4 March (Part 2) - Will he or won’t he?
Just over a year ago, Councillor James Hunt was
uncermoniously deselected as a Conservative for the May 2026 election.
20 years of loyal service counts for nothing if you get on the wrong side of Bexley’s Tory top brass. Just a few years earlier his collegaues were confident
enough in his loyalty to make him Mayor for two years in a row.
Someone had it in for him sufficiently to break the selection rules which enabled an appeal but that was never likely to succeed, and it didn’t.
Since then we have exchanged many a message but I was never very sure if James would stand for election again. Clearly he was sympathetic to Reform UK
but he never formed an especially close relationship as far as I could tell.
The whispers were that some in Bexley Reform may have seen him as an unwanted distraction who might steal the limelight. They may have been right,
James is not afraid of putting himself forward as a community leader.
He has been pretty senior within the Scout movement and has had connections with both the Air Training Force and Army Cadet Force.
Pretty knowledgeable about the NHS and the Artistic community too. He was recently pictured in the News
Shopper alongside his senior nurse wife.
As I have said before, James was the first to welcome me into the Bexley fraternity, albeit as a persistent critic in the early days and maybe that illustrates perfectly
how he is willing to put the community and democracy above party politics.
James has lived in Blackfen and Lamorbey ward all his life and clearly he thinks he still has something to offer and is taking the democratic approach once again. (See below.)
Residents will have three votes. James deserves one of them and maybe that’s better than putting all the eggs in a Reform UK basket. A balance of unreined enthusiasm and a lifetime of experience.
