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.

She 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 appears to be?

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 it 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 it 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.