REDMOND O’Neill – a man I knew relatively well during my membership of the International Marxist Group in the 1980s, but with whom I have had no dealings whatsoever since – died earlier this month at the young age of 55.

The following is entirely unedited. If you don’t like it, shoot Bob; I’m only the messenger.

I KNOW it’s not done to speak ill of the dead, but in the case of Redmond O’Neill, who played a prominent role in the London mayor’s office during the eight years that Ken Livingstone held power, I feel an exception should be made. Particularly so, in view of the gushing and entirely uncritical tributes to him that have appeared since his demise.

Having had some experience of working with him in the mayor’s office during 2004-8, I saw another side to O’Neill, namely the abuse and bullying of staff for which he became notorious at City Hall. It was the kind of behaviour you would expect from the worst sort of manager in the worst private sector company. Yet it took place under an administration that was supposed to be pursuing a progressive agenda and the individual responsible for this behaviour claimed to be a socialist.

This went on for years. Back in 2002 the chair of the London Assembly received an email from a member of staff stating: “Some of the mayor’s advisers have demonstrated an abysmal grasp of even basic management techniques, frequently bullying and threatening officers to obtain results.” With the backing of UNISON, the editor of The Londoner newspaper was pursuing a grievance against O’Neill on those grounds at the time Ken was voted out of office.

This was why many staff at City Hall had mixed feelings about Ken’s defeat. They were sorry for Ken that he lost the election, and understood that it was a big setback for progressive politics in London, but they really didn’t want people like O’Neill coming back for another four years.

As its programme of job cuts has shown, the current regime at City Hall is hardly a friend of the workers. Nevertheless, there are not a few PAs, portering staff and other non-political employees who actually find it pleasanter working under Boris Johnson’s administration than under Ken’s. On a one-to-one basis they are at least treated with some basic respect and civility, which is more than they got from O’Neill and those around him.

O’Neill’s methods not only alienated staff but also helped to bring down Ken’s administration. The reason why Atma Singh, the mayor’s former policy adviser on Asian affairs, turned against Ken and collaborated in the witch-hunt led by Andrew Gilligan and Martin Bright was because of his anger and bitterness over being bullied into a nervous breakdown by O’Neill. You have to ask – what sort of “socialism” is it that produces results like that?

Some would attribute it all to the corrupting influence of power, and there is an element of truth to this. Having long regarded himself as a central figure in the leadership of the British revolution, O’Neill certainly held an exaggerated view of his own political importance and, after he got his hands on a little bit of actual state power, the delusions of grandeur could only be magnified.

But a more fundamental explanation, I think, lies in the form of organisation that characterises most Leninoid sects – a “democratic centralism” in which the overwhelming emphasis is placed on the centralist component, providing a justification for unaccountable rule by domineering leadership cliques.

The problem was that O’Neill and other individuals who had spent decades running a small Trotskyist group on that basis suddenly found themselves at the head of a much bigger and broader organisation, where they antagonised and repelled people by importing the arrogant, top-down, authoritarian culture that characterises the internal life of the far-left sect. There is a striking parallel here with the behaviour of the SWP leaders in Respect.

The irony is that when I worked in the mayor’s office I was enthusiastic supporter of the administration’s political agenda – its transport and environmental policies, defence of multiculturalism, anti-racist campaigning, opposition to Islamophobia, promotion of LGBT rights, support for the anti-war movement and solidarity with Venezuela. It was just a shame that this progressive programme was soured by the organisational methods employed by some of the people charged with implementing it.