Reply to comment

Published: 4 February 2010
by RICHARD OSLEY and JOSH LOEB

THE Mayor of Camden, who was last week questioned by benefit fraud investigators, has told the New Journal that his main focus is recovering from a heart attack.
Speaking last night (Wednesday) from his hospital bed, Councillor Omar Faruque Ansari said he had been swamped by support after being suspended by the Liberal Democrat group, who he feels let him down when he needed them most.
He was taken to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead with chest pains on Saturday and has spent four days being treated and undergoing tests.
Sounding weak and stunned, Cllr Ansari said: “The doctors have said I’ve had a heart attack. I am not well. I don’t want to talk about the Lib Dems now. I have had lots of visitors wishing me well.”
In July, the Mayor, a diabetic, told the New Journal’s health page that he had given up smoking and walked around a park near his home in Kentish Town for an hour every day after a health check showed he had a one in three chance of developing heart problems.
But friends said he had been put under “unfair stress” throughout last week and that he was shocked at being  taken to Holborn Police Station for a video-taped interview and saddened by then being suspended from the Liberal Democrat group at a private meeting at the Town Hll soon after his arrest. A major bone of contention appeared to be the lack of opportunity for him to give his side of the story to his fellow councillors.
Many of Cllr Ansari’s supporters in the south of the borough have insisted they will now give up on plans to vote for the Lib Dems because of what they feel has been rough treatment.
He fell ill just a day after learning that his attempts to continue as Camden’s Mayor – regardless of the lack of support from the Lib Dems – would be sev­erely hampered by a decision by council bosses to remove his support team, including access to the mayor’s parlour, a diary of community engagements and a limousine.
Town Hall chief executive Moira Gibb told councillors in a letter that she had been clear that Cllr Ansari had not been found guilty of any offence, but insisted the move was necessary in the light of his arrest.
She said: “My role is to seek to protect Camden and its reputation and it is clearly, with these allegation hanging over him, untenable for him to continue to attend events as the borough’s First ­Citizen.”
The full text of her letter can be read on the New Journal’s website – www.camdennewjournal.com.
Cllr Ansari was arrested at the Town Hall last Monday and questioned about benefit payments relating to a neck injury. But no charges have been brought and he emphatically denies any wrong-doing.
Conservative councillor Lulu Mitchell, his deputy, will take on diary events, although it has been noted by her colleagues in private that under the “emergency” arrangements she will not be handed Cllr Ansari’s allowance for doing his work.
He was defiant last week in the face of attempts to persuade him to give up the mayoral chain. “I have been a good Mayor and I want to continue to serve Camden,” he said. “I am an innocent man.”
He is on police bail until March, and supporters say that people have rushed to conclusions.
Abu Rufian, an executive at SN Estates in Chalton Street, Somers Town, said: “Cllr Ansari is a smart guy – why would he do something to jeopardise his career? I just feel sorry for him. I think he will clear his name.” Another businessman in the area added: “Why did they have to go the Town Hall to arrest him? Was he a danger to the public? Of course not. They should have just asked him some questions at his home.”
Mohammed Salique, chairman of the Surma Community Centre in Robert Street, said: “Something like this is shocking to people of any community when it happens to someone so high-profile, but at the moment there is not much to say. Nothing has been proven, there is only an allegation.”
The Lib Dems went door to door with leaflets on Monday with an explanation of the past seven days. In their description of events, Kentish Town councillors Ralph Scott and Nick Russell said: “The investigation is a personal matter for him and the authorities.” They did not mention that he held the position of Mayor, a fact which Tories claimed “treated the voters like fools”. The Lib Dems deputy leader Councillor Janet Grauberg visited Cllr Ansari in hospital on Sunday and insisted there were still cordial relations. “I gave him a ‘get well’ card on behalf of the Group and we ­chatted for 10 minutes or so. He obviously appreciated the visit and he asked me to send his best wishes to everyone.”

What happens now? Town Hall is left in limbo

THE Town Hall is in a constitutional twist of the like it has never seen before.
With Camden Mayor Omar Faruque Ansari refusing to step down as the borough’s First Citizen and with health problems taking priority for the immediate future at least, there is uncertainty about how civic duties will be carried in the next few weeks – or even months.
Who will be in charge of the next full council meeting at the start of March for example? Some councillors are already saying they will “tell him to his face” that he should step down if he is still insisting on carrying on in the role by then. Not because they say he is guilty, but because an unresolved police investigation should not hang over the Mayor’s parlour.
But there is no clause anywhere in the council’s constitution which can force Cllr Ansari out of his post.
And if an emergency meeting of councillors was called, it is understood lawyers fear the discussions could be seen to unfairly affect any future legal case.
Frantic meetings were held last week between group leaders and the council’s most senior staff.
They led to what has been described in private briefings as an “ultimatum” with Cllr Ansari being subtly told that if he did not hand in the mayoral chain then other action would be pursued.
Cllr Ansari held firm – and so on ­Friday afternoon Camden’s chief ­executive Moira Gibb sent out a letter explaining that vital support services would be removed.
Conservative Lulu Mitchell, the deputy, has been left to fulfil the ­ must-attend events in the diary.
Cllr Ansari’s supporters insist that  for an unelected civil servant – even as high as chief executive and somebody as experienced as Ms Gibb – to impose sanctions without him even being charged is a step too far.
More sympathetic council figures say she had no choice.
And so for the first time, Camden has a mayor who is effectively only that in name, stripped of his civic duties even though no court has found him guilty of anything.
RICHARD OSLEY

‘Freedom fighter’s’ road to the Mayor’s Parlour

OMAR Faruque Ansari first appeared in the pages of the New Journal with little more than a towel wrapped around his waist.
Back in 2005, he was one of the campaigners who started taking petitions door to door to “Save Our Baths”.
A recent convert to the Liberal Democrats, the campaign to stop the Prince of Wales Baths in Kentish Town from being sold off was a springboard for his campaign to get elected in Kentish Town.
News reports from the time do not say whether he ever said how often he used the baths himself, but, with his trunks on for a campaign stunt, he said: “Generation after generation have used the pool. It is a gift.”
Victory in May 2006 meant he was one of only two Lib Dems to make gains in that ward. The other was Philip Thompson, who later gave up his seat to live in the United States.
When Cllr Ansari became Mayor last year, his self-written biographical notes described his previous life from being born in east Pakistan to becoming a “freedom fighter” in the  battle for an independent Bangladesh.
As he is previously reported to be 55, that means he would have been little older than 14 when he took up arms in 1969 and commanded a “force of 300 members”, and was still a teenager when, as he says in his own notes, he was appointed a district commissioner under the provisional government.
In 1973, he left Bangladesh to concentrate on a restaurant business in London and has lived in Kentish Town since 1988 with his wife Elma, the Mayoress.
He is particularly well known in the south of the borough and his claims that his work inside the Lib Dems group brought 300 new paid-up members to the party have not been disputed.
One of his consorts in his mayoral year is Mukul Hira, the Somers Town shop owner who ran for Respect at the 2006 council elections before later defec­ting to Cllr Ansari’s party.