THE man hailed as the saviour of Camden’s crumbling leisure centres was awarded a £14,000 raise as his pay rocketed to nearly £100,000 last year.
Greenwich Leisure Limited (GLL), set to take over the borough’s leisure centres for 15 years in April, paid its managing director Mark Sesnan £96,231 in 2003, the last year for which I can find records.
Recently, Councillor Phil Turner, who runs leisure for the Town Hall, praised GLL’s “not-for-profit” status, arguing that all surpluses the firm makes would be ploughed back into Camden’s crumbling facilities and that frontline staff would be well paid.
But existing GLL staff’s in-line-with-inflation rise in 2003 pales next to Mr Sesnan’s 17 per cent hike, which is equivalent to the annual full-time pay of a lifeguard.
Files held by the Financial Services Authority at Canary Wharf show his salary rose by 89 per cent since 1994, when a group of Greenwich Council officials set up GLL and took over the borough’s leisure centres.
Even allowing for inflation, his pay has gone up by 50 per cent.
The chairman, Chris Symons, was paid £53,317 – nearly what his predecessor was paid in 1994.
GLL’s turnover has tripled since 2000, as it expanded to take over eight other London council’s services.
A spokeswoman insisted his pay – seven times that of a gym assistant – was a good deal.
She told me: “Turnover for GLL in 1993 was £4.5 million – turn over for GLL in 2004 was £36.5 million.
“In 1993, GLL was managing seven centres and 90 staff – at present it manages 42 centres and 2,500 staff.”
Camden Unison leisure branch secretary Barry Walden saw Mr Sesnan’s salary in a different light.
He said: “A pay rise of more than a normal member of staff makes in a year is certainly interesting and something we will be asking about,” he said. Unison was critical of the decision to award the contract to GLL last month, questioning how it could afford to bid to run Camden’s four centre’s for one-third the price of its rivals.
Accepting an award for growth in 2002, Mr Sesnan claimed that the “secret to success in inner city areas is remembering that leadership is 90 per cent empowerment, and 10 per cent control.”

Ex-Mirror snapper crows while welcoming in Year of the Rooster

I CAUGHT up with the former Mirror photographer Mike Maloney on Tuesday night as he hosted a double celebration – he was ushering in the Chinese New Year with some select friends at the Mulan restaurant in Haverstock Hill, and was also toasting his recently awarded OBE.
And although the house was full, Mike tells me there was one guest who had said he’d try to drop by if the affairs of state were not too pressing.
“I took a picture of Tony Blair, sitting under a pool of light created by a standard lamp in Whitehall,” he told me.
“I was speaking to Tony last week and he told me how it was his favourite picture; he has it on the wall of his office.”
So Mike asked Tony if he would like to join them for the Chinese: and he told Mike he’d be there if the red boxes allowed it.
Sadly, late night policy making took precedence.
But the party still had a variety of interesting faces.

Actor Leonard Whiting, who made his name as a 16-year-old playing Romeo in Franco Zefferilli’s Shakespearean tragedy shared spring rolls with Pink Panther legend Burt Kwouk, who played the detective’s violent home help Cato.
And Sally Farmiloe, the one-time girlfriend of the disgraced Conservative Lord Archer made an appearance. Sally was the lady spotted wandering idly with the ex-convict on a beach in Cape Town, behind Mary Archer’s back. Her friend the socialite party organiser Liz Brewer also popped in.
Highgate-based writer William Hall, who wrote Dead Lucky, which linked a Goa-based drifter called Jungle Barry with Lord Lucan, told me over a bowl of rice he is considering an offer to go on the after dinner lecture circuit. He has written over a dozen biographies, including the official biography of Michael Caine – although he had to turn down the chance to write about Gregory Peck.
“Peck asked me to go to the States for a year,” he sighed.
“He said he had 140 boxes of files in his basement for me to work through. I would have loved to have done it, but it was too much of a commitment.”

The life of Frank

SPREAD out on a small table at the front of the chapel at Golders Green crematorium lay a display of ageing trade union and political membership forms. Here, I thought, lay the life of Frank Stone.
A man of conscience and compassion, I had met Frank (pictured) many times over the years and what struck me was his extraordinary sense of optimism in the face of the failure of his communist gods.
Over the years, he had championed the pensioners’ cause. Later, he had fought for the rights of patients on the Hampstead Community Health Council.
Even as he approached his 90th birthday, he had a run-in with his landlord over dilapidations in his Hampstead flat. For him, a battle had to be faced.
Typically, he was blacklisted by employers after his expulsion from his union for standing up for the rights of his fellow members.
His funeral on Friday drew a surprising number of youngish friends some of whom conducted a moving service full of anecdotes, poems and hummable jazz tunes.
“It was good, wasn’t it?” one of them said. Frank would have liked it.

Sheer disbelief

JONATHAN Miller is dangerously popular. Such is his draw, a talk on ‘disbelief’ by the Camden Town-based polymath attracted more people than could be safely accommodated by Belsize Library in Antrim Grove, at least according to the council’s health and safety experts.
I watched people arrive half an hour before the talk was due to start and the doors were already locked, with a note pinned to the door saying the library could only accommodate 50 people.
But the crowds outside were not content to shrug their shoulders and leave. A few of the outsiders were quick to make nuisances of themselves, kicking the door and ringing both the doorbell and telephone until both had to be disconnected.
“It’s as hard to get into this library as it will be for Jonathan Miller to get into heaven,” boomed one man piously.
Speaking to Dr Miller after the event he told me he was sorry that people were turned away – he was well aware of the kerfuffle outside. “It’s a municipal decision,” he said, “and not the fault of the library. If they violate the rules I imagine the consequences are severe.”

Off to pastures new?

IS Camden’s education chairman Councillor Nick Smith about to take off for Brussels?
I hear that Smith who learned his political ropes as an advisor at the Labour party HQ in the 1990s, has been offered a tempting job by his comrades in the EU parliament.
If rumours are right, Smith would presumably have to leave the borough. Unfortunately, he was unable to return my phone calls this week week despite repeated attempts to get in touch.