14 August - Making a difference to residents’ lives. By sending cops to their doors?
I
have been told I am expected to comment on the Tweet put out by London Councils featuring Bexley’s dear Leader.
She is vice-chairman of London Councils and has been floating around in high places
ever since she caught the eye of Boris Johnson in 2010. When asked why, Boris
admitted there were no job selection processes, he simply “admired” her more than any other contender.
I have a copy of his letter somewhere, the appointment has been
removed from the GLA website although it may be seen on
a few newspaper websites. Looks like Sadiq Khan may have cleared out a few
of Boris’s skeletons.
It seems That Teresa and I have more in common that one might expect, not
everything of course. She was in the sixth form at school in 1979 while I beat
her by exactly 20 years. By 1979 I had 1,300 staff to manage, most of them
female. That was fun and probably more than Teresa has now!
She campaigned for Margaret Thatcher in her school, me for Harold Macmillan.
Both of us were Thatherites. She rescued us from industrial stagnation but I can
see now that she set the scene for too many of today’s problems. Can Teresa?
Ms. O’Neill was first elected as a Councillor in 1998 which by coincidence or
maybe not is more or less when I first noticed that Bexley Council was doing
nothing to make life better for residents, I wrote to them and was rewarded with a wonderfully honest
letter from their Sidcup Place address. It said that Councils never make things
better, it was in the nature of the beast. Maybe it is still in one of my files
somewhere. Nothing much gets thrown away.
Teresa O’Neill claims to be “hands on, leading from the front”. I suspected as
much and it ought to be good, but maybe not when backed up by Kangaroo Courts
and iron fist discipline for any dissenting voice. Don’t whatever you do report
a would-be Conservative election candidate to the
police for dipping into the shop till! Guaranteed political suicide.
Another thing we have in common is having no time for TV. I watched Ripper
Street, mainly on catch up, this year but all the other block busters I have
heard of have passed me by. I’ve bought two blu-ray discs but both are still
wrapped in cellophane.
She says you can take a lot of personal criticism implying you have to learn to
take it. If so that is a bad joke. Within a couple of months of BiB’s first
Council meeting report she was down the cop shop asking them to have me arrested, and I quote, “for criticising the way the Council is run by Councillors”.
Every time something reminds me that Teresa O’Neill and I have quite a lot in
common and she should never have got on the wrong side of Bonkers, my opinion of
her begins to soften. Then I usually go and wreck everything by asking one of
the friendlier Councillors if she is bad as I generally paint her. The answers
are always much the same, worse.