There is no doubt that Ray Lewis’s resignation is embarrassing for Boris Johnson but I rather feel that sections of the media are rather overreacting to it. Listening to the Today Programme this morning you would have thought that the accusations against Lewis discredited the whole idea of community work.
Ross Hawkins, the Today correspondent, said that the resignation had caused damage not only to Boris but also to the party as a whole. He concluded that ‘a couple of years down the line they [the national Tory party] might be able to forget this one’. I suspect that the next set of opinion polls will show that Lewis’s departure has had no impact on the party’s standing nationally.
Whatever Ray Lewis might have done the work of the Eastside Young Leaders Academy is good and valuable. It would be a catastrophe if his downfall was to be used to discredit the philosophy behind it.
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