Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

John Bercow describes Nadine Dorries as ‘an oily opportunist’. Oh, sorry, it’s the other way round. Easy mistake to make.

Mad Nad also describes the election of Bercow as an act of vindictiveness by Labour. She must be right. Nobody can teach Nadine anything about vindictiveness.

And she says Bercow isn’t fit for the job of Speaker because his wife is a socialist. I’ve no idea whether that’s true but I thought we had moved away from that kind of linkage. Are we to assume that Mr Dorries is bonkers because she is?

Sunday proved to be one of those days when being Mayor is almost pure pleasure. I entertained world champion boxer Joe Clazaghe, his trainer father Enzo, and a large tribe of Calzaghes - many from Bedford or nearby -in the council chamber of the old Town Hall. The trip was Joe’s father’s day gift to his Dad.

Enzo, 60, came to Bedford aged two or three with his family when his father worked in the brickworks. They lived in Dudley Street and he went to Goldington Lower School until the family moved away a decade later. They now live in South Wales.

To hear Enzo tell it, his Bedford days were idyllic (apart from frequent acquaintance with the cane at school), and he often recounted them to his family. At a presentation in the mayor’s parlour he said he had often longed to come back to Bedford but never dreamed it would be as an honoured guest.

I presented him with a limited edition of Bedford Portrayed (reproductions of painting of Bedford by various artists) and an address of welcome; he gave Bedford a display set of a picture of Joe winning his WBC world crown and the buckle of the belt which went with it.

At the buffet lunch which followed, I asked Joe if there was any likelihood of him making a comeback. He said not. Comebacks rarely worked out well. He had retired unbeaten and in good health and that meant more to him than money. Very wise, too. No comeback for Calzaghe - yoiu read it here first.

The family has another, less pleasant, connection with Bedford. They are suing Frank Warren, once the owner of Bedford blues for £2 million from fights promoted by him. “You had some problems with him, as well,” said Enzo. I told him that Bedford had cost Warren a lot of money; he hadn’t made any here. “Good,” said Enzo.

This court battle is due to come to a climax soon. Enzo asked if I knew why the earlier stages had received little press coverage. I said maybe it was because Warren had a reputation for suing the press and that sports reporters were often reluctant to risk annoying good sources of copy like Warren.

After the buffet we all went to the newly refurbished bandstand in Mill Meadows for the firstr Sunday concert performed by Bedford Town Band. I inbtroduced the Calzaghes, father and son. Enzo again got emotional about Bedford. The family stayed for the first half of the concert before leaving for another family engagement.

There was more music after the concert ended. The Salvation Army was back playing on the Embankment. I haven’t seen them there for several years.

There will be free concerts at the bandstand every Sunday between three and five pm until August 24. We have new deckchairs; it’s like old times

My wife and I used to walk a lot until she had a hip replacement a couple of years ago. Ten or 12 milers were fairly routine and once we did 20 miles. Although the operation was a success we had got out of the habit.

So I decided to buy a couple of bicycles for exercise and we took our first ride towards Sandy on Saturday. Marlies sailed through it, but for me it was a bit of a disaster. I came off on a bend after a footbridge, scraping a knee and putting a hole in my trousers, fortunately old ones, and nearly did it again negotiating one of those narrow gates designed to keep out motor vehicles.

This was the first bike I had ever owned although I had ridden one in my youth, and it must be at least 25 years since I rode regularly. Perhaps 70 is a bit late to take up cycling?

We shall see. Fortunately I can get to Borough Hall from my home using only a short stretch of public road so I hope to get some practice that way.

I expect you have had one of those charmingly mis-spelled and sub-literate letters, usually from Nigeria but sometimes from other African countries, promising to make you rich if you’ll just lend your name and bank account to transfer large amounts of money out of the writer’s country.

Anybody who tries it soon discovers their bank account has been cleaned out.

Yesterday I received one of these propositions with a new twist. It purports to come from somebody in Hong Kong who has the job of dealing with the estate of a Mr Branston who died intestate, with no discoverable relatives to inherit his £15 million. If the money is not distributed soon it will disappear forever to be shared out among the directors of the bank where it is lodged.

To prevent this tragedy happening the writer suggests I pose as a relative of the dead man, I will get a third of his estate. I suppose the scammer must have done some research and found that Branston is a fairly rare name.

At least the writer of this letter is literate; the only mistake he makes is to address me as Branston Francis Joseph, Chinese style where the family name comes first …or maybe that’s another cunning ploy to make himself look genuine

Often with these offers, I’m tempted to play games by sending false information and demanding they give proof of their identity. But perhaps not this time. Triads, tongs, etc.

There should be nobody left in the world to fall for this scam, but just in case your name is Throckmorton or Scrimgeour and you get news of an unknown stiff with a similar name in Hong Kong, don’t be tempted. Remember the financial health warning: ‘If it seems to good to be true, it is’.

Every couple of months I get a catalogue for Christie’s jewellery sale. This is not because I am a regular in the sale room but because when I was looking for something that I could afford to buy for my wife on our ruby wedding I asked for a catalogue of its next sale and I’m still getting them.

They are, in their way, a fascinating read. The catalogue for Wednesday’s sale was particularly so. A quarter of the booklet was devoted to a sale of handbags, mostly by Hermés, at eye-popping estimated prices.

Who, for God’s sake, would pay between £20,000 and £25,000 for a ‘fauve’ matt brown crocodile ‘Birkin’ bag, whatever that may be. To me it looks just like an ordinary handbag, smart, but £20,000 plus? They’ve got to be kidding. On the facing page is another crocodile ‘Birkin’ bag, described as ‘exceptional’. At £16,000 bottom estimate that must be the understatement of the year.

True, there were other items for as ‘little’ as £500 (an evening bag by Gucci and a ‘Rio Pochette’ by, yes, our old friend Hermés) but the BOTTOM estimates for 29 bags was £157,000, an average of more than £5,000 each. For TOP estimates add about 20%.

Isn’t there something obscene about people being prepared to pay this sort of money for a handbag while others are losing their homes for less?

Apparently Posh Becks (I don’t know her real name so I have to use the Sun-given one) has 100 Hermés bags in all shades.

It’s probably lucky that the unemployed are unlikely to see this catalogue; it could be a ‘let them eat cake’ moment. One would hate to see Posh and her ludicrous husband perched with a few other Hermés buyers on their way to Tyburn in a tumbril, wouldn’t one?

What’s that? You’d pay good money to see it. Come to think of it, so would I. Maybe they would put out a Hermés bag for the heads to drop into.

Reluctant as I am to criticise my successors at BoS, I had difficulty in believing what I read about the borough elections which it relegated to an inside page.

The headline was ‘Few new faces as borough sees no shocks or surprises’ and the intro quoted me as saying the biggest saurprise was that there were none.

At the time we spoke maybe that was true but by the end of the day ikt certainly wasn’t.

No surprises? Just Bedford going the opposite way to the rest of the country; just the Conservatives losing four seats while England was turning into a sea of blue; just the Liberal-Democrats becoming the biggest party for the first time in Bedford’s history; just Labour holding on to its share of the seats when everywhere else Labour was in meltdown; just the Independents taking two Tory seats to achieve parity with one of the major parties for the first time.

It was one of the biggest political upheavals in Bedford’s history yet the BoS attitude could be summed up as: ‘Small cataclysm in Bedford; not many interested - especially us’.

One man for whom the maverick result in Bedford will have provided a boost is Bedford and Kempston MP, Patrick Hall. If Labour held its position, might he yet pull off a stunning victory come the General Election, especially as he is handbag carrier to Caroline Flint?
She is the good-looking ex-Minister who resigned the day after polling day in the local election, accusing Gordon Brown as using her for window dressing.
Hall is prone to fits of the glums. In the last General Election he seemed beaten from the start and it was only in the last few days he pulled out the stops against Richard Fuller, one of the Tories given financial backing by Lord Ashcroft.
He won that time. He must be thinking maybe he can pull it off again.

Bedford’s Tories may prove to have been the Tory tide’s worst result. Where the map was changing to blue all over England, Bedford Tories lost 40 per cent of their seats (adjusted for the changed numbers of the new unitary council).

The fact that Thursday’s borough elections were for 36 seats rather than the previous council’s 54 means there are no straight comparisons but that can be balanced with a bit of elementary arithmetic.

Thirty six is two thirds of 54 so all we need to do is calculate two-thirds of the seats held by the groups in the previous council (to the nearest whole number) to work out what would have been a standstill result. Anything lower means a loss of seats; anything higher means an overall gain. So:

Below are in turn group seat numbers in the old council, followed by standstill numbers (figures in brackets) followed by the number of seats each group holds in thenew council

Conservatives 20 (13) 9
Lib-Dems 15 (10) 13
Labour 11 (7) 7
Independent 7 (5) 7

From this we can see the Tories suffered a huge loss.

Lib-Dems gained three on their standstill figure.

To most people’s surprise, Labour maintained a standstill.

Independents gained two.

The Independents made a 40% gain on its standstill; Lib Dems gained 30%; Labour neither gained nor lost; Tories were down 41%.(because groups started from different bases the total does not add up to 100%)

Why are Bedford’s results so at odds with the rest of England? It may be that the splits in the Tories had an effect. It is received wisdom that voters punish disunited parties. They may also have suffered from the expenses scandal - Nadine Dorries’s comments on it may have percolated through, especially in those parts of the borough where she is the MP, such as Elstow and Wilstead where ex-Tory Barry Huckle beat the unpopular sitting Tory Lyn Faulkner.

The Lib-Dem machine was as efficient as ever. They held Harrold (which they had gained as a result of a Tory split in 2007) and may have benefitted from the Tories aiming their guns in the wrong direction.

Labour may have gained from Patrick Hall being identified as one of the ’saints’ in the expenses scandal.

The Independents gained from having some popular candidates. Doug McMurdo won back Sharnbrook with 56% of the vote. He had lost it in 2007 to a combination of over-confidence and a smear campaign.

In Riseley Ian Clifton was never troubled. As one wag put it: “They found somebody had voted against Ian; an inquiry is being held”.

Veronica Zwetsloot put the wind up Tom Wootton in Roxton where the Tories usually weigh their majority. If she decides to stand again she will have a very solid platform.

Labour came out of it smiling having held on to their pre-poll standstill and the Lib Dems are equally happy to have taken control of Brickhill where they also control the urban parish council.

But, after weighing all the factors, the result is probably down to Bedford cussedness. We have a reputation for going against the flow and we’ve done it again.

Former councillor Simon Cocksedge has asked me where is my list of expenses I promised in an earlier blog.

The answer is that I only have part of what I promised, ie only the 2008/9 expenses. I am happy to provide that.

I was paid my current salary as full-time directly-elected mayor of £49,372.66 plus an additional £5122.54 for being on the Implementation Executive which was the body charged with managing the move from two tier authority to unitary. All members of the Implementation Executive received the same amount.

I drew no expenses during 2008/9.

As soon as possible I will publish the full figure for the period since I became directly-elected Mayor of Bedford.

I am about to go out to vote and I realise that what little I know of the Euro candidates is gleaned from a quick scan of my wife’s postal voting paper. It’s full of ‘parties’ and people I have never heard of. During the so-called campaign I have received nothing to tell me what the ‘Jury’ party may be, nor the Christian something or other, nor even what sort of Independent the Independent candidate is.

Which means that the only candidates about which I know anything are the usual suspects. Surely the EU, with all its resources, could give each candidate 50 words to say who or what they are. Otherwise we could be voting for crypto-communists, fascists or men (or women) of straw.

My researchers predict an Independent win. This is on the basis of three people telling me that is where they have or will put their cross. None knew anything about him other than the description Independent.

I agree that three people are not a scientific sample so don’t bet the farm on it.

I confess to a touch of amivalence about the departure of Hazel Blears undere whose remit local government fell.

I have always admired her as afeisty lasy with a sense of humour and - more important and understanding of what local government was about. She faced tough questions with a smile and gave as good as she got to such fearsome inquisitors as Jeremy Paxman..

I am not all that sure that what she did was particularly heinous. Most people with second homes make a careful calculation which to nominate as their main residence for tax purposes. I am one and I am lucky that it is a ‘no brainer’. Changing the designation of my main home would leave me with a potentially huge tax bill. That is not, of course, the same as flipping second homes to make a profit on resale as some MPs have done still less claiming for a non-existant mortgage.

There’s no dofficulty in being upfront when it’s in one’s interest to be so. If Hazel hadn’t made her ‘You tube if you want to’ gibe against her boss she might have survived.

So Terry Waite is considering doing a Martin Bell. I hope he decides to do it in Mid-Bedfordshire.

I know nothing about this former pop ’star’ who has thrown his hat in the ring,nor his group ‘Dollar’, which takes me back to an assertion for which I was well-known in my newspaper days; that nobody I had never heard of could be called a ’star’.

That didn’t mean I had to be a fan, just that if I, a newspaper junkie, hadn’t heard of this person he or she wasn’t a star. This statement was made as a consequence of my not knowing - at that time, I do now - who Mel Gibson was. I had mixed him up with Mel Smith of Alas Smith and Jones fame.

Anyway, I don’t know who Mr Day is, but I have made the acquaintance of Terry Waite.

One of his virtues in the local situation is that he suffered a horrendous five years as a prisoner of Hizbollah and came out of it not blaming anybody, in contrast to Ms Dorries who seems to believe that looking at MPs expenses is an act of conscious cruelty on the part of the media and we might be responsible for the suicide of some MPs.

Another is that he is a man of principle. In this I don’t contrast him with Ms Dorries who appears to be a lady of principle, albeit very elastic ones.

There are those who say that Terry Waite has a monumental ego, so he would fit in the House of Commons as though born to it.

Terry has said he wants to stand in Suffolk, but he has Bedford connections, and that famous picture of the Bunyan window which reached him in his cell in Lebanon would make a great campaigning poster.

If you agree, or even if you don’t, take the opportunity to comment on this blog and I will undertake that the word reaches him.

I am not, under normal circumstances, an instinctive Daily Telegraph reader, although I don’t spit it out as a term of abuse like readers of right-wing papers do at Guardian readers.

But over the past three weeks I have felt deprived when I have been unable to get hold of a copy. To say it has been rivetting stuff has been the understatement of the year. Even when I haven’t known the MP with his/her fingers in our wallets I have still slavered over the details and the humiliatingly pathetic excuses they come up with.

Among the victims of these revelations will be those editors who were offered the disk and turned it down. Until this moment the Daily Torygraph was suffering a long slide in its circulation. I bet it isn’t now. £300,000 (the price the whistleblower was said to be asking)? Peanuts!

This has rightly been called a political cataclysm and rightly so, but I guarantee there will be no shortage of politicians joining Mad Nad and unlikely allies such as Peter Mandelson in saying otherwise.

I have a friend who is a retired political journalist wont to say in a world-weary manner that compared with politics in other countries Britain is clean.

And he will probably continue to say that compared with politics in Ruritania, or wherever, the money our politicians have trousered (or handbagged) is petty cash.

Maybe he’s right, although I wouldn’t call twenty or thirty thousand quid for second homes that petty but the really remarkable thing is how many politicians have been at it. It must be running at 50 per cent at least and totalling millions. And then there’s the question of how long it has been going on. At the moment it seems that five years is as far as anybody has gone but this racket couldn’t have popped up fully-formed at the time of the last election.

And then there are the MEPs to come. I bet they are quaking in their boots.

Sooner or later it will be the turn of local government. I have already given instructions that my expenses going back to the date of my election on October 18 2002 be calculated. When that’s done I will publish them and hope not to be damned.

All week I have been watching with fascination as Nadine Dorries winds herself up to tell us that the fact that she is in the mire is everybody`s fault but hers.

Her modus operandi is what one might call the attacking whinge.

Her claim that the expenses fiddling, so starkly exposed in that left-wing publication the Daily Telegraph, is really just a means of compensation for an MP’s lousy pay is a case in point. She was elected in 2005. She claims to be a business woman so I assume she checked the terms and conditions before she signed up for the job.

In any case, she doesn`t mind telling people she`s a millionaire as a result of selling her business to BUPA.

But the real sickener is her claim that the drip feed of information is a form of torture and MPs are going around with dread in their eyes at the prospect of the next day’s relevations. But if their exes are clean what do they have to fear? And as for torture, perhaps somebody should do Nad the favour of demonstrating waterboarding to show her the difference between torture and getting caught with one’s hand in the till.

Time should now be called on Mad Nad by David Cameron and/or her constituency party.

Failing that somebody needs to stand against her on a clean government/no whingeing ticket.

I have explained why I can`t do it but surely there must be someone ready to have a go for the greater good.

All week I have been watching with fascination as Nadine Dorries winds herself up to tell us that the fact that she is in the mire is everybody`s fault but hers.

Her modus operandi is what one might call the attacking whinge.

Her claim that the expenses fiddling, so starkly exposed in that left-wing publication the Daily Telegraph, is really just a means of compensation for an MP’s lousy pay is a case in point. She was elected in 2005. She claims to be a business woman so I assume she checked the terms and conditions before she signed up for the job.

In any case, she doesn`t mind telling people she`s a millionaire as a result of selling her business to BUPA.

But the real sickener is her claim that the drip feed of information is a form of torture and MPs are going around with dread in their eyes at the prospect of the next day’s relevations. But if their exes are clean what do they have to fear? And as for torture, perhaps somebody should do Nad the favour of demonstrating waterboarding to show her the difference between torture and getting caught with one’s hand in the till.

Time should now be called on Mad Nad by David Cameron and/or her constituency party.

Failing that somebody needs to stand against her on a clean government/no whingeing ticket.

I have explained why I can`t do it but surely there must be someone ready to have a go for the greater good.

Nobody takes election pledges too seriously nor should they. Most are vague and where they are not, Mr Hans Christian Anderson has generally been identified as the author.

Take the latest Tory one being put round Castle Ward calling for a vote for Messrs. David Fletcher and Andrew McConnell. It says: ‘A Conservative controlled council …..will invest in mobile CCTV, limit new alcohol licences, fund 24 hour graffito clean-up crews and invest in a network of youth facilities…

‘Funding will come from savings in other programme areas, BID funding and private sector sources.'’

Let’s analyse those pledges, shall we.

Conservatives can’t control the council before 20 11 when there will be a new all-out election for councillors and mayor. The crucial question is the latter because they can’t do anything without the mayor’s say-so.

Graffiti is already cleared up within 24 hours of being notified, or do they mean they are going to have graffiti crews on standby 24/7? If so the costs will be colossal. It sounds like John Major’s cones hotline pledge.

The BID (Business Improvement District) is not an arm of the council so can’t be made to spend its money on Fletcher’s and McConnell’s whims, and ‘private sector sources’ is so vague as to be meaningless. If they mean town centre businesses they will have a riot on their hands from people who already pay business rate and the BID levy.

In other words, the pledges are not worth the paper they are written on. Taking the pledge used to mean laying off the booze and was generally done after seeing pink elephants in ballet skirts. Perhaps these two lads have been over-imbibing while writing their manifesto.

Methinks the lady doth protest too much and too incoherently.

I have been trying to make sense out of Nadine Dorries’s defence to the allegation that her Parliamentary expenses. Between her dog, her daughter and her former husband it’s difficult to work out who or what she blames for her present predicament.

She says she’s innocent so she must be, mustn’t she? Meanwhile I note that out of the four Bedfordshire MPs (not including Luton) her expenses are the highest, although to be fair (and we must always strive to be fair), there’s only £21,000 between her and the lowest who is Patrick Hall.

If Nadine is renting her main home and her second home, which is presumably the one in Woburn, I cannot see why her claims should be the highest. No doubt it will all become clear eventually.

Listening to the Saturday repeat of Any Questions I heard a woman MP, whose name I didn’t catch, bleating that she would love to have her expenses posted up on the Parliament website except she had been warned that she could be sued under the Data Protection Act.

I yelled: ‘Wha-a-a-t!’ oblivious to the fact she couldn’t hear me.

Has there ever been an Act of Parliament as abused and misused as the Data Protection Act? From the day it came into force it has been used to refuse information, often that which had previously been freely available. The police, Civil Service, hospitals and local government seized on it like manna from heaven. A line of inquiry could be stopped dead by quoting (usually misquoting) the Data Protection Act.

Useless to contact the commissioner who was supposed to prevent its abuse. She might well - often did - confirm one’s suspicions that the status of the information had not changed. The answer was always that as far as the body involved was concerned, the DPA prevented the information being given.

And, inevitably, it became a fact, accepted even by an MP whose job it was to review laws before passing them.

What was to be done? Who could afford the money or time to ask the courts to rule on what could be discovered, as was done by the journalist whose persistence in seeking information about MPs expenses brought the present imbroglio to a head.

It would be nice to think that the forthcoming cleaning of the Augean stables, aka the Houses of Parliament, would change the rules for the better. But I am old and cynical beyond my years and I suspect that the barriers will soon be in place again.

In between doing some fancy footwork over his expenses, Jack Straw has decided to drop the idea of giving coroners the right to hold inquests in secret.
Which brings me back to the vexed subject of the Dave Ledsom inquest.

I must make it clear that I am satisfied that the coroner, David Morris, and Mrs Ledsom had expected the media to arrive and was surprised when it didn’t. Inquests are notified by the coroner’s office to the police who pass them on to their press office who should pass them on to the media. Somewhere this chain broke down. The question is where and why.

How devastated I was to hear that Mad Nad, MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, has found herself sucked into the MPs expenses scandal. This is despite a passage in her blog which makes it clear that she is totally and completely as pure as the driven snow - or maybe slush - with regards to this one.

One can only hope that the authorities carry out a minute examination of her expenses before clearing her to continue adding to the gaiety of nations (see first paragaph second sentence).

One is equally distressed to learn that Margaret Moran, Labour MP for Luton South, Is also under investigation after it was revealed that she is claiming on her second home in Southampton where her partner lives.

While their politics are polar opposites, Margaret, like Nadine, has been beset by begrudgers in the past and isn’t it ironic that Cental Beds councillor Richard Stay (Tory) is encouraging the police in its Moran probe. How unkind people are to these selfless public servants.

Now excuse me, I have to go and wring out my handkerchief.