Go on Dave!

If I can do it. you can do it!

Last night’s Midsomer Murder was a classic of the genre. The person who had taken to mass murder after a seemingly blameless life is a teacher (in an Independent school, natch!) seen praying in church, who suggests praying for the soul of one of his victims. he is apparently driven mad by three years of celibacy, waiting for the return of his fiancee from South Africa and wants to visit divine vengeance on sinners against matrimony (mainly but not exclusively young women) after she reveals she has married someone else in South Africa and isn’t coming home. I know it’s fiction and rather incredible, but it reveals a great deal about the mental hang-ups of the author and the mindset that takes negative portrayal of Christian principles and practice as almost de rigeur.

It has become a cliche that, wherever there’s a clergyMAN in the plot he is either a murderer, or mad or at the very least a mysoginist or any combination of any two or all three! – clergy WOMEN tend to be smiled on, I notice, but they are never portrayed as upholders of traditional Christian principles either. Which probably does an injustice to most real clergy women too!

I note that other faiths are left strictly alone, but they ot their adherents are hardly ever portrayed at all. So much for multiculturalism…………

65th birthday lunch at Gravetye Manor, Sussex

I believe the saying has it ‘what goes around comes around’.  So take heart, younger readers – or not, depending on your politics!

40 years ago I was 25 for the first time. From 1967 onwards we’d had huge poll leads pretty well consistently. We’d won Council after Council – including Manchester and the GLC and Liverpool! Then, in the spring of 1970 – for no apparent reason – it all started to go wrong. Or so we thought. The County elections in April showed a bit of a Labour revival. The locals in May (yes we did have separate elections in consecutive months in those days! ) were actually quite good for Labour, so Harold Wilson decided to trot up the Mall to see HM and have a GE on 18th June (anniversary of Waterloo).

On the Saturday before polling day the NOP in the Daily Mail showed Labour with a 12% lead over the Conservatives. The Evening Standard was more hopeful – Labour lead 2%. On the morning of the 18^th no poll gave us a lead at all, though they did all suggest a tight finish. I got a huge laugh when explaining to my VI formers on polling day why the Tories were going to win. By Friday afternoon they were hailing me as a prophet.

It turned out to be one of the most exciting election nights of my life and by lunchtime on 19^th Ted Heath was on his way down the Mall with a majority of 30 overall in his pocket.

So what this new senior citizen is telling you all is, we’ve been here before and we held firm to our resolve and we won. As my parents’ generation would have had it, we resolved to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’.

If this helps you, tell your friends. If not, keep it to thi’sen, as we used to say up North!

For the record I spend an average of 2-3 hours daily dealing with emails and phone calls coming from Council officers,  constituents and several outside organisations. This includes weekends. On average I attend four meetings of Council committees and working parties at about 2- 3 hours duration each; some are longer than this. Whenever possible I attend outside meetings on Health and Community matters.Then you could add the preparation time before each meeting.

I reckon my working week lasts about 30+ hours all told. Well, I am retired and a front bencher, so I’m not complaining. I am not by any stretch of the imagination unique in this degree of time commitment.

Sir,

It is a pity that your headline of yesterday (3^rd. November) accused David Cameron of ‘reneging’ on his commitment to a referendum on Lisbon, when in fact he had no choice in the matter.

The pledge he gave in 2007 was sincere and would have been implemented if it lawfully could have been. Very sadly, now, it can’t. If this broken Parliament had been dissolved after four years like the previous two we would have a new government by now and the referendum would almost certainly have occurred. The Irish changed their mind in their referendum, encouraged no doubt by the intervention of Nigel Farage of Ukip in the Republic’s domestic affairs. The Czech President has attached his signature to it. And Gordon Brown continues to cling on for dear life as the Parliament Act permits him to, more’s the pity. So the ghastly treaty has become Law, but David Cameron is not responsible at all for any of this.

The ‘reneging’ was done by Blair and Brown – and their Liberal Democrat fellow travellers – not by Cameron. However some of your correspondents want to punish the innocent Conservatives by voting for Ukip or some such. When will they ever learn that fragmentation on the right in politics merely lets in the left? If they want another five years of Gordon Brown and his Lib Dem Europhile allies, let them vote Ukip by all means. But let them be aware of the consequences and not expect to find much left of the Britain they have known and loved at the end of them.

Recently I was asked along with other councillors to volunteer to have a young person work alongside me for a short time so they could get an idea what councillors actually do. It’s part of their citizenship education, I think. I could hardly refuse, given my background.

However I was apparently unsuitable because of the absence of a recent CRB check. As it happens I had a CRB check about 5 years ago and still have the Certificate to prove it. I have served continuously as a councillor ever since, so the Council knows whether I have done anything criminal during that time.  But it appears that the check was out of date and would have to be renewed – at cost, of course.

These vetting procedures sound all very well in theory but one wonders whether the supposed need to repeat them regularly is a real one or a job creation scheme wrapped up in another revenue raising scam by You Know Who.

Paul was the MP for North Somerset and Anne was the Conservative agent in the constituency. As an officer of North Somerset Conservative Association from 1974 to 1980, I worked with both of them very closely.

In these days of expenses scandals I have thought of Paul often. He and his wife Ellen  (the obituaries refer to her as Doris, I never heard anyone in her home or the constituency do so!) worked their socks off week in week out to help make a marginal seat (majority in 1966 just over 2000) into the safe 21,000 it became by 1979. It often fell to Daphne and myself to go on a Saturday evening to their home in East Harptree to pick up Paul or Ellen and chauffeur them to three or four social events dotted about the 600 square mile constituency. Often he would go to the west and she to the east of the constituency but they ensured that they got around the whole patch and no village went without seeing one of them on a regular basis. Paul remained important to me even after we left North Somerset for London in 1980. He was my sponsor for the Parliamentary candidates list and I visited him at the House quite a few times over the next few years for ‘fatherly’ advice and , occasionally, lunch or tea – on the Terrace, of course. We need some of the newer MPs to follow his example of honest hard work.

Anne was his and NSCA’s Agent. I have known and respected quite a lot of Conservative agents in my time and Anne was simply the best. From 1974 onwards we worked together very closely, helping to build up the North Somerset Association  and the Conservative groups on Woodspring and Wansdyke District Councils and the then Avon County Council. North Somerset contained 12 County Council seats and, in 1977, for the first time ever, we took all 12 of them. It was Anne who used to give me my Saturday itinerary of Branch functions and evening committee meetings to get to with Paul or Ellen. Many times we would meet after a round of Branch AGMs or a meeting of the Political and Local Government Committee to talk over the strengths and weaknesses of the Association. Anne was a ‘hands -on’ agent. I remember we had an ambition to start up a branch in Paulton (notorious Labour stronghold) and we got the PLGC members to agree to go and canvass for members there. Anne was out there with us knocking on doors. She had a nack for getting people to do things like few other people I’ve known. She once got Gordon Wood and myself to drive all the way to Newcastle (upon Tyne!) and back towing a trailer behind his Maxi to collect an offset litho printing machine from Area Office there! She had another endearing characteristic. She was a Lancastrian! Until last autumn, when we last spoke, she remained one of my closest friends and confidantes in politics.

Paul and Anne died within a couple of weeks of each other. It was a privilege to have known them both. May they rest in peace.

We ran a major scrutiny exercise on the service from the Residents Services Overview Panel some four or five years ago, and I hope this may  have born some fruit. Of major concern at the time was the future of non-accredited courses in things like pottery and upholstery. I wonder what has happened to these in the interim, since I notice that the Council’s press release refers to modern foreign languages but not to matters of this sort. As I write this, Daphne is attending a course in drawing in Sutton………