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Willie Nelson | |
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 Veteran country music singer Willie Nelson is always up to something new. Read our Willie Watch column to keep up.
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It's Official! Paddick to stand for London Mayor
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By
The Minx, contributing editor
Saturday,
4 August, 2007
As predicted in The Naked Reader last week, former Met Police commissioner Brian Paddick, has put himself forward to be the Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate for London, the party confirmed yesterday.
A spokesman for the Liberal Democrats confirmed that the party had been in talks with Mr Paddick, who was Britain’s most senior openly gay policeman until his retirement as Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner this year.
Mr Paddick, 49, left the Met after clashing with his boss, Sir Ian Blair, over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian man killed in a case of mistaken identity as police hunted terrorist suspects in July 2005. The IPCC report published on Thursday on the aftermath of Mr de Menezes’s death, confirmed Mr Paddick’s account that close aides of Sir Ian, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, knew within hours of rumours that police had shot the wrong man.
The mayoral hopeful is best known for pioneering a light-touch approach to policing cannabis in Brixton. No other contenders have yet put themselves forward, but his public prominence could help him to win the party’s nomination.
Some Liberal Democrats believe that he would be an asset because he knows London and he has a profile that would make him able to take on Ken Livingstone for Labour and Boris Johnson for the Conservatives. Yesterday the Liberal Democrats released a statement saying: “We have been in talks with Brian Paddick, among others. We hope and expect him to go forward for the nomination as part of a full and open selection process which will begin shortly.”
Advertisements will be placed in papers in a week. The party will then draw up a shortlist that will be released a fortnight before next month’s party conference, during which hustings will take place. Then, everyone who has been a London member of the party for more than a year will be invited to vote. It is hoped to have a candidate in place by mid-November.
Liberal Democrat sources said that Mr Paddick had been a party supporter “for some time”, but had not been able to join until he left the Metropolitan Police.
Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem MP for Hornsey & Wood Green, described him as an impressive candidate. “Brian is the one officer I met who I believe really understands and gives weight to some of the problems that are contentious,” she said on her blog. She praised him for his “avant-garde” approach to cannabis when he was commander in Lambeth and his “evidence to the stop-and-search scrutiny and subsequent work on that”.
Mr Paddick's autobiography is due for publication this summer.
The Naked Reader
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