Why is Boris paying his disgraced former deputy £20,000 for a one day a week job that was a voluntary position?

Anyone remember Ray Lewis? Until recently Mr Lewis volunteered for Boris Johnson as Ambassador for Mentoring. Yet now Boris has given Lewis a salary of £20,000 a year for the one day a week role as “Senior Adviser for Mentoring”. The difference between the roles is unclear.

Such a promotion might be understandable if the mentoring scheme had been a roaring success, but it hasn’t been – there have only been 100 mentoring partnerships to date, but there should have been 1,000 by March 2012. So it appears Ray Lewis has been rewarded by Boris Johnson, for failure.

Labour’s London Assembly Police & Crime Spokesperson Joanne McCartney AM responded to the news of Lewis’s appointment/promotion, by suggesting that he “simply isn’t up to the job”:

“Mr Lewis has admitted that he didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing in his previous role. I believe this was partly due to a lack of direction and commitment from the Mayor. How do we know that Boris will take this any more seriously now? It’s time Boris got serious about mentoring, it is simply not good enough that he is using public money to pay someone who simply isn’t up to the job. This is yet another example of Boris getting a poor deal for Londoners.”

And if you thought that the name Ray Lewis sounded familiar, that’s probably because he was forced to quit as Boris Johnson’s Deputy Mayor in 2008, only two months after Boris became Mayor – after it emerged that he’d lied about being a magistrate.

What a sound appointment this is…