Last year, in between looking at MP Bill Wiggin’s expenses claims and the inflated allowances of Herefordshire councillors, I tried to inspect the accounts of my local Town council in Leominster, as is my right as an elector.
The Town Clerk and Deputy Town Clerk refused to let me see them on the instruction, I was told, of the ‘Old Guard’ cllrs who run everything round here. So I decided to stand for Town Council to start opening some books.
As soon as I was elected in May the Clerk & Deputy Clerk, aided by Old Guardsmen Peter McCaull, Mayor Eddie Clark & Brigadier Peter Jones, filed a complaint that I was harassing them in my position of Town Councillor. The complaint went in one day after I was elected. Yes, that’s how confident they were that their pals on Herefordshire Standards Board would find me guilty of any jumped-up, ludicrous charge they put in front of them.
They had to get Leo Town council to approve their “report” before it went to the Standards Board. They presented it at a secret trial of me held on July 7th: no press, no public and no me, as they knew I was on holiday in Scotland that week.
Unfortunately – and unknown to them – cllr Benson Ferrari also went on holiday that week, and his signature had to be on the report otherwise it was not a legal council report. Oops! Rather than wait for Ferrari to return (when I also would have returned, ready to defend myself from the ludicrous nonsense) Mayor Clark simply signed Ferrari’s signature & he, McCaull and the Brigadier presented the report to the Town Council as a bona fide council document. You can see here a genuine signature by Ferrari, then the signature on the “Recommendations” presented on July 7th.
When I returned I was anonymously told about the forgery, and Ferrari confirmed he had not authorised it.
I then emailed all Town Councillors calling for Clark, McCaull & the Brigadier to resign for the good name of the town.
Instead, another secret meeting was held on July 18th. After Eddie Clark admitted he was the forger Labour’s Philippa Roberts proposed that the Town Council nonetheless vote to accept the forgery as an official council document and send it to Herefordshire Standards Board. This was voted for by the Tory and Labour councillors, and by Felicity Norman who sits in the main opposition group on Herefordshire Council ‘It’s Our County’ - slogan “Bringing a new kind of politics to Herefordshire” - and also leads the county’s Green Party.
When Herefordshire Standards Committee – an untrustworthy body controlled by local grandees and career politicians – received the ludicrous complaint against me and then saw the proof that Ferrari’s signature had been forged, even they couldn’t swallow it and passed the whole matter to the national Standards Board for England.
On 19th August the leader of the ‘It’s Our County’ party, Mark Hubbard, issued a public statement that signing another cllr’s name on an official govt document is not really forgery so long as you persuade that person to give their consent after the event.
