Sadiq Khan has already come under fire for choosing one of his cronies, Labour Councillor Lib Peck, to be his new London crime tsar on a whopping £116,000 salary, despite gun crime almost doubling in her own patch of Lambeth where she has been leader of the Council for six years. Now Guido can shed some light on the murky process which led to her appointment…

The Violence Reduction Unit is a new Khan creation, a ‘Partnership Reference Group’ was set up last year specifically to oversee its creation, chaired by Khan himself and his Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, Sophie Linden. Who else was a ‘Partner’ in the Group and has attended every meeting? A certain Lib Peck…

Indeed, Labour’s Wes Streeting was keen to draw attention to this fact after her appointment was first criticised:

In fact, according to the Group’s official Terms of Reference, not only did the Partnership Reference Group design the VRU but it specifically designed the role of Director and the recruitment process for it:

A panel of eight carried out the longlist and shortlist for candidates for the role of Director, while a heavily overlapping panel of eight (six people sat on both) then carried out the final assessments where Lib Peck was selected. On both selection panels, six of the eight members had already worked alongside Peck designing her role on the Partnership Reference Group…

One member of both selection panels, John O’Brien, knows Peck particularly well – O’Brien has been the Chief Executive of London Councils since 2007. Who is the Deputy Chair of and has been a member of London Councils’ Executive committee since 2014? You’ve guessed it. Lib Peck…

And delving even more deeply into the Group’s Terms of Reference reveals exactly who nominated Peck to be on the Partnership Reference Group in the first place. London Councils…

Appointing a Labour politician rather than a policing professional – and one with a poor track record at that – to a highly overpaid quango job is a questionable decision in itself. When that person was involved in designing the selection process for the role themselves and had prior relationships with 6 of 8 people on both selection panels it starts to look a whole lot more questionable than that…