The previous Chairman, Brian Cooke, having been defenstrated by the Transport Committee for Backing Boris (never a great thing in a supposedly independent consumer champion), a permanent replacement has been announced in Sharon Grant:
Ms Grant comes to the post with a strong consumer background. She has been Chair of the Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health for the last six years, and sits on the Food Standards Agency Advisory Committee on Consumer Engagement. She has extensive previous experience in local government and has worked as a parliamentary advisor and an academic.
What it doesn’t mention is that she’s the widow of the very left wing, very outspoken Labour MP Bernie Grant and an ex-Haringey councillor in her own right, and I can guess which party. Don’t get much more multicultural or, well, London Labour, than that. I look forward to her meeting Antony Browne at GLA functions with *relish*.
More here, in an interesting article in the Guardian from 2005.
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Ha! Whos the ref?
Roger will not be happy
I suggest the next time LT is touched upon in a Transport Committee meeting there will be four distasteful expressions present. Confirms to me that transport is a feminine issue thse days - Villiers for the Tories, Shawcross/Kelly/Dunwoody*/Ellman for Labour, Caroline Pidgeon for the Lib Dems…
* RIP.
Juicy! Sharon Grant was David Lammy’s principal opponent in the Tottenham by-election Labour selection caused by Bernie Grant’s death.
The Chair of London Travelwatch is supposed to be impartial and apolitical. The last incumbent was dismissed because he spoke up in favour of Boris, albeit in a private capacity, in the run up to the Mayoral election.
I applied for this job when it was advertised but was turned down on the grounds that I had too recently (until last May) been a Member of the London Assembly and was therefore considered to be ‘too political’.
Are we now being asked to believe that this is not a nakedly political appointment??