September 27th 2011
Dear Mayor,
On May 10th, one working day after I was declared a winner in an election to Leominster Council, and a fortnight before the Returning Officer declared that I was now a Town Councillor, the Clerk and Deputy Clerk of the Council made a complaint that I, as a Town Councillor, had conducted a campaign of harassment and bullying.
You chose to accept this logically absurd allegation.
You appointed yourself as chairman of a Grievance Panel. You contributed to a Report on the allegation which you presented to a Secret Session of Leominster Town Council on July 7th. You chaired this meeting and – according to the minutes I have obtained of that meeting – you debated on the Report and voted to recommend disciplinary action be taken against me on the basis of that Report.
You did all of the above despite having serious prejudicial interest against me, prejudicial interests which our Code of Conduct required you to declare at every step of the course of action you embarked upon.
Those prejudicial interests were as follows:
In November 2009 I and nine other electors convened an Official Town Meeting to discuss revelations about the expenses claims of our local MP. The MP, Bill Wiggin, secretly wrote to all Leominster Town Councillors in a message which several found to be very offensive.
At the December full council Meeting this letter and its offensiveness were raised and the local newspaper the Hereford Journal reported on the discussion.
The Journal reported that your long term partner/common law wife Janet Atkinson said that she had not only received this offensive letter but also “offensive phone calls from Jim Miller”.
As you know, this was entirely untrue. At that time I did not even know who your partner Janet Atkinson was and had never even had a conversation with her let alone made “offensive phone calls”.
After I consulted with my solicitors Ms Atkinson contacted Colin Osborne, editor of the Journal, and beseeched him to print her retraction of the lie she had publicly made about me and her apology. The Journal published this and I was satisfied with the apology.
Your partner/common law wife Ms Atkinson, being a former Mayor of Leominster, must have been upset to have to admit in print that she would make such a false allegation against an entirely innocent elector and I know that she was very angry at having to do so.
It seems natural that you would have shared the upset and anger of your partner in this matter and would have a degree of resentment towards me for requiring the public apology, and that therefore you have a longstanding prejudicial interest against me.
After this year’s May 5th election you had the Town Clerk publish official documents that you had been chosen ‘Mayor Elect’ by the previous sixteen Town Councillors even though nine of them had not been re-elected to the Town Council. As you know I challenged this as a deeply undemocratic procedure and I boycotted your “Mayor Making”, instead handing out leaflets explaining to those attending why this was an affront to due procedure.
Then, at the first full Council Meeting I attended, I stated that I did not recognise you as having been democratically elected as our Town Mayor. This was prominently reported on the front page of the Hereford Journal under the headline “New Councillor Ruffles Feathers”.
There can be little doubt that my picketing of your Mayor Making and the reporting of my refusal to acknowledge you as a legitimate Mayor have been of discomfort to you; I believe they have undermined the legitimacy of your claim to have been chosen as our Mayor via an open or transparent process. It seems to me that you have a clear and still pressing prejudicial interest against me.
Mr Clark: can you please tell me why, with such strong and personal prejudicial interests against me, you appointed yourself as the Chairman of a Panel investigating allegations against me? Why you did not declare these prejudicial interests before a Report attacking me to the Town Council on July 7th? Why you did not declare these interests before chairing that meeting? And why you did not declare these interests and abstain from any discussion or vote on this Report as our Code of Conduct required you to do?
Yours faithfully
Jim Miller
