“It is disappointing that Margaret Hodge saw fit to try to gag the BBC when similar action in the past has had such terrible repercussions Her position is now untenable and it’s time for her to go.”. Tony Blair gave his strongest hint yet yesterday that Ken Livingstone might be readmitted to the Labour fold ahead of next year’s mayor of London election. However, Ms Gavron, the former deputy mayor of London and the candidate selected by Labour members in the capital, is making it clear that she has no plans to step aside.”I’m putting the finishing touches to my strong policy platform and am looking forward to the campaign,” she said when he was confronted about the issue.At Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr Blair was asked by Andrew Mackay, Tory MP for Bracknell, whether he wanted Mr Livingstone or Ms Gavron to win the mayoral election next June. The Prime Minister replied: “I will of course support the Labour candidate.”Mr Blair’s remark will fuel claims that he has already asked Ian McCartney, the party chairman, to find a way of allowing Mr Livingstone back into the party and installing him as Labour’s candidate.Ms Gavron believes that she can win the mayoral race and that Mr Livingstone will lose support if he drops his independence from Labour. The threat of legal action by expelled Labour members if Mr Livingstone is readmitted also makes any move to end his five-year ban risky.A MORI poll recently put Mr Livingstone on 40 per cent, Steve Norris, the Tory candidate, on 27 per cent, Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat, on 16 per cent and Ms Gavron on 12 per cent.Ms Gavron rejected the idea that she could come a “humiliating” fourth because her own polling indicated that she could overtake Mr Hughes by the end of the year.

A senior Gavron source said: “The activists are not jumping up and down asking for Ken to be their candidate.” Despite possible offers of a peerage and even ministerial job, Ms Gavron has won support as the only woman candidate and is determined to implement her ideas to combat poverty and improve the capital’s environment and transport.Although she was removed as Deputy Mayor by Mr Livingstone last year, Ms Gavron has sought to unite the Labour party by recommending that Labour voters use their second preference to back the Mayor.Ms Gavron is understood to have met Mr Blair for half an hour on Tuesday. She said last night: “I can categorically deny that the Prime Minister asked me to step aside. He didn’t.” However, as party sources briefed that she had indicated that a deal was possible under the right terms and conditions, she was guarded about exactly what was discussed.The Gavron camp maintain that while there have been vociferous supporters lobbying for Mr Livingstone’s return, there are also substantial numbers of members who are opposed to him becoming Labour’s candidate.But backers of Mr Livingstone’s return are threatening a so-called “nuclear winter” scenario under which Ms Gavron would be frozen out if she refused a deal. If she came fourth and undermined the Labour Party as a whole, she could be barred from having a chance to implement her own policies and from senior posts at the GLA.No 10 is understood to be extremely worried at the damage a poor showing in the mayoral elections would do to Labour’s standing in the capital as a whole, just one year before a likely general election.. A schoolboy was tortured and strangled before his body was dismembered and parts dumped in a canal, a court heard yesterday. His said the death was an act of “great cruelty”.Adam, Mr Milmo said, was beaten and punched by each member of the gang and doused in boiling water before being strangled.His body was hacked with a saw in the bathroom, wrapped in black plastic bags and dumped in and around a canal.

Members of the gang told police how they had played loud music to drown out the noise as his body was sawn into pieces.Mr Milmo said: “Adam had been subjected to a prolonged and, we say, vicious assault over a period of time and over a period lasting a day or more. There was sufficient head injury caused, almost certainly by repeated blows to the head and face, to have caused death but marks found on the neck also suggested strangulation with some form of ligature although [the pathologist] could not rule out strangulation manually.”The court heard Adam was a “handful” at home and at school and had been expelled several times.He called his father in the days before his death to say that he was staying with friends for the night and they never heard from him again.He was last seen on 15 November last year at a fair in Loughborough with friends. Parts of his remains were discovered two days later by a group of people walking along the canal.Over the next few days, his torso and legs were found in separate locations around Loughborough and a bag containing his clothes was recovered by police from an electricity substation.The boy’s head was wrapped in a black plastic bag and was found by underwater search teams in the canal. Only one limb was never recovered, Mr Milmo said.Each defendant gave a different account to police of the extent of their involvement in the torture, said Mr Milmo, but one said it had lasted for around three to four hours.Mr Welsh and Miss Morris, who was his girlfriend at the time, admitted striking the boy but said they had not been involved in killing him. Mr Biggs denied carrying out an assault.Miss Morris told police she saw Adam the next day and he was “looking like an alien – he was unrecognisable”. She said that Barnett made the decision to kill Adam and that she put the music up to drown out the noise of Adam choking.Mr Milmo said Barnett had first told police that Adam had been killed in a churchyard before being taken to the canal bridge where his body was cut up, an account initially supported by the others.The trial is expected to last three weeks..

Pedal power emerged victorious yesterday in the battle between the nation’s taxis and its rickshaws. In one of the more unusual disputes to come before the High Court, a company which offers rides around London in three-wheeled cycles, also known as trishaws or pedicabs, defeated a demand from the capital’s drivers of black cabs for the trade to be licensed.
A judge reluctantly threw out an appeal by the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA) against a ruling that pedicabs are exempt from the licensing regime that applies to London’s 120,000 black cabs. Mr Justice Pitchford said Victorian-era rules covering the private-hire industry meant that, in the eyes of the law, the cycles were the same form of transport as stage coaches and could not be licensed.The judge said: “I recognise pedicabs plying for trade are subject to no licensing regime, which may be regarded as an unwelcome consequence.”Beyond the arcane technicalities of the 1869 Metropolitan Public Carriage Act, the case highlighted an atmosphere of simmering resentment between the taxi and trishaw trades which threatens to break into open hostility.The LTDA claims that the pedicabs are an unnecessary addition to the streets in London’s West End. Richard Massett, the LTDA executive in charge of bringing yesterday’s case, said: “We are very disappointed to have lost because we cannot see the benefit to Londoners of having these vehicles on our roads. They are clogging up bus lanes, causing more congestion and operating without supervision in a way which means they charge whatever they can.