Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, launched an extraordinary attack today on race relations chief Trevor Phillips, dubbing him a self-publicist who was "pandering to the Right".

The outspoken politician said that the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) had "gone so far over to the other side that I expect soon he’ll be joining the BNP".

His comments - on BBC London’s Vanessa Feltz show - came after Mr Phillips suggested the Notting Hill Carnival was not a triumph of multiculturalism.

Mr Livingstone said: "I don’t know where Trevor Phillips is going. When we had the first mayoral election and he was running to be mayor - he denounced me as being a racist because I said to him ’would you like to be my deputy?’.

"He’d had a brief sort of black power fling - and ever since then he’s gone so far over to the other side that I expect soon he’ll be joining the BNP."

Mr Phillips was "trying to move the race agenda away from the celebration of multiculturalism and pandering to the Right", he suggested. "I think I have to say it’s an absolutely disgraceful record."

The Mayor accused his former political rival of turning the CRE into a "vast press department" at the expense of legal work on individual race cases.

"What he did was turn it into a vast press department and wound down all the legal work. I think Trevor’s view is that he’s achieving something if he’s in the papers and that isn’t the way it works," he said.

He also said that Mr Phillips thought he could "drift into jobs without doing the work".

"He’s one of those people everyone always expecting he’ll go on to great things. I don’t think he does the work," he suggested.

The mayor said that when the CRE chief was elected to the London Assembly, he offered him a top job which was refused.

"I said to him, look we’ve had a very bitter and unpleasant time in the election and I’m not ever going to forgive the things you did and said, particularly the stuff behind the scenes, but there’s a real chance you’ll be mayor one day and therefore you need to get some experience of proper administration.

"And I asked him to chair the Fire Authority. Big union, difficult management decisions, and he turned that down. He said he just wanted to chair the Assembly - twice a month - lots of press releases. At that moment I thought, you’re not actually serious.

"I offered him the chance to develop those skills because you don’t get them running a small film development company like he’d done, and he just wasn’t interested. And I think basically he’s one of those people who assumes he can drift into jobs without doing the work."

Mr Phillips had rejected one newspaper’s description of the weekend’s carnival in Notting Hill as "the triumph of multiculturalism".

"Though it’s a fabulous party, carnival can hardly be said to represent the everyday culture of most of London’s communities," he told the Royal Geographical Society earlier this week. "It is largely about a celebration of the historic culture with which I grew up in the Caribbean.

"We wouldn’t, frankly, think of participation in a day’s Morris dancing or caber tossing as a valuable exercise in building a modern multicultural society."

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