Cleared AND Suspended!?

The political career of Cllr Lewis Godfrey continues to involve some twists and turns.

The agenda for the Standards Advisory Committee has removed all public reference to complaints against individual councillors (pp101-107). However, we are informed that they finally made a determination in the case of Cllr Godfrey.

Readers will recall that on the day of the Plaistow North by-election Cllr Godfrey was accused of intimidating voters, we covered this in an earlier post. A complaint was made to the Returning Officer.

We are informed that the Standards Committee have resolved that Cllr Godfrey did not act in breach the standards of behaviour for a councillor.

More than that we cannot say, because the information provided to the public is nothing but a blank sheet.

As always, should a member of the committee wish to share some of the details, we’d be delighted to hear from them.

Given that Cllr Godfrey has been “cleared” we were somewhat surprised to hear that he was the subject of a Labour Party investigation. We made some enquiries and clearly some members are of the belief that Godfrey has been suspended by the Labour Party.  However, his status on the council website indicates that he is still representing the Labour and Co-op Parties. 

We reached out to Cllr Godfrey for clarification, but as yet have not had a response.

It seems a strange situation, where he is cleared by the standards committee but suspended by the Labour Party. Why?

More on this as we hear it.