Ray Lewis: My assassins have not heard the last of me

RAY Lewis, the man hailed as Boris Johnson's guru in the war against knife crime, today speaks for the first time about the allegations that led to him resigning in disgrace as Deputy Mayor of Young People.

The former pastor whose groundbreaking work at the Eastside Young Leaders Academy, founded to help troubled black youths, has been lauded, not just by Boris Johnson but also by Conservative leader David Cameron and former leader Iain Duncan Smith, and whose trustees include Francis Maude MP and former politician Steven Norris.

But after two months as Deputy Mayor, he fell on his sword, after lying about being a magistrate and being accused of financially exploiting a vulnerable parishioner, of making sexual advances to a young woman parishioner, and of lying that he did not know that he had been suspended by the Church of England. In addition, complaints by six children at his academy about his boot-camp style of discipline were referred to police.

The fallout has meant that the future of his academy - which helps 90 black boys "perform a handbrake turn in their lives" and which Boris wanted to replicate across London - is in jeopardy. "We have lost £1.2 million of funding, more than half our budget of £2.1 million," says Lewis, 45. "Seven donors have pulled out, run for the hills because apparently I am too leprous. I had to make a third of my staff redundant. Also the credit crunch took Lehman Brothers, so we lost the £130,000 a year they were giving us.

"We've taken one hell of a bash here at the academy, and unless we find new funders, we will not survive the next 12 months. One of our boys is up on a murder charge. I visited him in prison a couple of weeks ago. This is what we do, we try to rescue boys from themselves, we try to make our communities safer. It doesn't always work. The problems in this city run so deep.We've got to cut off the supply to gangs, that's why we target at-risk eight-year-olds.

"It's so painful. To think that everything we've built up since 2002 could go up in smoke. The loss to the boys, the schools and the community will be immense. Because of claims of financial and sexual misconduct contained in a 10-year-old Church file that were never even put to me to refute or to answer."

The file, compiled by the then Bishop of Barking, Roger Sainsbury, led to Lewis being put on the Lambeth List in 1999, a blacklist that prevented him from practising as a pastor for six years. But Lewis says: "There was no letter, no phone call, no hearing, nothing."

Can it really be true that the allegations were never subject to any rigorous due process? "It's fair to say that Ray was never given an opportunity to defend himself," admits the Reverend Chris Newland, chaplain to the Bishop of Chelmsford. "It would not happen today: we changed the disciplinary system in 2003 to make it fairer."

But the Church's insistence that Lewis "knew very well" that he'd been blacklisted - with the damaging implication that he'd lied to Boris Johnson when he claimed he didn't know - now appears in doubt. Evening Standard has discovered that a third pastor, the Rev Peter Stow, vicar of St Mark's in Forest Gate, east London, was also at the meeting of which Dr Sainsbury says: "In 2000 Ray came to see me and I told him he no longer had the right to officiate as a priest. I can still see it, he had tears in his eyes and, frankly, I was a bit tearful myself."

Mr Stow recalls it differently. "Yes, I was at that meeting and yes I do know what went on," he says. "I don't remember anything [being said] about Ray being suspended or defrocked." Asked if Ray cried at that meeting, he laughed. "Are you serious?"

They had gone to see Dr Sainsbury, says Lewis, because after three years serving as a pastor in the Caribbean between 1997 and 2000 he had been asked by Mr Stow to help out in his church, and protocol required that they seek the bishop's permission.

"At that point in my life," says Lewis, "I was looking to branch out into other things and had no desire to return to a full-time ministry. The bishop expressed no concerns and said he was happy for me to officiate. After that, I practised within Peter's church about once a month and during the holidays. What's more, the Archdeacon of West Ham, Elwin Cockett, knew all about it. This was not for a few months, it went on for almost eight years."

Iain Duncan Smith says of the Church: "They sat on Ray Lewis's file and never went to him and said: 'Let's clear this up.' I think they behaved in a disgusting and appalling manner."

Dr Sainsbury told the Standard: "I stand by what I say."

What is Ray Lewis's response to the allegations? The Church's case dates back to a four-year stretch from 1993 when Lewis, having been ordained as a minister at St Paul's Cathedral in 1990, went to the parish of St Matthew's in West Ham. During his tenure, Lewis is said to have persuaded parish secretary Mary Massey, 60, to invest £29,000 of her pension in property schemes. It is alleged that the police had to prevail on him to return the money, which he did.

It was also claimed that £8,000 had been loaned to him by a young parishioner with mental health issues. Moreover, that Lewis had booked a single room for himself and a parishioner when attending a conference and had asked the woman to have sex with him.

"Taking the case of Mary Massey first," says Lewis, "let me be clear - Mary approached me to invest her money, not the other way round. We invested it in schemes run by people connected to the Church and she was paid back, via my bank account, with interest. I was purely the conduit, I did not benefit from one single penny. And she was happy with the arrangement.

"The problem came when I left for Grenada in 1997 and the system broke down and [for almost a year] Mary stopped getting her money. With me so far away, she must have panicked and called in the police. When I visited England in 1998, the police called me in for a chat. I made sure it was sorted out and Mary was repaid in full, with interest."

Surely such financial arrangements are inappropriate? Lewis shakes his head: "Not in my case. I've always been a different kind of clergyman, as comfortable in the pub as the pulpit. People would approach me for things they would not ask of a normal pastor - for example, we started an in-house scheme for home insurance."

What about the charge that he took £8,000 from a mentally ill person? "Total rubbish!" he snorts.

You would think that if Lewis really engaged in financial shenanigans, then parishioners such as Ms Massey, once bitten, would keep their distance. But Mary, says Lewis, has taught English to the boys at his academy for years. "If this person was so upset, and I am such an untrustworthy person, then why is she still choosing to work for me?"

What about the claim that Lewis forced himself sexually on a parishioner? "What? You mean the anonymous woman who says that I offered to show her the promised land and then called her a slag? I want to know who she is and when and where it supposedly happened. My big mistake was that I even responded to such vague nonsense. I checked my diaries and the last time I went to a Church conference was in 1994. Even then, the only woman I recall travelling with was my close colleague, Anne Collard."

He laughs. "Yes, Anne, the one you met earlier at the academy and who reporters refer to as the 'attractive blonde' or my 'girlfriend'." Is she? "What a load of balls! Tell that to her boyfriend. Anne is my closest colleague and one of my wife's closest friends. Our families go on holiday together. And all the stuff about my marriage being on the rocks, what nonsense."

As to the six complaints raised by Newham council into his boot-camp style of discipline, the police investigated, says Lewis, but found no case to answer. In retrospect, the report from a Left-wing council - heavily critical of Lewis's sergeant-major-style methods - has been widely regarded as politically motivated.

In the end, though, what brought Lewis down was none of these things. It was the perception that he was dishonest. Specifically, that he lied in his CV about being a magistrate.

Does he accept that he deceived Boris? "On face value, I guess you might say I lied but in my mind it did not seem like a lie. I had passed the exams and I even had a letter [which he shows me] from the Lord Chancellor's advisory committee saying I had been 'recommended for appointment' as a magistrate.

"And so, although it had not been rubber-stamped, I put it down on my CV because I had been told by personnel that I needed to avoid a conflict of interest by disclosing all my interests. It seemed to me like a tiny, irrelevant detail, certainly one that had no bearing on Boris appointing me."

So why, if he felt it was not a major issue, did he fall on his sword? Did the Mayor force him out? "No, there was no pressure from Boris or his team. In fact, it was not my intention to stand down from office at the start of that day on 4 July. But things became frenzied and I felt my presence was detracting from the job that needed to be done - tackling knife crime.

"Also, I could see it was affecting my daughters and when my wife called to say my youngest had been in tears after seeing me on television, I decided enough was enough."

Lewis lives between his terrace house in Newham and the family home in Milton Keynes, which he shares with his wife, Pamela, 49, a former Hackney primary school teacher, and their three daughters, Nadine, 21, Naomi, 18, and Chloe, 16. Like many of the boys at his academy, he knows what it is to grow up without a father and in poverty. His parents split up shortly after arriving in the UK from Guyana and the family struggled to survive on his mother's meagre earnings. At his secondary school, Lewis was regularly excluded for violent and disruptive behaviour.

His saving grace was taking up boxing, and an English teacher, Miss Archer, who took him aside and said: "Ray, you're on the verge of being permanently excluded. Is that what you want? I believe you're really talented and can do anything you want."

Using his love of boxing, she explained the value of working towards achieving goals in life. It changed him, and now he passes on this lesson to the boys from 26 Newham schools who attend his academy.

Has Boris been in touch since he left City Hall? "In the first fortnight, he would call to see how I was, but not since. I have nothing but praise for Boris. In two months at City Hall, I learned a tough lesson: that politics is about power, not people. But Boris is the exception - he's a genuine bloke concerned about people."

Have the academy's trustees, who include Francis Maude and Steve Norris, stood by him? "Yes. I was called in to explain myself. It was rigorous. These are men who have made their names and who will stake their reputation on me."

What about the boys? "I spoke to them at the academy two weeks after I stood down. It was a full house with parents there, too. I told them that some horrible things had been said about me, some of them complete lies, and that I'd said some unhelpful things as well. I took questions for half an hour. Some of the boys were in tears. There was a lot of anger against my attackers. One teenager, Anthony, asked how people could relate something that happened 10 years ago with my work now, and wondered why, if they had all these concerns, they waited so long to raise them."

What does he think of the Mayor's knife crime initiative? "Mostly good," he says. "I love the ideas of the after-school sports clubs and of building respect by guiding troubled kids into organisations like the cadets. The idea of opening a new prison for first-time young offenders is fine in theory, but re-programming kids in three months will be impossible in practice. "

The problems of gangs and knife crime, says Lewis, run far deeper than anybody realises. "I was delighted when the Mayor offered me the job, because I could make a critical contribution."

He sighs. "It's been one hell of a rollercoaster, the toughest, most confusing time of my life. But I'm going to get to the bottom of what happened. Make no mistake, my would-be assassins haven't heard the last of me."