Squeamish on Jasper

The FT's Westminster blog ponders this morning on why the mainstream press aren't pursuing Lee Jasper with quite the - ahem - glee of the Standard:

A growing number of pundits are wondering why the mainstream press aren't writing much - if anything - about Lee Jasper. The London mayor's race adviser has been subjected to a stream of allegations made by Andrew Gilligan, the investigative reporter, in the Evening Standard.

Kate Hoey, MP for Vauxhall, was fuming to me the other day at how the story was being ignored by papers including the FT.

Some interesting points are raised by this:

• Why is Hoey, always something of a loose cannon, interesting in Jasper? Or is this just sour grapes?
• Is the "mainstream press" squeamish about asking questions related to race groups? Why, in particular, is the Daily Mail not taking up the cudgel? Or is it worried about stepping on the toes of its sister paper?
• Has the press generally blown itself out on Livingstone? It's thrown everything it has at the man, and he's still ahead in the polls. This might speak volumes for BoJo and the Tories, but newspapers as a group don't tend to pursue lost causes (individual newspapers, like the Standard, are very different). Maybe they've just decided Ken is impervious to this kind of criticism (and, as we've said before, many voters have discounted a certain amount of dodgy shenanigans when it comes to deciding on who to vote for)
• Since when is Gilligan a "reporter"?