City Hall staff helped Ken bid to rejoin Labour

Staff at the Greater London Authority drafted letters for key Labour donors to send to then prime minister Tony Blair, appealing for the Mayor's reinstatement, two years after he was expelled.

One letter written on Mr Livingstone's behalf makes clear his desire to join New Labour - in contrast to jokey comments he made this month about his proudest moment being "grinding them into the dust". It reads: "As you know, Ken has implemented policies consistent with those of your Government on a wide range of areas.

"I would like to strongly support the request that Ken Livingstone is re-admitted into membership of the Labour Party, so that he is able to participate in the selection process for the Labour candidate for Mayor of London."-The letter was to be signed by the businessman Sir Gulam Noon, a major donor to both the Labour Party and Mr Livingstone. It was drafted by Atma Singh, the Mayor's then Asian affairs adviser, and sent to Sir Gulam with a GLA cover sheet from a GLA fax machine.

The letter was sent during working hours on 11 July 2002, a weekday. It appears to be a clear breach of GLA rules that staff should not engage in party political activity during work time.

Mr Singh said: "It didn't occur to me at the time that it was improper, but I now realise it was not something we should have been doing."

He said the lobbying campaign was drawn up at one of the morning meetings of Mr Livingstone's senior policy advisers.

"It was decided that we would approach people who might support Ken Livingstone," he said. "I was a member of the Grassroots Alliance [an internal Labour political grouping] and I talked to Mark Seddon [editor of the Left-wing magazine Tribune] and Sir Gulam, who we hoped would persuade Tony Blair to re-admit Ken to the party."

Mr Livingstone was expelled from Labour after standing as an independent against the party's candidate for Mayor, Frank Dobson, in 2000 - something he had promised not to do.

In January of that year, he said: "Stories that I am about to stand as an independent are ludicrous. I will not stand against the party I have spent my whole adult working life serving." His 2002 campaign for readmission was unsuccessful but, following Labour's poll slump after the Iraq war, he was re-admitted to the party in January 2004 and contested the mayoral election later that year as Labour candidate.

Richard Barnes, leader of the Conservatives on the GLA, said: "This just shows what the Mayor's advisers were up to - not representing the interests of London, but trying to get Ken into Tony Blair's good books.

"As soon as the election is over I will immediately report this matter to the GLA monitoring of ficer and the Standards Board for England."

This is not the first time the Mayor's use of public resources has been called into question.

In January, the Standard revealed that Mr Livingstone's Re-elect Ken website for the current election campaign was registered in the name of Mark Watts, a publicly paid senior adviser to the Mayor. The registration was later changed.

Channel 4's Dispatches programme also showed that senior aides had been writing briefings and articles for the 2004 campaign without resigning from the City Hall payroll or taking holiday, as the rules require.

Spokesmen for the Mayor and Sir Gulam declined to comment.