Everyone has their own pet explanation of Ledbury’s political meltdown – and each is wrong in its own way.
 
There is the ‘playground antics‘ one which says all the town’s councillors are childish idiots, silly egotists who seem to enjoy arguing with each other. Why don’t they grow up? Better still, why don’t they all resign?
 
Another story – the motherhood and apple pie tale - talks about ‘clashing personalities’. So consumed are they by their own inflated importance, that councillors have forgotten their purpose, which is to represent Ledbury’s best interests. Why oh why can’t they just stop sniping and pull together for the good of our community? They are all volunteers, and work hard for no material reward, so why can’t we all be nice to each other? Bless the do-gooders.
 
The ructions which have shredded the town council’s effectiveness and credibility these last months and years, are frequently demoted to ‘bickering’ in the annals of the Ledbury Reporter.  While public lawyers and politicians around England and Wales are busy grappling with the constitutional implications of the ‘Ledbury Judgement’, local people are being served up big fatty slices of banality: It's time for a change, says Chris Wall, generously quoted from Facebook on the front page of the local paper. ‘Perhaps local councils have naturally run their course’, he adds profoundly. This is the ‘democracy doesn’t work’ trope: politicians everywhere will always go bad and voters are stupid, so let’s revert to something else; erm, not sure what though. 
 
In these competing narratives (which each contain some truth but miss the central point), there is an obvious omission. The original argument that kicked it all  off, as with the four years of increasingly bitter conflict and an eventual high court action, was about the conservation of power. We run this town. Not you.
 
Get Orf My Laand.
 
Like so many other self-important little county places which used to call their own shots, Ledbury Town Council has been emasculated in successive local government reorganisations, downgraded to a parish council, shorn of most of its responsibilities, left to amuse itself with the vestiges of former grandeur: the ‘mayor-making’ and her Chain of Office, the Civic Service in which the town’s great and good pay obeisance, the Mayor’s Charities (an often sordid affair), a raised throne at the head of the room, complete with gavel and a whole minuet of rituals and conventions befitting the ancient dignity of the title. No wonder the Masons are hand in glove with the town council. It has played its own quaint version of the emperor’s new clothes for several decades uninterrupted. Who needs actual cojones when you have all those shiny little bawbles to fiddle with in public?
 
Then along came Harvey. And her ‘acolytes’ as Michael Purton the new-to-Ledbury editor of the Ledbury Reporter recently referred to them. I am probably one of these.
 
The Harvey judicial review, Ledbury’s right to behave as it saw fit, was the Council’s Suez Crisis, a final, tragic attempt to assert its manhood, to stick a crooked little finger up at the hated Herefordshire Council who had long since been given parental responsibility for parish governance.
 
Do One.
 
‘If they think we’ll be told what to do by Herefordshire Council,’ spat Bob-the-liar-Barnes with bargain basement eloquence, ‘they don’t know me, and they don’t know Ledbury.’
 
He was raging about the Monitoring Officer Clare Ward’s insistence, as per the Localism Act 2011, that she had sole responsibility for determining allegations of misconduct of elected councillors. She warned the Council that it was acting ultra vires in banning two councillors, and was risking judicial review. Her entreaties were met with insolent defiance.
 
When the inevitable came in Cardiff High Court, Ledbury Town Council was brutally reminded that its power was all gone. Much as the old nativist tendency, the born and bred brigade, bemoan the passing of the old days when Ledbury was such a lovely, peaceful little town until all these meddling incomers arrived, their friends who ran the town council had decided finally to cut out the ‘extremist’ pestilence that was eating away at the foundations of its time-honoured existence.
 
In a letter to the Reporter, which to their credit, the editor chose not to print in its original form, but gave it the front page in heavily edited form, Barnes said he believed that a ‘political extremist group’ was now in charge of the town council, specifically the chairman Nina Shields: the imagined faction of outsiders, communists, terrorist sympathizers, traitors, bullies and sundry Johnny-come-latelys led by Liz Harvey and friends was running a plot to overthrow the civilised order. They were to be stopped. And thus the bannings.
 
It was a coup d’etat involving a junta of mad generals. It didn’t matter that a barrister’s opinion said the Council’s defense of the judicial review was hopeless. Nor that Herefordshire’s chief legal officer had told them so. Nor that even their preferred second opinion, barrister Lisa Busch QC, said they were on shaky ground because of the clear unfairness with which they had treated Liz Harvey and Andrew Harrison. Despite these auguries, the quartet of Crowe, Barnes, Fieldhouse and Eager (de facto), thrust forward in the manner of samurai warriors, all hack and slash. Who cared anyhow? It wasn’t their money that was being pissed the length of Ledbury High Street.  

​At the centre of the drama has been Ledbury’s Town Council’s former town clerk, Karen Mitchell. At every turn, Mitchell has been present, urging on her co-conspirators, orchestrating every move and countermove, playing the levers of bureaucracy adeptly in service of her cause.

It emerges that Mrs Mitchell was managing her own 'grievance process' throughout. An interested party, she really shouldn't have had any access to paperwork or be consulted on how Harvey and Harrison were treated. Nor should she have had any involvement in the judicial review being the person at its epicentre. Ledbury Town Council has never worried about such niceties. 

Having reviewed the duplicate set of legal of correspondence between solicitors Winkworth Sherwood and the Council, I can confirm that Mitchell personally supervised and controlled much of the proceedings leading up the High Court. While ordinary town councillors were kept completely in the dark about the Council's defence, Mitchell knew everything and took part in decision-making at every stage. 

No wonder that Karen Mitchell reportedly deleted the entire contents of her email inbox and purged large amounts of documentation before she left Ledbury for a new town clerk position in Bromyard. 

Something is Missing.
 
It was at the height of Ledbury’s supermarket controversy that I first bumped up against her. We had presented a petition of over three thousand names to the Town Council at a Council meeting. Mayor Allen Conway, a supporter of the cause, received the thick bundle of papers for ‘safe-keeping’ over the weekend in the Council offices until they could be taken to the Planning Department of Herefordshire Council. When, on the Monday morning, I collected the petitions to take them to Hereford, the bundle was thinner, much thinner.  Sheets containing about six hundred names and addresses were missing.  I contacted Liz Harvey as a local town and county councillor to seek advice. She took up the theft with Karen Mitchell who vehemently denied any wrong-doing. They exchanged acrimonious emails but nothing came of the spat. The matter was to be reprised as part of Mitchell’s complaint all those years later in 2016 in which she alleged systematic and continual bullying, harassment and intimidation by Harvey and me, beginning with the supermarket petition.
 
That shocking little incident foretold precisely the wayward behaviour of Town Council staff and their impressionable councillor friends and bosses. I learned that someone at least was willing to steal legal documents; if not the Clerk or staff who had taken them, these public servants were responsible at least for ensuring security. Instead of being concerned at the allegations of theft, Mitchell was on the contrary affronted, disclaiming all responsibility, alleging that she was being attacked politically by Harvey. And so it all began. Could she ever be trusted? Did she realise she’d been rumbled? Was she always willing to cover up for her dishonest friends and allies like Barnes and Eager?
 
To the members of the dark place at the core of Ledbury political life, Mitchell was a pricelessly valuable asset. To her, they were her occupational anchorage and so long as they danced to each other's tune, they were safe.

Hard Lines for Ledbury
 
Was it really just about holding on to power? Perhaps this narrative is also flawed. Perhaps there has been something much worse at play. What happens when a toxic personality hooks up with another one? Or several? A narcissist enlists a sociopath? And this group manoeuvres itself into a position of control? Is that what we’ve also seen, an unlucky conjunction?
 
Surveying the wreckage, it is clear that Ledbury has been in the grip of some very disturbing characters since the last election in 2015. The previous cohort might have been controlling, arrogant and self-serving, but it consisted mostly of ordinary people who had got above themselves, as lowly parish councillors tend to do. In the new administration, there was a change of climate. A new, febrile atmosphere had emerged. The town clerk was feeling threatened (and so as it turns out, well she might). New glories, some of them dangerous, were being sought, including ‘glitz and glamour’.
 
Majestic Annette Crowe had yolked her best buddy Elaine Fieldhouse into the fold. They quickly made common cause with brother masons Bob Barnes and Martin Eager. Much more lethal than alone, this sinister foursome rapidly coalesced into a nexus of bombastic viciousness and deceit. Amid all the patriotic bunting, the dark triad of toxic personality had found its luxury Herefordshire holiday home.
 
That systematic Machiavellian cynicism and self-serving manipulation has been the norm among this group is beyond question: just read back in this blog to the beginning of 2015 for the evidence. At council meetings, each of the four has repeatedly dissembled and swerved when confronted with the truth. ‘We have had legal advice that our case is cast iron’, said Elaine Fieldhouse, omitting that she and her confederates had also been told by another barrister (the first they had consulted) that their legal defence was unwinnable. ‘We are acting on advice from the National Association of Local Councils’ said Annette Crowe in justifying the in-house banning of two town councillors. Perhaps this is true, but the advice is nowhere to be found in the records, nor apparently has ever been seen by anyone outside the inner circle, not even the Deputy Mayor at the time, Keith Francis. ‘I trust people’, he said plaintively, ‘to tell the truth’.  Wrong.
 
Just the other week Bob Barnes is on the front page of the Ledbury Reporter asserting that ‘there are no missing documents’ (even though the evidence is clear that screeds of paper pertaining to the judicial review and other sensitive matters have disappeared). Barnes added craftily: ‘all the minutes regarding the handling of the complaints process, and the subsequent introduction of protective measures, were presented to and approved by full council.’ Yes Bob, we know that: it’s the legal papers, the email correspondence including everything ever emailed by the clerk, Karen Mitchell, the grievance and appeal panel proceedings, the notorious Lynda Wilcox/NALC advice, about a hundred grand’s worth of work which the council bought, which are vanished into air. He’s not exactly telling lies on this occasion, but nor is he telling the truth. Yes he is telling lies. Phew. I’d hate to misrepresent him.
 
I have previously vowed not to dwell on the monstrous Martin Eager any longer than is necessary, save to say he has a long background in ‘not recalling’ this discussion, or that decision, or this thing happening if they are of an incriminating nature. Eager’s moral universe is different to most people’s, the gravity of right and wrong has broken down. Whether it’s gluing up parking meters, inviting children to touch his genitals, or citing committee discussions in council meetings which never happened, Eager’s utterances are to be avoided like smallpox. Thankfully he is finished.
 
In August 2017 when the town council voted to hand over the management of the legal action to the Standing Committee (of Crowe, Barnes, Fieldhouse and their hapless subordinates Bradford and Francis), the mayor Fieldhouse promised councillors that no decision would be taken without its coming back first to full council ‘to vote’ on everything. Young Cllr Matthew Eakin made a point of confirming this fact: ‘yes everything’ she said brazenly.  His chagrin was palpable when it emerged two months later that nothing was being referred back to full council.
 
‘I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the back. I was assured by the mayor that we would have the chance to vote on everything before any action was taken by the standing committee’ Eakin said angrily. You can read a full account of this in an earlier blog piece, An Issue of Trust.
 
So much for cynical distortion, shameless manipulation and bare-faced mendacity. The two other facets of dark triad personality also glinted in the wintry sunshine last year and before.
 
Narcissism, that over inflated sense of self importance and grandeur, is often to be seen in this company. Here is Crowe tossing her long blond locks haughtily while declaiming to the crowd in her venomous mayoral farewell speech.  Read Barnes’ puffed up cod-legalese for a taste of the man’s egotism.  Asked why he resigned from the Council, he said, ‘the Political extremist's were just wasting my time, hours spent discussing Town matters, just for it to be disrupted or deferred (sic)’.  It’s so annoying when these foolish little rules of democracy get in the way of you getting your way, isn’t that right Bob?
 
She Said What?
 
Is Fieldhouse full of herself? I am remembering her with sidekick, the deputy clerk Maria Bradman, berating me in the town centre, later grasping my arm and saying smoothly that I have mental health issues, then visiting the police and making false allegations of harassment and public order offences against me. She did the same at a packed local government conference grandiosely denouncing Liz Harvey and me as bullies to an aghast Police and Crime Commissioner.
 
I think she might qualify as a narcissist; the lady has a mind-boggling sense of daring entitlement.
 
And so to the third face of malice.  Sociopaths comprise about 4% of the population; they are not common but are ubiquitous in life as the bullies and terrorisers of humanity. They cluster in certain occupations and positions, being disproportionately in charge of organisations by virtue of their ruthlessness and cunning. They like power. Are often charming. They lack human feeling. Are callous and unconscionable.
 
At least three of the quartet lean towards this behaviour, albeit possibly at a sub-clinical level. That’s my opinion. I may be wrong, blinded by hatred and revenge. If they are innocent I am truly sorry. But the signs don’t look good.
 
So actually, to the Mrs Pauline Preedy on Voice of Ledbury who said she was sick of it all, and that the ‘personalities’ had been ruining it, maybe you are right.
 
Nice Work.
 
Ideology and the ambition for power and control were the raw material, but it was the enriched fuel of disordered personalities which has led to such an unprecedented, extraordinary parish council scandal this year. Ledbury will go down in history as the basket case of town councils ne plus ultra. And that means forever. Are you satisfied ladies and gents?
 
Those four personalities together, Bob Barnes, Annette Crowe, Martin Eager and Elaine Fieldhouse, had formed a menacing black hole at the centre of the Council, shredding every vestige of truth that mattered. Even now, though the four are gone, well you can’t see them, their pull is still felt in the irritable outer fringes of Ledbury society. Of course, those who espouse them, and continue to give them succour, are also part of the problem in this town. For such a breathtaking financial gamble to take place, which was then lost, and there be people who genuinely think the Ledbury Judgement was a left wing stitch-up, and there are, shows the degree of subservience and contempt for democracy which is latent in our society. Over this, I weep.
 
People kid themselves that the populist, authoritarian hard right will never gain a foothold in mainstream British politics. Based on what has happened in Ledbury, I’m not so sure. Our duty now, in these times of Trump and Orban, Putin and Erdogan, Bannon and Farage is to defend our democracy wherever, however we can. For this, call me an extremist: No pasaran!

Note: the judicial review was heard at Cardiff High Court, not Bristol High Court. Corrected 22 August 2018 

There is a narrative being put about by the sore losers in Ledbury's judicial review into councillor bannings, that says that employees of parish and town councils are now defenceless against bullying and harassment by their bosses, elected councillors. Why should Council employees be the only people in the country not covered by employment law, they ask. Do not people have the right to go to work and not be bullied or harassed?

It's complete rubbish of course.  If you read the judgement (a summary of which is printed below), staff are as protected from unacceptable behaviour as they were before, but now also are elected councillors shielded from the kind of political thuggishness we have seen in Ledbury of late. 

Nor is it just the five disgraced councillors (Fieldhouse, Crowe, Barnes, Francis and Bradford) who ran the judicial review behind closed doors and gambled £200 thousand on legal costs, who are spitting venom over Judge Sara Cockerill's judgement. Now the National Association of Local Councils, the parish council umbrella body, and the Society for Local Council Clerks, the 'professional' regulatory organisation for town and parish clerks, is lobbying central government. 'The judgement will make it more difficult for local (parish and town) councils to resolve disputes between councillors and their employees,' they say in a joint statement 'demanding urgent talks' with government. Who would have thought they were so important? 

It will remembered that it was NALC's faulty advice which weaponised Ledbury Town Council in its resolve finally to extirpate Liz Harvey and her 'politically extremist' friends. On this fact, I am indebted to a comment of a reader of the Ledbury Reporter who says pithily: 'Of course, I wouldn't accuse NALC and SLCC of using this mechanism to try and avoid paying Ledbury Town Council compensation for the legal advice they, and HALC (Herefordshire Association of Local Councils), gave to the Council. I'm sure they are acting with the most impeccable motives.' I might not be quite so charitable. See the full thread here. 

The upshot of the 'Ledbury judgement' is that parish council county associations (run by people like Herefordshire's incompetent Lynda Wilcox) are now frantically urging their members to 'unban' town and parish councillors up and down the country on pain of legal action.

Despite the agony of having had to go to the courts and risking her house in the process, Liz Harvey has struck a little blow for democracy. No longer can politically and personally motivated councillor enemies gang up against dissident voices on trumped up staff bullying allegations. Out in the lawless shires, while the viciousness will no doubt continue, the councillor bannings at least are now at end. 

Many councillors and parish residents at their wits' end, have been in touch with Liz Harvey (and me through this blog) to seek advice, to complain bitterly, to have a friendly shoulder to cry on. The human cost of this political cess-pit is immeasurable: depression, anxiety, rage, and despair involving scores of local councillors accused of bullying and residents of being 'vexatious'.

We have been lucky in Ledbury that there have been just enough of us to keep going, that we have had enough comradely support to maintain our resolve and refuse steadfastly to bow down before the anti-democratic power-trippers that rise like turds in the sluggish grey water of parish affairs.  Others have not been so fortunate and are alone. Don't despair.  

If you have a story to tell about your town or parish council, we'd love to hear it: write to me at richhadley@gmail.com or to Liz Harvey at cllrlizharvey@gmail.com. We intend to keep going and organise a campaign for real local democracy, while exposing the pitiful charade of 'localism' which has poisoned the body politic of so many towns and villages throughout England.  

Meantime, for anyone still not sure about what the judicial review means, or the facts surrounding it, public law practices have been busy scripting advice in light of the judgement. Here is an excellent summary from Bevan Britain which I am copying in full: 

The High Court has recently considered local authority staff grievance procedures and their relationship with the Code of Conduct regime under the Localism Act 2011. The court held that a council cannot run a grievance procedure alongside, or as an alternative to, a standards regime procedure under the Localism Act 2011, and that complaints regarding a councillor's conduct have to be dealt with under the authority's standards arrangements.
 
The case of R (Harvey) v Ledbury Town Council [2018] EWHC 1151(Admin) concerned the Town Council's decision to impose sanctions on a councillor under its grievance procedures, banning her from serving on any committees and from communicating with any staff, following complaints of bullying and harassment. The councillor contended that any such complaints had to be dealt with under the Localism Act procedures; the council said that the 2011 Act did not prohibit parish councils from instigating proceedings under their grievance procedure where what was in issue was a matter involving internal relations between its employees and staff.
 
The facts
 
Following complaints that Cllr H had bullied, intimidated and harassed staff, the Town Council's Grievance Panel held a meeting to discuss the allegations. Cllr H did not attend, stating that she did not recognise the authority of the Panel, and she requested that the matter be properly investigated under the standards procedure.
 
The Panel upheld the accusations and the Town Council then resolved to impose a number of prohibitions on Cllr H, including that she should not sit on any committees, sub-committees, panels or working groups nor represent the council on any outside body, and that all communications between her and its clerk and deputy clerk should go through the mayor.
 
Herefordshire Council (HC), a unitary council, which had responsibility for investigating complaints about parish councillors, advised the Town Council that Cllr H's complaint was sufficiently serious to require further investigation, and so it was making arrangements for the complaint to be investigated by an external investigator.
 
The Monitoring Officer of HC wrote to the Town Council advising that although these allegations were made under the grievance procedure, they were in fact that a member had failed to comply with the authority's Code of Conduct and so had to be dealt with in accordance with the arrangements made under s.28(6) of the Localism Act 2011.
 
A year later the Town Council reviewed the restrictions, in Cllr H's absence, and decided that the restrictions should not only continue but should also be expanded to prevent her from communicating with all staff. HC then advised that its external investigator had found no breach by Cllr H of the Town Council's Code of Conduct and so HC would be taking no further action on the standards complaint.
Cllr H applied for judicial review of the Town Council's decision to impose sanctions under its grievance procedures. She contended that the decision was: 

• ultra vires as a councillor’s conduct must always and only be considered under the Code of Conduct procedures required by the Localism Act 2011; 
• substantively unfair and in breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) or at common law; and 
• procedurally unfair in the absence of following proper procedures including the absence of an opportunity to respond or defend herself.

The Town Council claimed that it had powers to determine complaints about councillors through its grievance procedure and under s.111 of the Local Government Act 1972.
 
Cllr H relied on a number of cases, including R (Taylor) v Honiton Town Council [2016] EWHC 3307 (Admin) and  Hussain v Sandwell MBC [2017] EWHC 1641 (Admin). The Town Council principally relied on R (Lashley) v Broadland DC [2001] EWCA Civ 179.
 
Effect of Localism Act 2011
 
The court granted the application, and ruled that the Town Council's decision to continue and enlarge the prohibitions must be quashed and Cllr H was entitled to declaratory relief.
 
Mrs Justice Cockerill found that there was no general power to run a grievance procedure process in tandem with or as an alternative to the Code of Conduct process envisaged by the 2011 Act, as that would be contrary to the intention of Parliament. It was clear that Parliament intended the 2011 Act to change the regime which was previously in operation. When looking at the case law, cases prior to the 2011 Act operated in the context of a different statutory world and it was important not to strain the meaning of those decisions too far.
 
Lashley established that councils had, prior to the 2011 Act (in fact before the Local Government Act 2000) a power to investigate misconduct substantively but it could not establish what the power was after the Localism Act 2011. The existence of such a rump power was not a given, and if it existed did not necessitate the finding of a full tandem system. The ability to exclude a parish councillor was no wider than the statutory provision in relation to such councillors and anything which went wider than this would, even before the 2011 Act, be ultra vires.
 
The court then considered whether a "qualifying allegation" had to be investigated under the Code provisions, or whether the Council had a residual power to investigate formally or informally. The judge stated that the key issue related not to the making of the allegation, but to the taking of a decision as regards breach and then taking action in furtherance of that decision. What s.28(11) of the 2011 Act contemplated was actually a four stage process:

• the making of an allegation; 
• (optionally) a non-formal investigatory or mediation stage ("informal resolution") or a pause pending other relevant steps being taken (e.g. criminal proceedings); 
• a formal stage, involving an independent person, leading to a decision on breach; 
• (if breach is found) a formal stage, again involving the independent person, dealing with action.
• An independent person had to be involved and consulted not just at the sanction stage, but also at the decision-making (breach finding) stage.

 
Breach of Article 10 rights
 
Article 10 ECHR provides the right to freedom of expression and information, subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society". This right includes the freedom to hold opinions, and to receive and impart information and ideas. Article 10 protects both popular and unpopular expression – including speech that might shock others – subject to certain limitations.
 
The judge found that there were two potential issues regarding Cllr H's submission that the action taken was an unjustified interference with her right under Art.10 ECHR and/or that the action was unreasonable at common law: first, whether the conduct of Cllr H engaged Art.10; and secondly, if so, whether it constituted a justified interference with her right.
 
The issue of her conduct was not in dispute: Heesom v Public Services Ombudsman for Wales [2014] EWHC 1504 (Admin) had confirmed that what was said by elected politicians was subject to "enhanced protection", applying to all levels of politics (including local politics); and that the protection "extends to all matters of public administration and public concern including comments about the adequacy or inadequacy of performance of public duties by others".
 
But the judge noted that Heesom qualified this: although the acceptable limits of criticism were wider for non-elected public servants acting in an official capacity, they were not as wide as for elected politicians, who came to the arena voluntarily and had the ability to respond in kind which civil servants do not. Furthermore, where critical comment was made of a civil servant, such that the public interest in protecting him as well as his private interests were in play, the requirement to protect that civil servant had to be weighed against the interest of open discussion of matters of public concern and, if the relevant comment was made by a politician in political expression, the enhanced protection given to his right of freedom of expression.
 
Mrs Justice Cockerill stated that the key issue here was therefore whether the committee resolutions which full Council had adopted and approved were justified under Art.10(2) ECHR.
 
Cllr H contended that the case was not sufficiently made clear to her and/or that she did not have a fair opportunity to respond and the proceedings were therefore seriously and obviously unfair, for example she was not told of the content of staff interviews nor did she have a report or any other analysis of the complaints and was excluded from the private discussion of her complaints and did not get the opportunity to hear the case let alone respond. The details of the alleged conduct were not provided to the meeting of the Council and therefore she had no effective opportunity to defend herself at full Council.
 
The court held that the Town Council's process was flawed both procedurally and substantively. It had not undertaken a process of identification and investigation, and its broad opinion on reconsideration after a year that "there had been little or no improvement in Cllr H's behaviour" could not be adequate. The process of considering the complaint was deficient in natural justice and it was entirely wrong for the Council to approach any fresh consideration of the complaints with anything other than an open mind engaged with the possibility that Cllr H might have legitimate answers to specific complaints made against her.
 
The judge concluded that: "In essence, the Council identifies a single purpose in the action it took: "to safeguard staff". That is, of course, a legitimate objective and it may be one which could justify some limitation of Cllr H's Article 10 rights". "..there is no sign at all of engagement with the other factors: rational connection, less intrusive measures and fair balance. All of these also would have to be considered in the light of the specific complaints as established following due process, which of course is missing in this case. I am therefore bound to conclude that for this reason also the decision complained of should be quashed."
The Council's response needed to demonstrate proportionality. Even if the complaints had been established, the sanctions were unreasonable and disproportionate (for further details see para.180 of the judgment).
Comment
 
This case provides a useful analysis of the new standards regime under the Localism Act 2011, and makes clear that it overrides the previous statutory procedures and also local authorities' inherent powers under the 1972 Act as determined in the Lashley case.
 
It also highlights that councils cannot try and get round the 2011 Act's lack of effective sanctions by dealing with complaints under their staff grievance procedures.
 
The judgment provides a reminder that any process must be fair and in accordance with the principles of natural justice, i.e. the right to a fair hearing by an unbiased and impartial body requires that individuals should have been given prior notice of the allegations made against them, a fair opportunity to answer them, and the opportunity to present their own side of the story. The right to a fair hearing is also guaranteed by Art.6(1) ECHR, which complements the common law rather than replaces it.
 
Notwithstanding this judgment, local authorities must continue to be mindful of their responsibilities to protect their employees from bullying, intimidation and harassment, since the authority may be liable for the actions of its councillors, established in the case of Moores v Bude-Stratton Town Council [2000] EAT 313/99. The proper course for the investigation of such behaviour of councillors would however now be under the Code of Conduct adopted under the Localism Act 2011, and following investigation, for the Monitoring Officer to discuss the outcome of the investigation with an Independent Person, ensuring that any hearing or informal action is proportionate in all the circumstances of the case.

 

 

In the three weeks between the court’s judgement on Liz Harvey’s judicial review and the election of Nina Shields as Ledbury Town Council’s chairman, there was wild activity in the offices of the town council, mostly at night but not of the amorous kind. This followed a major 'spring clean' of files and other paperwork before the ex-clerk Karen Mitchell left, some of which found its way on to a bonfire or into the bottom of a sodden skip.
 
Now it emerges that all the important paperwork about the judicial review and the grievance process which led to it, is gone. There are also reports that tranches of email messages have been deleted from the Council’s server. Take a moment to process this information. Are you shocked? Or are you, like the local police, blithely untroubled and think we should all now 'move on'?
 
As it stands, a substantial part of the legal documentation base is missing; all the professional advice and opinions; correspondence and emails; records from early 2016 pertaining to the ‘grievance and appeal panels’ that led to Liz Harvey’s and Andrew Harrison’s bannings. Most damningly, the original ‘advice’ is missing which Lynda Wilcox used to design a net in which to snare Harvey and Harrison; this was the ‘advice’ that in the end launched Ledbury’s doomed adventure in the courts. The town council has been raided. Who took it and why? Where is it now? Why aren't the police interested?
 
This much I have established by a formal request under Freedom of Information to Cllr Shields. As it stands, the Council, at its own expense, is having to commission a duplicate pack of the judicial review paperwork from the London solicitors, Winkworth Sherwood.  This will cost somewhere between one pound and twelve hundred pounds: the Council has not established how much exactly, since to do so will apparently incur even further costs. Winkworth Sherwood attach great value to their services it seems, even when they have dismally failed their client in the high court.
 
During the legal proceedings, August 2017 to March 2018, councillors and members of the public made multiple requests for details of the Council’s spending with solicitors and the legal opinions which underpinned it. These requests were refused. The entire process was managed in closed session by the Standing Committee consisting of Mayor Elaine Fieldhouse, Deputy Mayor, Keith Francis, and the three committee chairs, Tony Bradford, Bob Barnes and Annette Crowe.
 
Earlier, councillors had asked to review the supposedly compelling legal guidance that supported the ‘grievance process’ during 2016 from Lynda Wilcox of HALC, who in turn had been advised by NALC’s chief legal officer. This too was refused as it was claimed to be legally privileged.
 
When Nina Shields was elected chairman of the town council in May 2018, I asked formally whether this particular piece of evidence upon which the entire judicial review process was founded, could be revealed. With Keith Francis sitting at her side, she said she would try to find it. Cllr Francis claimed ignorance, even though he was intimately involved in every serpentine aspect of the three year imbroglio.
 
Credulous
 
‘No, I have never seen the legal advice from Mrs Wilcox, but I was told it existed, and I always trust people to tell the truth,’ he said virtuously. It's a pity that his fidelity didn't extend to the Monitoring Officer's entreaties to the Town Council to cease its unlawful actions, nor to the findings of Herefordshire Council's independent investigation which established that Harvey and Harrison did not bully staff.
 
Following the court judgement, the National Association of Local Councils (NALC) has petitioned the government to address the ‘concerns’ arising from the ‘Ledbury Case’. They say that ‘the judgement will make it more difficult for local councils to resolve disputes between councillors and their employees... [This] will impact on the corporate well-being of councils’. How touching. Is that what you call it now?
 
So it seems after all that NALC may have been propagating advice to parish and town councils that they are free to investigate and punish councillors outwith the provisions of the Localism Act. We shall be seeking clarification on this.
 
The NALC intervention with the Local Government Minister is encouraging because it means that Ledbury Town Council may indeed have a case to reclaim the legal costs from the body's professional indemnity insurance. This may be some consolation for Ledbury tax-payers who are currently staring at a two hundred thousand pounds legal bill.
 
Though welcome, the insurance payment will do nothing to redress the years of paralysis in the Council while the bannings have been in force. Nor will the process be straightforward given the presumed destruction of the relevant paperwork.
 
Deceitful
 
And so to the present.  The scorched earth campaign by resigned councillors (and possibly staff)  has robbed Ledbury of the evidence to go after the perpetrators of this reckless episode.
 
It looks likely that as they resigned one by one in an orderly sequence, councillors and staff of the 'ancien regime' systematically trashed their records, deliberately left payments and important deadlines to fizzle and smoulder, possibly deleted swathes of emails, burned files and records, and denuded the offices of usable resources. The Council's administration is in ruins. To their beloved council, these guardians of civic pride and historical tradition, have taken a match and a can of petrol. If we can’t have it,
say the wreckers, then neither shall you.
 
Just like Iago unmasked at the end of his murderous spree, Barnes, Crowe, Fieldhouse, Eager, Francis and Bradford are silent, hoping the jetstream of fury will pass over: 'Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.'
 
Shadow Play
 
The Council pays Herefordshire Council of Local Councils a fee to provide ‘emergency cover’ for temporary ‘clerking’ purposes. Just before the judicial review judgement was announced, the stand-in town clerk, Eva Thomas, provided by HALC, suddenly called in sick, then disappeared completely. Whether coincidence or not, Ledbury’s new Deputy Clerk, resigned a week later. It now emerges that HALC’s boss, Lynda Wilcox says that she is unable to find any temporary staff to work in Ledbury Town Council.  
 
All that is left are two clerical assistants, a chaotic mess of sifted files, and a heap of half-completed tasks. The attrition has been going on for months it seems.
 
Of most concern have been the evening incursions into the offices by several, now-resigned, councillors who have been watched foraging through paperwork in the town council offices. Being trusted council insiders, the gentlemen held office keys, security passwords and knew their way adeptly around the filing system. On one occasion, they arrived three quarters of an hour early for a ‘working party’ meeting and spent all that time in the warren of back offices going through filing cabinets and laying out piles of paperwork on the meeting table before tidying up for the meeting. Challenged to explain what they were doing and why they were there alone, one of these ex-councillors denies having attended the meeting at all, a typically brazen gesture.
 
Deeply troubling too is the behaviour of the two ex-mayors at the centre of the maelstrom that has engulfed the council, Elaine Fieldhouse and Annette Crowe. Why would they enter and exit meetings by the back door of the Council offices? Why would they gather in this gloomy spot and be handed bundles of paperwork from within by an unseen third party? To what end have been the clandestine meetings of ex-councillors Clive Jupp, Allen Conway, Rob Yeoman and Mary Cooper with their recently departed colleagues Barnes, Crowe and Fieldhouse? There has been frenetic shuttling in recent weeks between Crowe’s and Fieldhouse’s shops, visits by all the resigned councillors and allegedly by council staff, as well as goodwill visits by the newly elected town councillor, the irrepressible Philip Howells standing for the Lib Dems. So much for Ledbury Town Council being a politics-free zone. At least we can retire that old trope.
 
To Protect and Serve?
 
Of most concern perhaps, is the attitude of the Police. While incoming committee chairs have expressed alarm at the potential tampering of criminal evidence by resigned councillors and staff, the police have conspicuously stood by and refused to investigate complaints of maladministration, corruption, theft, and misconduct in office that were put before them: ‘he (Sgt A-B) decided that at the time the matter did not require further police attention’, according to an officer in writing.
 
The police also said that they could not intervene in the business of securing the council premises and CCTV footage, even though potential suspect parties were able to come and go from the offices with impunity for several days before adequate security could be established. This was because ‘there was no police investigation running that [required] us to consider securing and preserving anything that might be viewed as evidence’. QED. After several years of observing town council affairs, I’m sorry to say that this type of recursive logic is becoming tiresomely familiar.
 
What the police should have done was take seriously the concerns and allegations put before them, opened an investigation, helped to preserve evidence and to interview interested parties, the new council chairman Nina Shields, councillors Liz Harvey and Andrew Harrison. Not a bit of it.
 
Jump to Attention
 
This passive attitude is in contrast to previous behaviour. In November 2015, ex-mayor Elaine Fieldhouse and ex-deputy clerk Maria Bradman made a serious complaint to the police about my having harassed and abused them in the street.  The police snapped to an investigation of this fabricated incident.
 
Over the Christmas and New Year period an enquiry took place involving many witness statements, sound recordings, CCTV records and two months of detective work. So seriously was the matter taken that it was overseen by a police inspector. Of course, having trawled the evidence, the only corroboration for Fieldhouse’s and Bradman’s lies, was their own maliciously fictional account. I was summoned to the station and told I had no case to answer, and that graciously, I was never ‘regarded as a suspect’.  Thanks a lot; and a merry christmas to you too. The two liars meanwhile walked out of their meeting scot-free (despite obviously wasting much police time), albeit most disappointed that I had not been charged.
 
Later, when it was established that Elaine’s bankrupt husband David Fieldhouse was the perpetrator of a threatening telephone call to my home, I was asked whether I’d prefer him to be cautioned or to apologise. I opted for the latter, which he refused. So then I said he could take the caution. At some point before he was collared, the police attitude changed. Now they didn’t want to caution him after all. I endured a series of bruising phone calls with the well-meaning inspector who it seemed had been instructed to let Fieldhouse off - and get me to shut up and accept a private apology. I insisted he be given the caution, not out of vindictiveness, but on principle. Having prevaricated for weeks, told lies about me to the police, generally wheedled his way through denials and half-hearted admissions, Fieldhouse finally got his comeuppance. The Inspector was then swiftly and unexpectedly transferred out of the county.  
 
Liz Harvey has also received two sexually threatening telephone calls. Neither of them has been adequately investigated.      
 
Answers Please

The force won’t be pleased for me to say this but who is pulling the strings here?
 
We know that members of the freemasons have been centrally involved in the ‘get Harvey’ campaign and have been driving forward the council’s legal action. At the centre of the web sits Lynda Wilcox, wife of Brian, something very high up in the Masons and Chairman of Herefordshire Council. She is the lady who unlawfully falsified crucial committee minutes of the Council, and has to this day, refused to set the record correctly. She wrote a ‘witness statement’ for the Council in its legal defense; it was a perversion of the truth, shot through with falsehoods and distortions. She was the person who designed and managed the unlawful grievance procedure against Harvey and Harrison which was emphatically rejected by the Court. This is the source of the much-vaunted legal opinion from the National Association of Local Councils, the document that just dares not show its face. Having been exposed, Lynda Wilcox has now graciously withdrawn her professional services from Ledbury Town Council.
 
It feels very much like somebody is protecting Wilcox: could it be high-placed friends, or masonic brothers of her husband? In normal times, this lady would be dancing a bullet-dodging tarantella for her sins, but curiously now, as with the ex-Town Clerk, Karen Mitchell, she is serene and untroubled. Why could that be?
 
I don't go in for conspiracy theories, but there are palpable suspicions that an establishment cover-up of ludicrous audacity is in process.
 
In the Feathers over drinks, ex-staff and ex-councillors are busy planning their come-back tour in next year's town elections. Upstairs the 'brethren' whisper about the left-wing plot to take over Ledbury. On Facebook's Voice of Ledbury, the fascist tendency fulminate against Liz Harvey and say that since she kicked off the legal action, she should pay (even though she won); logic is not abundant in that forum. The losers are spinning the high court judgement as simply a procedural nicety: all the Council did wrong was to use the wrong process to ban her. The local media colludes in suppressing ex-councillors' delinquent behaviour, reducing the bitter three year clash over transparency and ethics to school playground 'bickering'. The slanted coverage is frankly absurd, and obvious to anyone with an ounce of brain.
 
Look the other way

Most troubling of all however is the police's apparent nonchalence over the misuse of a fortune in public money, the publication of fraudulent official minutes, and now the disappearance of a hoard of crucial - presumably incriminating -  documentation.  The 'bickering' is rapidly metastasizing into a chilling political scandal.
 
To the Chief Constable of West Mercia Police, Anthony Bangham, and the Police and Crime Commissioner (conservative), John Campion, I humbly say to you (and on behalf of hundreds of like-minded people in Ledbury), we won't be browbeaten into silence and we won't allow the debris of a shattered Ledbury establishment to be swept under the carpet. Be aware, that this corrosive affair will run and run, until the truth has been told. Then there can be reconciliation.
 
I may be wrong, but it looks like there has been an attempt at cover-up. The destruction of official records is profoundly serious. We have to ask, what else has been concealed or destroyed. We wonder why everybody seems to be rallying to Lynda Wilcox's distress. We expect the Nolan Principles to be upheld.
 
'Throughout history,' said Haile Selassie, 'it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.'

​So she was right all along.
 
That pig-headed, infuriating, argumentative, sulphurous trouble-maker Liz Harvey was perfectly correct in arguing that the bans imposed on her and Andrew Harrison, were unlawful. She said that the process used by Ledbury Town Council to investigate and convict her and Andrew, was grossly unfair. She said that the Council's sanctions also infringed her human rights as an elected councillor.
 
The High Court judge agreed with her. Mrs Justice Sara Cockerill's judgement, first released in draft appropriately enough on the First of May, is comprehensive and emphatic. Liz Harvey is completely vindicated, while Ledbury Town Council is judged completely wrong since it embarked on its campaign to exclude and silence the two dissident councillors. There is no mitigation; the Council's defense has been obliterated.
 
So now the town's assorted right wing conformists, the establishment stooges and xenophobic nativists are foaming at the mouth, appalled at what they see as yet another left wing stitch up by outsiders. Hazy on the detail, the reaction of most ordinary people is surprise that the Council was prepared to go all the way on a project that seemed doubtful from the start, given the weight of legal opinion (and common sense) ranged against it.
 
Of more concern to tax payers is the two hundred thousand pounds of public money that the Gang of Four - Fieldhouse, Crowe, Barnes and Eager - have squirted up the wall on what now emerges as the flimsiest of pretexts.  Reading the judgment anybody with the most middling intelligence could not help exclaiming, is that really it?
 
Advice that dares not speak its name.
 
The vaunted legal advice was that the Council's case was 'cast iron', 'rock solid', 'as safe as houses' (I quote). It came first from Lynda Wilcox of Herefordshire Association of Local Councils, then the National Association of Local Council's chief legal officer Meera Tharmarajah, then from DF Legal LLP, the local Ledbury solicitors, and finally from the swanky London lawyers of Winkworth Sherwood LLP. Wow: that sounds impressive.  Except for over two years, this secret legal advice, the Council's killer card, has remained elusive.
 
You can imagine the mixture of hilarity and dismay when Harvey's team finally got sight of the Council's defence as its QC, Lisa Busch, revealed its long-awaited 'skeleton' legal argument before the court hearing. It was about as robust as a used kleenex, as convincing as a Bill Clinton stain removing kit. 
 
In poker, there's a particular bluff you can use at the start of a round called a Blind Steal. It's a preemptive move where you bet aggressively straight after the deal even though you have a dead hand. You use your ample financial resources, to convince your opponents that resistance is futile, they might as well drop out at the start. Your confidence blinds them. Military strategists refer to it as shock and awe. I'll give the ladies and gents of the town council's 'Standing Committee'  top marks for bluff. Fieldhouse in particular would make a spectacular poker player with her repertoire of diversions, evasions and distraction tactics, and her peerless ability to look you in the eye and lie through her teeth. When her business folds, perhaps poker could be her financial salvation? But who really cares? For now, alongside the other three resigned councillors, Elaine is bobbing helplessly in scalding hot water.
 
As predicted, this foolish adventure by the four grifters and their saps - Francis, Bradford, Eakin and Manns - means that Ledbury Town Council is now effectively ripped apart. Not only has the Clerk at the centre of the lies - Karen Mitchell - ditched her co-conspirators for a new job in Bromyard, but the temporary stand-in clerk has also resigned. Now the new Deputy Clerk has gone, citing 'personal reasons'. Lastly, the Mayor Fieldhouse joins the stinking, crumpled heap of Eager, Crowe and Barnes on the bench.  
 
Reactionaries.
 
This is not to say that their idiot fan club aren't still trying to spin the judgment as simply a 'procedural' error, some kind of minor technicality. Just because Harvey has won the JR, they say, doesn't mean she and Harrison didn't bully the staff. Yes it fucking does.
 
Reality check: Harvey and Harrison had already been cleared of bullying by the Monitoring Officer at Herefordshire Council two years ago. This judgment finally removes the legally indefensible sanctions imposed on them by hostile political opponents since then. It also means that parish councils everywhere else henceforth must comply with the terms of the Localism Act 2011 and hand over complaints about councillor conduct to their 'principal authority', the county or district council above them. Tin-pot, third-tier councils, like Ledbury's, are not competent in any sense of that word, to investigate councillor conduct. End of.
 
What now remains is to investigate if criminal maladministration has taken place in the town council. What exactly were the compelling legal opinions which justified the Gang of Four's insistence on taking this dispute all the way to the High Court?  Were they within their powers to commit so much money to a legal cause of which the wider Town Council had no knowledge? Was the Standing Committee entitled to pay legal invoices exceeding £80 thousand to Winkworth Sherwood, in full awareness that there were no budgeted funds to cover it? Did they tell lies and misrepresent the situation to fellow councillors? Were crucial committee decisions suppressed and false minutes presented to council?
 
Now it is time for the police to launch a formal inquiry into these and other questions.
 
Meanwhile out in the street, the Mmes Crowe and Fieldhouse are still busy cooking up schemes and stratagems. Today they were allegedly spotted at the back door of the council while clerical assistant Mrs Jill Jupp (another ex-mayor's wife) ran around collecting paperwork for them. Were these nomination forms for the forthcoming election? Now it emerges, Keith Francis, the hapless deputy mayor who has eagerly participated in every stage of this unfolding scandal, is trying to argue that he was 'bullied' by Crowe and Eager. I was following orders, he says plaintively.

<eye-roll> 

Another longstanding council waste container, veteran councillor Tony Bradford, champion of the common man, is also claiming that he was bullied into acquiesence by Crowe and her chums. Sympathy for his plight is leavened because at Ledbury's recent irritable Annual Council meeting, Bradford continued to bemoan the awful bullying he was subject to by Harvey, Harrison, me and my 'team'. Has he got a persecution disorder, or does he just say whatever is expedient to make himself look good in the moment, or at least less bad?
 
Whatever their excuses, Bradford and Francis are as culpably foolish and malign as the other three ringleaders, Crowe, Fieldhouse and Barnes. Here they were prosecuting a ruinous legal campaign against Harvey (and Harrison) for bullying staff, while now claiming they were simultaneously being 'bullied' into going along with the three others; oh, the irony.

Time's up Gentlemen. 

Weak, cowardly, craven, morally bankrupt, manipulative, hypocritical, Mr Bradford and Mr Francis: your gutless excuses are nauseating and shameful. Get out of it.
 
So too, can young Matthew Eakin (another locally famous Lib-Dem) and Andy Manns, these two 'good guys' who eagerly voted for every illegal sanction, every vicious little act on Harvey and Harrison to be imposed, who ignored every protestation that the Council's actions were clearly unfair, who up to last week, have continued to support the bans until the two offending councillors 'begin behaving themselves', who have been regularly popping in and out of Crowe's and Fieldhouse's shops for political instruction.  There is a special type of contempt that is reserved for collaborationists. Unless they fess up that is. Being ignored.
 
Let's just end this by recalling the vile whining of the Nazi war-criminal Adolf Eichmann: I was only following orders.
 
No. He had a choice. The actions into which he was allegedly 'coerced' were so egregious and unreasonable from a moral and legal point of view, that his defense of 'superior orders' was rejected as impossible.

The Council miscreants always had a choice. They didn't have to do what they did. Their actions were calculated and deliberate. Now they must take the consequences.
 
I apologise to my readers for my intemperate language and biting opinions. When I have seen justice being done in Ledbury, and the real bullies of this town exposed and judged, my ire may subside. Right now, I'm with the rest of the mob, in wanting to see these shoddy little enemies of democracy, these petty tricksters, these power-thirsty narcissists, dealt with harshly in the court of public opinion. Let them be identified, their behaviour scrutinised and learned from, and then let them be forgotten.
 
Then we might put this tragedy behind us.
 
 
 
 

For a moment, and for the last time I promise, I want to talk about the sordid world of Martin Eager - the violent, paedophile councillor who has just resigned from Ledbury Town Council.
 
In his sickening resignation letter, Eager says he had seen 'town council staff coming to work with dread and in tears, because of a "toxic" climate... I did not join the council to witness staff crying their eyes out because they dreaded going into work.'
 
If he is to be believed, this would not be the first time this evil man has witnessed people crying their eyes out in fear and dread.
 
Let us picture the scene as he tightened his hands round the neck of his slightly built wife and shook her like a rag doll, and punched her repeatedly, telling her he was going to fucking kill her. She was probably crying her eyes out. Think about his thirteen year old ex-step daughter having to endure the most awful sexual abuse - she told the police he had done 'disgusting things' to her, that he was a 'perv', probably while crying her eyes out. Imagine the tears of shame and rage of that mother having to listen to her daughter explaining in horrifying detail to police officers and to the court how she had been defiled and degraded by this obese fifty year old man. She had to listen too while her young son's testimony was given; he too was invited into Eager's sex-games and invited to touch the man's penis.
 
These are the facts that were read out in court. But there are people in Ledbury who say that he did much more, terrible things that never saw the light. Yes we might spare a thought for the daughters' school friends who were party to the abuse, and to their parents having to listen to their harrowing, at that stage, unsubstantiated accounts of domestic physical and sexual abuse. Even now, a decade later there is a cloud of shame and guilt that hangs over these families, that they weren't able to do more to put a stop to the abuse and see Eager behind bars.
 
Let us now imagine the dread of this family, living in a foreign country, having to go to court each day and relive such unspeakable life-changing experiences in public, even while Eager's posse of Ledbury friends, some of them openly racist, were running round the town saying they were all liars, that the allegations were a pack of lies, that Eager's ex-wife deserved her fate.
 
Turning up to court on 30 October 2008, this wretched family was told by the judge to go home: the trial was aborted. As they walked from Worcester Crown Court on that chilly autumn day, we might visualise the mother trying her best to be strong, desperate to fight back the bitter tears of rage, injustice and grief so as not to make her children's pain any worse. Confused, she is dimly trying to make sense of a 'mistake' by the Crown Prosecution Service having charged Eager under the wrong legislation, causing the trial to collapse. Was it a genuine mistake? Or was it a deliberate perversion of justice, enacted by Eager's high-placed friends to let him off the hook? Could she face putting her family through a retrial?
 
Finally, let's try out the toxic climate in which these three vulnerable people had been immersed for months, possibly years: a bullying, abusive home life, a hostile, racist town, an incompetent - or possibly malevolent - judicial system unable, or unwilling, to offer redress. Just for a moment, imagine the parting glance of ex-Mrs Eager boarding the plane to go home, looking out over the bleak concrete expanse below, choking back the bitter tears. What would she be thinking about Ledbury? About her adoptive home, Britain?
 
These three lives were emotionally destroyed by a man who walked away scot-free, completely unrepentant, who was sheltered and later welcomed back into respectable society by his friends in the Ledbury establishment.
 
A few hundred voters in the North Ward of Ledbury voted for him at the 2015 election, many unaware of his crimes, but some, shamefully willing to condone his monstrous behaviour. In 2009 after the abortive trial, a previous town council had co-opted him back into its ranks amid warm words and friendly handshakes: Keith Francis, Mary Cooper, Clive Jupp, Paul Winter, Allen Conway, Rob Yeoman, Tony Bradford: you were all there to welcome him back.  And the town? Where was Ledbury when he took his seat as a committee chair in charge of play equipment, youth projects and family amenities? It took another decade to have his disgrace acknowledged.
 
In its most shameful act, Ledbury Town Council elected Eager Town Mayor in 2017. His cheerleaders included Bob Barnes, Annette Crowe, Tony Bradford, Elaine Fieldhouse, Jean Simpson, Debbie Baker, Matthew Eakin, Andy Manns. Each one of these people knew full well about Eager's past crimes. And yet it was to Liz Harvey whom they hurled abuse and cheered when Eager insulted in her in the most grossly misogynistic terms. He called her a smelly old cow, and said she was the most disgusting woman he had ever seen. Even writing this makes me feel sick.
 
Let us not forget the town council staff in this affair too, the Clerk, the Deputy Clerk, the various Clerical Assistants who have all fussed and fawned over Eager, a regular and welcome visitor to the town council offices.
 
Tears. Dread. Toxic. Three little words which have cast a life sentence over so many innocent lives. Completely disregarded by the amoral guardians of Ledbury's civic affairs, Eager has survived and prospered because of his friends in the rotten, corrupt, sleazy establishment of this town. We must of course point the finger at the Freemasons whom we know are infused with notions of fraternal loyalty, even when confronting the most disgusting behaviour. But there are women too who have chosen to turn a blind eye. Shame on them too. 
 
The people who have given Eager succour over the years - including the local press - are guilty by association. By allowing this paedophile to roam free in public life, they have given solace to bullies, domestic abusers, child abusers, inept and/or corrupt officials everywhere. They have furthered the cause of cruelty, oppression and domination. They have sought to rewrite history in favour of the violent oppressor and cast anyone who challenges them as heinous liars. This is the rancid culture in which Ledbury Town Council has been steeped for ten or more years.
 
In time the stench of decay might fade. It is to be hoped that Eager crawls off into a dark place and is never heard from again. Nonce: not on communal exercise. Some of his cronies are gone, but a few cling on for now: Francis, Fieldhouse, Bradford in particular. They must go too.
 
It is fair to say that this affair is a stain on the reputation of Ledbury. At the very least, there needs to be an acknowledgement of the pain that the Town Council has visited on Eager's ex-family by its craven actions, and an apology offered by unanimous motion for sheltering and encouraging him. It must happen soon. It will begin the process of truth and reconciliation. 

It didn't take long. As Ledbury Town Council goes into meltdown, a ruthless damage limitation operation is already underway by elements of the town's old political guard, the conservative establishment.
 
Ledbury's shadowy burghers have done their best to shore up the hapless Elaine Fieldhouse during her bleak tenure as mayor after defenestrating their first choice for the job last year, self confessed domestic and child abuser, Martin Eager. The public outcry at his election almost threatened riots.
 
These upstanding brothers from the Eastnor Lodge who know what's best for the town, understand that stability is strength and continuity is control.
 
It is essential that the Liz Harvey tendency, that raucous, insolent, anti-patriotic rabble who have taken the Council to the brink of ruin, must be stopped before it has the chance to do anything to really upset the status quo. One thing is certain: they must never grasp the reins of power.
 
There was a foretaste of this at the Parish Meeting last Thursday, even before Crowe had flounced and Barnes had said his nasty little goodbye. Out of six 'distinguished citizens' that were recognised by the Town Council, three were Council cronies.
 
First up was Ken Davies, a former town mayor from bygone times. His most recent outing into Ledbury affairs was a letter denouncing the bullies in the town council, and expressing such sympathy for the awful treatment endured by council staff. Ken's most infamous contribution however was the proposal that Ledbury Park should be converted into a golf course, with the building of an accompanying holiday village. Ken has always had an interest in tourism with a keen eye for an opportunity; he owns Woodside Holiday Cottages. Next came Bob Barnes-acolyte Jennie Harrison, the amateur military activist and leading light in the Royal British Legion since her recent arrival in Ledbury.
 
As if the tang of dyspepsia from twenty long minutes of fawning and mutual back slapping was hard enough to take, the spectacle then got really bilious. One of last year's winners - Hilary Jones - stood up and to groans of disbelief, nominated ex-town councillor Clive Jupp for a distinguished citizen award. His face beamed with delight and gratitude, the audience not so much. She was presumably returning the favour to Clive who had nominated her last year.

CORRECTION: Hilary Jones's daughter has corrected me on the above information; apologies to Mrs Jones for any offence caused. She said: "Mum was in fact nominated in 2012,she was not one of last years winners as you stated,she was nominated for her voluntary work within the community over the past 40 years,this nomination was not in fact by Clive as you have suggested.
She chose to nominate Clive for the distinguished citizen award this year on behalf of many people who have appreciated his valued input to the local community.....not purely to ‘return the favour’ as you put it. She also doesn’t recall any groans of disbelief at the nomination.... ​"
 
It is important to pay attention to signs and symbols like these. Here we had the town council signalling its allegiance to an old, entrenched Tory establishment, to military values and service, and to the chivalric codes of deference, obedience, and reverence for authority, so admired by the town's old believers of Jupp, Conway, Winter, Yeoman et al. Remember those has-beens? Except they are not.
 
These people might have bowed out of actual council meetings, but let us not forget that they still run things. The oligarchy in Ledbury - as in the wider county - is complemented by a sprinkling of high-ranking masons, conservative grandees, ex-councillors and county gentry.  'Here' you do as you're told.
 
Barely had the unctuous words of praise and gracious acceptance speeches faded, than Crowe was slating Harvey (and me) for years of bullying, intimidation, abuse and victimisation - of her. Somebody shouted 'look in the mirror'.
 
Annette's jeremiad was fulsomely backed up by former arch-enemy Tony Bradford, who continued from the platform to insult and berate members of the audience and fellow councillors.
 
It was a typically undignified and ugly display. But it served its purpose. Counterpointed by Ledbury's little awards ceremony - we're calling them the LAFTAs by the way - the rancourous exchanges created an even more poisonous atmosphere.
 
Then and now. Now, it is all chaos and anarchy. Then, it was smooth, purposeful, and controlled. Now it is bitterness and hatred. Then it was camaraderie and civility. Then it was us. Now, horrifyingly, it might be them.
 
The Vulgarians are at the gate.
 
Today (Monday) they were gathered in the town council offices, joined by a few unknown faces: Bradford, Eager, Fieldhouse, Barnes and Crowe - though why these two should be in private conference within the town council is concerning since they are no longer elected councillors. Papers and files were being scrutinised amid much pursing of brows.  It was agreed that Fieldhouse would, like her friend Crowe, use her mayoral speech of thanks to launch another vicious assault on Liz Harvey et al. Then she will storm out casting the chains of office down histrionically. And there will be a dreadful scene. And the 'people' will call for the Council to stand down, and then the council can start afresh - preferably shorn of its reformist faction.
 
The 'new blood' narrative is designed to ensure that the dissident councillors, the ones that have been calling out incompetence, nepotism, maladministration, and possible corruption for the last three years, will also be swept away on a populist tide. The intake of 'new faces' will be the better to have their strings tweaked just like the gullible fools from 2015 did: Andy Manns, Matthew Eakin, Jean Simpson, Debbie Baker.
 
So on Voice of Ledbury yet another ex-mayor from long ago crawls out and says he wants a town council he can be proud of. The lot of them should resign, he says craftily. One of the town's pillars of charitable virtue, a mason's wife and Rotarian, says that it is such a pity that despite everything Crowe and Barnes have not been formally thanked for their wonderful voluntary work in the town. Obtusely, she says has lost track of all the rights and wrongs of the matter. A serving councillor - one of Crowe's vegetables - is upset that here he is trying to 'deffuse (sic) the situation and others [are] fanning the flames'. Forget it.
 
The blaze is raging out of control and things are becoming dangerously unpredictable. One of Barnes' attack dogs drove his car straight at Cllr Andrew Warmington while he was walking his dog. In the Bye Street loos, Liz Harvey, who has been cleaning them single-handed since the reopening, had to contend with a pile of human excrement carefully deposited in the middle of the toilet floor. This follows on from gluing up of the locks, and trashing of the floral display. There have been a string of nuisance phone calls, and David Fieldhouse, the mayor's optician husband, has been officially cautioned by police for making a threatening and abusive telephone call to a serving councillor's house. There is violence in the air.
 
No. Let there be a fresh start for the town council in May 2019 at the appointed time. In the meantime, let us undertake the hard task of truth and reconciliation. Ledbury Town Council - and its residents - need to reflect on what has happened and understand how to ensure this obscene abuse of power, privilege and precious resources can never happen again. The Council needs to be reformed in the way it does business. But more than anything, councillors - or rather those who remain after the ringleaders of the vendetta against Harvey have resigned - need to agree how they treat each other, how disputes are resolved, and how a culture of decency can be restored. A rebuilt Ledbury Town Council needs to commit itself to an exemplary ethical framework. From being one of the worst parish councils in England, it should and can aspire to being a leader and a role model. 
 
More than anything Ledbury needs honesty and openness. Let there be no sweeping the filth and decayed matter under the carpet.
 
Then it was lies. Now is the time for truth.

Everything happens for a reason. Or rather, there is always a reason why things happen.
 
So Annette Crowe and Bob Barnes have now resigned from Ledbury Town Council. Why? Outwardly, everything in their universe is situation normal. They occupy positions of influence in the council, are bolstered by their regular coterie of supporters, and continue to be the locus of the establishment values in town life. Their grip on the town council seems unassailable. It's business as usual isn't it?
 
And yet, last evening at the Annual Parish Council, the cunning pair dramatically quit, in Crowe's case, with an intended blaze of theatrical glory. She flounced out, tossing her tresses contemptuously as the crowd jeered and clapped.
 
The resignation statements were retreads of familiar material: they had been bullied and abused on social media, subject to intimidation and intolerable abuse, have valiantly kept going amid a toxic and hateful atmosphere, have been victims of unfair and unsubstantiated allegations. Sensitive souls both, they had had enough. Oh how the audience felt for them...
 
Yes well. I'm sure everyone believes them to be righteously sincere in all that they say. We heard the same bullshit playbook when Cllr Jean Simpson threw in the towel, when deputy clerk Maria Bradman resigned, and when Cllr Martin Eager resigned as town mayor. It's called victim-playing.
 
In each of those cases, there was a real reason why they left, and so it is with Crowe's and Barnes' exit.
 
People are wondering why, on the eve of the decision of the judicial review which they personally initiated and have been stage-managing, the pair should quit. Why not wait until their expected apotheosis, when their victory has been announced, and the evil Liz Harvey has been crushed? The town council has been repeatedly told by mayor Elaine Fieldhouse, that its case is cast iron, that the legal opinion from their eminent barrister is that they should defend the case to the utmost. Sweet success would be theirs, if only everyone held their nerve, and trusted the inner councillor circle of Barnes, Crowe, Francis, Bradford and Fieldhouse herself.
 
Can we see the evidence and the legal advice upon which the case rests, implored even Crowe-friendly councillors of the imperturbable Mrs Fieldhouse. 'Oh we'd love to,' she cooed while slipping a delicious little humbug in between those richly painted lips, 'but we cannot risk this being leaked into social media. We cannot risk helping Liz Harvey. You'll have to take our word for it. It's confidential you see'. Enough of the vegetables agreed to suspend their disbelief. 
 
At this point we might consider the law of unintended consequences. Actions which seem logical and reasonable at the time, have an annoying tendency later to result in unforeseen and often unhelpful outcomes.  In Ledbury's case, the little inner cabal of decision-makers that make up the 'Standing Committee' assumed plenipotentiary powers in handling the judicial review and in so doing, could maintain tight control on the release of sensitive information. Unfortunately, this meant that not only did they strip themselves of any democratic accountability (and arguably contravened council finance regulations), but they also made themselves solely responsible for everything that has happened since, good or bad.
 
Using wonderfully contorted logic, Barnes last night tried to wriggle out of this evil position. Straight-faced, he asserted that since the Standing Committee was acting under powers given it by the Full Council, its decisions therefore were effectively being made not just on behalf of the Full Council, but by the Full Council and that every town councillor was fully responsible for what has happened, not just Crowe's and Barnes' little junta. As Cllr Nina Shields said, this was despite that same Full Council being told nothing about its decisions, the costs, the likelihood of success, the legal arguments and the various settlement offers which have been made by Harvey and her team.
 
Ignoring their cynical bluster about bullying and abuse, the obvious reason Crowe and Barnes walked was because they expect the council to lose the judicial review. Why, if they thought success was imminent, would they not stay and savour their moment of triumph?
 
It is fair to say that nobody in the courtroom on April 17 thought that the Council's defense was a strong one. The look of weary dismay on the faces of Barnes, Eager and Lynda Wilcox told their own story as Harvey's barrister, Tom Cross, spent the best part of three hours eviscerating his 'learned friend' Lisa Busch QC. She too looked forlorn, especially when politely upbraided by Mrs Justice Sara Cockerill, to remain standing because she had 'further questions'. The judge proceeded to harry the barrister with horribly difficult legal issues for which she had no answer. There is no other way to describe it than that Ms Busch floundered her way through the proceedings, failing to land a single punch on Harvey's Mr Crosse. It was pitiful and slightly embarrassing. At the end of the hearing, Busch looked as broken and dejected as her clients, who had in any case fled the court without stopping to thank their legal team. Could anyone blame them? They had just watched all their dreams disappear.
 
This would be the obvious reason for Crowe's and Barnes' going. But there may be more. Two days ago, they attended a secret meeting in the Feathers Hotel at which ex-Mayor Allen Conway, Lynda Wilcox and others were present. Were the parish meeting resignations designed as a diversionary strike in anticipation of legal defeat? Or were perhaps the shady forces of the Herefordshire Conservative-Masonic establishment quietly advising that the two should fall on their swords as sacrificial victims, and thereby hoping to avert a complete collapse of the established order?  It worked in the case of Lucky Martin Eager a year ago. Why not give those same mucky, ruthless dice another whirl?
 
We may never know. All that remains is for the judgement to be announced and the inevitable wrangling over costs to be endured.
 
There will now be at least three by-elections for the town council vacancies. Meantime, a new mayor, deputy and committee chairs will be appointed. If, as seems likely, these will consist largely of reformist councillors, we can expect a furious and sustained backlash from the shadowy old guard. Whatever you say about them, they won't be going quietly.

Is it possible to be too fair? Or too procedurally correct?

A week before the postponed judicial review, a ‘review panel’ was held to decide if Andrew Harrison’s banning from town council duties should continue.  

While the affirmative outcome was foregone, Andrew and accompanying fellow councillor Nina Shields were much surprised by their treatment.

Previous reviews have consisted of mainly hostile, fellow town councillors (the crux of the judicial review).  To make things look better in court, the council was advised by its eminent legal counsel, Ms Lisa Busch QC, that in reviewing Andrew’s behaviour, the panel should include two ‘independent’ persons, alongside two town councillors, and an ‘independent’ clerk (ie, not Lynda Wilcox). To make it even ‘fairer’, all the evidence presented to the panel should be provided in advance. This would enable Andrew Harrison to consider his response.

The town council’s very own Queen’s Counsel will be frustrated to learn that it didn’t go to plan. The aggrieved clerk, Karen Mitchell, said she would not submit her written evidence against Andrew Harrison in advance, in case he published it online. Andrew went into the review without knowing what he had done wrong, or what he should do in future to escape a ban.

The review panel was perfunctory. On entering, Andrew was told by chairman, Cllr Fred Clarke, Mayor of Bromyard, that he had ten minutes. While Andrew spoke, former police officer and freemason, Fred spent a lot of time looking at his watch impatiently and sighing heavily, a psychological trick he had learned softening up villains in the interview room. At the appointed moment, Right Said Fred: time’s up, snapping his file shut and sweeping imperiously out of the room.

What happened next is less clear. The review panel went into conference and at some point gave a report to the town council’s Standing Committee.

At the next full council meeting, the Standing Committee’s recommendation was for Cllr Harrison’s ban to continue. They claimed that they were acting ‘within the principles’ of the report from the review panel.

This is classic ‘easterly beast’ phraseology, full of portent, and meaning the clear opposite of what it says. Translated into plain English, the Standing Committee had completely ignored the Review Panel’s recommendations. When Andrew asked to see the report into his conduct, he was told it was ‘confidential’.

Panel members, including local curate, the Reverend Tony Hodder, have signed legal confidentiality statements and claim that they are sworn to secrecy on all aspects of the review panel and its outcomes.

Could the priest offer theological guidance on whether the eighth commandment allows you to turn a blind eye to injustice, the one that says 'thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour'? Exactly how serious are sins of omission? When you have put yourself into a situation where injustice is likely to occur and damage to an innocent party is clear, do you have a duty speak up for the victim? These are interesting moral philosophical questions.

Let’s recap. The judicial review is in part, challenging Ledbury Town Council’s procedural unfairness in the way that it banned two councillors. The Council are arguing strongly that the bannings, which were clearly called ‘sanctions’ in the May 2017 minutes, were scrupulously fair.  Now, after counsel advice, the word ‘sanctions’ has been substituted for ‘protective measures’, far more defensible they believe. Meanwhile, the claimed ‘even fairer’ process was not only botched, but was ultimately ignored by the Standing Committee presidium of Crowe, Fieldhouse, Barnes, Francis and Bradford.

You have to smile at the London lawyer’s innocence that Ledbury Town Council would ever conduct itself in a judicious fashion. Their frustration will soon dissipate when the next dollop of cash from Ledbury pings into the coffers of Winkworth Sherwood Ltd.

​Who cares if the town council is doing its damnedest to lose the judicial review? Not the lawyers, nor the town councillors, it’s not their money they’re squirting up the wall. All told, the ‘fight Harvey’ legal bill now tops £100 thousand.   

Charades anyone? Or perhaps a game of consequences?

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​Celebratory champagne and a precautionary police presence had been laid on for the council party, sorry Council Meeting on 1 March.
This was the evening following on from Liz Harvey’s judicial review at Bristol High Court.  Councillors and town council staff were all happy expectation leading up to the ‘Big Day’ as they called it. How auspicious that the ‘JR’ coincided with a Council meeting: wouldn’t it be marvellous to announce victory? Police were needed in case protesting members of the public disrupted the party, sorry meeting.

Late to court, the quartet of Ledbury Defenders created a fascinating sight in the smart surroundings of the Bristol Civil Justice Centre. In his trainers, Bob Barnes padded across the polished floor noiselessly, followed by lumbering 'Mucky' Martin Eager looking fresh from some gardening; Town clerk, Karen Mitchell, shone of course, all in brown. Some moments later, the Lynda ‘Your Council’ Wilcox arrived, delayed in the loo by a quick protective coat of fresh lacquer. Was it me or could you hear that perfectly coiffed bob creaking as she hastened to a far corner, trying hard not to disturb the judge who evidently hadn’t noticed her.

It was unfortunate that a late blizzard caused an adjournment of the hearing, especially after they had come all this way.  It also meant the party, sorry council meeting, would also be postponed. Double drat.

Aside from the lurking Beast from the East, optimism for a Ledbury Spring among the merry band of town councillors led by Crowe and Fieldhouse, was always likely to be misplaced: judgements in judicial review are rarely determined on the day of the hearing. Unlike some Ledbury town councillors, judges tend to be cautious, preferring to weigh all the evidence before making a decision. Crowe’s bottle of cheap bubbly will have to stay on ice for a while longer.

The new date for the hearing is April 17 in Cardiff. Pob lwc Ledbury!

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