The Picture which Shook the Election

The team supporting Sophia Naqvi published the picture above. (We have done similar.)

It named and showed the faces of five Newham Chief Execs in six years. The inference was that there was some problem between the Newham Mayor and her senior officers that meant that they didn’t stay around long.

The current chief exec, Abi Gbago, took exception to the pictures of Newham officers. It seems that she interpreted the meme as somehow implying that the council officers somehow supported the independent candidate. It is, of course wrong for officers of Newham Council to publicly support one candidate and it is equally wrong to imply support that does not exist.

We struggle to interpret the post in any way that suggests that any of the Chief Exec’s had expressed or implied support for one council candidate over another.

The full post is below, so you can judge for yourself.

We are given to understand that the current Chief Exec wrote to the independent candidate regarding the post and complaining that it somehow breached the rules concerning involvement of officers in election campaigns. She didn’t explain how, but the implication was that this breached the rules concerning election campaigns.

The Independent team duly removed the post, (but not before we had screen-grabbed it!).

At about the same time, that is during the Plaistow North byelection, Mayor Fiaz attended an event and proudly celebrated the success of a “key manifesto achievement”. This was posted on the Newham London Twitter/X account.

As we earlier noted, Cllr Nate Higgins made reference to this in a tweet.

The offending post (below) was removed shortly after.

If the Independent Group had been asserting (or implying) that one or more of the former Chief Exec’s had supported one of the candidates in the by-election, there would clearly be an issue.

Council officers should not be dragged into the tussle of elections.

Given that we can see no way in which the Independent Group suggested otherwise, it does appear that the new Chief Exec has been guilty of some over-reach in the management in the by-election. It probably isn’t sinister, but it should be embarrassing that there was a faux pas on the official Twitter/X account of the council.