Birmingham Broad Street manager Mike Olley has vowed to appeal against a decision to snub his bid to become the first West Midlands elected police commissioner.
Former Labour Birmingham city councillor Mike Olley has been campaigning for the Police Commissioner job for more than a year, but has been left off the shortlist by the party.
The party’s regional board conducted interviews last weekend and decided instead to shortlist local councillors Bob Jones, from Wolverhampton, and Yvonne Mosquito, from Birmingham.
West Midlands Labour Party members will be given the two names from which to choose a candidate to run for the job.
Both are long-serving members of the West Midlands Police Authority, and Coun Jones chairs the finance committee.
The decision appears to put paid to the chances of a political comeback by Mr Olley, who is the manager of the Broad Street Improvement District in Birmingham.
However, he said he intended to appeal to Labour’s National Executive Committee in an attempt to have the decision overturned.
Mr Olley said: “It is a setback. But I have made an appeal to the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee and am hopeful of a positive outcome.”
He said that he remains hopeful as the committee would need to meet to hear his appeal before approving the shortlist.
He believes the regional board may have misinterpreted the rule book and was under the mistaken belief that the party was insisting on shortlists of two candidates. He pointed out that Labour has approved a shortlist of three for the Lancashire police commissioner.
Mr Olley, who is a governor of South Birmingham College, has been dogged by some bad publicity in the latter part of his campaign to become commissioner.
In March, the Post’s sister newspaper the Birmingham Mail revealed the BBC had pulled a TV documentary to investigate whether scenes in which Mr Olley appeared to sell a classic car had been faked.
He was filmed apparently selling a rare Lanchester, which once belonged to King George VI, to city pawnbroker Gez Pountney for around £50,000 for the new BBC One documentary Cash Britain.
The corporation later pulled the opening episode to investigate if the scene ‘‘meets editorial standards’’, but Mr Olley said the episode featuring the car was intended to be a “not for broadcast pilot” and that he had never been a customer of nor received any money from a pawnbroker.
The appeal over the shortlisting for the Police Commissioner job comes as Labour faces a national row over the selection process for elected mayor roles.
It has been claimed that the NEC is considering barring sitting MPs from being candidates in order to avoid potentially difficult by-elections which Labour might lose.
