A reader who says he has been following Bonkers since 2011 sent me this
cutting from the Bexley Chronicle, a newspaper which was always very
critical of Bexley Council. What happened to this lot he asks to which the
obvious response should be “have you really followed Bonkers for the past 15 years? If so you should know.”
The first thing that should be noted is that the allowances paid have not got
close to keeping up with inflation. £21,000 in 2008 would be worth £36,000 now
and todayְ’s Cabinet Members are on about £25,000; which neatly brings us to the first name on the list.
Councillor Perrior was the founder and boss of the PR Agency InHouse and credited with bringing Boris
Johnson to power. After being caught claiming additional expenses
she wrote to the Chronicle
to claim that as a mother she needed every penny she could get.
Katie Perrior was in charge of Children’s Services when OSTED gave Bexley an Inadequate rating.
Teresa O’Neill became Leader when Ian Clement was recruited by Mayor Johnson and famously
refused to report him to the police when it was discovered that he
had dishonestly pocketed £2,087 of Council funds covered up by
accounting fiddles.
In 2024 she got her reward when elevated to the House of Lords.
Nothing much is known about Simon Windle. It was rumoured that he might have
been the Tories one honest guy and was therefore deselected in 2014. “Probing
where others fear to tread” was his BiB epitaph.
Gareth
Bacon was famous at the time for being the highest paid elected official
in London holding down something like six jobs with the GLA and goodness knows
what else. But he did them reasonably well and went on to be M.P. for
Orpington. On the downside he is almost personally responsible for ensuring that there is no
bridge across the Thames at Gallions Reach/Thamesmead.
Chris Ball is still with us. I sometimes wonder why he is in the Labour party. He can be very reasonable and helpful at times.
John Waters is long gone from the Council. A
successful businessman and a little infamous in 2012 for telling worried residents that mobile phone masts were
no more
dangerous than vacuum cleaners. His knowledge of electromagnetic frequencies was not the best.
I have been warned to never talk about Nigel Betts, allegedly something to do with an
unsavoury police investigation. An Independent Councillor for the last two years and leaving next month.
Sharon Massey; oh where do we start? I was reported to the police for
publishing
an anonymised version of what I found on her family’s publicly available Facebook page and was kept
in suspense for six months until the police told her I had done nothing wrong.
At a Scrutiny meeting in 2016
she asked the Police Borough Commander if he could introduce a law against lying. He immediately arrested everyone present. (Actually he didn’t.)
It was not clear who she was targetting. She had made complaints about a Labour Councillor as well as me.
Surely no one needs another
catalogue of the misdemeanours of Peter Craske?
Colin Campbell was another rogue.
Did a
TV interview defaming a Bexley resident in 2013 and every single word,
literally, was a lie.
And now we are back to Ian Clement. A suspended prison sentence for doing to Boris
Johnson and the GLA what he had done on a ten times larger scale in Bexley but
which the Baroness decided should go unpunished here. Few if any of the Conservative
Councillors of 2008 could be trusted. Be careful who you vote for next month.
I’m pleased to see I am not the only nerd to file away everything about Bexley Council.
Maybe that is why they have
stopped sending me their quarterly Magazine.
Whatever happened to
Letter Box Marketing which was awarded the distribution contract in 2016?