16 August - Paul Moore, not all bad
Although Bexley Council is, as always, intent on secrecy it seems to me that
Chief Executive Gill Steward has well and truly gone and Paul Moore is
temporarily at least in the hot seat. Mr. Moore has been in Bexley since time began,
never quite making it to the top spot.
I have no idea why he seems not to have what it takes to rise any higher than Director level in Bexley. He has the
ability to string together a long series of impressive words which upon analysis
one realises anyone could have said whether they knew the subject or not, so he
appears to have all the required qualities.
Mr. Moore and I had the occasional run in in the early days of Bonkers but I was
left with the impression he was fundamentally honest, which perhaps has been his undoing.
When a retired police officer caught Bexley’s parking department out being
dishonest - it was under a previous contract, not the current one - but would not
allow his PCN appeal, Mr. Moore
reimbursed him the cost of the parking fine from his own personal account.
He is inclined to stick up for his staff. When Bonkers revealed that
a senior staff member had a girl friend who worked in Downing Street he wrote me
a rather stroppy letter of complaint. I
doubt I would do that now, Bonkers has moved on a bit since 2013, but it was
almost war back then. If you think Bexley Council plays dirty in 2018 it’s
nothing compared to what they used to get up to when they thought no one was watching. Social Media has changed all that.
When Councillor Cheryl Bacon illegally excluded everyone from a public meeting,
Paul Moore wrote a guidance note to Councillors the next day which made the only honest reference to what happened - not counting all the Councillors who
wrote to me independently to say how appalled they all were at the dishonesty
coming from Cheryl Bacon and several other senior Council officers.
On the other hand when Councillor Danny Hackett was seen speaking to me in the
Council Chamber Mr. Moore told Danny that he should not be speaking to me. Danny pointed out
that he was entitled to speak to any resident and most certainly one from his own ward.
Probably
the worst thing that Acting Chief Executive Paul Moore is alleged to have done
is to edit a Council webcast so as to make mischief over a comment in the
Chamber by former UKIP Councillor Lynn Smith. He then put the video on a DVD for
distribution to guests at a retirement party, just for their amusement. It understandably caused Lynn a
great deal of distress.
When the Constitutional Review Panel agreed to introduce webcasting they were
very worried that members of the public - me probably - would indulge in
malicious video editing but the only two known examples of it have both come from within Bexley Council.
At least Paul Moore eventually apologised for his misjudgment, you would never
have caught Gill Steward doing that, too many misjudgments to cope with probably.