There was much agitation, though I didn’t know it at the time, after I published a salacious list of errors and misdeeds committed by Ledbury Town Councillors and their spouses.

I didn’t name and shame them; I just painted a picture of sleaze and decay. I had been challenged to say why I thought some Ledbury town councillors were ethically compromised, why they might be unfit for office. I did. The knife cut deeper apparently than their public silence imported.  

At several Council meetings since, there have been mutterings and derisive dismissals of what I wrote. ‘Pah. I’m supposed to be a witch’ said Jayne Roberts angrily. ‘And I’m a Tory,’ tittered Elaine Fieldhouse. ‘Yes, that was really nasty’, said Jayne Roberts to moans of general agreement from her friends.

As usual when it comes to the majority of Ledbury’s elected decision-makers, they misunderstood what they were reading. So I thought I should put the record straight.

Whether Jayne Roberts is a practising witch, I have no idea. She might be a dabbler in the old religion, and that would be fine. What piques my interest is that she presumed it was herself to whom I was referring when I said that there were at least two Wiccan Town Councillors in Ledbury. Perhaps there are three, or even more; which could, depending on your views, be great for the town, were it not a secret.

This may be why our ardent new vicar, Keith Hilton-Turvey is lately so exercised by the presence of the devil in Ledbury’s body civic. At the last Halloween Festival in New Street, Reverend Keith and some of his church acolytes swept through the cheerful crowds like Salem witch-finders, denouncing customers and stall-holders.  Purveyors of face-painting, palm reading and crystal objects were particular targets.

Now young Cllr Matthew Eakin has thrillingly got it into his mind that a town councillor might be running a sex slave racket. I do not know if Eakin’s imaginings are true or not, although I am prepared to say that there is at least one councillor who does enjoy submissive sexual role-play. They have been active around the counties as a ‘pleasure slave’. I mention this because it is another secret.

Many people, like me, may be surprised to learn about a fetish sub-culture with which this councillor has been associated. The fantasy novels of the Chronicles of Counter-Earth by John Norman completely passed me by in the 1970s and 80s. Since then these ‘sword and planet’-genre books have attracted a cult following, not just of the ‘Trekkie’ kind, but in a practical sense.  Followers have embraced the philosophy and ways of their fantasy world with varying degrees of application up to and including being shackled in chains for periods and being physically abused. Who knew? Networks, communes and menages of this kind exist throughout the Western world it appears: even in Herefordshire.

The Order of Nature

In this fantasy world of planet Gor, high social status is achieved by men who are real men. Muscles, martial arts and machismo are the ideal. Women fulfill themselves by being helpless and obedient, not questioning their dominating he-men. This is the Gorean ‘order of nature’.

The ritualistic and authoritarian aspects of this behaviour must be appealing to our friend in Ledbury Town Council, for this person is also mixed up in witchcraft, freemasonry, and most alarmingly, has connections to far-right, white supremacist Knights Templar activity, all secret.

There is another councillor who is also into witchcraft and weird sex stuff, also a chum of our Gorean colleague. It was an outraged Annette Crowe who told me a few years back that this person had left a sex tape of himself in congress, primed in his video player. When the kids switched it on to watch cartoons, there was predictable shock and disgust. Annette said that it was ‘appalling’ that children might stumble across such images. Not to be unduly cynical, this incident took place almost two decades ago. There was no #metoo in those days. In her new-found special club of knaves, Annette has let bygone be bygones, even voting for this person, her former sworn enemy, for a council-committee position.

This exhibitionistic councillor has been a longstanding friend of ‘mucky’ Martin Eager, well known around town for his awful conduct towards his family including a conviction for assaulting his wife. As reported in court, his thirteen year old step-daughter told the police that ‘he did disgusting things to me’. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?

Moral Compass

We complete this dark circle by recording that a majority of Ledbury Town Councillors, the ones who are currently running things, voted for Eager to be Mayor, and who subsequently defended his reputation, and screamed abuse at Liz Harvey for asking him to explain why he was suitable to be mayor, given his background. Both the sex-slave and the sex-tape councillors were vociferous supporters of Eager, alongside Crowe, Fieldhouse, Simpson and his buddy, Bob Barnes. There didn’t seem to be a jot of conscience among them that this abuser’s past might render him inappropriate to be mayor. It all happened a long time ago, they chorused; can’t people be forgiven?

We arrive at the Freemasons. There are many members of the ‘craft’ who revolve around Ledbury Town Council: councillors, their spouses and the spouses of town council staff, professional advisers. Many are organised into the Eastnor Lodge which has been meeting in Ledbury since the mid 19th century. It has a relatively thriving membership by all accounts, comprising retired professionals, civil servants and police, local landowners, wealthy individuals, local government officials, accountants and solicitors. Like Ledbury’s great and good, many of these men are older than average and strong supporters of the Tory cause. They donate to charity and are dedicated to self improvement through a concentration on the ways of the ‘Great Architect of the Universe’. They also, assiduously, look after their own.

Fraternity. Liberty Not So Much. 

Bound by deadly oaths of fraternity, their brotherhood is paramount. They will choose each other for work above others, help each other (and their families) when they are in need, do whatever it takes to look after their mutual interests, always within the law that is, they are quick to add. It takes a special type of conformist to be a mason: the craft is all about rank, obedience and power. It is a finely honed ideological framework invented, protected by, and dedicated to supporting the established order and those in power, wherever that may be. Masons are all around the world and despite their vaunted ethical codes, are not very choosy. Famous brothers included Mugabe, Pinochet and Gadaffi.

Initiates to freemasonry endure hours of quasi-magical, ritualised meetings where long archaic texts of allegorical meaning are learned by rote and incanted with feeling. Swords, bared nipples, blind-folds and rolled up trousers are featured in their long, highly choreographed ceremonies. Membership takes stamina and commitment. In a recent Guardian article, Dawn Foster observes: ‘no-one joins the masons for the handshakes. It must be for the benefits it can bring.’

It is amusing to reflect how these elderly gents, mostly of some standing about town, are upstairs in the Feathers Hotel playing fantasy games revolving around obedience, submission and occult secrets while normal human beings are busy in the bar below chatting and drinking.

Here is their meeting timetable; you might be able to catch them slipping in and out quietly by the back door if you’re lucky.

This is important, since their membership is of the utmost secrecy. We have no idea who they are, unless their membership has been leaked, which is a masonic crime theoretically punishable by death. The Freemasons say they are not a secret society, but a society with secrets. How clever. And yet, it is literally upon their lives that they swear to preserve the anonymity of their masonic brothers from outsiders, whom they call the ‘profane’. They have secret gestures, postures and words which signal to brothers their masonic membership and rank, and if they are ‘in distress, for example when under arrest or in the dock.

What people get up to in their private lives is their business. The problem arises when members of secret networks, which sometimes overlap, enter public life. They are compromised. To whom do they owe ultimate allegiance? Are they open to influence?

The masons here are well represented in Ledbury Town Council. It falls to one man however, a former mayor to pull the strings and bear aloft the grand ceremonial sword of patriotic observance, and vengeance. He is a clandestine protagonist in the council’s bitter quarrel with Liz Harvey and Andrew Harrison, and also in close relations with that other “great architect” of the council bannings, a leading mason’s wife, Lynda Wilcox. Town council staff themselves (called the “the girls in the office” by the elderly gents) are also yolked into the masonic web.

The fraternity also extends pervasively into Herefordshire Council where councillors and council officers, many of them senior, who should maintain distance from each other according to their code, rub shoulders in Lodge meetings and afterwards at dinner. It is telling that Herefordshire Council top-brass have thwarted attempts to introduce a simple code of disclosure for officers and elected and members. If everything is above board, why the reticence?

Sticky.

It has always seemed curious how cohesive Ledbury Town Council is, particularly when one of them happens to be ‘in distress’. Nobody is surprised that the establishment closes ranks when it is threatened. What is striking in Ledbury’s case is both the degree of organisation that underpins their self-defence, but also the audacity of their behaviour. Could the masons be at work, ever so quietly?

Remarkable is the lack of shame by the Mayor, or the Clerk, that so many important matters are kept secret and that lies are told, even in Council meetings. Their minutes are pruned of content to the point of redundancy. The general public is routinely expelled from meetings on spurious grounds of confidentiality. Important meetings (like those for the Neighbourhood Plan or Traffic Management) are not advertised. Items are refused to be put on agendas. Meetings are truncated. Questions are not answered, emails are ignored. Correspondence is suppressed. Money is spent, lots of it, without the permission of the Council and therefore outside of financial regulations.

A comparatively trivial, if instructive case is the Mayor’s Charities. Despite turning over thousands of pounds each year, it is run like an office tea fund.  The Clerk denies that the charity fund is a functional part of council business, and yet she herself is a cheque signatory. Town council staff spend many hours of their time supporting it. The Clerk says all the work is done voluntarily by staff in their own time, but this is hard to sustain particularly that there are no time sheets to account for their contribution in kind; the project is woven into the fabric of town council routine and has been for decades. We should keep in mind the name: the Mayor of Ledbury Town Council’s Charity/ies.

Uncoupled deliberately from statutory financial audit nor public accountability, nor open to inspection through Freedom of Information legislation, this mayor’s fund is operated in complete secret. Why? What on earth could be so confidential? It is horrible to contemplate, but without any external oversight, the mayor’s charities fund is wide open to abuse. Who is giving? Who is taking? Its laissez-faire mode of operation does very little to create trust or confidence, in it, in the mayor, or in the council.

But the most awful thing is that they don’t seem to give a hoot what anyone thinks. Why are they so cocky? Why do they think they can get away with such outrageous behaviour?

There are two explanations as to why the Council operates in such a bizarrely furtive manner.  Either, it believes arrogantly that the control of knowledge is power, and so the sharing of knowledge and information, is a diminution of its power. Or, people in the Council are up to no good and are concealing decisions and documentation because they are incriminating. Maybe both.

Secrecy is the blood-sugar of the dark beating heart of Ledbury Town Council. Churchill is apposite. To paraphrase: ‘it is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma ; but perhaps there is a key. That key is … [self]... interest.’ Elaine Fieldhouse, the current mayor, is perhaps the most sphynx-like of all the councillors; everything she says - or doesn’t say - must be treated with great caution.

The Neighbourhood Plan has become dark matter since the Council took over direct control. Nobody has any idea what is genuinely going to happen next. Mountains of feedback on the draft version of the Plan have seemingly disappeared without trace. Finances are opaque: it has cost a lot, but quite how much is undisclosed.  Meetings are not advertised. It is run by a closed group  of Annette’s and Elaine’s friends and allies, save one newly elected town councillor. Reportbacks to the Council, much less the public, are minimal.

In others times and places, this would be seen as a scandal and a democratic affront. Not in Ledbury. Sadly, the town council is so consumed with its intrigues and schemes, and with the impending judicial review (JR) it has no brainspace for anything - not even to do anything useful about the catastrophically unplanned building bonanza taking place in the town’s surrounding fields. Vital and urgent to halting this assault is Ledbury’s Neighbourhood Plan, but this it has sunk into obscurity. The Mayor and her confederates are too busy on their wild legal goose-chase - another financial black hole - defending in the High Court, the manifestly unlawful and unfair banning of Cllrs Liz Harvey, and Andrew Harrison.

Not long to wait now - the hearing is on 1 March - but as ever the Council discloses nothing in public - or even in private. Fieldhouse claims in a closed session of the council, that its lawyers say that their case is very strong in defending Harvey’s challenge; she says, or at least strongly implies, that they think the Council will win, and that Liz Harvey will be made to pay all the costs it has incurred. If not, the Council will be able to claim on litigation insurance through Lynda Wilcox.

In what is becoming a regular ironic trope in Council meetings, Cllr Nick Morris asked Fieldhouse if councillors might be allowed to see this reassuring advice.  She immediately said, no, it’s legal and confidential. Then after being pressed, said that Cllr Morris should ask the Clerk, Karen Mitchell for it. There were intakes of breath… you mean, Mrs Mitchell has access to all the confidential papers concerning the judicial review? Even though it is her complaints against Harvey and Harrison which are at the centre of the bans?

The disclosure was inadvertent but devastating.  The realisation that she had revealed that the Clerk had access to all the advice from the London solicitors, but elected town councillors had seen none of it, caused Fieldhouse to flush momentarily. She normally doesn’t do shame or embarrassment.

In her fleeting disarray, Fieldhouse continued to dig down into the bottom of her unstable pit. Notwithstanding their ‘very strong case’, and ‘firm grounds’, she said the Council would be making a final offer to Harvey to settle out of court. Nearing the end of what had been a dull and lengthy meeting, the council suddenly awoke from its torpor.  This time Andrew Harrison came to his feet. ‘And who decides on what that offer will be?’, he asked.  She waved her hand airily in a distracting arc. ‘That is for our counsel to decide. We don’t get involved in that’, she said imperiously, as if it were a trivial detail best left to the servants to sort out. There were further collective gulps, even from loyalists.

Of course she knew what the offer was: how else would it have any serious intent, or legal jurisdiction? More secrets, more lies.  

Don't Mention It. 

In all of these disparate tales, what I have been discussing is secrecy, and its corrosive effects.  I am not interested in people’s sexual proclivities, nor their religious or occult leanings all of which I respect. I don’t care that they like dressing up and pretending to be knights, or seers. This said, sexual and physical abuse disturbs me and should be named which is why I continue to bang the drum for Martin Eager’s resignation from public office.

Councillors and public servants who belong to secret networks, or who have shameful secrets, and who would not wish to have aspects of their private lives or the record of their public service exposed, are subject to a Faustian curse. They are compromised. They must cover their tracks continually, distract and dissemble, preempt intrusive questioning by hostility and aggression. They must also conform and do as they are told, on pain of exposure.

Not knowledge: secrets are power. They are corrupted and ensnared by them, and to survive must keep creating more, telling more lies. And sticking together. The web is almost invisible but it is as adhesive as glue

The tragedy of Ledbury’s Neighbourhood Plan is its epic, mind-boggling vacuity.

Five long, painful years have passed since Ledbury began its Neighbourhood Plan. Tens of thousands of pounds have been spent on consultants. Four chairmen, dozens of volunteers and scores of meetings have come and gone. There have been leaflets and consultations, exhibitions and questionnaires. Has Ledbury ever witnessed such a calamitous flop?
 
Despite rampant building works disfiguring its outskirts, with more planning applications in prospect, the town still seems no nearer having a neighbourhood plan than it did two and half years ago. This was when the Town Council sacked the community-led group and took over its management, supposedly to get the job done quickly. 
 
Building developers are having a free-for-all in the rolling countryside to the south of Ledbury. If they get their way, about two thousand new houses are expected in the next couple of years. Many local people think this will be a catastrophic shock to the town, especially as few extra resources like doctors, schools and car-parks are being built to cope with the influx of the six thousand extra people.
 
There are worries too about the ugly impact of all that building on the landscape of Ledbury, not to mention all the extra cars, the demand on water and sewerage facilities, and the short supply of leisure amenities which a town of fifteen thousand people might expect. 

Dissolution

Back in October 2015, ex-councillor Rob Yeoman said that the old Neighbourhood Planning working group wasn’t delivering, that the plan was taking too long, that Ledbury was being failed. He claimed that by dissolving the community-led group and moving the project under the direct control of the Council, progress would be hastened so that a Plan could be completed within a matter of months; if only.
 
Yeoman bemoaned the bitter personality conflicts and what he alleged was political chicanery (got up cynically by Liz Harvey and her party, It’s Our County). He complained that she stared at him menacingly. He said that the new ‘Neighbourhood Development Plan Group’ (note the subtle name-change) would achieve in a few months what the community volunteers had failed to deliver in two years. To roars of ironic laughter from the public, he said the group was dysfunctional, ineffective and amateurish, incapable of making progress due to ‘infighting and bad behaviour’. Yeoman’s scornful claims were wrong and flew in the face of all the evidence, but a gullible majority of the town council supported his proposal and down came the shutters. Thus began Ledbury Town Council’s time of ruination.
 
At that fateful Town Council meeting, it was pointed out that the Council would be ‘dissolving’ a vast pool of knowledge, experience and skills, not to mention commitment and energy, the very thing which should be harnessed, not cast aside, to bring the project to rapid fruition. Councillors and members of the public argued passionately that having to start again with a new group, and losing so much valuable expertise, would cause immeasurably more delay. 
 
The Neighbourhood Plan group’s dissolution was not so much the act of cutting off Ledbury’s nose, as kicking its face to pulp in a fit of vengeful spite. The consequences were clear to everyone, except the Town Council’s Jacobin tendency.  And so all our worst fears have come to pass: two and half years later, Ledbury is still an eternity away from a plan that is adequate. Now the grimly optimistic talk is that ‘a bad plan is better than no plan’. At this point, the smart money is on no plan.
 
After Yeoman’s coup d’etat, it fell to the Mayor Annette Crowe, to cobble things back together and form a new project group. This she did by bringing in several of her very good friends and some of their family members, none of whom had any background knowledge of planning or community engagement, much less awareness of the intensive work that had been completed already.
 
Under Crowe’s dubious leadership, meetings of the new group were rarely, if ever advertised, even though it was claimed they were ‘open and inclusive’ to the community. After a decent interval, the mendacious Bob Barnes (who had presided shambolically over the group’s previous incarnation and was responsible for so much of the conflict) came in from the cold. Meanwhile, Cllr Rob Yeoman, having wielded the axe, promptly resigned from the Council and henceforth absented himself from NDP meetings. Thanks Rob! Fresh from the acquisition of his prized new cricket pitch, all that ostentatious enthusiasm for neighbourhood planning and doing the best for Ledbury suddenly evaporated; make of this what you will. 
 
Throughout the pantomime, the fragrant Sally Tagg continues to do what she likes to do, and collect her handsome consultancy pay cheques.  How much are we up to so far? £60 thousand?
 
Don’t Question Us.
 
Over a year later (January 2017), there was another bitter town council meeting to discuss the clearly faltering progress on the Neighbourhood Plan.  Crowe, Barnes and Fieldhouse, aided by their loyal dupes, huffed and bluffed. Everything was on track they claimed. According to their tired narrative, the only problem was the trouble-makers.
 
Seemingly any feedback or criticism, however legitimate, was branded ‘political’ or vexatious.
 
What about the disappointingly poor response rates to public consultations? ‘Community apathy’ is normal and expected, they explained. How could the spiralling costs be justified, with so little to see for the money? Rubbish they said: the £70 thousand budget is in line with other comparable towns. To charges of lack of accountability, they claimed that all the NDP meetings are open and ‘above board’, everyone was welcome (despite never being advertised). In other words, shut up and leave us alone.
 
We were reassured that the Group was ‘almost ready’ to go to the next important phase, which was the official major consultation stage called Regulation 14. At this point, the draft final plan would be released for public scrutiny. All being well, it would sail through to independent examination (by a planning inspector) and a referendum, job done by the autumn.
 
The ‘Reg 14’ consultation did happen, but not for another nine months in September 2017. Since then, having been deluged with critical feedback from organisations and individuals in Ledbury, four months have passed and there has been silence. There is surprise and consternation that none of the submissions from this consultation have been made public as is normal practice. There continues to be minimal contact between Ledbury Town Council and Herefordshire Council. The Plan as published, is potentially in conflict with aspects of the County’s ‘core strategy’, a fatal legal impediment. It certainly does not meet the policy threshold set out in the latest ministerial guidance to Parliament. This does not bode well for a successful resolution.
 
When the draft plan was finally released for consultation at ‘Reg 14’, former members of the dissolved Neighbourhood Plan group were dismayed that so little had been contributed since they had left it in October 2015, two years before. More than this, vital elements which were being worked on at that stage, had simply been left out.
 
Where was the land for business and employment? Sports pitches and playing fields? Town centre economic development? Community venues? Medical and educational facilities? Nowhere to be seen. Traffic management and parking had not been considered. Habitat creation, green spaces and other natural environmental resources were left fallow. Just about all the most pressing questions for Ledbury’s future as a thriving, prosperous, happy place to live, were ignored.
 
Perhaps most damningly, the Plan delineated a ‘settlement boundary’ for Ledbury which flew in the face of all logic.  This is not surprising since it was apparently crayoned in by Bob Barnes (who else?) one random evening. The settlement boundary is important since it defines the outer extent of building and other development in the town. By creating a larger settlement boundary, with space allocated for business parks, playing fields and open green space as well as housing, Ledbury would be able to prevent the kind of unplanned, predatory development which is currently taking place beyond the Leadon Way by-pass between the town and Parkway.
 
The whole point of a Neighbourhood Plan is that it sets out a framework for planned development based on the views of local residents. The tragedy of Ledbury’s is its epic, mind-boggling vacuity. It has cost a fortune and taken years, and yet it still manages to contribute almost nothing of value to our townscape. It is a dullard’s vision of Ledbury’s future: not so much wrong, as simply lacking any horizon beyond the obvious, the banal and the mundane. Like its authors, the plan is horribly platitudinous and patronising. This is a typical sentence: “There can be much confusion, concern and worry when people hear about a pending housing development. Well, with the right objectives and policies in the NP, there needn’t be.”
 
Those people who look with dismay and sorrow at the churned up meadows and monstrous earthworks on Leadon Way, will no doubt be grateful for Mrs Tagg’s emollient words. They will sleep easier at night as three more predatory planning applications for many hundreds more houses land in Herefordshire Council’s planners’ in-tray. They will wave aside as scaremongering or mischief-making, claims that the town’s infrastructure won’t be able to cope.
 
Blame

What is even more galling, is that Ledbury is now being softened up for failure at official inspection of its Neighbourhood Plan - and they are already finding scapegoats.  There are reports that crispy new councillor Jean Simpson, new best friend of Crowe and Fieldhouse, declared at a Ledbury Civic Society meeting that ‘if the Neighbourhood Plan fails, you know whose fault it will be: Liz Harvey’s’.
 
This outrageous statement isn’t entirely surprising, since Ms Simpson is well known for her waspish tongue and brittle personality. The shocking thing is how readily she and her malevolent gang of confederates are prepared to offload blame for all their mistakes and shortcomings onto the very people who forewarned them. Even now, after two and half years when Liz Harvey et al (including me) have had no input to the Neighbourhood Plan, they are being fingered. Do we have mystical powers?
 
There is a school of thought which believes that certain town councillors have deliberately hobbled the progress of the Neighbourhood Plan.  By holding it back to the last possible moment, landowning friends (and brothers) around the town have been helped in the meantime to get ahead with building development plans, to pitch their pre-emptive housing proposals before Ledbury’s Neighbourhood Planning window bangs shut, and decimates the potential value of their fields. As building plots those acres are worth millions and millions; as grazing or arable land they aren’t worth tuppence. Some people would hate to see their friends (and brothers) lose out so unfairly, so the conspiracy theory runs.
 
I take a more charitable view. Stupidity. Apart from Bob Barnes’ serpentine foray around the local landowners during 2016 to explore their building intentions, the possibility of an organised conspiracy of corruption is fairly low, and even harder to prove.

Power Trip.
 
The more likely explanation is that Ledbury has been mostly in the grip of a bunch of foolish bullshitters who couldn’t plan their way out of a sick bag.  Like characters out of a Grimms’ fairy tale, the twain sisters Crowe and Fieldhouse might radiate bonhomie, but on the inside theirs is an ugly power trip. More than any other people presiding over the failed Neighbourhood Planning process and the chaotic Town Council, it is they who have brought civic life to its knees. By their errors of judgement and vainglorious ambition, they have allowed Ledbury’s future to be stolen by a few self-interested miscreants variously motivated by personal advantage, employment security and social status. They know who they are, and so do we.
 
And herein lies the kernel of the matter: Ledbury’s Town Council’s judicial woes, the tens of thousands it has spent on legal fees, the paralysis and isolation, the opportunities lost and hopes unfulfilled, the councillor bans, the abuse, harassment and intimidation, the suppression of information, and the dismal perversion of the public record: all these failures spring from the impulses of a closed group intent on covering up its misdeeds and hanging on to its power. In that sense, many town councillors are guilty, not just the nasty junta at the centre, but the credulous fools who go along with it all.
 
Corruption and personal enrichment is always a possibility in any closed organisation that shuns external scrutiny and refuses to be accountable.