Lord Mayor suspended by party for complaints over ‘pauper’ residence
THE Lord Mayor of York has been suspended from the Labour Party after a row in which she claimed she was rendered a pauper when restoration work forced her to move out of the city’s Georgian Mansion House.
Sonja Crisp clashed with council officials in a string of emails about her accommodation and demanded that they replace “stained and filthy” carpet tiles with an actual carpet before she would move into temporary offices in the Guildhall.
She suggested she would never have taken the job if she had known she would be unable to live in the 18th century building and asked the council what facilities it could provide to ensure she could “have a family Christmas complete with tree etc”.
Labour officials in the city suspended the 62-year-old councillor after details of the row emerged from emails released to a local paper under the Freedom of Information Act. The de- tails of the mayor’s demands followed leaked emails last month showing she had threatened to cancel public engagements because her chains of office were too tatty.
The latest emails show that Mrs Crisp signed one email exchange about her accommodation “the Pauper Lord Mayor of York”.
York’s Lord Mayor is entitled to an apartment in the city’s Mansion House, but Mrs Crisp, who was appointed in May, was told she had to move out in September because of Lottery-funded restoration work.
Mrs Crisp, whose family house is only around three miles away, said in one email: “Nobody warned me this would be for nine months out of my civic year or I would not have accepted it.”
She also alleged the council was spending more money on a “two-day jolly” for sheriffs in 2016 than on nine months’ accommodation for the “1st citizen of the city”.
Residents last night called for her to step down and accused her of “ridiculous pomposity”, “self importance” and being a “complete disgrace to the post”.
As the emails were released, she was suspended by the local party while it investigated whether she had brought it into disrepute.
A spokesman for the Yorkshire and the Humber Labour Party said: “Sonja Crisp has been suspended by the Labour party pending an investigation.”
After being suspended, Mrs Crisp said she was the victim of a witch hunt. “I have done nothing illegal, I was sending emails that I believed were confidential,” she said.