It seems like half a lifetime since the last Council meeting of note, but tomorrow Bexley Council
will hold a public meeting; nothing very controversial, it’s only the annual festival
of boozing and cake which celebrates the appointment, coronation, inauguration, anointment
even - whatever it’s called - of a new Mayor. It is going
to be Councillor Geraldene Lucia-Hennis so the year ahead may be a lot
more fun than the last one with a Bishop for a Mayor.
The problem with him, that is Councillor Brian Bishop in case you have
forgotten, is that he got through his entire year as Mayor without deviating
from his businesslike, professional and calm oversight of the job, and for a
politician, commendably even handed decisions.
Where’s the entertainment value in that?
Councillor
Lucia-Hennis promises so much more but whether her plans run to table dancers no
one can be certain but we should perhaps expect the unexpected.
No one expected her to
organise a strip show in a pub which did not have an
entertainment licence; but she did. It even attracted the then Mayor Sharon Massey to its front row.
The event was excused by the then Chief Executive who said it “was neither a
formal Council function, nor a Mayoral function” but a Freedom of Information
request showed that to be not entirely true. The event warranted
an entry in the
Mayor’s diary. One might also ask why the Council made no attempt to penalise
the Councillor for a blatant breach of licensing law.
A fun year may indeed lie ahead but I doubt very much that it can be better than 2010/2011. That was
the year of Mayor Clark, Councillor Val Clark that is.
She had little idea of how to control a meeting although it can be said in her
defence that since the coming of webcasting Councillors have been a lot less boisterous
and less of a problem to inadequate Mayors.
Clark’s party trick was to claim that what she was doing in her Chairmanship role
was entirely in accordance with the rulings of The Right Honourable Sir Walter
Citrine in his famed reference book ‘ABC of Chairmanship’.
I had my own copy so I knew that most of what she said was hogwash.
My warmest memory of my formative years in and around the Bexley Council Chamber
was reading a letter Mayor Clark sent to a member of the public. He had sat
unmoved by her praise for someone or other and the letter to his home address
complained about his "parsimonious appreciation".
The degree of silliness on display within Bexley Council may have reached its peak with
the obscenities happily posted on line by a Cabinet Member but five to
ten years ago it was widespread, someone must have decided to clean things up.
Another newcomer on display tomorrow will be
the new Chief Executive Jackie Belton.
The last time we had a new Chief Executive in Bexley she used her
enormous intellect to declare war on the Press and me in particular - she sent
me an email to announce her decision but not the local newspaper reporters. She
decided that withdrawing the limited Press facilities that had been provided at
Council meetings for
many years was the right way to win friends and influence people.
I am quietly confident that we will not see such idiocy again. Life is so much
more pleasant when new grounds for criticism are hard to come by.