The shame of schmoozer Singh

The curtains of the neat semi-detached house just round the corner from Winchmore Hill station remained firmly closed yesterday: neither the owner nor his wife put so much as a nose outside their wellpolished front door. The shame was just too great.

For the owner of this intensely respectable house in one of London's leafier suburbs is none other than Gurbux Singh, the former £108,000-a-year chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality.

He resigned this week after pleading guilty on Wednesday to using threatening behaviour towards two white police officers outside Lord's Cricket Ground last month, while he was drunk.

Just three week ago the eloquent and charming Singh, who is 51, stood on his doorstep, defending himself to the media and defiantly refusing even to contemplate his resignation. Yesterday, he must have been all too aware that it will take something approaching a miracle if he is to ever revive his career in public life.

"How are the mighty fallen?" one outspoken neighbour asked, as she walked past the Singhs' tidy front garden. "Serves him right, though. He always was a stuck up so-and-so, what with his grand manners, and his wife wasn't much better. They both thought they were better than anyone round here."

Singh's blonde wife - Irish-born former local authority housing officer Siobhan Maguire, 40, whom he married last summer, has three children by him - boys aged two, four and six.

"She's his greatest defender," says one friend. Indeed she was arrested at Lord's while trying to separate her husband from the police but was not charged.

The family Saab stood untouched outside their semi while its owner - who once earned himself the nickname of "Gearbox" Singh for driving around Haringey in a gleaming Mercedes when he was the local council's chief executive - pondered his future.

"The truth is he hasn't got a future," one Labour source said last night. "He's ruined, as surely as Jo Moore was ruined the day she sent that email about 'burying bad news' on 11 September last year."

Singh will know all about that. He and Ms Moore are old friends. She worked as his press officer at Haringey and, like his old colleague, he's demonstrated a greater appetite for power than subtlety in dispensing it.

But there are two sides to the normally suave Singh, whose rise to one of the most important posts in race relations in Britain was apparently effortless.

"It's not that Gurbux has got a drinking problem," says a former colleague. "It's that he's got a temper problem. He can be a nasty bastard."

Some of that temper was clearly on display outside Lord's last month, when he told one white police officer: "Do you know who I am?" before launching into an expletive-drenched tirade against the officer, which ended in him threatening the officer with his fists - only to be prevented from the assault by two bystanders who held him back.

After attempting to head butt another officer, and shouting: "I'll f****** have you," Singh was placed on the ground and handcuffed while being told to calm down.

He was then taken to cells at Marylebone Police Station. This week he admitted drinking "five, six or seven glasses" of wine in the British Airways hospitality box at the ground, and was fined £500.

"I wasn't surprised about what happened at Lord's, or what he said to the police," says another former colleague from Singh's council days. "He's arrogant, totally arrogant. He and the then Treasurer and Labour leader, Toby (now Lord) Harris, ran Haringey. There was no discussion allowed."

But all that is in the past. "Who'd want to employ a man so publicly branded a belligerent drunk with a foul mouth?" asks one old associate. "He'd better be sure to squirrel away some of the £120,000 golden handshake he got from the Home Office for leaving the CRE."

FOR a time, at least, the cricket-mad Singh, who was born in the Punjab in December 1950 and used to live in Crouch End overlooking the North Middlesex cricket club, may have to curb his enthusiasm for £1,000 Armani suits, though he is unlikely to forgo his regular trips to Wolverhampton, where he was brought up from the age of six and where he is still a season ticket holder at Wolves football club.

Nevertheless the urbane Singh certainly has friends in high places, including Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who headhunted him for the chairmanship of the CRE two years ago. They are unlikely, however, to rush to his rescue.

"There's no denying that Gurbux was the best schmoozer I've ever seen," says one CRE insider.

"But when it came to actually doing something he was far less successful. He didn't get the job as chairman of the CRE because anyone thought he was going to be dynamic, or an unstinting campaigner for racial equality. He got it because he was considered a 'safe pair of hands'."

Not entirely safe, however. Singh's competence as a manager was questioned during the Victoria Climbie hearings last December, when he was condemned for a failure to ensure the eight-year-old was protected by social services in Haringey while he was the local authority's chief executive.

The dead girl's parents also criticised his failure to oversee the borough effectively. In fact, there was suppressed laughter in the corridors of the executive offices of Haringey council when Singh's appointment as chairman of the CRE was announced in 2000.

"It wasn't just the fact that he'd been applying for almost every local authority post going for the previous three years, in a frantic attempt to escape from the worst performing borough in London - which he'd been running," remembers one local official.

"It was also the fact that, when he arrived in the Haringey job, there were four black heads of department and, when he left, there were none at all."

Singh's appetite for political power was born when he was an undergraduate at the then trendy Sussex University in the early Seventies, where he befriended the activist Tariq Ali.

His whole career was a preparation for his CRE chairmanship. Indeed, he even started his career there in 1972, in a junior post shortly after graduating, when it was still the Community Relations Commission.

He has spent the whole of his career in the public sector. During the Eighties he worked his way through three of the most notoriously inefficient boroughs in London - starting with Hackney, moving on to Brent and ending up in Haringey, where he became director of housing in 1987.

Two years later he was appointed chief executive, the first Asian to lead the executive of a London borough. Subsequently the CRE post put him at the very heart of government, giving him access to Cabinet ministers. From there it would have been only a short step to a knighthood, or even to an elevation to the House of Lords - like his predecessor, Sir Herman (now Lord) Ouseley.

Now Singh's glittering future lies in ruins, thanks to too many glasses of wine. "It's a real tragedy what's happened to him," says one former Labour councillor in Haringey. "If the CRE had got rid of him because he'd done a crap job that would have been one thing, But to have to resign in this way is so sad."