Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

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.

‘Sorry’ is said to be the hardest word. I don’t think so. Just lately it seems to be the easiest. Having got over the hurdle of his first ’sorry’, Gordon Brown says it regularly, looking like a dyspeptic Highland bull as he does so. Cameron looks like a sick sheep as he makes his contribution.

They remind me of what teachers and parents used to say when one was caught in some mayhem as a child: ‘Are you really sorry, or are you just saying it because you’ve been caught’? The latter would have been the truthful answer, but an unwise one in those days of frequent corporal punbishment.

It’s equally true about these expenses fiddles. All those MPs with their snouts in the trough were filling their mouths as hard as they could go. It’s only since they have been found out that the ‘S’ word is on their lips.

I feel like shouting to the television screen: ‘Don’t tell me you’re sorry. Pay the money back, you greedy b****** and remember you were elected to represent the people not trouser every penny you can lay your hands on.’

My wife and I celebrated our birthdays on Saturday, in my case 70 on the day, in hers, 65 exactly a month later.

We hired a boat on the Thames and La Fontana, of Bromham Road, Bedford, provided a superb buffet.

It was lucky that there were half-a-dozen drop-outs. I had invited
80 guests on the basis probably 20 per cent would be busy elsewhere. In fact only four declined, four dropped out at the last minute and two missed the boat.

We went downstream to Greenwich where the aircraft carrier Illustrious was anchored waiting for distinguished visitors to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fleet Air Arm. We circled the huge vessels raising our glasses to the crew who waved back.

A naval police boat came over to tell us to clear off but our skipper was made of sterner stuff and told them where to go so we continued to circle as distinguished visitors arrived in helicopters including Prince Andrew who flew helicopters in the Falklands.

Eventually we turned upstream. I had been hoping to get as far as Worlds End, Chelsea, where I was brought up but we turned round to head for base just short.

Still, it was a wonderful afternoon with fine weather, good food, drink and friends. I can’t say I like the thought of being 70 - and my wife feels the same about becoming an official pensioner - but when there’s no alternative one might as well celebrate.

I came to Bedford 41 years ago to work on the Bedfordshire Times and I see one of the links to my first day in the job is broken.

I was sent to a Rotary Club meeting and found myself on a table with Ron Adams, Secretary (which meant chief administrator) of Bedford Hospital. Reporters were meant to keep quiet and take notes at these occasions, but being an argumentative sort of chap - I know that’s hard to believe now - I soon got into a tussle with Ron. I suspect he thought I wouldn’t last long.

Well, we both lasted longer than anybody would have guessed and his is still the first name in my contacts book although he was too discreet for it to do me much good.

I see Ron has died aged 95. I saw him from time to time over the years and his memory and mind were as sharp as ever. We didn’t argue, though, so one of us must have mellowed.

The same paper reported the death of Roy Douglas, well known locally as an agent for commercial propery. He worked with Chris Kilroy until Chris sold his eponymous estate agency after which Roy went out on his own with great success.

He was one of the Gentlemen of Sharnbrook who were regular sponsors of Blues games. And he certainly was a gentleman, always ready to give his opinion of the local property scene although it was usually rather pesimistic.

Scanning the sports pages over the weekend I noticed that Ferrari is kicking up a fuss because under the new F1 regulations its spending over a season is being capped at £40million. This, say Farrari, is unfair.

When I stopped choking over my cornflakes my mind flew back to the late 1950s when I was a junior reporter on the Richmond and Twickenham Times, then owned by the Dimbleby family. Part of my beat took in a garage owned by one Paul Emery. When I say garage, I am not talking about one with acres of immaculate floor and gleaming power tools. It was not much bigger than the reception area of the Town Hall and the only person I ever saw working there was Emery himself.

Tucked away in a corner of this garage was a grand prix car built and raced by Emery. The Emeryson Special was a bitza (bitza this and bitza that) but it raced in the company of Maserati, Ferrari, BRM and Vanwall and drivers like Moss, Hawthorn and Fangio. It was very quick until it blew up, as it almost invariably did; I’m not sure if it ever completed a race; if it did it must have been a short one. Even allowing for inflation Paul’s racing would have cost a fraction of the amount Ferrari deems beneath its notice.

Today Bernie Ecclestone wouldn’t allow an Emeryson Special within a mile of his nice shiny grid, but I accompanied Emery to a couple of race meetings and I bet it was more fun than the financial black hole which is Formula I racing today.

Paul was a true sportsman. He raced for the love of it during a period when the life expectancy of a racing driver wasn’t much better than that of a a fighter pilot a few years earlier. Today’s drivers probably have a greater life expectancy than a truck driver yet are paid millions. Hard cash is on the side of the Bermie Ecclestones; sportsmanship died with people like Paul Emery.

It upsets me that in my latest ‘dictatorship watch’ I have to bring up the name of a friend. In doing so I make it clear that I am casting no aspersions on the late Dave Ledsom, whose death in November I found as upsetting as did all his other friends.

A few days ago I asked a journalist on BoS whether the inquest had taken place yet because if it had I must have missed it. I had no ulterior motive for asking; I could well have missed it with so much else on my plate or during a period of non-delivery of the paper. He replied that it had not yet been heard and they were keeping en eye out for it.

My question obviously caused him to make an enquiry and the result was a few paragraphs on page 2 of BoS saying the inquest had taken place on March 10 without any of the local media being informed. Normally the press is warned of up-coming inquests as a matter of course.

I have no desire to add to the grief of the Ledsom family, but I must say I am appalled. There has been some recent controversy about Government proposals to allow coroners to hold inquests in private where security issues were involved. Clearly there was no such involvement in this case and in any case the Government backed down on this.

Inquests are among the oldest judicial proceedings in our history. They serve an important purpose of public disclosure. While many inquest verdicts are open to dispute, at least the major facts are brought into the open. Holding an inquest in secret is another step down the slippery slope and I hope the media will take steps to find out why the normal procedure was not followed in this case and not let themselves be fobbed off.

I heard about Mad Nad’s latest outpouring of bile while I was on my way to London for the bank holiday weekend and fleetingly considered an immediate response before deciding not to waste valuable leisure time on it.

Now I’m back, I’m still not going to. The problem with Mad Nad is her scattergun approach means that if I responded to everything she says I’d appear as barmy as she does.

I’ll content myself with one small point. She is also snivelling about political journalist Kevin Maguire calling her ‘Mad Nad’ on a Sky Television programme: ‘He certainly didn’t think I was mad when he frequently chased me for information to pad out his column’, she says.

Only somebody as blinkered as she would fail to realise that the reason he chased her was because she could usually be goaded to say something bonkers, which is exactly why she gets so much space in the local media.

There’s not much that’s routine about being a mayor. On Saturday morning I fulfilled a long-made promise to join Debbie O’Regan’s Pride in Bedford day at the Slipe in Queen’s Park. There was a good crowd and I was set to help digging the seasonal pond. And what’s a ’seasonal pond’? I hear you cry.

It appears to be a shallow mud pool which is boggy in summer and fills up with water in winter and is sown with plants that can live in either condition.

I shifted a few sods before going to see what else was happening. A team from Bedford sub-aqua club were fishing piles of junk out of the river, mostly bikes plus a shopping trolley, a couple of cash boxes and assorted detritus. Youngsters from the Viking Canoe club were paddling up and down the river collecting rubbish which they loaded into a bigger canoe and brought back for disposal. Others were combing the banks for more rubbish. Two trucks were used to cart the rubbish away.

I was torn between admiring those coming out to help and anger at those who gtreat an attractive area of Bedford as a rubbish tip but it was a great community event and went on all day and my congratulations to Debbie for organising it and thanks for the people of Queens Park for taking part. Especially those who provided a delicious lunch of sandwiches, samosas and pakoras

In the evening a community event of a different sort, a black tie St George’s Day Ball at the Park Inn. Organiser Nick Kier reminded us that the event was started 15 years ago by the late and sadly missed Dave Ledsom and that it had now raised more than £300,000 for local charities.

Chief beneficiary this year was Anglian Air Ambulance which had also been chief beneficiary for my Mayor’s Charity when we were able to hand over a cheque for £15,000. The St George’s Day event raised double that but it is still only a fraction of the £3million the service needs every year, every penny of which comes from fund-raising events and nothing from the Government.

Through all the heavy weather over the past few months the good ship Unitary Bedford has remained remarkably stable.

Members had expected to go into unitary with much the same team as got us there but it hasn’t worked out that way. Shaun Field is retiring as chief executive and is being joined by his deputy Gordon Johnston and the head of human resources and DSD Roland Simmonds.

The reduction in the number of council seats has made it inevitable that as many as half the existing councillors will be gone after the elections on June 4.

And then there is the sad loss of Chief Education Officer Graham Last and on Monday the equally devastating news that Labour group leader Dave Lewis had died suddenly.

Despite all this there has been no panic at Borough Hall. Our ability to take these shocks on the chin bodes well for the future.

It used to be complained that the Conservatives had hijacked the Union Jack. Then it got further hijacked by the BNP.

Now Castle Conservative candidates have hijacked St George. Anybody less like knights in shining armour than Andrew McConnell and his fellow candidate David Fletcher is difficult to imagine but on April 23 they put out a leaflet wishing everybody a ‘Happy St George’s Day’. Their leaflet contains the peculiar sentence: “David and Andrew are both proud to live in the ward they call home”. It would be difficult to be proud of living in the ward they didn’t call home, wouldn’t it.

The leaflet carries a few ‘facts’ about St George. As it happens virtually nothing is known about him, not even if he ever existed and if he did what exactly he did to merit his halo.

The two unlikely lads have included ‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George’ from Shakespeare’s Henry V. Shakespeare was born and died on April 23 but our present April 23 doesn’t correspond to his. Seventeen days were taken out of the calendar a century later to bring it into line with the true year.

McConnell has shown his gallantry by threatening Marrgaret Davey with a libel action over some petty point in a letter she wrote to the Times and Citizen. If St George had been of that mind he would never have made sainthood, unless it was as the patron saint of shysters. Anyway, McConnell’s claim is rubbish.

Cycling on the pavement is an offence, but not one to which the police pay attention even though it almost always comes up on meet the public sessions. “What do you want us to do, tackle burglars and drug dealers or people cycling on the pavement”? is their usual response as though the issues were mutually exclusive.

Yes, it does seem a petty matter. The problem is that by now cyclists appear to think it is their right to dominate the pavements. I have occasionally remonstrated and, of course, my reward has been the torrent of filth that passes for repartee these days.

The consequences can be serious. Last year a cyclist shouted out to pedestrians that he was coming through, collided with one and killed her. Some years ago, Cllr John Mingay was hit by a cyclist in Harpur Square, was concussed and passed out at a council meeting. Shame on all of you for thinking it was just a ruse to get out of a boring meeting.

Today I was backing a car out of my drive. As usual, I looked out for pedestrians before moving. What I had not seen was a cyclist moving at speed on the pavement and only realised he was there when he shouted as he swerved and pedalled on looking back at me angrily.

I wonder what the police attitude would have been had I knocked him off his bike? He had no right to be on the pavement and I had no reason to believe that he would be there, but would the police have ‘done’ me for careless driving. Is it another case of immunity for the law-breaker and responsibility for the law abider?

I was on my way back from Boulogne when I got the shocking news of the death of Labour group leader Dave Lewis.

Dave was ‘Old Labour’ to his fingertips and for that he was admired by many people, including me. We liked the fact that he would have been unrecognisable to the sharp-suited political machine operators whose day would seem to be over. It was a shame he did not live to see that Labour’s political verities come back into fashion.

Dave did not approve of directly-elected mayors because he saw them as being anti-democratic. We had a few arguments on the subject with me arguing that at least people knew who the mayor was and therefore who they should vote against if they did not like what he did.

To Dave it was anathema thet the mayor, albeit elected by general vote, could decide to ignore a unanimous vote against him (or her) at full council unless it was on certain issues outside the mayor’s remit.

Despite these arguments, Dave and I got on pretty well when he got back on the council after a few years in the doldrums. Although we certainly did not agree all the time we got on pretty well and I was able to help him with a number of issues on behalf of the citizens of his beloved Kempston.

My sympathies go to Mary, his wife, and his family.