of the City council who are most directly implicated in the C&G scandal do not inspire confidence. Let’s start with ex-Lord Mayor Alastair King. We covered King’s role in promoting Guavapay before its suspension by the Financial Conduct Authority in early October last year. As far as we know, King has said nothing publicly about Guavapay over the last eight months, but Compliance Corylated has followed up on our research and provided an even more thorough and damning portrait of the involvement of King and other councillors with Guavapay – and its frontman Elkhan Nasibov – than we did:

Schmoozing the City

Elkhan Nasibov, meanwhile, is well connected within the City of London Corporation, having private “catch-ups” with councilmen, aldermen and even the Lord Mayor of London. He received the Freedom of the City of London Award in 2024 and the Lord Mayor’s Award in 2025.

Guavapay sponsored events, such as the annual London Transport Dinner and Auction and the Eid-Al-Fitr dinner, and joined the City of London Corporationʼs overseas delegation to the Gulf region in May 2025.

Elkhan Nasibov developed a connection with Alastair King, Lord Mayor of London for 2024/25, who received a “box of nuts and delights and pot of honey, pink pashmina and tea glass set from Azerbaijan”, among other things, according to the declaration of gifts…

Elkhan Nasibov presented an Azerbaijani rug to Alastair King at Mansion House in early 2025.

Elkhan Nasibov accompanied the Lord Mayor of London’s official delegation to the Gulf region.

Guavapay played in the Lord Mayor’s Cup charity tournament in June.

In August, the Lord Mayor of London attended the opening of Guavapay’s office in London.

Last October, Elkhan Nasibov also received Lord Mayor’s Award for “outstanding leadership in cross-border financial technology”.

King also opened Guavapay’s offices in Monument, London. The location shares its registered address with three other UK-based entities associated with Orkhan Nasibov: Cardex Solutions, Tainotech Holding Ltd, and Fly Now Pay Later (currently known as Guavapay Credit Intermediary Services)…

Through the City of London events that he attended, Elkhan Nasibov was also photographed with politicians, including current Mayor of London Sadiq Khan; Labour government minister Stephen Doughty; and former Conservative prime minister Theresa May.

Guavapay sponsored Lord Mayor’s Eid al-Fitr dinner and was photographed with the current Mayor of London,Sadiq Khan.

Elkhan Nasibov was photographed with Mayor of London again at a tea party at Mansion House.

He shared these photographs on social media — particularly on LinkedIn — showcasing his connections with high-profile figures. According to his posts, he spoke on behalf of Guavapay, sharing his perspective as chief compliance officer…

Even the FCA?

In 2024, the Payments System Regulator (PSR) — which has since been absorbed into the FCA — found that 11% of customer transactions at Guavapay were authorised push payment (APP) scams. This rate is nearly 44 times higher than that of the second worst performing firm.

Yet despite being flagged up in the regulatorʼs fraud data, Guavapay executives rubbed shoulders with the FCA for years — attending its payments roundtable on the “competition impacts of big tech in retail financial services” in 2022, for example.

More recently, Elkhan Nasibov attended the City of London’s Audit and Risk Committee 2025 annual dinner, at which FCA chief operating officer Emily Shepperd was the keynote speaker.

Guavapay: Small EMI with a sprawling network by Niece Prayoonrat, Compliance Corylated, 17 March 2026. See the original here.

Given the way in which Guavapay played King – and other members of the City of London council, including its ‘leader’ Chris Hayward – to create the appearance of connection to more substantial political figures, it seems unlikely King was suited to overseeing governance as a member of the C&G board.

What we know about the other City councillors on the C&G board around the time of the sell off also makes us wonder about their suitability for the role. We’ve tended to focus on Greg Jones‘s mishaps at the City council, but back in 2023 we gave him some rather more sober coverage as background to a then current story:

On 16 July 2020 there was a Bench Table (ie a meeting) of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. Item 9 on the agenda concerned approval of the election of new Inner Temple Barrister Governing Benchers, as recommended by the Bencher Nomination Committee and approved by the Executive Committee. There are 327 Governing Benchers of the Inner Temple Inn of Court, who are responsible for “deciding the policy of the Inn, managing the property, and supervising finances”.

Two of the successful candidates, Alderman Gregory Jones and Common Councillor Ruby Sayed, are Farringdon Without ward councillors and members of the City of London Corporation. Their candidate submissions, and supporting statements from their nominators, are included in the Agenda reports pack for the meeting.

Alderman Jones was keen to state his achievements using his local authority role to support the interests of the Inner Temple:

“IT is the only Inn entirely within the City. For the last 8 years I have represented its interests as Councillor and now Alderman in various matters e.g.: overturning the Tudor Street closure; Thames Tide Way noise disturbances and the Garden Bridge. In 2017 I created an election winning slate with four IT members who now head key City Committees. In particular I helped secure Master Sells as chairman of Streets & Walkways and onto the new Criminal Court works project. During COVID19, I’m assisting the IT leadership lobbying over rates and chambers support. I have given guidance on nurturing key City contacts………………… I will do these things regardless. However, being a Bencher would give me more authority with City members in my representations on behalf of IT………..Practically speaking, it also would enhance the experience I could offer to City guests to Inn events”

The Treasurer of the Inner Temple, Guy Fetherstonhaugh, was a proposer for both Corporation candidates. As a KC whose areas of expertise include development agreements, easements and restrictive covenants, Fetherstonhaugh was in no doubt about the advantages that can be gained by cultivating local authority councillors:

“Inner Temple (the only Inn entirely within the City) is at the heart of Greg’s ward, whereas by contrast Lincoln’s Inn sits outside the City Corporation. It would be of considerable assistance to have in Greg a Bencher who would be prepared to use his aldermanic support to promote the Bar and Inner Temple with the City……..

Being a Bencher of the Inner Temple would give Greg more authority in his representations on behalf of Inner Temple with members of the City Corporation – many of whom are quite status-driven. On the practical side too, when Greg is encouraging people such as Christopher Hayward or others from the City whom we have made Honorary Benchers to attend Inn events, Greg’s elevated status as Governing Bencher would assist………………

Bench Master Charles George KC was also a cheerleader for Alderman Jones, stating “I write to express my enthusiastic support for Gregory Jones QC to become a governing bencher. He is of the utmost integrity, and can be relied upon to play a full part in the Inn’s affairs, where in particular his knowledge of environmental and planning law are likely to be of considerable assistance, quite apart from his role as an Alderman”

Given that Jones is in the pipeline to be a future Lord Mayor, he may well turn up as a member of the C&G board once again in the near future. We’ve covered Henry Cothurst fairly often but never in great detail – for example see here and here (scroll down) – we’d certainly like to hear his account of his role in the C&G sell off. Florence Keelson-Anfu has a considerably lower profile at the City council than the other three figures we’ve covered in relation to the C&G scandal. What coverage we’ve given Keelson-Anfu has been mainly in relationship to her failure to correctly complete and update her register of interests, and her poor attendance record at council meetings (scroll down here).

The fact that the City council appears to treat appointments of its members to ‘outside bodies’ rather lightly is a good reason to stop the practice. Nonetheless our local authority and those it appoints should be held to account for any governance failures at other organisations which have had square mile councillors inflicted upon them – and they and it need to come clean and be transparent about what happened around the C&G sell off.

The header shows Alastair King and his wife Florence King.

Notes

*The City and Guilds office address is 5-6 Giltspur Street, EC1A 9DE, a road which is partly in Farringdon Without ward and partly in Farringdon Within ward. The City’s ward boundaries map shows the C&G office address as being in Farringdon Without. This suggests that the currently elected City councillors who may have received political support from C&G via its undemocratic business votes are: Gregory Jones KC (addressed above), George Christopher Abrahams, Gregory Alfred Lawrence Charles Edward Lord, Paul Nicholas Martinelli, Wendy Mead, Suzanne Ornsby KC, Ruby Sayed, Oliver Sells KC, Stuart Peter James Thompson and William Upton KC.

The City’s Estate Annual Report and Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31 March 2025 in Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements addressing 2024/25 transactions disclosures where members held positions of control or significant influence in related parties to City’s Estate notes that: “The City Corporation nominated four Members to the City & Guilds London Institute, which leases premises for which rent and service charges were receive (sic)…Rent and service charges received by City’s Estate.” See page 58 here.

In our last post we wrote: “(Edward) Lord boasts about being the City Council’s “lead member” for sport since 2022. (See Lord’s absurd personal website.) So where was Lord when services at the Council’s only leisure centre were collapsing? Nowhere to be seen as far as we can tell. Lord should be immediately sacked as “lead member” for sport. That decision is in the hands of Chris Hayward, the Council Leader, who is a stranger to principle, so will take the decision only if it is politically expedient for him.”

Since then the agenda for the Policy & Resource Committee meeting of 7 May 2026 has appeared online. Item 9 is ‘Lead Members’ and a document attached to it reveals that Edward Lord is slated to be retained as Lead Member for Sport despite having served a maximum term in the post. According to this document the decision was made following ‘officer assessment and Policy Leadership team consideration’. It will probably be rubber stamped at the meeting of 7 May – although there is an outside chance that ongoing protests by City residents against the closure of Golden Lane Sport & Fitness will lead to some dissension on the matter.

Reappointing Lord will send City residents the message that those at the Guildhall don’t care about them or their views. Lord shares council ‘leader’ Chris Hayward’s delusions about the City council operating on an international stage, as is evident from Lord’s pitch to be reappointed as Lead Member for Sport, in which Lord expresses no meaningful support for community level sport in the City – this pitch can be found in another document appended to agenda item 9:

I wish to apply for a final one-year term as Lead Member for Sport, to support delivery of the City Corporation’s Sport Strategy and transition into its next phase. In this role, I have acted as a central Member point of contact, providing strategic oversight, external representation, and a sounding board for officers and fellow Members across the Corporation’s sport engagement programme.

My experience spans over a decade of senior leadership in sport governance, including as Chair of Swim England, Senior Independent Director of the British Basketball League, and roles with the FA, Middlesex CCC, and the Sport & Recreation Alliance. As Lead Member, I have strengthened relationships with domestic and international governing bodies, supported major events, and helped position the City as a “Global City of Sport” in line with the current strategy’s objectives.

A further year would enable me to complete key priorities already in hand. These include supporting the Policy Chairman’s engagement around the FIFA World Cup 2026 in the USA; developing a clear and deliverable income generation programme for sport; and ensuring successful delivery of the City’s involvement in the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games. I am also working alongside the Head of Sport to progress strategic relationships with new partners, including Leyton Orient FC and other sector leaders.

Importantly, I would use this final year to support succession, actively working with Members interested in the role to ensure continuity of knowledge, relationships, and strategic direction.

Aside from Lord remaining invisible when services at the City’s only leisure centre were collapsing, this lobbyist’s lines about having ‘helped position the City as a “Global City of Sport” in line with the current strategy’s objectives’ are delusional. As a tiny – abeit very wealth – local authority, the City of London should be focused on delivering a high level of service for community sports on an ongoing basis – not overseeing the managed decline of its only leisure centre and then closing it unnecessarily a long time ahead of a largely unnecessary refurbishment.

What is most ominous in Lord’s pitch are this lobbyist’s words about ‘developing a clear and deliverable income generation programme for sport’. Those who are familiar with City politics know that Lord is a neo-liberal and that as a previous chair of Corporate Services, Lord presided over a disastrous staff “restructuring” – scroll down to notes here. Lord’s plans to replace community facilities with income generating sports infrastructure are likely to be just as disastrous – the deliberate and managed running down of the leisure centre was merely the start of this process.

Regular readers of this blog will know that we are not enamoured with Lord’s rival for the post of Lead Member for Sport Karina Dostalova (see the 7 May meeting agenda item 9 documents linked to above). That said, from the perspective of residents she would be massively preferable to Lord, whose reappointment would be yet another Guildhall slap in the face to those who live in the City.

In recent weeks, we’ve posted on this blog more frequently than usual to cover the high number of scandals generated by the City of London Council, including its continuing failure to undertake a timely renovation of its relatively few and dilapidated social housing units, its failed assessment by the Regulator of Social Housing, its mishandling of the removal of the Freedom of the City from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (which is scandal on a national scale), its weaselling out of continuing to provide day care for small children at Aldgate School, its bestowing awards on the elected members responsible for these and other failures, its Lady Mayor behaving  crassly like the social climber she is and, what is worse, promoting with the Alder Sheriff the Council’s policy of appeasement of the genocidal Chinese government, its mishandling of the Guild of Young Freemen scandal, its shafting residents over the closure of the Golden Lane leisure centre then trying to spin its way out when caught on ITV News reports and its generally replacing truth with spin.

By way of relief from these weighty matters, we turn to the Council’s internal elections to various committees that were held during its meeting on 23/4/26. These elections aren’t important, because the committees only exist to give its 125 elected members something to do. Political “power” is held and abused by a clique of members within the governing Policy and Resources Committee. We report, though, on the fortunes of 8 members in these elections, as their stories illustrate what is fundamentally wrong with this council.

Edward Lord

Councillor Charles Edward Lord OBE JP was a malevolent micro influencer within the City of London Council for more than two decades, as documented here. Lord is still malevolent and still on the Council, but after a protracted downfall – having failed to be re-elected to the governing Policy and Resources Committee in April 2023 and to be elected as Chief Commoner in October 2025 – Lord’s influence has dropped from micro to zero, as proved by failing to be elected any of the three committees for which this loser stood in the Council meeting on 23/4/26. Those committees were Corporate Services (of which Lord had previously been Chair, and had in that capacity presided over a disastrous staff “restructuring” – scroll down to notes here), the Barbican Centre Board (seen as prestigious within the Council) and the Freedom Applications Sub-Committee (which faces challenges that would be better addressed without Lord on board).

These latest election results prove the power of the goddess Nemesis. All that malice and bullying which Lord directed especially at brave women who challenged the Guildhall establishment has rebounded with repeated failings to be elected to committee positions that normal people regard as trivial but that status-seekers obsess over.

Switching from Pagan mythology to Christian theology, Lord recently broke the Ninth Commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” (Exodus 20:16). Lord should know that one, having once aspired to be ordained as an Anglican priest. Lord no longer has that aspiration, which is just as well, since the crumbling institution of the Church of England doesn’t need any more problems. Lord breached this Commandment by falsely claiming in the non-public session of a committee meeting that Philip Woodhouse (who had defeated Lord in the election for Chief Commoner) was using his phone during the meeting to send information to this blog. Woodhouse made a complaint, as a result of which Lord had to eat humble pie by apologising (not for the first time) in the non-public session of a recent meeting of the committee. We can, incidentally, confirm the falsity of Lord’s claim; Woodhouse wasn’t sending information to this blog, nor is he the source of this story.

There is, though, nothing wrong with members sending information to this blog in the public interest, which is an interest that the secretive, mason-influenced City Council serves so badly. Officers in the Town Clerk’s department are making comically desperate attempts to tighten the security of documents that it classifies – often wrongly – as “non-public”, but they’re wasting their time. A primary school pupil could work around their clumsy efforts: hasn’t it occurred to them that an elected member who wants to serve the public interest can simply take a photo of the pages of the relevant document on their private phone and send the photos to us? We can retype the text of the document to work around any electronic watermarks. We won’t publish things that should properly be private, but there are far fewer of those than the Council thinks, and they are (by definition) not of interest to the public.

When aspiring to be ordained, Lord was required by the Bishop of Southwark to suspend activity as a freemason (although bizarrely only until “Easter Sunday 2032”). Now that aspiration is over, Lord’s current register of interests reveals that Lord is back to the brotherhood and its (self-described) “peculiar system of morality”, in which “truth” is part of the theory but ignored in practice.

Lord boasts about being the City Council’s “lead member” for sport since 2022. (See Lord’s absurd personal website.) So where was Lord when services at the Council’s only leisure centre were collapsing? Nowhere to be seen as far as we can tell. Lord should be immediately sacked as “lead member” for sport. That decision is in the hands of Chris Hayward, the Council Leader, who is a stranger to principle, so will take the decision only if it is politically expedient for him. During the Chief Commoner campaign last autumn, Lord murmured about not standing again as a councillor at the next elections in 2029. Lord is a frequent stranger to truth, though, so in the event of standing again in three years’ time, it would be worth encouraging good candidates to contest that election and finally oust Lord for the good of the City.

Simon Duckworth

Another masonic councillor, Simon Duckworth OBE DL, failed in yet another attempt to be re-elected to the governing Policy and Resources Committee on 23/4/26. He’s a sad case of someone one who doesn’t know when it’s time to go. Some years ago, he had dreams of becoming an Alder, but they came to nought. He did become Deputy Chair of Policy and Resources, then dropped to being one of the Vice Chairs, then dropped off the committee altogether. He stood again for this committee, unsuccessfully, in 2023, 2024, 2025 and now in 2026. There’s a pattern there that only Simon appears not to see.

James Tumbridge

Yet another mason, Councillor James Tumbridge, who is bizarrely also the Attorney-General of the Chagos Islands Government-in-Exile (there are a lot of bizarre things in this Council), also failed to be re-elected to the governing Policy and Resources Committee. We don’t know why, nor do we care.

Henry Pollard

Yet one more mason, Councillor Henry Pollard, failed to be re-elected to the governing Policy and Resources Committee in the Council meeting on 23/4/26. At the beginning of that meeting, he solemnly handed over his badge of office to mark the end of his year as Chief Commoner. The only part of this role which requires any skill – as most of it consists of attending dinners – is dealing informally with member on member complaints. With his background in the lodge, where a good chap is always a good chap regardless of what he does, Pollard was predictably useless at dealing with complaints effectively. You’d think his fellow masons might have given him more votes in this election to a committee that he sat on ex officio for the last year, but Council masons aren’t nice even to each other. The pernicious influence of freemasonry in this Council lies not in masons voting for each other, which does happen to a certain extent, but in their “values” of unity, hierarchy and secrecy corrupting the entire civic culture, so that most members behave like masons even if they aren’t.

Irem Yerdelen 

Councillor Irem Yerdelen, who can’t be a mason in the lodges of the above councillors because she’s a woman, also failed to be re-elected to the governing Policy and Resources Committee. She must have got establishment backing to have been voted onto that committee in April 2025, but didn’t get it this time, perhaps because she hadn’t been useful enough. We can’t think of a single thing she’s done during the last year.

Leyla Boulton

We mentioned in a footnote to a recent post that:

we’ve heard that Leyla Boulton is canvassing members to be elected to the governing Policy and Resources Committee at the next Council meeting. She talks the talk of reform, but walks the walk to conform, so the establishment might encourage its supporters to vote for her, just as it got them to vote for her officer-subverted motion that enabled it to kick a significant democratic reform at least three years down the road (which, in political terms, equals infinity).

As usual, our prediction  turned out to be correct: she was elected to that committee – possibly replacing Yerdelen as a more useful token woman, alongside the evergreen Caroline Haines (scroll down the link to the ancient tree bit). Boulton’s fakery should go down well with many elected members, who abide by the practice of fakery themselves.

Jo Hayes

Councillor Josephine Hayes, who – in the tradition of professional politicians – has been monstrously disloyal to the person without whom she would never have been elected to the Council, polled only 16 votes in her failed bid to be elected to the governing Policy and Resources Committee. She presumably got the votes of herself and maybe some from the 7 other former Iceni, who have also been monstrously disloyal to the person without whom they would never have been elected to the Council. We wonder where the other votes came from. It’s likely that she realised she had no chance of being elected, but as a life long Liberal Democrat (until she was expelled from the party), losing elections must be second nature.

Madush Gupta

Within months after being first elected, Councillor Madush Gupta gave Council Leader Chris Hayward a pen as a Christmas present.  Last year Gupta spoke in a Council meeting about his magical money tree. Neither his crude attempt at ingratiation nor his magical money tree helped him in the committee elections on 23/4/26. He failed to be re-elected to the Investment Committee, of which he was the Deputy Chair – the committee members must have really not liked him. He also failed to be elected to the Freedom Applications Sub-Committee, where his presence, like Lord’s, wouldn’t have helped this sub-committee do anything as “radical” as removing the Freedom from paedophiles and their friends as well as men who molest adult women. 

Councillors like these make a vivid case for the abolition of this Council. That may come sooner than its members think, given the current rate at which it is generating scandals.

At 11.59pm on the night before yesterday’s full council meeting, ‘leader’ Chris Hayward and Community and Children’s Services Committee (CCS) chair Helen Fentimen sent all council members a gaslighting email that followed their patented line in spin by emphasising “already underway improvements,” in an attempt to shift attention from both individual and leadership accountability and responsibility for housing failures. The message read in part:

Ahead of tomorrow’s meeting of the Court of Common Council, we wanted to update you on the strong and growing momentum in our housing programme – an area where the City Corporation is demonstrating leadership at a time of significant pressure on housing delivery across London, and where the voice of our residents must remain central to everything we do…

The opening of Black Raven Court, providing 66 high-quality social homes on the City/Islington border, is a clear example of how we are translating ambition into delivery. In a challenging development environment, schemes like this underline the importance of strong partnerships with neighbouring Boroughs to push projects forward…

…[this] sit[s] within the context of our recent inspection by the Regulator for [sic] Social Housing, where we received a C3 grading. That judgement made clear that significant improvement is needed across a number of safety and quality standards. We are pleased that Officers have already had constructive and positive conversations with the Regulator about the steps we are taking to improve, and we are working with their oversight to deliver the necessary improvements at pace.

We will address the gap between the rhetoric about the voice of residents and how the council actually behaves shortly, but first a reminder that last month we covered the issue of who was responsible for, and who should resign (a list including both Hayward and Fentimen) after the council’s C3 flunk from the Regulator of Social Housing.

Those outside the Guildhall bubble – such as councillors in neighbouring London boroughs – are considerably less sanguine about the delivery of the 66 flats in Black Raven Court than Hayward and Fentimen. See our stories here and here (scroll down on both links), or this 6 March 2026 coverage from the Islington Tribune entitled After ‘grotesque, bizarre, unprecedented’ flats saga, first residents moving in: Social homes on the Golden Lane estate had stood empty since 2024 by Isabel Loubser:

It has taken almost three years, but the first residents have now finally been handed the keys to new flats on an estate near Clerkenwell.

The 66 brand-new social homes on the Golden Lane estate had stood empty since 2024, after an ongoing dispute between the contractor and the City of London, who was responsible for the project.

Islington Council had contributed £7million to building the homes, and each of the authorities has the nomination rights for 30 flats to house residents.

In a letter to the Tribune last July, housing chief Cllr John Woolf, described the saga as “grotesque, bizarre, and unprecedented” and said the homes had become a “case study in how not to deliver for local people”.

Indeed, when the Tribune asked the City of London for a timeline last summer, they assured residents that moving-in day would be sometime in September 2025.

The City of London would not answer the Tribune’s questions about the cause of delays, what lessons had been learnt, or whether they would like to apologise to residents.

Instead, the City’s community services committee chair, Helen Fentimen, said in a statement via a press release: “Black Raven Court reflects our commitment to delivering genuinely affordable, high-quality homes for Londoners.”

Fentimen’s lack of commitment to those she was elected to serve is evident from a whole series of scandals she has been involved in, ranging from her ongoing attempts to shut down the Aldgate School Children’s Centre through to her unilateral decision (made with her deputy chair Steve Goodman) to close Golden Lane Sport and Fitness.

Despite it being a working day, yesterday more than 80 City residents marched from Golden Lane Sport and Fitness to the Guildhall to protest against the closure. They knew council members were having a service in St Lawrence Jewry next Guildhall, and were scheduled to make the short walk from the church’s west doors into the council’s Guildhall HQ for lunch at 12 noon, followed by a full council meeting at 1pm. Respectful silence was observed by the protesters until the service was over.

Crash barriers were erected to prevent protesters getting into the church (which no one was attempting to do) or Guildhall Yard. Two clerics appeared at the west doors to greet councillors as they left. The elected officials inside decided to snub their hosts and the residents waiting to speak to them, and ducked out through the back door. This walk of shame was caught on camera by an ITV news team and broadcast on the London evening news (see still in header above). So much for the claim in Hayward and Fentimen’s letter (see above) that: “the voice of our residents must remain central to everything we do”.* They’re happy enough to talk at residents but they go out of their way to avoid listening to us.

It was particularly telling that no Cripplegate councillor meaningfully participated in the demonstration, since they represent the ward in which the threatened leisure centre is located. What were they thinking? This was their chance to show both the rest of the council and those who voted them into office whose side they are on. They totally blew the opportunity. Naresh Sonpar, from Fentimen and Goodman’s Aldersgate ward took part in the march, and Castle Baynard councillor Martha Grekos enthusiastically joined protesters once they arrived outside the Guildhall. Three Golden Lane councillors had sent apologies, four of the six who were recorded as present** appeared very briefly on the sidelines roughly an hour after the walk of shame, having waited until a lot of the protesters had dispersed, they were unlikely to be seen by many of their fellow councillors and without joining the chanting.

During yesterday’s full council meeting, Fentimen was grilled about the response to the Regulator of Social Housing’s report, Aldgate School childcare and the Golden Lane leisure centre and responded with her usual word salads. Focusing in on the leisure centre, if Fentimen believes the alternative exercise provision she talks about is satisfactory, why does she think the people who have to use it are protesting? She cut an equally sorry figure in an interview for ITV London News, despite only having a mercifully brief appearance in the TV news clip. She is quoted at greater length in a web feature from the same source, including stating the following:

“However, we have been focused, since learning about the administration of Fusion, on putting new alternative services in place at a very rapid pace.”

This is spin, as we stated in an earlier piece: “The obvious omission in the council’s messaging is why, when it announced that the Golden Lane leisure facility would close at the end of April, it didn’t tell residents then that it would look for alternative provision. The obvious answer to that question is that the Council’s establishment thought it would get away with doing nothing.”

Fentimen continues in the ITV web piece.

“We have done that and all service users have got alternatives put in place for them, within a ten minute distance of the leisure centre.”

This isn’t true, what the council claims is the alternative provision is only within a ten minute walk for those who are able bodied. Anyone who has spent any time at the centre will know – and we pointed this out in a previous post (scroll down here)- not all users are able bodied.

We understand that while some members of Golden Lane Sport and Fitness got an email about alternative provision yesterday, information about alternative provision wasn’t sent to all of them. So at least some City residents who belong to the leisure centre are still in the dark as to whether there is anywhere their Fusion membership will entitle them to exercise from the end of next week.

We’ve come across older residents on the Young At Heart scheme who have been to the Better facilities that are supposedly providing some of their alternative provision only for them to be told by staff there they won’t be able to use the gym and pool with their Fusion memberships. They’d gone there to ask about it because they’d heard nothing directly from the council.

The ITV News web coverage continues with the following:

The City of London Corporation added that a survey it carried out, with over 400 people, found the biggest barrier stopping respondents from exercising was the quality of the centre.

The centre was recently redecorated. Leaving aside the pool, the two big issues with the centre are the male changing room and the equipment. Four of the five running machines don’t work and all three cross trainers (elliptical machines) are broken, and some of this equipment has been broken for more than 18 months. These machines have been professionally assessed and all the broken running machines and two of the cross trainers were deemed to be beyond repair. For around £20,000 it would be possible to buy refurbished versions of the broken machines. Why wasn’t this done? And why hasn’t the cross trainer that could be repaired been repaired?

It isn’t necessary to close the leisure centre to replace broken machines and refurbish the men’s changing rooms. Most commercial – and even most council – gyms fix or replace broken equipment in a matter of days, it doesn’t lie around taking up space for months and years. The gym at Golden Lane is of very modest size and if the unrepairable machines were not going to be replaced then it would have been sensible to remove them and create more space for people to exercise with free weights, bodyweight, Swiss balls, medicine balls &c., since room for this is in short supply at the facility.

Fentimen and her CCS deputy chair Steve Goodman are ultimately responsible for the current state of the Golden Lane leisure centre and they should resign, not just from CCS but as councillors.

Notes

*Indeed, why did the Lady Mayor Sue Langley flee from the protest through a back door of the church? To prevent reality impinging on her fantasy of being the Queen of the Square Mile? (Scroll down here). Is she worried that there will be another protest when she processes from Mansion House to Cannon Street Station on Thursday 14 May 2026 for her expensive “let them eat cake” luxury train experience? Or when she introduces Deborah Oliver’s Women In The City talk at the Ironmongers Hall on the Barbican Estate at 6.30pm on 6 May 2026?

**Anne Corbett, Adam Hogg and Sarah Gillinson sent apologies. Liz King, Dawn Frampton, Jacqui Roberts Webster and Ceri Wilkins very briefly appeared on the sidelines as protesters were drifting away. King, Frampton, Roberts Webster and Wilkins didn’t go over to the protesters, who couldn’t approach them because they were being kept behind metal barriers for no good reason (since the organisers had arranged with the police where demonstrators could and couldn’t go and stuck to the agreement). The attendance record for the council meeting is archived here.

As we’ve covered in two previous posts (here and here), a really well organised campaign against the closure of Golden Lane Sport & Fitness has come together remarkably quickly. On Thursday 23 April there will be a march from the leisure centre to the Guildhall (HQ of the City council) leaving Golden Lane Estate at 11.15am.

A campaign newsletter dated 20 April gives details of both the Guildhall protest and what those organising it have discovered about the decision to close the leisure centre:

On Wednesday 15 April, we met four elected officials – Helen Fentimen (Chair, Community & Children’s Services Committee), Steve Goodman (Deputy Chair, CCS) and CCS Officers Judith Finlay and Simon Cribbens – at Guildhall in a formal recorded meeting. Here is what was confirmed on the record for the first time:

Who decided to close Golden Lane Leisure Centre:

Helen Fentimen and Steve Goodman, under delegated urgency authority, in consultation with the Town Clerk – without a committee vote. Steve Goodman acknowledged an emergency committee meeting could have been called. They chose not to call one, avoiding public debate.

When the decision was made

24 February 2026 – 14 days after Fusion first warned the City it might go into administration. The decision was made while every other affected council in England was still working to keep their facilities open.

No alternatives

No alternative operator was formally approached about keeping the centre open on an interim basis. Not one. Confirmed by Simon Cribbens.

No Equality Impact Assessment

No Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) was completed before closing the only SEND-dedicated sports provision in the City of London. Helen Fentimen confirmed assessments are being developed “as we go.”

Helen Fentimen’s response when challenged on the closure: “The decision has been made. It stands.” She also said – and we are holding her to this – that decisions can be overturned.

These revelations inflict even more damage on the already shredded political reputations of Labour Party councillors Helen Fentimen and Steve Goodman. In an earlier post we explained why Fentimen and Goodman (alongside others including Judith Finlay and council leader Chris Hayward) are politically responsibile for the chronic mismanagement of City of London social housing estates – as identified by the Regulator of Social Housing in a report on City housing failures. We did this after Helen Fentimen declined to identify herself or anyone else as being at fault in a council meeting when the question of who was to blame was addressed to her.

Given Fentimen and Goodman invoked delegated authority to close Golden Lane Sport and Fitness, they now need to tell us how many other decisions they have made in this manner. We also want to know if this is some kind of inbuilt blanket power available whenever the chair and deputy chair of Community and Children’s Services feel like avoiding, as far as possible, public debate on policies and decisions they want but know will be unpopular with residents?

If this is a blanket power, it’s highly risky. Delegated authority has already been shown to be a travesty when applied to City planning decisions, where the planning director has authority to make decisions with “advice” from the chair and deputy chair of the planning committee. It was abuse of such delegated powers that led us to repeat our description of the City of London council as a rogue planning authority (see here, here, here and here). In light of Fentimen and Goodman’s power grabbing antics (not to mention Chris Hayward’s elsewhere), we now need to expand this description and call the City of London council out for what it is – a rogue local authority in urgent need of democratic reform.

In our last post on this subject, we noted that an article published in My London on 30/3/26 about the removal of the Freedom of the City of London from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor quoted a City Council spokesperson as saying that:

There is no effective legal mechanism available to remove the Freedom in this case. Nonetheless, the City Corporation is listening to the concerns raised and is reflecting on what further steps, if any, may be open to us.

We commented as follows:

The second sentence in the quote above is revealing. It signals, in the coyest possible terms, that the Council has started to succumb to pressure to change its position on removing the Freedom from Mountbatten-Windsor. But only started. This is a typical Council strategy: it repeatedly defends an indefensible position, then changes its position so gradually it hopes no-one will notice, then takes full credit for adopting the new position, then smears those who forced it to change its position as being the cause of all the trouble.

We went on to give the following advice:

We set out below free PR advice from us to the senior members of the Council who make all significant decisions, namely Chris Hayward (a mason) and his inner circle in the Policy and Resources Committee. This advice is better than anything they’ll hear from their new Director of Communications, Rob Hall, who’s washed up on the Council’s shore from the Home Office, the most incompetent department of the civil service. By the way, where is the new Director in this crisis?

Here’s our advice to Hayward & Co: Don’t follow your typical strategy of gradually withdrawing from an untenable position and trying to get credit on the back end. It didn’t work in previous cases. It would be even worse now that you’re subject to the political vivisection of this blog. Better to make a forthright statement that the Council is determined to remove the Freedom from Mountbatten-Windsor, and indicate which method you consider to be the most expedient to achieve that.

Whichever method you choose, start implementing it immediately, which means now, not after six months of passing the matter from one committee to another. Everyone knows that all the committees – except the governing Policy and Resources Committee – exist only to give 125 members something to do. If the method chosen is legislative change, that neatly puts the ball into Parliament’s court. Then shut up. Don’t lie about why the Council was previously lying that this couldn’t be done, or why you’ve taken so long to do it.

We don’t expect, though, that Hayward & Co will be willing to take this advice, because if they were, we wouldn’t have a council that has notched up 8 scandals in one month… We expect that their own lack of sense, political awareness and moral integrity, together with their natural masonic inclinations, will lead them into making the same blunders as previously.

Hayward & Co are doing exactly as we had predicted. They always do. On 16/4/26, the Council’s governing Policy and Resources Committee, which Hayward chairs, decided in non-public session (as usual) to deal with the removal of the Freedom from Mountbatten-Windsor by feebly asking him to relinquish it voluntarily! We assume Hayward & Co will claim they were following legal advice in a non-public report from Paul Wright, the City Remembrancer, and Michael Cogher, the City Solicitor, but – as we explained in our last post on this subject – they are the last two people from whom anyone should seek good advice.

The Council’s “Communications” team promptly issued a media release, full of their usual deceptions. We were about to reproduce it and write a commentary on the Council’s continuing mishandling of this crisis when an elected member of the Council, plainly annoyed by Hayward & Co claiming to act in their name, sent us an email which leading Council reformist Alder Martha Grekos had sent to all Council members this morning. We reproduce it below, as it tells the story better than we can.

The leading roles in this self-generated Council drama are performed by (from the left): Paul Wright, the City Remembrancer, and Michael Cogher, the City Solicitor, who provided legal advice that may have passed muster in the 18th century; Chris Hayward, the Council Leader, who has sufficiently little awareness of contemporary culture (he is a mason after all) that he followed their advice together with his masonic and quasi-masonic cronies on the governing Policy and Resources Committee, and has consequently exposed the City Council to public opprobrium for feebly requesting that Mountbatten-Windsor relinquish his Freedom of the City voluntarily; Sue Langley, the Lady Mayor, who promotes herself as a role model for young women but has done nothing to stop Hayward & Co giving an easy pass to Mountbatten-Windsor, who has been photographed groping vulnerable young women; and Alder Martha Grekos, who has called out this shameful behaviour by the Council’s ruling elite and spoken for women and decent men everywhere.

Email from Alder Martha Grekos to all Council members on 20/4/26 

On 24th March, I tabled a question to be put to the Policy Chair in the public session of the meeting of the Court of Common Council this Thursday as follows:

“The City Remembrancer has already publicly indicated that – contrary to what a City spokesperson has said – a procedure does exist to remove the Freedom of the City of London from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Even if such a procedure did not exist, the Remembrancer is well placed to propose to Parliament that it effects legislative change to achieve this outcome. All that is lacking is the political will to instruct the Remembrancer to take appropriate action. Will the Chair of Policy and Resources, in his capacity as the political leader of the Corporation, now undertake to do whatever he can to achieve this outcome, bearing in mind that inaction is neither a moral nor a political option?”

On 16th April, the Corporation issued the following media release:

“Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor received the Freedom of the City of London in 2012 by virtue of patrimony, which is inherited as the child of a Freeman and constitutes a legal right.

Applications via patrimony are not considered or endorsed by our elected Members, and there is no effective legal mechanism to remove this type of Freedom.

Elected Members have today agreed to write to Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, inviting him to formally relinquish the Freedom.

They will consider the response received, if any, at a future meeting and determine what action may be taken.”

A number of media outlets reproduced the content of this release. On 17th April, My London reported on this development with more context and commentary.

Following this development, I have deferred my question to the Court meeting on 21st May, by which time we should know whether and how Mountbatten-Windsor has responded to the Corporation’s request.

The Corporation’s handling of this matter does, however, raise a number of issues that ought to concern all members now. I set them out below, and suggest that the Policy Chair address them in his statement to the Court on Thursday.  

(1) On 4th March, My London quoted a “Corporation spokesperson” as saying that “we have carefully considered whether it is possible to remove a Freedom granted by patrimony and understand that we are not able to do so”. On 17th March, the Remembrancer told the General Purposes Committee of Alders in public session that it was “very difficult” to remove such a Freedom under an old existing procedure, thus implying it was nevertheless possible. On 30th March, My London quoted a “Corporation spokesperson” as saying that there was “no effective legal mechanism” to remove such a Freedom, a line repeated in the latest media release quoted above. So the Corporation has given three contradictory versions of its position in less than a month. This makes it appear that its left hand doesn’t know what its right hand is doing, which does not instil confidence in its stakeholders. What is worse, it makes the Corporation look shifty and opaque.

(2) The “Corporation spokesperson” emphasised that Mountbatten-Windsor’s Freedom had been acquired by patrimony “and constitutes a legal right”, implying that this was the cause of “this type of Freedom” being “difficult” to remove. There is actually no difference in the degree of “difficulty” in removing a Freedom whether it is granted by patrimony, redemption (by far the most common method) or servitude. So the emphasis on patrimony was potentially misleading. It is easier to remove a rarely granted Honorary Freedom, although you’d never think so from the protracted and clumsy way in which the Corporation removed this kind of Freedom from Aung San Suu Kyi in 2020 in response to a sustained campaign.

(3) The latest media release quoted above states that “Elected members have today agreed to write to Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, inviting him to formally relinquish the Freedom”. That is beyond misleading: it is simply untrue. Most of us elected members, including myself, took no part in this decision, and knew nothing about it until the media release was issued, then reproduced in a number of media outlets. The decision was taken by the Policy and Resources Committee, or at least a majority of its members present at its last meeting  – I don’t know whether it was unanimous. That Committee does not have a mandate to act for all members on any subject – otherwise there would be no need to have 125 members.

(4) I hope that Mountbatten-Windsor will respond to the request to relinquish his Freedom voluntarily. It would not be in his interest to refuse or (more likely) to fail to reply, as that would signal he still wanted to cling to a remaining title when the public mood is that he doesn’t deserve to hold any. If he had good judgment, though, he wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. He may also be encouraged by the nature of the Corporation’s action (if you can call it that), and convince himself that his problem is that he is, after all, “too honourable”, as he described himself in an infamous television interview in 2019.

(5) In whichever way he does, or doesn’t, respond to the Corporation’s request, what should concern us all is how the Corporation appears to the public by putting the decision to relinquish the Freedom in Mountbatten-Windsor’s own hands, instead of taking robust action like every other major institution, including the monarchy. The Corporation has focused obsessively on the “difficulty” of using an old existing procedure, but “difficult” is not impossible, and in a situation as extreme as this, I think the public expects us to show the will to find a way to make the legal mechanism “effective”. It would probably be a lot simpler to ask Parliament to enact legislation that would enable the Freedom to be removed. The Corporation has unique access to Parliament through the Remembrancer, and this would be an ideal opportunity to use it. We already know that Parliamentarians would be receptive to ensuring that Mountbatten-Windsor does not retain any honours.

(6) There can be no legal objection to proposing legislative change to Parliament – especially not an argument that this would infringe Mountbatten-Windsor’s human rights by depriving him of “a legal right” as the holder of the Freedom. This “legal right” now consists of nothing more than being able to stand as a candidate in Corporation elections and being appointed by a livery company as a liveryman with the consequent right to vote in the “elections” of the Sheriffs and the Lord/Lady Mayor. These are things that Mountbatten-Windsor has never done or is ever likely to do. Assuming that they do amount to a “legal right”, which is arguable, can you imagine any court of law ruling that protecting this “legal right” of Mountbatten-Windsor is a human right which should outweigh the human rights of the vulnerable young women with whom he has been photographed in salacious circumstances? I hope no-one in the Corporation would try to argue that.

(7) We are no longer living in the 1950s when a typical institutional response to someone in high office acting scandalously was to hush it up to preserve the reputation of the institutions associated with him (and it was typically “him”). In the contemporary world, transparency and accountability are expected and privilege and obfuscation are deplored, so the old approach to dealing with scandals has now become counter-productive. The Corporation’s reputation suffered because of its foot dragging when removing the Honorary Freedom from Aung San Suu Kyi to whom it had granted that Freedom when allegations were already circulating about her tacit endorsement of genocide. The Corporation granted Mountbatten-Windsor the Freedom by patrimony a year after a photograph had been published of him with his arm around the waist of a vulnerable seventeen year old (now dead by suicide). By dragging its feet over removing the Freedom from him, as it has been doing, and – even worse – signalling that the Freedom may never be removed unless he relinquishes it voluntarily, the Corporation is putting itself in grave moral and political jeopardy.

(8) The latest media release quoted above does not set a deadline for dealing with a response, or lack of response, from Mountbatten-Windsor. It merely states that “They [i.e. “elected members”, but actually members of the Policy and Resources Committee] will consider the response received, if any, at a future meeting and determine what action may be taken.”  Which “future meeting”? Why not the next Policy and Resources Committee meeting on 7th May? Or the Court of Common Council meeting on 21st May, as I’m sure other elected members have a view on this matter? Is an indefinite “future meeting” just code for knocking this matter into the long grass, in the hope that everyone will then forget about it and no action need be taken?

If a satisfactory response is not received from Mountbatten-Windsor by the Court meeting on 21 May, my deferred question will still be relevant. Alternatively, members may be interested in putting a motion instructing the Remembrancer to approach Parliament.

Even if Mountbatten-Windsor has given a satisfactory response by then, the Court needs to establish a way of revoking the Freedom where appropriate in other cases, both present and future. Otherwise we risk our institution becoming the last bastion for honouring sleazy characters. No-one outside the Guildhall would accept the Corporation’s excuses that an old existing procedure is “difficult” to use and that alternatively the Corporation doesn’t want to propose legislative change to Parliament.

The attempt by the City of London Council to sweep the recent Guild of Young Freemen scandal under the carpet is itself a scandal, and one of eight on which we have reported in a single month.

The problem with sweeping a pile of dirt under the carpet is that when the carpet is trodden upon, the dirt comes out again. This blog been treading on this corner of the City Council’s extensive carpet six times since the Guild scandal broke, and more dirt is coming out.

If the leaders of the Council had any sense, political awareness or moral integrity, they would lift the carpet, sweep out the dirt and tip it into the dustbin. They don’t, though, have any those qualities, so they continue to act as if the Guild scandal hadn’t happened, and we expect they’ll do so until public opinion eventually forces them to change their position, as it is now forcing them to reverse their initial refusal to remove the Freedom of the City from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The irony is that this behaviour by the leaders makes it more likely that they will themselves be swept into the dustbin of history.

In our last post on the Guild, we indicated that the City Council, which is effectively the Guild’s mentor, was turning a blind eye to the fact that the Guild’s new leadership had initially refused to follow a recommendation made by a review panel to expel the members of the previous leadership who participated in scandalous WhatsApp group chats. The new leadership saw nothing wrong with those previous members staying in the Guild and being able to return to office after just two years, in spite of the panel finding that they were all “equally culpable” of participating in the WhatsApp chats, which were described as “ableist, bigoted, homophobic, racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive”. The new leadership was forced to do a U turn on letting the previous members stay following an adverse reaction from the livery, but we all now know what they really think.

We reported that the new interim “Master” of the Guild was Michael Polak. We reproduced a photograph of him being chummy with Councillor Fraser Peck, one of the disgraced members of the previous leadership, at the Livery Dinner at Mansion House after the City Council thought it had swept the Guild scandal under the carpet. We also reported how that photograph was quickly removed from the website on which it appeared, but not before we’d taken a screen shot as proof of the unsuitability of Polak to hold that office.

We can now report that Polak will cease to hold office on 1/7/26 following the election on 26/3/26 of a new set of leaders. The timing indicates that his pending departure wasn’t triggered by our latest disclosures, which were made on 31/3/26. It is practically inconceivable that the Council applied pressure on him. It’s certain that  officers of the Guild didn’t have a fit of conscience, because they have bestowed on him “the special title of ‘Honorary Master’… for the Guild Year 2026-27 in recognition of his exceptional service to the Guild in recent months”. This is recorded in the Guild’s latest newsletter, which goes on to state that “During the forthcoming Guild Year, Michael will work closely with Master-Elect Jago Turner, the Wardens, and other members of the Court of Assistants to continue to lead the Guild and to ensure it is appropriately represented in the City”.

The new set of leaders elected on 26/3/26 to take office on 1/7/26 mostly comprise the new leadership that replaced the (eventually) expelled members of the previous leadership. These new leaders are therefore as unsuitable as Polak to hold office, and having Polak “work closely” with them won’t make things better.

Much of the opprobrium for the WhatsApp messages has rightly fallen on Rafael Steinmetz Leffa, who is reported to have sent 5,078 of them on the one of the two scandalous group chats for which we have statistics. He should now quietly do good works to atone for his behaviour, instead of bleating with self-pity*.

We haven’t heard anything from Jacqueline Chan, who is reported to have sent 1,415 messages on the group chat for which we have statistics. Here’s a sample of her contribution:

[7/6/24 – 18:17] Leffa: Actually we got to be aware to keep [REDACTED – name of Guild member], and the few spastics we got, away from upstairs to not embarrass us

[13/6/24 – 11:06] Chan: We should create a list of the shitty liveries and send our spastics to them 

[2/7/24 – 15:13] Chan: What’s the non-offensive word for spastics? “Retarded”?

[24/9/24 – 16:20] Leffa: First one to call [REDACTED – name of disabled Guild member requiring a wheelchair]  “hot wheels” wins a prize

[25/9/24 – 00:09] Chan: Just need to make sure the tickets don’t go to spastics

At the time of writing, Chan’s profile can still be found on the Guild of Young Freemen’s website, which underlines the fact that the Guild’s new leadership doesn’t share the disgust of everyone else at the behaviour of their reluctantly expelled former colleagues, which is a fact that the City Council is in denial about. That profile describes Chan as “a Chartered Accountant, working as a financial auditor for the UK National Audit Office”. The Code of Ethics of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales proscribes in Rule 115 conduct that discredits the profession, an example of which is posting discriminatory comments on social media.

We also haven’t heard anything from Councillor Fraser Peck (a mason), who is reported to have sent 785 messages on the group chat for which we have statistics. Here’s a sample of his contribution:

[10/6/24 – 23:40:01] Leffa: Yeah am getting [REDACTED name] to join the Ironmongers [livery company] to make his life shit

[10/6/24 – 23:40:02] Peck: He is still in the closet

[10/6/24 – 23:40:23] Chan: Pretty sure he sleeps with [REDACTED  – name of Guild member]

[10/6/24 – 23:40:40] Peck: It’s not gay till the balls touch

Jacqueline Chan and Councillor Fraser Peck: in need of lessons learned  

In our last post on this subject, we advised Peck to get ahead of events, which may well include him as a medical doctor becoming subject to a complaint to the General Medical Council. We assume that he hasn’t followed our advice to resign from the Council, as it hasn’t issued a notice of a by-election being held in his ward of Farringdon Within. We wonder, by the way, whether his fellow ward members have thought of distancing themselves from him. It will be interesting to see if he is brazen enough to turn up to the Council meeting on 23/4/26, knowing that practically all the other Council members will have read our posts and will be aware of his involvement in the Guild scandal.

Peck should look to save not only his professional career but also his social position. We’ve discovered that only a few months ago he joined the exclusive Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall. It is known as a club particularly for “clerics, medics and academics”, with Peck falling within the second of those categories. Due to its substantial academic membership, this club is more “progressive” than most in clubland, so we wouldn’t expect its members to be willing to keep as a member someone who has participated in WhatsApp chats that were “ableist, bigoted, homophobic, racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive”.

Like all traditional London clubs, the Athenaeum shuns publicity. It has very recently been bruised by the public disclosure that a past Chair, Ann Limb, had lied about having earned an MA degree and a doctorate to embellish her CV. Her dishonesty did not, of course, disqualify her from being made a Labour peer earlier this year. Club members took a dimmer view of her behaviour than politicians, though, and it is reported that she is no longer a member of the club. Whether she jumped or was pushed is unclear.

If Club members didn’t like Limb’s fakery, what will they make of Peck’s bigotry?

There used to be an expectation in traditional clubs that when a member was expelled, the members who proposed and seconded him (it would always have been “him” in those days) resigned themselves. We doubt whether that is an actual rule in the Athenaeum, but don’t know whether it remains a custom. Peck’s proposer was Dr John Moore-Gillon and his seconder was Professor Henrietta Hughes. We presume that they only knew the Dr Jekyll side of Peck when they nominated him. Whether they resign now is a matter for them and the Club, but they could help both the Club and themselves by urging Peck to do the decent thing and resign forthwith.

Peck’s member’s register of interests records that he is also a member of the Royal Ocean Racing Club, the City Livery Club, the Society of Apothecaries  (the livery company for doctors), the Farringdon Ward Club and various medical societies prefixed with the word “Royal”. Do these organisations want to pass judgment on themselves by keeping Peck as a member? Or will someone in each of them persuade him to resign in everyone’s interest?

The patron of the City Livery Club is Lady Mayoress Sue Langley, so don’t expect anything to happen there. Especially as its Junior Vice-President is former Lord Mayor Michael Mainelli and its Treasurer is Simon Burrows, both of whom are Peck’s fellow masons.** Is that relevant? For the answer, read here.

The Joint Patron of the Farringdon Ward Club is Alder Greg Jones, who is yet another mason.***

Going back to the City Council’s position on the Guild, we observe that Alder Alastair King has now emerged from the period of “purdah” following the end of his term of office as Lord Mayor last November. He remains the Honorary President of the Guild. If King had good judgment, he would promptly resign from that role and cease to have any connection with the toxic Guild. But if King had good judgment, he wouldn’t while he was Lord Mayor have endorsed Guavapay or let himself be photographed twice with an ex-convict and ex-Playboy model. He might still hope for a knighthood in the Birthday Honours List, but it would be more realistic to expect a consolation prize like a CBE. If the honours system had integrity, he wouldn’t get anything, but that’s too much to hope for.

The header show Fraser Peck with his friend, fellow City of London councillor and fellow freemason, Stephen Hodgson.

Notes

*We’ve been told by a source close to the Guild that former Lord Mayor and recently retired Alder Peter Estlin had been mentoring Leffa for years, and was even putting pressure on fellow Alder Andrew Parmley to stop his investigation of the Guild scandal, but Parmley went ahead anyway. Parmley is no hero, though: he’s been as keen as any Alder (except, of course, Martha Grekos) to sweep the Guild scandal under the carpet, notwithstanding the attitude of its new leadership and the problem of Councillor Peck.

**Burrows, like Peck, tries to hide the fact that he is a mason in his member’s register of interests. Whereas as Peck states “Rye Lodge”, Burrows even more cryptically declares that he is a “Member, UGLE”. We know from our research into the City Council that “UGLE” stands for “United Grand Lodge of England” and that this is the main masonic organisation in the country, but most people wouldn’t recognise those initials. Mainelli does at least declare that he is a “Freemason, Guildhall Lodge”. 

***In his member’s register of interests, Jones fudges the fact that he is a mason by stating “Freemasons Grand Charity”. That statement contains the word “Freemason”, but the unnecessary addition of the words “Grand Charity” can be read as implying that he does work for this charity but is not himself actually a mason. He is, so why doesn’t he just say so?

Instead of taking action over the problems it encounters, the City of London council likes to use spin and token gestures to deflect attention from them. In a recent piece about our local authority failing an investigation by the Regulator of Social Housing, we explained how the council:

..tend(s) to frame failures as collective or structural rather than personal. Likewise, the City council’s communications often emphasise “longstanding issues” and “already underway improvements,” in an attempt to shift attention from both individual and leadership accountability and in opposition to the democratic premise that power should be accompanied by responsibility.

This is happening yet again with the closure of Golden Lane Sport and Fitness at the end of this month. Caught off guard by resident reaction to the announcement it was closing this leisure centre – and the publicity attracted by a petition against closure (which we reported on here) – the council panicked and cobbled together an inadequate response. We reproduce the council’s spin in its original email form here and comment on it below to explain why it is inadequate. The same message has been reproduced in variant forms by the council in a variety of places.

MESSAGE SENT ON BEHALF OF THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMUNITY AND CHILDREN’S SERVICES COMMITTEE TO ALL MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE, WARD MEMBERS OF CRIPPLEGATE, ALDERSGATE, AND FARRINGDON WITHIN, AND THE LEAD MEMBER FOR SPORT

Dear Members,

I wanted to provide you with an update on the work that has been under way to support users of Golden Lane Leisure Centre following the financial failure and administration of the operator, Fusion Lifestyle, and the earlier than planned temporary closure of the centre at the end of this month.

As you know, the closure has been disappointing for residents and centre users. Since Fusion’s financial difficulties became clear, officers have been working at pace to ensure that people are able to continue accessing leisure facilities locally while plans progress for our major refurbishment of Golden Lane.

I am pleased to confirm that an agreement has now been reached with the charitable social enterprise GLL (Better) to provide alternative local provision for Golden Lane users.

Under these arrangements:
• All existing Golden Lane members will be able to use Finsbury Leisure Centre and Ironmonger Row Baths, both within a ten minute walk of Golden Lane.
• Existing memberships will be honoured for 12 months at the same price
• Any additional costs to support this arrangement will be met by the City Corporation.

Alongside membership access, GLL will work closely with officers to accommodate existing programmes and user groups wherever possible, subject to space and availability. This includes older people’s activities, SEND sessions, swimming clubs and fitness classes. Further details will be shared directly with users as individual arrangements are confirmed.

Where GLL cannot meet needs, our Sports Development team are working to identify alternatives, and are collating information on the many other sports and leisure activities and opportunities within and close to the Square Mile.

The tennis courts adjoining the building will continue to be available. Officers will share the details of how they will operate with stakeholders and on the website when the full detail is settled.

Members will be aware that the City Corporation has committed £10.4 million to refurbish Golden Lane Leisure Centre. Design and planning work is already underway ahead of public engagement, and this investment will transform and significantly improve the centre for the long term.

I appreciate the strength of feeling around this issue and the concerns raised by residents. Our priority has been to act quickly and responsibly: securing local alternatives, protecting users from additional costs, and continuing to invest in the future of Golden Lane.

Our media team will be issuing a news release on these arrangements later today and you can accept to see media coverage of this.

I am planning to meet with the representatives of the Save Golden Lane campaign next week and hope to set up a town hall meeting for wider public engagement.

If you are contacted by residents or organisations with questions, officers can be reached at GLLC@cityoflondon.gov.uk, and further updates will continue to be shared as arrangements develop.

Kind regards,
Deputy Helen Fentimen OBE JP
Chairman of Community and Children’s Services Committee

The obvious omission in the council’s messaging is why, when it announced that the Golden Lane leisure facility would close at the end of April, it didn’t tell residents then that it would look for alternative provision. The obvious answer to that question is that the Council’s establishment thought it would get away with doing nothing.

The council is always willing to save itself a little money at the expense of its residents, and the money is little both relative to its wealth and in absolute terms. Its attempt to wriggle out of its responsibilities was, however, defeated by a surge of people power as expressed through support for the petition, which has at the time of writing has garnered 1,627 signatures.

Given the council’s love of outsourcing we suspect its main concern may have been to avoid taking on direct responsibility for Fusion’s Golden Lane workforce, which is likely to be necessary if the centre is to stay open.

Likewise, as the petition against closure states: “residents have received no: “Guaranteed start date for renovation works. Confirmed completion date. Commitment that the centre will reopen at all. Detail on what standard of facility will be provided.” This resembles what the council did with its plans to close the Aldgate School Children’s Centre, namely to delay the day of reckoning in the hope the issue will go away – here by offering to subsidise use of another facility for 12 months for some residents (those with memberships, although many are casual users). Of course after a year all residents will be bearing the increased costs.

The alternative facilities are as noted in the council’s messaging run by Better in south Islington. We have heard from gym goers across London that when Better took over their leisure centres the quality of provision dropped and prices went up, particularly for those – such as seniors – who were entitled to discounts. In fact we know of gym users who stopped using the Better facilities the council are offering as an alternative to Golden Lane when Better took over because of the increased costs – some of whom then joined the Leisure Centre in Golden Lane.

What the City subsidising Better memberships for a year actually means is unclear. Those who belong to the City leisure centre will all be part way through their Fusion membership – when it runs out are they expected to take out an annual membership with Better and be subsidised for what remains of the 12 months from the date the Golden Lane closure, but then have to pay the full price for the rest? Some won’t be able to afford this if this is what the City is proposing.

Note the highlighted weasel wording in Fentimen’s message above: “Alongside membership access, GLL will work closely with officers to accommodate existing programmes and user groups wherever possible, subject to space and availability.” If Fusion members are getting the same classes as current Better members, then there won’t be space and availability. We regularly hear Better members complaining about the classes being over subscribed and of their inability to get into them – some of the instructors there, who we know, have told us this is an issue too. Better don’t provide any tai chi classes in south Islington, so that is something else Fusion members will lose out on and the Golden Lane Tuesday afternoon tai chi class is very popular.

We would emphasise there is no equivalent scheme to Young At Heart membership for older residents at Better’s south Islington facilities. They have a more expansive but also much more expensive scheme for over-60s. Likewise, parents concerned about the SEND provision for their kids report that Simon Cribbins – who is a council officer – has told them that swimming may be transferred to the City of London Girls School, while football and gym may go to City Sport on Goswell Road.

Some Golden Lane Leisure Centre users have disabilities that will make getting to alternative venues difficult. Anyone who has spent any time in the gym will have noticed that there are Young At Heart members with serious mobility issues. Steve Goodman – cutting a very sorry figure and coming across more like a Reform councillor than the Labour one he supposedly is – appeared on ITV London News at 6pm last Friday breezily saying the Better facilities were just ten minutes walk away (echoing Helen Fentimen in the email reproduced above and other council messaging on the subject) – the ableism inherent in such statements is shocking. Goodman looked especially sleazy since he was cut against figures such as Frank, a schoolboy, who talked eloquently about how he learned to swim at Golden Lane while recovering from a brain tumour.

Goodman also mentioned the council knew Fusion were doing a bad job of running the leisure centre – so why didn’t the council do something about this? Resident users have been complaining to councillors about this issue for years to no effect whatsoever.

That said, above all what the council appear not to want to acknowledge is that Golden Lane is a community gym, the vibe is very different to all the other fitness centres in the area. By comparison the Better centres and City Sport are far more corporate and a lot closer to local commercial operations such as Virgin and Nuffield. This was something emphasised in the Barbican and Golden Lane Neighbourhood Forum’s Response To The City Of London’s Consultation On The Refurbishment Of Golden Lane Leisure Centre (CLLC) Using Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) Funds:

We are particularly concerned that the City of London’s investment in GLLC results in real, tangible improvements to the health and wellbeing of the local community of residents and workers. A narrow focus simply on “sports” may not be entirely appropriate in an area which has many gyms but is short on support and facilities for a wide range of health needs and a changing demographic.

GLLC is not a big space and currently has little ancillary accommodation. It cannot be all things to all people, so the eventual focus for the project must be based on an open assessment of potential future use of all the spaces, prioritising health and wellbeing. This should include services under a “social prescribing” model to help people to stay put and stay healthy – at a reasonable cost. The needs of the local community should be the starting point for this project; to maintain a properly caring and healthy neighbourhood, with the associated benefits and savings. The Forum recommends that the primary measure of success should be social value rather than income generated.

Rather that piecemeal provision, led by separate Corporation departments, the Forum takes the view that there should be a whole neighbourhood strategy for health and wellbeing with Golden Lane Leisure Centre at its heart. We recall the Goldsmith University research on isolation and loneliness across the two estates; one response to this is to provide communal facilities that work for all stages of life.

The Golden Lane pool is twenty metres and relatively shallow, the gym is small and the studio space quite restricted. It is competing with gyms run by Better, Nuffield, the new YMCA gym and many others nearby. At present it is frequently closed and poorly maintained, but there is a danger that if it is renovated simply as another fitness centre, it will again fail through being insufficiently competitive with others in the neighbourhood.

The Forum considers that Golden Lane Leisure Centre should always be a community resource providing for children, schools, local older adults, vulnerable groups and clubs. It is important that a model for long-term management and maintenance is determined before architects’ plans are drawn up in order to create a genuinely viable project. For this reason, it is recommended that the leisure centre is seen not as just a fitness facility but as a public health project – and one that has the active support of the public health department, the GP’s surgery and Barts Hospital, as well as the Barbican & Golden Lane Neighbourhood Forum, GLERA and the Barbican Association (BA).

Given the ambition to increase usage, and to ensure long-term viability, it is crucial at this early stage that the City of London adopts a genuinely collaborative approach with the local community whose members are the primary users of GLLC. We recommend that project is governed by a Working Party with local stakeholders as equal partners; jointly establishing the Project Scope and Benefits Case, and also the full Business Case as a first step.

As the title of the above response to the refurbishment indicates, the funding for it comes from Strategic CIL approved by the Policy and Resources Committee in December 2024. See here.

CIL is a planning charge laid on developers that local authorities can then spend on infrastructure. The City of London council is rolling in such funds and as we have pointed out in previous posts, have often allocated the money inappropriately to its friends in the City Property Association (essentially giving back to developers funds they’d handed over as recompense for the impact of their projects on local communities) and the Church of England (CoE).

Following our coverage of these scandals, there was discussion at council committee meetings of the amount of CIL money going to the CoE and a search for other ways of spending it. We suggested in a November 2022 post that some CIL funds should be used for: “the construction of new drainage in places where there is persistent flooding. For example, there are ongoing issues with flooding on the City’s listed modernist Golden Lane Estate…” As the table reproduced above indicates, two years later the council finally took up our rather obvious suggestion and allocated CIL funds to drainage on the podium above the Golden Lane Leisure Centre. CIL funds should have been allocated for the refurbishment of the leisure centre far sooner.

There is a meeting about the campaign to save the leisure centre on Friday 17 April at Golden Lane Community Centre at 7.45pm.

The City of London Council generates scandals so frequently it can be hard to keep up with them. In the last month alone, we’ve reported on:

(1) how no elected member or senior officer of the Council has been held responsible for the Regulator of Social Housing ruling that this Council – by far the wealthiest in the country – “does not meet governance standards. There are issues of serious regulatory concern” in relation to its small and  dilapidated social housing stock (see here);

(2) how the Council is refusing to remove the Freedom of the City of London from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, a decision so crass it has surprised even us (see here);

(3) how the Council continues to weasel out of continuing to provide day care for small children in the City beyond 2027 (see here), while having no difficulty in finding the cash to host a lavish dinner at the Mansion House for the livery companies, all of which claim to do good works, and some of which are extraordinarily wealthy;

(4) how the elected members implicated in the scandals mentioned in (1) and (3) above, namely Chris Hayward, Helen Fentimen and Steve Goodman, have been rewarded with official accolades (see here); 

(5) how the Lady Mayor, Sue Langley, demeans her office by promoting a luxury train journey that would appeal only to social climbers like herself, and doesn’t want to know about the City’s less privileged residents (scroll down here);

(6) how the Council’s attempt to sweep the Guild of Young Freemen scandal under the carpet isn’t working and how Councillor Fraser Peck, who was implicated in that scandal, is potentially in serious trouble (see here);

(7) how the Lady Mayor, Sue Langley, and the Alder Sheriff, Robert Hughes-Penney, are continuing to promote the City of London Council’s long-standing policy of shameful appeasement of the genocidal Chinese government (see here); and 

(8) how City residents have yet again been betrayed by their Council, this time over the unnecessary closure of a much used sports centre, which has triggered a petition that garnered more than 1,000 signatures on the first day alone, and many more since then (see here).

We have more to report on the Guild of Young Freemen soon, but in this post we will provide an update on the compounding scandal of Epstein, Mandelson. Mountbatten-Windsor, his ex-wife and now the City of London Council.

In our last post on this subject, we reported that the City Remembrancer, Paul Wright, told the Alders at their meeting on 17/3/26 that there was a way of removing the Freedom, but it was “very difficult” (as are many things, including taking this bewigged buffoon seriously). We wrote at the time that:

His admission that there was a procedure to remove the Freedom flatly contradicts what a Council spokesperson had confirmed to Ben Lynch [who originally covered this story on My London], which was that this “historic honour cannot be taken back”. So the Council spokesperson was either incompetent by giving out the wrong information or lying.

Six days after the Alders’ meeting and three days after our last post, BBC News published another article by Lynch reporting on how Alder Martha Grekos had challenged the other Alders at that meeting to take action, and especially the Lady Mayor, Sue Langley, who thinks she’s a role model for young women. The article also reported on the mumbled evasions by Wright and the highly-strung City Solicitor, Michael Cogher, who both advocated discussing the matter in private session, although it is difficult to think of a matter of greater public interest.

On the same morning that this BBC News report appeared, the Council’s “Communications” team mentioned it in the “Morning Media Briefing” email which they send to all elected members every weekday. We reproduce the text of that email below, and have highlighted the description of the BBC report with a yellow arrow.

Two things are worth noting about the “Communications” team’s description of the BBC report.

First, the description is so sanitised as to mislead the reader entirely about the content of the report. Compare the report and the description – it takes only a couple of minutes – and you’ll see what we mean. The description crosses the line from spin, which consists of the distortion of the truth, to outright deception. What is even more remarkable is that this description was not intended for public consumption: these morning emails are sent only to elected members, some of whom leaked this one to us. This Council is so debased that its officers now openly try to deceive its own members.

The second noteworthy point about the description is that it repeats the line that:

The City Corporation says that it has carefully considered whether it is possible to remove a Freedom granted by patrimony and understands that it is not able to do so.

But, as we had pointed out in our post three days earlier, this statement flatly contradicts what Wright and Cogher had said at the Alders’ meeting three days before our post, which was that the Council was able to remove the Freedom, even if the method Wright had mentioned was “very difficult”. An alternative method – legislative change – should, in the current climate, be very easy. The Council had still not got its story straight.

Before moving on with the Mountbatten-Windsor story, let’s look at another description in the same “Morning Media Briefing”, which we have highlighted with a green arrow above. It concerns Lynch’s My London report about the Regulator of Social Housing assigning the Council a C3 rating – a dismal fail, especially for a council that considers itself to be a cut above all other local authorities, and has far fewer social housing units, far more money and pretensions to national importance. The “Communications” team, though, didn’t read the article that way at all. They thought it was about the Council’s
plans to improve its social housing portfolio although it plainly wasn’t. One (almost) feels sorry for someone who earns a living by lying, and by doing it so badly.*

Just two days later, Lynch published an article in My London on the Stationers’ livery company “researching” and “drawing the facts together” about the honorary membership which it had bestowed on Mountbatten-Windsor’s disgraced ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, in 1988. Lynch states that when he asked the company directly whether it was doing this with a view to stripping Ferguson of her honorary membership, it denied that this was what its response suggested! Where the City Council leads, this livery company follows – in the wrong direction.

In the same article, Lynch mentioned that the City of York Council was shortly to vote on whether to remove the Freedom of its City which it had granted to Ferguson in 1987. On the following day, a BBC News report announced that the City of York Council had voted to remove that Freedom from Ferguson, and mentioned that it had removed it from her ex-husband Andrew four years earlier. Where the City of York leads, the City of London should follow, but currently won’t.

Four days later, Lynch – who has done outstanding reporting on this subject – published an article in My London quoting suggestions made by a group of City of London tour guides to the Council on how to remove the Freedom from Mountbatten-Windsor. The guides are worth listening to, because by the nature of their role they know a lot about City history and customs. They also sound sensible, something that can never be said of the Council’s legal officers Wright and Cogher.     

At the end of the article, Lynch quotes the Council’s response:

There is no effective legal mechanism available to remove the Freedom in this case. Nonetheless, the City Corporation is listening to the concerns raised and is reflecting on what further steps, if any, may be open to us.

The word “effective” in the first sentence is a clumsy attempt to reconcile the repeated statements by the “Communications” team that the Freedom could not be removed and Wright’s admission that it could although it would be “very difficult” (although not as difficult as him understanding the ways of the 21st century). This “reconciled” statement is still a lie, though – the “Communications” team just can’t help themselves. As Grekos had pointed out at the Alders’ meeting on 14/3/26, and as the City guides had independently suggested, legislative change is an effective legal mechanism, and one that Parliament would surely embrace. All the City Council needs to do is ask, and asking Parliament is one of the roles of the Remembrancer.

We speculated previously on why he may be reluctant to perform his role in this instance – receiving a CVO bauble is important to flunkeys like him. Now that this character has appeared on our radar screen, we’ve taken a greater interest in him, and think he deserves a dedicated post about what he does (or doesn’t do). That can wait, though, until we have a slower news week than recently. 

The second sentence in the quote above is revealing. It signals, in the coyest possible terms, that the Council has started to succumb to pressure to change its position on removing the Freedom from Mountbatten-Windsor. But only started. This is a typical Council strategy: it repeatedly defends an indefensible position, then changes its position so gradually it hopes no-one will notice, then takes full credit for adopting the new position, then smears those who forced it to change its position as being the cause of all the trouble.

This strategy played out on an epic scale with the downfall of the Standards Committee. It also played out over a shorter timescale with the removal of the Freedom from Aung San Suu Kyi, which was first “suspended” before being “revoked”. Decisive action is anathema to this Council, which is probably something to do with its masonic culture: the brethren like things just the way they are.              

On the day after this latest My London article appeared, the Council’s “Communications” team predictably described it in the “Morning Media Briefing” in the following terms:

My London reports on continued coverage on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s Freedom of City of London, which he received in 2012 by virtue of patrimony.

No mention, of course, of the City guides’ thoughtful suggestions, which were the thrust of the piece. The reference to “patrimony” is a last desperate clutch to hold in place the legalistic fig leaf offered by Wright and now disintegrating to reveal the Council’s shame.

On the subject of shame, “Morning Media Briefing” is acquiring the same status as the newspaper Pravda (Russian for “Truth”) used to have in the Soviet Union: Soviet citizens were disinclined to believe rumours that abounded (rather as they do in the City Council’s Members’ Room) until Pravda denied them.          

The frequency of the reporting on the removal of the Freedom from Mountbatten-Windsor and related matters in recent weeks must have made the Council’s establishment realise that this issue would not go away as they had hoped. Hence the signal quoted above about changing its position.

We’ve also noticed a cryptic item in the agenda for the governing Policy and Resources Committee meeting on 16/4/26. Item 17 is described simply as “Freedom of the City – Report of the Comptroller and City Solicitor”. Neither this committee nor the City Solicitor deal with routine Freedom matters, so this item very likely relates to the removal of the Freedom from Mountbatten -Windsor. The item has been scheduled for consideration in the non-public session of the meeting – improperly, as it is a matter of overriding public interest – so  Cogher’s report which is “to follow” won’t be publicly available. Coming from Cogher, you can be sure it will say whatever the committee wants to hear, which now seems to be removing the Freedom after all. What may be delaying the internal distribution of his report is that Cogher needs to think of ways of letting the Council do a U turn while pretending that it isn’t and saving face for the leadership, Wright and himself.

The Council meeting in April is traditionally a significant one. It is the one at which most internal elections to committees are held**, and at which the outgoing Chief Commoner hands over to the incoming one, although no-one outside the Guildhall cares about these things. After a month of so many scandals, there is likely to be some tension. We’ve heard from reliable sources that several councillors don’t intend to stand again at the next elections, which aren’t due until March 2029, as the Council isn’t the fun it used to be. The benefits and privileges are still there to be enjoyed, but that enjoyment is being increasingly tainted by the Council’s never-ending reputational issues.

We set out below free PR advice from us to the senior members of the Council who make all significant decisions, namely Chris Hayward (a mason) and his inner circle in the Policy and Resources Committee. This advice is better than anything they’ll hear from their new Director of Communications, Rob Hall, who’s washed up on the Council’s shore from the Home Office, the most incompetent department of the civil service. By the way, where is the new Director in this crisis?

Here’s our advice to Hayward & Co: Don’t follow your typical strategy of gradually withdrawing from an untenable position and trying to get credit on the back end. It didn’t work in previous cases. It would be even worse now that you’re subject to the political vivisection of this blog. Better to make a forthright statement that the Council is determined to remove the Freedom from Mountbatten-Windsor, and indicate which method you consider to be the most expedient to achieve that.

Whichever method you choose, start implementing it immediately, which means now, not after six months of passing the matter from one committee to another. Everyone knows that all the committees – except the governing Policy and Resources Committee – exist only to give 125 members something to do. If the method chosen is legislative change, that neatly puts the ball into Parliament’s court. Then shut up. Don’t lie about why the Council was previously lying that this couldn’t be done, or why you’ve taken so long to do it.

We don’t expect, though, that Hayward & Co will be willing to take this advice, because if they were, we wouldn’t have a council that has notched up 8 scandals in one month (see above). We expect that their own lack of sense, political awareness and moral integrity, together with their natural masonic inclinations, will lead them into making the same blunders as previously.***

And that’s fine by us: it will bring this council a step closer to the extinction which it deserves.         

Notes

*Curiously the last item in this particular Morning Media Briefing is about rogue landlords in London avoiding millions in penalties and the City of London Corporation being one of ‘five authorities not to have issued any civil penalties to landlords between 2023 and 2025’. During that period former City councillor Luis Tilleria (he stood but wasn’t re-elected in 2025) was exposed by the national press as a rogue landlord who’d been fined for subdividing flats before cramming tenants into the properties – but he was still allowed to sit on the Planning Committee.

Likewise this blog exposed the fact Tilleria had been declared bankrupt 4 years before being elected to the council in 2022 but he was allowed to continue sitting on the Finance Committee even after we published the evidence of this. Tilleria was also allowed to remain on the Licensing Committee after we covered the fact that his company Barrio Latino Management Ltd had been caught running an illegal nightclub by Southwark council (see here). Given that the City council inappropriately allowed a rogue landlord to sit on such committees despite the fact he was known to be unsuitable, it is perhaps not surprising it has not been handing out the type of civil penalties that Tilleria had been subject to in other London boroughs and which appear to have led to his bankruptcy.

It is also worth noting in relation to the two items in the briefing addressing the issue of who runs the Hampstead Heath cafes that controversy over this has generated considerable public protest against the City of London Corporation, and a good deal of negative press coverage for the City council too.

**On a lighter note, we’ve heard that Leyla Boulton is canvassing members  to be elected to the governing Policy and Resources Committee at the next Council meeting. She talks the talk of reform, but walks the walk to conform, so the establishment might encourage its supporters to vote for her, just as it got them to vote for her officer-subverted motion that enabled it to kick a significant democratic reform at least three years down the road (which, in political terms, equals infinity).

***It might also be prudent on the part of the City council ‘leadership’ to look into the allegations that have swirled around Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s great uncle on his paternal side (and also a cousin at a few removes on the maternal side) Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten (AKA Lord Mountbatten) and if – given the way sexual abuse accusations against this dead ‘royal’ have piled up from around the world and across decades – his Freedom should be posthumously revoked. Louis Mountbatten received his Freedom in 1946. Allegations that he was a paedophile are recorded in FBI files dating back to the 1940s. Among the most troubling of the testimonies alleging Louis Mountbatten was a sexual predator are those made by former residents of the Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast, who say they were trafficked to him. Issued last year, journalist Chris Moore’s book, Kincora: Britain’s Shame, contains detailed accounts by a number of men of Louis Mountbatten raping them when they were children.