Strayside Sunday: Gove, Adams and Dorries ..the big reshuffle

Strayside Sunday is our monthly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party. 

The wonderfully dotty Nadine Dorries is now Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, appointed in Boris Johnson’s surprisingly brutal ‘night of the long knives’ reshuffle.  When I first saw the news I had to check the calendar, sure that this must be an elaborate April fool’s – Ms. Dorries’ contribution to the arts hitherto limited to the publication of a series of novels which, although receiving horrible notices (“the worst novel I’ve read in ten years”), have sold in bulk to an undiscerning public; it transpires that Misery on the Mersey has wide popular appeal.

No shrinking violet, La Dorries; among the positions of policy for which the MP is (in)famous are; proposing amendments to a Health and Care bill that would have blocked Marie Stopes International from providing abortion counselling services; abstinence advocacy for girls in sex education; opposing the same-sex marriage bill and proposing a ban on the Burkha.  A “snowflake” she is not.  Her independent streak reached its peak when she defied the whip to travel down under and take a hefty fee to participate in that celebrity jungle show with Ant and/or Dec.

Jonny Oxford-Cambridge at the BBC will be quivering in his boots at the prospect of negotiating the license fee renewal with a new Culture Secretary whose sensibilities are distinctly Channel 5. And perhaps that, along with belated patronage – Dorries passionately supported BoJo on both his abortive and successful leadership attempts – is the point.  Reason perhaps, but not reason enough, to put a cultural philistine and avowed social conservative in charge of a liberal sector in mortal danger, post-lockdown.

Dorries and newly minted Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Michael Gove have previous.  Being a diehard, the lady was seriously unimpressed when Gove pulled the rug on BoJo’s first leadership bid.  Sitting in the front row of the press conference at which Boris announced he was pulling out of the contest she wept.  That said I suspect she will be foursquare behind Gove as he attempts to make sense of the not-in-my-backyard Rubik’s Cube that is planning reform.  Dorries earned the ire of her Mid-Beds constituents when she supported and advocated the creation of a new 700 chalet Centre Parcs greenfield development, against their and the local council’s vehement wishes and, indeed, any sense of good taste.  It seems she has the same devil-may-care attitude to development as our own Harrogate Borough Council.

As locals know, Beckwithshaw is a lovely local village, population 400.  It is now the latest of our communities to be faced with the prospect of large-scale development on its doorstep –  Taylor Wimpey and Redrow Homes are hoping to build 780 houses and a primary school on the ‘Windmill Farm’ site north of Harlow Carr, off Otley Road.  If given the go-ahead it would be the latest in a hotch-potch of concrete and brick building that is fundamentally changing the character of Harrogate Borough.  We need homes, but we don’t need yet more bland and utilitarian sprawl, or yet more traffic to further fur-up our clogged arterial roads.  Harrogate Borough (Conservative) Council’s Local Plan is in grave danger of leading to the permanent paving over our green and pleasant lands with, as ever with this mob, no discernible cogent thought, let alone vision.  Whatever Gove does at DLUHC, let’s hope he gets a grip.  He has a reputation as an able departmental minister, so we live in hope.

Our own Nigel Adams, MP for Selby and Ainsty, also prospered from the reshuffle; he now attends cabinet as Minister without Portfolio – perhaps for services to the gambling industry? (See Strayside Sunday, August 21) It can’t have been for diplomacy, it was just two weeks ago that he was filmed in the street in Westminster telling Steve (Mr. “Stop Brexit”) Bray to go forth and multiply.  I admit to a sneaking sympathy for Mr. Adams in this one instance only.  Steve Bray is the loutish, shouty, blue top hat wearing, EU flag waving protester whose unprepossessing visage forced its way into the background of almost every television interview conducted with politicians during the interminable Brexit process.  As my daughter would say, people getting “all up in your grill” is never a pleasant experience.  Peaceful political protest is a democratic essential but invading anyone’s personal space and haranguing them is intimidation and beyond the pale.  Should Mr. Adam’s have told this man to “f—k off”? Clearly not.  But I suspect most people that saw the episode unfold on YouTube or Twitter thought they might have dispensed with such pleasantries and dispensed a bunch of fives.

I’ve long been of the dysphoric view that we get the politicians we deserve.  If Harrogate Borough Council, Nigel Adams and Nadine Dorries are anything to go by, we are indeed unworthy.  Notwithstanding they provide a large bullseye for these monthly meanderings, I fervently wish for a different and better state-of-affairs.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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Strayside Sunday: MPs should not accept gifts from gambling firms

Strayside Sunday is our monthly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party. 

Nigel Adams made local news this week.  Wonders never cease.

It seems that the Member of Parliament for Selby and Ainsty, enjoyed a very good European Championships this summer.  Thanks to the generosity of Paddy Power and Betfair he was present at England’s Round of 16 victory over Germany.  He enjoyed a semi-final jolly, paid for by Entain, whose betting brands include Coral, Ladbrokes, PartyPoker, and Sportingbet, to watch Gareth Southgate’s men vanquish the Danes.  And, unlike those who breached Wembley’s defences and got into the final against Italy without a ticket, Mr. Adams attended legitimately, with a ticket paid for by Heineken, the booze brand that refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.

Mr. Adams followed procedure and registered properly the 6 grand’s worth of hospitality he received in the Register of Member’s interests.  So, what, if anything, is noteworthy about this story? Heineken is based in Tadcaster, in Mr. Adams constituency and, as such, you can make the case that a local business and significant employer has every right to entertain its local MP and that it is sensible for the MP in question to maintain strong relationships with important local economic players.  However, in my view,  public servants accepting hospitality from gambling companies can never be right.

The think-tank the Institute for Public Policy Research estimates that “problem gambling” costs the taxpayer £1.2b a year; for mental health services, for police intervention and even through homelessness.  Gambling addiction is fast approaching epidemic status; fuelled by aggressive advertising campaigns (none more so than the wall-to-wall adverts that envelop football television coverage); by the gambling industry’s exceptional digital innovation; and by the prevalence of smartphones that bring accumulators, spreads and each-way bets into the palm of our hand (thereby absolving us of the social shame we once knew of flicking a fag butt and ducking swiftly and furtively into the betting shop).  Whatever you think about the morality and desirability of gambling in a civilised society, and whether you think that gambling should be free of advertising constraints or handcuffed by them, I hope we can all agree that a public servant accepting free tickets to England football matches sends all the wrong signals.  As an ex-communication professional, I used to tell my clients that one’s reputation is defined, at least in large part, by the company you keep.  Mr. Adams is all a flutter and enjoyed the football this summer at the expense of his credibility.

And credibility is in draught-like supply among western governments this week.  On Thursday, 2 suicide bombers from Isis-K killed 70 Afghans and 13 US soldiers at the gates of Kabul Airport.  These following days of chaotic scenes as almost 100,000 people have been evacuated from the country, largely under the stewardship of the US and UK military, as Joe Biden’s (and therefore the) 31st August deadline for concluding the operation fast approaches.

Aircraft holds crammed with terrified and exhausted men, women and children fleeing Taliban 2.0; crowds trampling countrymen and women underfoot in the crush to get anywhere near, let alone through the airport gates, desperate young men of promise falling from the undercarriage of planes flying to freedom and dead bodies strewn along a thronging open sewer.  For those of a sensitive disposition it is best to look away now.  But to do so is tacit acceptance of our own responsibility.  We did this.  More accurately those we elected to lead us did.  Thank you, Messers Bush and Blair; $2 trillion spent over 20 years in Afghanistan, on infrastructure, on civic society and capability building, on training and equipping Afghan police and military.  Yet once it became clear that the west was throwing in the towel (and setting a public date to do so) this lot, in the face of a well organised and ideologically driven enemy, collapsed in less than a month.  Viewed on these merits our involvement in Afghanistan has been a colossal failure.  Almost 500 British servicemen and women paid the ultimate price to deliver it.

It’s important however that we remember the organising principle for our involvement in Afghanistan and the climate in which the decision was taken for it.  In the aftermath of 9/11, we chose to rid the world of the awful threats posed to all our welfare by the existence of Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.  Al Qaeda has been quashed and Bin Laden was killed.  Job done.  Whether or not the new Taliban regime will now enable and see the rise of a radical replacement for these nefarious forces remains to be seen; but it already looks likely.  It seems probable too that this will lead to the threat of further terrorist attacks on the west.  And so the tragic cycle continues.

What matters now is how we treat the Afghan refugees we created, now arriving on our shores. Our challenge is to reconcile the high-minded morality we might proclaim (by providing safe haven to those for whom life under the Taliban would be intolerable) with our selfish desire not to have refugees living next door.  These people are coming here precisely because they are now too educated and too liberal for their own incoming regime.  We should embrace them; it’s the least we can do.  If we marginalise them, if we build barriers to their economic success, if we ghettoise them or allow cultural insularity, we will yet again be gambling on our future.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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Strayside Sunday: I want to pay one council tax to a single and accountable body

Strayside Sunday is our monthly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party. 

August 1st is Yorkshire Day, the day we hang out the white rose flags, revel in the natural and sometimes bleak beauty of our great county, celebrate our heroes from Harold Wilson to Alan Bennett, from Betty Boothroyd to Dame Janet Baker, from David Hockney to Emily Bronte and rebel against the cheap and cliched stereotypes of flat caps, whippets and black pudding.

In fact, Yorkshire Day has its roots in two historic events; the first being the Battle of Minden in Prussia in 1759, when the King’s Own (as opposed to God’s own, one presumes) Yorkshire Light Infantry formed the larger part of an Anglo-German force that, under the command of Field Marshall Ferdinand of Brunswick, sent packing the French forces of the Marquis de Contades.  In celebration and to this day, a white rose adorns the Light Infantry’s headdress.  Quite right too.  Another great Yorkshireman, William Wilberforce MP, led the campaign for emancipation that ended with the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act on August 1st, 1833.

However, Yorkshire Day’s modern roots lie in protest.  In 1975 the Yorkshire Ridings Society in Beverley used the day to protest the local government re-organisation of the previous year.  The word riding is, by the way, derived from the Danish word thridding, meaning third, or in this case one of three, North, East and West).  Those reforms introduced the two-tier (county and district) system of local government that has remained largely intact, in North Yorkshire at least, until now.

Last week, Housing and Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick announced the much-trailed devolution settlement for North Yorkshire.  The two-tier system goes, with a single unitary authority to be constituted from April 2023, serving the 618,000 residents of the county (excluding the City of York) and costing an estimated £38 millions of your money and mine to set up.  This ending an increasingly bitter scrap between two opposing bids for unitary powers, that of Councillor Carl Les’ North Yorkshire County Council, arguing for a single unitary authority and that of the seven districts, led by Harrogate’s own Councillor Richard Cooper, arguing for two.  Between them this sorry lot spent a staggering £330,000 of our money on consultants from PWC (North Yorkshire, £90,000) and KPMG (seven districts, £240,000) to help write their respective bids.  The more I hear about government spending on big consultancies (£3 billion on Test & Trace anyone?) the more I think I’m in the wrong game.

I doubt very much that this Yorkshire Day will see anyone lamenting the demise of Harrogate Borough Council, let alone the organisation of a protest at the reforms.  This council will disappear leaving an honours board of failure and mismanagement and leave a mettlesome legacy to the new unitary:  The financial sink hole that is the Harrogate Convention Centre, the actual sink hole at the new Ripon baths, the vanity project that is the council HQ at Knapping Mount, the outdated (and undelivered) town plan, a £165,000 Visit Harrogate website, a diminished and drab Harrogate town centre, a hotch-potch of unsympathetic housing developments, a political culture astonishing for its secrecy (more politburo than democratic body) and profligacy (Viv Nicholson would blush) and, perhaps most damning of all, it leaves a fragmented, fractious and divided group of stakeholders that the council under Richard Cooper’s grip has consistently sought to divide and conquer, rather than bring together in common purpose.  If this is the demise of Harrogate’s Dear Leader, then good riddance.  I wouldn’t bet on it though, as word reaches me that the starting gun has fired in Harrogate & Knaresborough Conservative Association on jockeying for selection for the new council seats.  As ever in these matters the likely outcome is ‘different party, same guests.’

Thank goodness the Secretary of State rejected the so-called east-west bid, citing likely and significant disruption during the transition period.  He makes the case that the unitary will benefit the county by between £58 and £61 millions per year.  We can but hope the additional funds are spent wisely and in our interests.  I’m in favour of the new authority.  I want to pay one council tax to a single and accountable body.  I want my local authority territory to match that of the pending re-organisation of the NHS, so that the council and Integrated Care Systems can work together in concert to promote public health, preventive care and to improve health equity and outcomes across our population.

I don’t buy the argument that the unitary will be ‘distant’ on the merits, any distance being in fact a product of our own lack of engagement and action.  Local politicians have been quick to say they fear the new deal will lead to fewer voices standing up for local people.  Call me cynical but I have an inkling that what they fear is that it won’t be their voice.

So, this August 1st I choose to celebrate the bravery of the Yorkshire Light Infantry at Minden and the emancipation vision of William Wilberforce.  While perhaps not quite as perspicacious as Kingston-Upon-Hull’s famous son, we should celebrate too that the members of the Yorkshire Ridings Society circa 1975 knew and warned us that the two-tier system of local government was doomed to fail.

Happy Yorkshire Day.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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Strayside Sunday: Get a grip or election defeat looms

Strayside Sunday is our monthly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party. 

Oh dear.  Since last we communed in these pages the Prime Minister has had to accept the resignation of his Secretary of State for Health Matt Hancock and, as a result it seems, failed to win an important by-election this week down the road in Batley and Spen, when set fair to do so.  Has the electoral worm turned?

When Mr. Hancock was caught on CCTV in the corridor outside his office at the Department for Health and Social Care the grainy images showed him engaged in enthusiastic tongue wrestling with his advisor Gina Colangelo, his hand clearly grabbing her bottom.  Not a dignified look.  Both parties concerned are married (but sadly not to each other) with six children between them.  When confronted with the story, Mr. Hancock’s hand was forced and he told his wife and family he was in love with another and would be setting up shop with Gina.

While marriage break up is often a cause for sadness, especially when children are involved, Mr. Hancock has let it be known through friends that he has found a “love match.”  Good for him.  Initially the PM let it be known that everyone was entitled to a private life and that he considered the matter closed.  Boris being Boris he could hardly have done anything else.  If he had sacked the man, he would have brought the chequered history of his own private life into sharp relief, which the media would have gleefully welcomed.

The issue of course is that Ms. Colangelo had been advising Mr. Hancock in government.  Further, following a period during which she acted in an unpaid capacity, she was then appointed to the board of the DHSC as a Non-Executive Director paid £15,000 annually from the public purse.  In other words, she became a public servant tasked with marking her lover’s homework.  In the United States this would be called “inside the beltway” and just won’t do.

Mr. Hancock tried to hang on to see which way the political wind was blowing; his fate sealed when his own party, in the form of cabinet ministers and MP’s, named and unnamed, turned against him and briefed the media that his behaviour was not on.  He resigned and posted a doleful video mea culpa to his Twitter account.  And with that he was gone.  No more lectures on rules of six and social distancing from our bouncy school prefect.

No one emerges from this sorry matter with much credit; the Health Secretary, his advisor, nor the PM.  But what grinds my gears most is that the British national media was shown again at its sanctimonious and hypocritical worst.  I want to know where, when and how did The Sun receive security footage from inside a government department?  And, while I agree that Ms. Colangelo’s paid position at the DHSC of course represented a conflict of interest for both parties, one must think that the hacks at the current bun were most excited by the prurient way it all came to light.  There is nothing the tabloids like more than a bit of how’s your father in public life.  And don’t we all?

A good friend of mine, an erstwhile bigwig in local government, is a member of the 2019 parliamentary intake.  A formidable campaigner, the aforesaid honourable member had been spending a significant amount of time recently telephone canvassing, knocking doors and delivering leaflets in the Conservative interest in the Batley and Spen constituency. We saw each other three weeks ago for a catch up and drink was taken.  Heavy in our botanicals he convinced me that the seat would be won, such was the blue-tinged sentiment on the doorstep.  Just a short cameo this week for our own Andrew Jones MP; Harrogate’s finest was spotted helping the cause in Batley and Spen, sharing fish and chips with the candidate.  No word on whether mushy peas or curry sauce provided the accompaniment.

Just three weeks ago the party was convinced it was on for another astonishing Red Wall win.   As it transpired the Labour Party held the seat by just 323 votes, Kim Leadbeater holding off the Conservative Ryan Stephenson.  Amanda Milling MP, the Conservative Party Co-Chair admitted that the Hancock affair had been a contributory factor in the final days leading up to the vote.  Of course it was; we don’t like being told what to do at the best of times but this government is clearly of the “do as I say” not “do as I do” school.

No one has been happier in all of this than the dreadful Dominic (Barnard Castle) Cummings.  Having attempted to bring Matt Hancock down during his appearance before a joint parliamentary committee hearing into the coronavirus – “he should have been sacked 17 times etc.” – Mr. Cummings has been playing out his own personal psychodrama through endless blogs and Twitter chains.  The man’s ego, as well as his prose, knows few bounds.  I guess that’s what happens when you are played by Benedict Cumberbatch on the telly.

In the end one is left with a vague and uneasy feeling that the ship of state isn’t being run by men and women of principle or decency.  People fall in love all the time.  They have affairs and leave marriages.  But Matt Hancock was the first to tell us he had been working tirelessly to beat coronavirus, yet, in addition to his work battling a national crisis and being a husband and father to three children he found the time to have a passionate affair.  Boris was willing to let this go unpunished because his own copy book is far from clean in this regard.  All of this contributes to a feeling of one rule for them, one for the rest of us.  Unless the government gets a grip, that way electoral defeat looms.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

Do you have a view on this column or is there a political issue you’d like Paul to write about? Get in touch on paul@thestrayferret.co.uk

Strayside Sunday: That sinking feeling in Ripon

Strayside Sunday is our monthly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party.

Hitherto I haven’t found it necessary to use this column to discuss matters of geology. However, recent events in Ripon have forced my hand. 

It turns out that Ripon is built on ground heavy in gypsum; chemical formula CaSO 4·2H₂O.  Gypsum, Wikipedia informs, is a soft sulphate mineral composed of calcium sulphate dihydrate. The dihydrate bit is important to this story because it means 2 crystalised molecules of water. 

By the way, gypsum is widely mined and is used as a fertilizer and as the main constituent in many forms of plaster, blackboard/sidewalk chalk, and drywall; just FYI. It should not be confused with flotsam, the wreckage that remains afloat when a ship has sunk, or with jetsam, the cargo thrown overboard from a ship in distress.

Currently, neither gypsum, flotsam nor jetsam would be able to float in Ripon Spa baths.  Alongside the leisure centre to which they are attached, the new baths remain shut, while the works to build them and to upgrade the adjoining leisure centre are delayed. It seems that a large void (a sinkhole to you and me) has opened on the leisure centre site.  It turns out that Ripon’s new leisure centre and baths is being built on ground with obvious stability issues.  You see, when crystalised dihydrate is exposed to the right conditions (water and heat), it dissolves and leaks away, creating a hole in the ground. Let’s hope and trust that, when eventually completed, Ripon baths don’t leak.

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Chartered Geologist Dr. Alan Thompson has written to Harrogate Borough Council to warn them of the inadequacies of the ground investigations undertaken so far and of the ongoing risk of subsidence. In his letter he expresses his support of the concerns raised by Ripon resident and Chartered Engineer Stanley Mackintosh “regarding the ongoing risk subsidence, the inadequacy of recent ground investigations, and the prospects of instability being exacerbated by the techniques being used”. I hope that the council takes note of those serious and legitimate concerns. My fear is that they won’t,

The void itself needs to be remediated at a cost of £110,000 of Her Majesty’s Pounds Sterling and the council’s insurers need to be reassured that the £3 million plus they have underwritten the site for is based on, ahem, sound footings. Meanwhile, notwithstanding Freedom of Information requests from the Ferret’s intrepid staff, HBC continue to hold the line that the final costs for the leisure centre are commercially sensitive and will therefore remain confidential.  I bet they are.  For ‘commercially sensitive’ read expensive, over-budget and wasteful. If they are not, then what does the council have to hide and gain from confidentiality?

Meanwhile it transpires that the council has again awarded a large single source contract, without competitive tender, for the design work of a new leisure centre in Knaresborough and for the refurbishment of Harrogate Hydro. Alliance Leisure are to be paid £2,107,161 for the eleven months of work on the £26 million projects. 

Eyebrows have been raised all around the district because Alliance hail not from our local economy but rather from Somerset. The contract to build our facilities has, in short, been awarded to “comers-in”. It won’t do. Still, I suppose local hostelries will benefit from a rise in cider sales and will need to stock up on Cheddar. No doubt Alliance is a fine company but, in all seriousness, awarding their contract this way is yet another example of a council that doesn’t know how to behave. It is secretive, arrogant and unaccountable.

Meanwhile, the good people of Starbeck find their own historic baths remain shuttered.  The council blame staff shortages and the difficulties of operating ‘covid-safe’ for its continued closure.  No re-opening date has been announced and fears are rising that the council plan to close the baths permanently and sell the site for development. I’ve written here before about the potential dangers of spinning off the district’s leisure facilities into a Local Authority Trading Company (LATC). In the pursuit of a commercial approach to running the show there will, by definition, be winners and losers. That’s what makes it commercial. In my view leisure is a public good and ought to be operated by the council as such so that it offers universal access to all the district’s residents.  

Each year the NHS spends roughly £60 billion, roughly 40% of its budget, on treating people for avoidable chronic health conditions. Physical activity is a modifiable risk factor for up to 50 chronic conditions, from obesity to diabetes, from cardio-pulmonary disorder to heart failure. And we know that those suffering from these illnesses have disproportionately borne the brunt of both Covid-19 serious illness and mortality. The bottom line is this; the less well off in our society suffer striking health inequality, the costs for which we all bare. We must make getting people active a local as well as a national priority.  We should be opening more leisure facilities, not closing them.  If we don’t then we will be building on gypsum, not just in Ripon, but across the district.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.    

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Strayside Sunday: Harrogate Borough Council believes itself above scrutiny

Strayside Sunday is our monthly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party.

This week a Stray Ferret in-depth investigation revealed that our beloved Borough Council cloaks itself in secrecy.  It’s long been suspected that when big or controversial issues are at hand, the Knapping Mounties use enough so-called “pink papers” (the bureaucratic standing instrument that allows ‘commercially sensitive’ information to be withheld) to avoid telling us about the decisions they make.  Decisions that involve the spending of taxpayer money.  Decisions about issues such as the financial affairs of the Harrogate Convention Centre, the sole source awarding of the £165k contract to create the new Visit Harrogate website, the long-delayed repairs to The Stray following the UTC World Cycling Championships, or the commercialisation of our leisure facilities.

In shocking fact, it turns out that HBC is in a pink paper league of its own.  The Stray Ferret’s research has shown that the council has on 222 occasions, deemed their deliberations and decisions too sensitive for the simple likes of you and me. By way of like-for-like comparison – Conservative council’s serving populations of roughly the same size, with leader and cabinet systems – South Kesteven utilises the second largest number of pink papers.  At 79, the Lincolnshire council uses 3 times fewer pink papers than our lot.  Clearly, they don’t have much going on in Hampshire because Test Valley Council only saw fit to use pink papers on 9 occasions.

As ever, when challenged, the Leader, Richard Cooper refused to comment, leaving it instead to his long-suffering media team.  Apparently, Harrogate Council is an irony free zone.  For there, buried in the middle of a long-winded press statement, an exposition on the grand ambitions and fevered activities of this crack squad, is a right corker.  “We pride ourselves on being an open and transparent council.”  For pure bathos this is up there with Tony Blair’s “a day like today is not a day for soundbites (..) but I do feel the hand of history on my shoulder.”  I would much rather that HBC be an open and transparent council, rather than pride itself on that which is patently untrue.  Still, you know what they say, pride comes before the fall.

For the sake of balance, I should report that in their statement the council reminded us that they are ambitious, that they have several multi-million-pound projects under way for our benefit.  They want the district to be known as the best place to work, live and visit.  I, on the other hand, would like Harrogate to be the best place to work, live and visit, but that’s by the by.  If indeed the council has more than the average number of commercial contracts being tendered then, surely, that is an argument for more transparency not less.  The facts suggest that HBC believes itself above public scrutiny.  What matters here is behaviour and Harrogate’s near one party state acts with impunity and, by papering the district pink, makes a mockery of our local democracy.

One further point. MP Andrew Jones has, as ever, refused to comment about the situation.  Mr. Jones gives a free pass to those with whom he has a close working relationship (this column has, on more than one occasion, made mention of the fact that his constituency office is staffed by several Councillors, including Richard Cooper).  It does not reflect well on the honourable member.

I confidently predict that none of this will lead to much trouble for the Conservatives, at least in the short term.  Since my column last month, the blue team nationally has (rightly) benefitted from a vaccination bounce in the polls (at time of writing they enjoy a 15-point lead by some estimates), won the Bilton ward by-election, won Hartlepool for the first time in the constituency’s history at a by-election, and retained the West Midlands and Tees Valley ‘Big City’ Mayoralties.  Emboldened, Boris gave Her Majesty a Queen’s Speech stuffed full of the “levelling up” spending measures our wider region needs so badly.

All this gave the PM political cover to announce a full-scale government inquiry, with subpoena powers, into his handling of the Covid-19 crisis.  His calculus being that the findings from the report (Chumocracy, Test and Trace, assorted U-turns) won’t be presented until after the next General Election.  Memories are short and BoJo is betting the house on consolidating his electoral position in the working-class constituencies of what is swiftly becoming Conservative England.

From Jim Hacker, the Minister for Administrative Affairs, to Richard Cooper’s Pink Papers, to Boris Johnson’s untruths and bombast, we Brits can’t seem to get too exercised about the lengths to which our pols go to obscure what they do in our name.  I’m reminded of the well know English revolutionary battle cry.

“What do we want?  Gradual change.”

“When do we want it?  In due course.”

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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Strayside Sunday: Low rent politics stinks

Strayside Sunday is our monthly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party.

It’s good to be back.

Now then, what’s happening?  Ah yes, it seems that the British political establishment stinks from root to branch.  It turns out, that while our attention was distracted by the exigencies of Covid-19 – not least the awarding of millions of pounds worth of PPE contracts to the Boris Chumocracy – our former Prime Minister David Cameron was up to no good.  Working for Greensill Capital, a purveyor of ‘supply chain financing solutions’ (purchasing the accounts payable debt of others and taking a hefty fee for the pleasure), including to Her Majesty’s Government, Dave Cam was bombarding his mates in high office, Chancellor Dishy Rishi for example, with telephone calls, texts and emails on behalf of his Australian employer.  That he stood to make millions through a stonking equity consideration in Greensill, were it to continue to succeed, is no excuse.  As it is, Greensill has gone spectacularly bust leaving Dave both with egg on his face and a significant reduction in future earnings.

Frankly, although it looks cheap, I am less concerned about a former Prime Minister being in close contact with friends and ex-senior colleagues than I am about the revelation that the founder of Greensill, the eponymous Lex, was given a desk at the Cabinet Office.  He was also given a government business card and license to roam across 11 government departments; all with a brief to create a new financial product.  Am I alone in thinking that this can’t be right?  Of course government needs to work closely with business, but surely it ought not give business unfettered access to create its own opportunities to benefit from the public purse (otherwise known as your money and mine).  That Mr. Cameron gave a 2010 speech in which he presaged that “lobbying was the next big scandal” awaiting government fills my schadenfreude goblet to the brim.  For, in the immortal words of the great Gore Vidal; “every time a friend succeeds, a little piece of me dies.”

The new Cabinet Secretary Simon Case is on the warpath.  It seems that Greensills tendrils penetrated deep into the Civil Service.  One Bill Crothers, the founder of the Crown Commercial Service, was double dipping, being paid both as a public servant and as a Greensill employee (before he crossed to the dark side completely and joined Greensill full-time; swapping, as it were, his Anakin Skywalker for his Darth Vadar).  In fact, there is deep suspicion that Mr. Crothers is not the only civil servant moonlighting in the private sector, so this is a story that will likely run and run, further undermining our brittle faith and trust in our government.

Closer to home, here in the great parliamentary constituency of Harrogate and Knaresborough (including Boroughbridge) we can be assured, can we not, of the probity, straight talking and all-around excellence of MP Andrew Jones?  Or so we thought.  Much ado this week over the quality news organ and website “Community News.”  It turns out that the MP’s office is publishing a digital news alternative; a platform for Conservative politicians to report their own activities and campaigns in the Conservative interest, Community News though states it is committed to providing news in a “non-political way.”

One has to dig pretty deep to uncover the origins of the website’s publishing in the office of the sitting Conservative MP; the office, by the way, that is run by the sitting Conservative Leader of Harrogate Borough Council; the office too that employs another leading Conservative councillor; the office, in fact, that employs the current Conservative candidate for the pending Bilton Ward by election.  Let’s generously call the lack of the Conservative logo an attempt at subtle branding; a desire perhaps to have the ‘issues’ front and centre.  Come on, who am I kidding?  Community News has a blue banner, ‘reports’ exclusively blue mouthpieces and offers no counter opinions.  If that’s “non-poilitical” I’ll bare my bottom on James Street.

The News Media Association, the voice of national, regional and local news media in the UK, has unleashed a campaign calling for an end to such fake newspapers (which is to say an end to the practice of political leaflets not-so-craftily disguising themselves as anything but).  The campaign is called “Don’t Be Duped.”  Don’t let mendacious pols pull the wool over your eyes.  The thing is, that whether it is fake Community News, civil servants on the make and take, or hustling former Prime Ministers (and by the way DC is far from the only one), it’s all a bit low rent.  We need to rise up and demand better, or we will continue to get the politics and politicians we deserve.

Finally this week, how great it is that society is opening up again.  Whatever its faults (and boy does it have them), the government has played a blinder with its vaccination programme.  Sunny skies have seen people flood to outdoor spaces and places and, wrapped up against the wind, begin again to feel the benefit and glow of precious human connection.  We can eat and drink outdoors, non-essential shops are open again, the hirsute are being shorn and the energetic are returning to gyms, swimming pools and leisure centres.  Well, except, that is, in Knaresborough, Ripon and Starbeck, where, for reasons various, the town’s swimming pools remain closed.  What a pity that the council hasn’t been able to deliver an essential service at such an important moment in our national reopening.  This wasn’t covered in Harrogate, Knaresborough and Boroughbridge Community News; and I suspect it won’t be.  Denied the masking whiff of chlorine, the awful smell of politics carries on the wind and tickles the nostrils.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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Strayside Sunday: It’s Census Day – time to take stock

Strayside Sunday is our monthly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party.

Today is Census Day. The day, every ten years, when the government seeks to assemble as accurate a picture as it can about the make-up of the nation’s population; the better to determine, deliver and target public policy and services.  This time, the census survey contains voluntary questions about gender identity and sexual orientation.  Two things are notable about this.  First, that we are being asked the question at all; these issues are now so prominent in the public consciousness that they have elbowed their way into the form.  Second, that the question is voluntary; we only have to label ourselves if we want to.

Ten years ago it was unheard of to receive emails from people and find their preferred gender pronoun written next to their signatures.  Now it is commonplace.  We can no longer assume that Robert wishes to be referred to as he/him, for example, when he may self-identify as they.  And gender pronouns are but one signal of the changes and, in some cases, the progress we’ve made during the last ten years.  As a nation we are well on our way to achieving carbon neutral; we have banned (from 2030) the production of petrol and diesel cars; the #blacklivesmatter and #metoo campaigns captured first social media and then the public mood and demonstrated that only active support, actually doing something to stop racism and sexism will do and, of course, with Brexit now implemented we are no longer part of the European Union.  Throw in a year’s worth of Covid-19-related restrictions on freedom of movement and association and Britain seems in many ways transformed from the last census to this.

Our national transformation means discomfort for many of us.  Wending our way merrily along, labouring under a set of long-held but seldom acknowledged assumptions that the patriarchy, the class system and the establishment were how we do things round here.  Around us, social media provides a democratising platform that enables international movements of the people to coalesce quickly around a single unifying purpose or cause and a communication platform which still lies largely beyond the reach of the regulator.  This heady mix has given rich voice to those on the receiving end of institutional and individual prejudice and injustice.  It’s been messy and not without its casualties, most of whom, mostly men, have fallen from grace and experienced ritual public humiliation, with social media the modern-day equivalent of the stocks.  Those with a progressive agenda will tell you the end justifies the means, so insidious are the barriers they aim to surmount.  Pursuing the truth “in the public interest,” once the domain of sanctimonious press barons and their journalistic henchmen (and women), is now open to all.  We are seeing a revolution in all but name, out with the old and in with the people.  Off with their heads and all that.

Following this week’s column I’ll be taking a short break for Easter.  When I return it will be on a periodic basis, monthly, rather than every Sunday.  It’s been a real pleasure writing weekly for the Stray Ferret and its wonderfully large and growing readership.  I think this publication does great work for the community in holding to account its often-inept leaders in the council and in shining a light on the important, the tragic, the ridiculous and the downright funny.  From the indefensible spending on the council’s Stately Pleasure Dome at Knapping Mount to Peter and other Peacocks around the district, I’ve had great fun bashing out my 800 words a week.

My attempt here has been to support the noble Ferret while, I hope, retaining my independence.  The by-line to my column tells you that I was Director of Communication for the Conservative Party under IDS.  That was a very long time ago when, as a precocious young man, I let my ambition get the better of my reason.  I like to think that 14 months inside the Westminster bubble almost 20 years ago doesn’t define me.  Rather, I hope my views today reflect a much broader perspective, coloured by personal experiences both wonderful and awful, enriching and traumatic; some of which I have hinted at in this column.  Many of which define our shared human condition.

I hope too that I have been able to confound those who believe they can (and should) easily caricature the “nasty Tory,” or indeed “socialist,” or “liberal.”  I met many blue ogres in my short and ill-starred career in politics.  But then I’ve met more than a few horrible Labourites and Lib Dems too.  I attempt to approach people without judgement, with an eye for context and an ear for motivation.  Let’s call it consideration.  Of course I get it wrong now and then.  Last week I was called a misogynist for implying that a prostitute was cheap and called a racist for contrasting the skin tones of my own two mixed race daughters.  Although I was aggrieved by both charges, they have made me think-on and reflect, hard.

My favourite part of writing this column is the writing; the playing around with language to tell a story, to deliver a complete narrative arc, to attempt wit and, occasionally, get a laugh.  I celebrate craft and latitude in language but we now live in a culture that demands absolute precision and care in what we say.  It matters not how or why we say things.  It used to be that the air between and around words, the space in which to think, to place things in perspective, were equally as important in deriving meaning as the words themselves.  This enabled an expansive set of normative behaviours to develop; norms which at their best are tolerant and, at their worst, majority tyranny.  Not in this literal age.  We now ascribe malicious intent to carelessness (care-less-ness); when it is, in fact, the failure to give sufficient attention to avoiding harm or error.  We are raising the bar inexorably on linguistic and behavioural expectations.  The rules of the game of life and language have changed; permanently.  Genie will not be put back in the bottle.  We all have to get onboard.  If we do, come time for Census 2031, we will be able to reflect on how far we have travelled.

Have a Happy Easter, stay safe and well and I very much look forward to seeing you again towards the end of April.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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Strayside Sunday: Putin, porn and the dirty world of fake news..

Strayside Sunday is our weekly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party.

Fake news reaches Harrogate!

No, Mother Russia has not sought to widen her sphere of influence beyond the first Trump election and the Brexit referendum and intervened in the bubbling Harrogate controversy over the proposed railway Station Gateway development.  Instead, it seems that local activists have taken a leaf from Vladimir Putin’s book and hijacked social media for means nefarious.  Keen-eyed observers of the medium have discovered several fake Facebook accounts whipping up anti-cycling and active travel scheme sentiment in the town.

One of the accounts is in the nom de guerre of one Tara Gunne.  Our anti-cycling heroine was the most prolific of the imaginary campaigners, even corresponding through the letters pages of the Harrogate Advertiser.  This until suspicious resident James Smith followed his nose and uncovered a calumny; it turns out there is no Tara Gunne.  Further inspection reveals that the photograph used on Ms. Gunne’s account is, in fact, one Hazel May, of Liverpool.  Ms. May’s profession, one of the oldest and most storied, is what we euphemistically call “adult entertainer.”  Basic internet research take one directly to pictures of Ms. May that leave little to the imagination.  Not the wealthy, romantic and stylised eroticism of 50 Shades of Grey these, but rather the cheap, cold and grainy; Readers Wives, photographed in poor light.

The picture of Ms. May used by this publication offers our lady in repose, clothed but with a large knee in the foreground, raised suspiciously close to her ears.  It turns out that in order for the Stray Ferret to use the photo it had to be carefully cropped, lest we be treated to a vision worthy of the Georgia O’Keefe treatment.  The nuda veritas, as it were.  I came away from my research traumatised, with a new blemish on my internet browsing history, now a target for unwanted pop-up videos of a certain sort and of a chatbot question to make one’s blood run cold and chill one’s bones; “wanna chat big boy?”

Ok, now that I’ve had my fun let’s get serious.  I’ve written here before about my views on social media and its negative impacts on contemporary society.  Once more unto the breach.  The thing about social media is that it can and often does drive news coverage.  And, as the Tara Gunne episode aptly demonstrates, using social media to reflect false sentiment and to influence debate is no longer the sole bailiwick of intelligence agencies, big business and their digital communication advisors.  Anyone can open a fake Facebook or Twitter account in moments and crack on with creating misinformation, distortion and outright lie.  The social media companies argue, broadly speaking, that they are information platforms rather than publishers.  This can’t be right.  As news makers and curators they must be made to take responsibility for the veracity of the information they publish and the authenticity of their sources.

Social media has had a material effect on the currency that is truth; it seems I have been operating under the false apprehension that the Enlightenment had settled how we determine what is accurate, credible, proven and solid.  Opinion now trumps fact; emotion trumps objectivity and we have created a culture that promotes “living our own truth.”  Harry and Megan are certainly living theirs (and endlessly talking about it) enabled by America’s Oprah Winfrey.  Call me old fashioned but I think we should live the truth.  Although it’s said that the twosome were not paid for their appearance, Oprah’s Harpo Productions reportedly banked $7m for bagging the interview.  Perhaps that explains why, by all accounts, she gave them such an easy ride; Paxman this was not.

I didn’t watch.  The writer and broadcaster Trevor Phillips did and has written a quite brilliant essay in The Times.  Read it, please.  Phillips is black and the father of two mixed race children, one of whom, now adult, still suffers from an eating disorder and mental illness so acute that she is regularly hospitalised to avoid self-harming or suicide.  Like Phillips I have two mixed race children; one of whom is as uninterestingly white as me and one of whom is dark like her Mother.  My younger daughter, the dark one, also battles her demons.  I was once called to collect her from the British Transport Police because she attempted to jump in front of a train at Worcester Park Station in London.  I had to section my daughter, twice.  The point is this, I’m sure that Harry and Megan found the Court of Windsor suffocating and anachronistic.  I don’t doubt that someone in the Royal Family wondered aloud about the likely skin tone of baby Sussex.  And I have no reason to doubt Megan’s claim that she contemplated killing herself.  But, as they sit in their $15m mansion in California and plot how to fulfil their $25m film, podcast and documentary deal with Netflix (providing “different stories” from “amazing people” to “build resilience”) you’ll forgive me if I’m not sympathetic.

Social media provides the means to curate one’s own life; or, in the case of Tara Gunne, to curate someone else’s life; to give an impressionistic account of one’s own fabulousness, rather than a figurative, faithful and prosaic rendering.  It is now so ubiquitous that its effects have moved beyond an assault on fact and is in danger of creating collective cultural hysteria.  The global fuss over Harry and Megan is both symptom and cause.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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Strayside Sunday: Oh the trials of being an elected representative…

Strayside Sunday is our weekly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party.

Following last week’s column on communitarianism, Shamima Begum and the Culture Wars, a reader emailed me with this missive: “Rubbish! Nowhere near Strayside. Local media should be for local news and opinion.” To spare blushes I won’t name the correspondent, nor share my reply, but I am stung into action. You want local. You’ve got it. I was going to do the most extraordinary budget since the war, or the 1% NHS “pay rise,” but I’ll stick to my Strayside knitting instead.

It must be difficult to be a local councillor. You pound the streets for months ahead of a local election, knocking the doors of mostly disinterested and often unfriendly strangers, canvassing their vote, making your pitch, doing your modest bit for the democratic process. Having convinced fully several hundred of your fellow residents to place their cross next to your name, you’re in. Elected to the Borough Council in the Conservative interest for the Pannal Ward, you take your first tentative steps in politics and, to mix my metaphors, you place both hands on the greasy pole and look upwards. What does the future hold? The heightened anticipation, the possibility, the responsibility, the accountability. The horrible burden of high office.

Councillor John Mann is chair of Harrogate Borough Council’s planning committee. In January the committee gave final approval to developer Berkeley DeVeer (shades of “To The Manor Born?”) to build 14 new homes on land at Rossett Green Lane. The vote was close; 6 in favour, 5 against. Step forward councillor Mann to cast the crucial vote. Were he to vote against, with the ballot tied at 6 for, 6 against, he would, as chair, have had a further and final casting vote. Councillor Mann abstained, ducking the difficult, to the consternation of local residents.

Pressed by emails from “at least” six of his constituents asking why he declined to vote, councillor Mann remained silent. When reached by telephone for comment by a Stray Ferret reporter, the councillor heard the subject and there was suddenly a poor connection and then he put the phone down saying he couldn’t hear the intrepid journo. An immediate subsequent call and voicemail message was ignored. When contacted for their comment Harrogate Borough Council’s press office said it was a matter for Mr. Mann. “Nothing to do with us, Guv” and all that.

You can tell a lot about people in general and even more about their state of mind by seeing what comes up first in their YouTube feed. Latterly I have been through a “Living Large in a Tiny House” stage; in which people create beautifully designed mobile tiny spaces so that they can escape the rat race and move to sites in the great unspoilt outdoors (a condition brought on by lockdown no doubt). Currently I’m going through a Fran Lebowitz phase. A symptom, I’m sure, of my general disappointment in myself, in life and in the actions of my fellow self-identified cis-gendered man. As Ms. Lebowitz says, “You can’t go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people pretend that they do.” In his comedy sketch handling of the Stray Ferret’s enquiries into his accountability lapse over the Rossett Green Lane development, I feel Councillor Mann ditched all such pretence.

I suspect that Councillor Mann simply panicked when he realised he had answered a call from a Stray Ferret journo and I have some small sympathy for him. I’ve been on the receiving end of several uncomfortable encounters with the press. They are no fun. During my blissfully brief time in front line politics I was once confronted by the Daily Mirror on my front door-step. I bluffed my way through it but I was terrified, both in the moment and from that moment until my political irrelevance. Modern politics is not for the faint of heart. It’s a full-contact sport. But that’s because principle, civility and accountability are in short supply among our duly elected; crowded out as they are by pliability, bile and brass neck. In large part our politicians get the coverage they deserve. They also deserve an equal measure of our sympathy to sweeten the bitter taste of our contempt.

Oprah Winfrey’s meeting with the self-obsessed Megan Markel and the increasingly new age Prince Harry (he says he wants their new Archewell podcast to provide a ‘safe space’ in which people can ‘tell their stories’) is not the only ‘event interview’ this week. I’m delighted to be able to report that The Stray Ferret conducted a wide-ranging interview with Harrogate Borough Council Chief Executive Wallace Sampson OBE on Friday. This is great news for local democracy and marks the first time that a senior representative from the council has felt able to speak with this publication. Bravo. Let’s hope the discussion marks the start of a new chapter, one in which visible accountability and open dialogue bring the council and townspeople together in community.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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