As was always going to be the case, Celia endorses Justin

Stuff reports:

Wellington’s outgoing mayor has backed her deputy for the top job – and delivered a withering appraisal of the seven other candidates in the process.

Celia Wade-Brown revealed she would rank Justin Lester No 1 on her voting paper for October’s election.

She also took something of a parting shot at the other contenders for her job, labelling them a mix of disruptive, dishonest and lacking the breadth of knowledge required to be mayor of the capital city.

This is no surprise. It was widely speculated at the beginning of the year that Celia’s candidacy was fake, and she was always going to pull out and then endorse Justin. They obviously had some sort of agreement as she started giving him many of the photo ops the Mayor normally does. But for some reason they kept up the pretence she was standing again, and not supporting him.

In her eyes, Lester was the most capable of the eight mayoral candidates on offer to promote consensus.

“It’s just his way of working … although he’s a member of the Labour Party, he doesn’t just work with Labour councillors or Greens. He works with everyone.”

Even if this is correct, alas it can no longer be true. By standing as the official Labour candidate for Mayor (he used to be an independent) he is constitutionally bound to vote in accordance with how the Labour Councillors instruct him.