survey for South Norwood – Inside Croydon

EXCLUSIVE: Parliamentary assistant to Streatham and Croydon North MP lands one of the boys and girls jobs as SPAD appointments are handed out.
By WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor

Moving up: Louis Carserides (right) with his boss, Labor MP Reed, now DEFRA minister

South Norwood residents will be asked to go to the polls again, possibly in September, for a council by-election caused by the greed and personal ambition of a Labor councillor.

Louis Carserides, who has only been a ward councilor since 2021, is jumping ship after being given a “politically restricted” job by his partner Steve Reed OBE.

With Reed now the government’s environment secretary, Carserides joins civil servants at DEFRA as a “special adviser”. Although the special advice Carserides can offer isn’t entirely clear…

Carserides was imposed on South Norwood residents by the local Labor Party in the 2021 by-election, immediately after the borough was bankrupted by Labour. At the time he was already working as a member of parliament for Reed. Carserides’ election and subsequent appointment as head of the City Hall Labor group made “Steve’s Snitch” give Reed additional insight and potential control over council matters at the time.

Working for an MP is not an unusual day job for councillors, from all parties.

But actually working as a government employee as a SPAD, or special adviser, on a salary of between £70,000 and £100,000 a year (depending on what ‘band’ he is offered) is politically restricted, so Carserides will have to give up pounds. 11,000 councilor allowances in Croydon.

According to Whitehall, “Special Advisers are a critical part of the team supporting Ministers. They add a political dimension to the advice and assistance available to ministers, while strengthening the political impartiality of the permanent civil service by distinguishing the source of political advice and support.”

The Power Behind the Throne: former Croydon Councilor Imogen Walker and her husband Morgan McSweeney

This form of jobs for boys and girls is nothing new or unique to Labour.

Indeed, it’s just another example of how Labour’s “change” to Keir Starmer looks a lot like the self-rewarding practices of the Tories. Political parties are assiduous in milking public money at national and local level for their own purposes.

Westminster’s green benches after the general election are full of “nephew babies”: husbands, wives, sons and daughters of various Blairite figures past and present.

There’s Ellie Reeves (Rachel’s sister), Georgia Gould (Philip’s daughter) and Pat McFadden (whose wife was Labour’s deputy campaign manager), then there’s Sue Gray’s son, Alastair Campbell’s nephew and Morgan McSweeney’s wife. ..

McSweeney, the power behind Starmer’s Labor throne, and his wife Imogen Walker, former actress Linda Lovelace, now MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley, have strong Croydon links.

By-elections?: Sarah Jones’ former assistant Jessica Leigh is a Lambeth councillor. For now…

McSweeney is famous as the man who ran Starmer’s hugely fraudulent and successful 2020 leadership campaign, who was director of the right-wing think tank Labor Together (where Reed was a significant figure) and is now himself a super SPAD, occupying the newly created post of No10’s head of political strategy. All this from humble beginnings working for Reed at Lambeth Council and David Evans at The Campaign Company in Croydon.

McSweeney and Walker met in Lambeth, where he was a Labor councillor. When Hamida Ali escaped from the ruins of Croydon’s financial collapse in 2020 and early 2021 as Tony Newman’s replacement council leader, Walker was hired as a kind of political problem-solver, “interim head of office leader’ to look over Ali’s shoulder at all decisions and reports (albeit somewhat from a distance, especially from Walker’s home in Scotland).

Hired at a time of mass redundancies at Croydon Council, the job was never advertised before being handed to Walker and there are no records of how the appointment came about. It was Walker who was advising Ali when she conducted a series of car crash TV and radio interviews about the council’s finances and then the Regina Road scandal.

Empty towns: Carserides has been a councilor for just over three years

Alongside the Carserides there are other figures behind the work in Croydon in SPAD jobs for boys and girls, all paid for with public money, which are starting to emerge from Whitehall.

Jessica Leigh, who used to work in Sarah Jones’s MP office, gets a SPAD job under Yvette Cooper in the Home Office (meaning a Lambeth Council by-election may be needed – Leigh is a councilor for Clapham East), in while Tom Hughes , another former Jones employee, will lend his expertise in the… (check notes)… defense under John Healey.

Carserides still has his personal website live from when he sought selection and then election as a councilor to serve the residents of South Norwood. “We proudly serve the community where I grew up and the community where I still live,” it says.

There has been no official announcement of Carserides’ resignation as councillor. Any by-elections must be properly announced and political parties will go through the pretense of “selecting” their candidates. If you can get to a branch of William Hill this afternoon, we’re tipping three-time election loser Ben Taylor to be ‘selected’ as Labour’s candidate. Because South Norwood is such a safe Labor ward, even Taylor can’t spoil it…

The estimated cost to cash-strapped Croydon Council of holding a by-election as a consequence of Carserides’ expected resignation? About £10,000…

Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
Read more: ‘No records’ after council hires Starmer ally to advise leader
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: Hacked data source worked for Evans
Read more: #PennReport wanted police to investigate possible wrongdoing