KEN LIVINGSTONE will carry on as Mayor of London after a High Court judge yesterday froze the order suspending him from office.

He was due to begin a four-week suspension today for bringing his office into disrepute after comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

The decision sparked widespread controversy, with many MPs echoing the mayor’s complaint that an unelected panel should not be able to remove representatives chosen democratically by voters.

The judge ruled that Mr Livingstone was entitled to have the sanction stayed pending his statutory appeal. His lawyers successfully sought leave to apply for judicial review against a decision by the Adjudication Panel for England, the government body that deals with serious disciplinary cases in local government.

With suspension only hours away, the mayor obtained an emergency injunction to stay his expulsion until his challenge is heard this month.

On Friday, a three-man committee of the panel unanimously found him guilty of being “unnecessarily insensitive and offensive” in comparing Oliver Finegold, an Evening Standard reporter, to a concentration camp guard.

The tribunal decided that the mayor was in breach of the Greater London Authority code of conduct. Mr Livingstone’s legal team submitted that the tribunal’s decision breached his right to private life under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and his right under article 10 to freedom of expression.

Mr Livingstone had earlier vowed to fight the case all the way to the House of Lords, if necessary, even though it could cost “hundreds of thousands of pounds” if he loses. Even before any further legal action, Mr Livingstone faces a bill for legal costs that exceeds £80,000.

Mr Livingstone became embroiled in a war of words after he was approached, while off duty, by Mr Finegold as he left a party marking 20 years since Chris Smith, the former Culture Secretary, became Britain’s first openly gay MP.

Mr Livingstone asked Mr Finegold whether he had ever been a “German war criminal”. On hearing that Mr Finegold was Jewish, the mayor likened him to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

The panel was told that Mr Livingstone had been expressing his long and honestly-held political view of Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Evening Standard and Daily Mail. Mr Livingstone accused the group of a history of anti-Semitism and the Evening Standard of “harassing” the largely gay private reception, which was paid for from public funds.

In the storm that followed, Mr Livingstone said that he was using his freedom of expression and had never meant to offend the Jewish community or play down the Holocaust. He said: “If the adjudication panel had reprimanded me but not imposed the penalty, I would most probably have said we will see what Londoners think at the ballot box next time.”

He added: “I have no intention of apologising because I don’t believe it.”

He accused the Board of Deputies of British Jews of making the original complaint only to try to “hush” him up over his views on the Middle East. They want him to “tone down” his views on the Israeli Government, he claimed, adding: “For decades the charge of anti-Semitism has been used to try to suppress any meaningful debate about the policies of the Israeli Government.”

Jon Benjamin, of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, denied there was a witch-hunt against Mr Livingstone. He said: “I think he is really just trying to spin this and create a smokescreen to justify what he did. He made the comments. He decided not to apologise and to make it worse. Now we are in the realms of legal argument but that does not get away from what he said a year ago which caused national uproar and even brought calls from the Prime Minister for him to apologise.”

Mr Livingstone described the stay of suspension as “a very welcome development”.

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