Livingstone likens Jewish reporter to Nazi guard

THE FEUD between the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and the capital's Evening Standard newspaper reached new depths yesterday after Mr Livingstone described the paper's staff as "a load of scumbags and reactionary bigots".

In making his remarks after a party to celebrate gay and lesbian freedoms, Mr Livingstone drew himself into a race row by likening one of the Standard's reporters - who had already told him he was Jewish - to a "concentration camp guard".

The journalist, Oliver Finegold, had told the Mayor that he was deeply offended by his advice that he should work for "a paper that doesn't have a record of supporting fascism" and his suggestion that Finegold must have taken his job because he was previously a "German war criminal".

Mr Livingstone's office said the exchange began in a "relatively light- hearted manner" but that the discussion had escalated and ended with the reporter swearing at the mayor.

The incident on Tuesday is the latest in an apparent vendetta between Mr Livingstone and the Standard which began soon after the appointment of the editor, Veronica Wadley, in 2002, when the paper reported that the Mayor had launched a drunken attack on his partner and her friend at a party. Mr Livingstone denied the claims, and even returned to the scene of the alleged incident to measure a wall as part of his questioning of the Standard's account.

His office became convinced that Ms Wadley had an agenda of attacking the left-leaning Mayor, noting that she had failed to respond to his invitation to lunch made shortly after her appointment. Mr Livingstone has since been a thorn in the side of the Standard's owners, Associated Newspapers, by taking legal action over the arrangements to distribute the free title, Metro (also owned by Associated), on the London Underground. Mr Livingstone has threatened the paper's exclusive rights to be distributed on London Underground, thus encouraging Associated's great rival, Richard Desmond, to publish his own free London title.

Mr Livingstone considers the Standard's coverage of London life to be unreasonably negative and refers to the paper as the "Evening Meldrew". He set up his own title, The Londoner, full of articles about the benefits of living in the capital and delivered free to people's homes.

Ms Wadley hit back in The Spectator magazine last month, saying that the Mayor regarded Mr Desmond as his "new best friend" and calling The Londoner "Ken's Pravda".

"Could it possibly be that Ken Livingstone, former Evening Standard magazine restaurant critic, is still riled by my refusing, three years ago and a few hours after my appointment as editor of the Standard, to go and have lunch with him?" she wrote.

The Mayor's office said that on Tuesday the Standard had provoked Mr Livingstone by attending an event (to mark the 20th anniversary of the former minister Chris Smith coming out as gay) which it would not normally attend. "The Mayor took the Standard's relatively unusual actions in this regard to be harassment of a predominantly lesbian and gay event," it said.