Former deputy mayor of London

A FORMER deputy mayor of London who founded an organisation which helped disadvantaged young children, which is said to have inspired a BBC series, has died aged 61.

Ray Lewis was deputy to thenLondon mayor Boris Johnson, but resigned in July 2008 following allegations of inappropriate behaviour and financial irregularities.

In 2002 Mr Lewis set up the Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy (EYLA), a charity which sent hundreds of disadvantaged young children to elite public schools in an attempt to address racial inequality.

The work of the charity is said to have inspired the creator of BBC3 series Boarders, a comedy drama about five black students who win scholarships to an elite private school.

Mr Lewis, who as deputy mayor had been in charge of leading the capital’s policy on youth crime, at the time said he was resigning in the face of a “drip, drip” of allegations against him which was “getting in the way of the very important work of this mayor and his vision for London”.

But he added that the “seeming duplicity” over his role as a magistrate – he had been recommended but not actually appointed – was the main reason for his resignation.

A spokesman for the mayor later said the City Hall investigation into Mr Lewis had been dropped because it would be “inappropriate to use taxpayers’ money to fund an inquiry into a private individual”.

In 2010 it was announced that Mr Lewis would help to lead Mr Johnson’s drive to recruit 1,000 people to inspire troubled and often violent youngsters.

He was made a CBE after being nominated by former prime minister Mr Johnson in his resignation honours in 2023.

Mr Lewis was born in Guyana and grew up in Walthamstow, east London.

Mr Lewis was ordained as a priest in 1990.

He worked as a curate at St Mary Magdalene Church in Islington, north London, before becoming vicar of St Matthew’s in east London in 1993.

In 2000 he started work in the Prison Service at Woodhill Young Offenders’ Institution, and then in 2002 he set up the Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy.

The charity in Forest Gate, east London, works with black boys at risk of exclusion from school.

Mr Lewis extended EYLA’s reach across London and further afield to Milton Keynes, Leicester and Nottingham.

Mr Lewis’s daughter Chloe said: “Ray, our dad, was a force of nature. This was as true of him as a father and husband, as much as it was in his professional life.”