My old friend and colleague Phil Shaddock passed away in September. It was Phil who first got me involved in politics; and dear lord we had some laughs. I said, ‘oh for f*ck’s sake, Phil’ so often he joked it was his new name. The man was politically incorrect to his fingertips; and yet people were incredibly fond of him. He suffered from shocking class snobbery at the City Council in Portsmouth, where we were both Fratton ward councillors, but it was water off a duck’s back to him. He was a working class boy who made it to become the Leader of Council.
I had to learn how to translate him
The ‘base line’ of his communication style was indirect, delivering chunks of information in rapid bursts. Unfiltered and erratic, he could be both painfully shy and yet a whirlwind; he had a tendency to hide his caring and intelligent side under a crumpled exterior that couldn’t sit still.
Phil was always around to help, but he nevertheless infuriated me (and others) with his apparent inability to answer a simple question, preferring instead to ramble into bewildering and inpenetrable non sequiturs. Because he would deliver information in segments, and then retreat, I had to learn how to translate him. It was worth the effort. This working class guy with the social awkwardness was passionate, smart, funny and well-read.
The working man and the councillor
He worked full-time while a councillor as a court clerk at the Combined Courts. It was handy that the court buildings were so close by and the civil service so accommodating, because he seemed to spend inordinate amounts of time in the members’ area of the Civic Offices at meetings and sorting out case work. After leaving the courts Phil spent his final working years for Portsmouth Water, trading in his black gown for a water mains rod. He seemed happy enough pootling about Fratton and beyond in his water board van.
What infuriated me over the years was his unfathomably odd and bonded relationship with Mike Hancock (the then MP and third Fratton ward councillor). Phil’s persona was the type that could be exploited and manipulated - he could be wholly malleable and jelly-like in both his opinions and his directions when cornered by the Lib Dem alpha males.
For one year only in 2003-04 Phil became Leader of the Council, after which he was demoted to Deputy Leader to make way for Gerald Vernon-Jackson. I was the new Cabinet Member for Education, Children and Lifelong Learning, finding my feet after just a year as a ‘back bencher’. Phil would tell me ‘hiliarious’ and lurid stories of other councillors who had been there for years, and what they had got up to in places like the Lord Mayor’s parlour. (Seriously, someone needs to look over that place with Luminol and UV light and fumigate it.) Sometimes Phil would start a separate story about Hancock and ‘parties’ and then stop; and veer off-subject onto something completely different.
While deflecting this way he would do his semi-disarming grin and shrug, as if he knew he was just playing the part of a man who knew nothing. Push him too much and he would bristle. But he knew a lot. ‘It was a long time ago, El’, he’d say. ‘What you have to understand is that things were different back then’.
‘What things?’ I’d ask. ‘Things’, he’d reply, and the bristling would start.
He used time as a cleanser; but time however does not cleanse. Things that happened a long time ago still happened.
As he grew older, Phil’s looks changed from ‘young Shakin’ Stevens’ to ‘old Phil Daniels’; but till the end he was still adored by the Fratton faithful. Phil’s popularity in Portsmouth was the stuff of legend.
Phil on a visit to the pre-school at the Wesley Centre, Fratton c. 1999 to hand over a cheque from the Council. Those were the days - when the Council actually had a few bob for schemes like this.
The advice centre and shouty letters
The advice centre he ran every Wednesday evening at the Wesley Centre was a thing of wonder to sit in on as a new councillor. Anyone with any problem, no matter how trivial or bonkers, had a letter dictated by Phil into his well-worn, grubby dictaphone on their behalf, a rant to be typed (and ‘polished’) by whichever bemused members’ secretary received the tape. I saw him dicate many a letter, banging on the desk, repeating himself over and over … ‘and something must be done!’ … ‘common sense must prevail!’ … ‘I demand action on this matter now!’ It was utterly bonkers.
The dictated letters were destined for the in-tray of a long-suffering senior council officer. ‘Letter to the Chief Executive on behalf of Mrs Goggins of 28 Norbert Terrace, Fratton, look up the postcode for me will you thank you Sandra yes anyway, Dear Chief Executive, I am writing on behalf on behalf of Mrs Goggins who has come to me with a problem and I have to say that I agree with her that something must be done about the situation in …’
Phil’s voice would grow louder throughout this dictation as though the power of his emotion and volume could punch their way onto the paper. The residents felt it. They were sitting there next to him. Then they received a copy of the letter through the post. It was old school, but the old school voters loved it.
The Chief Executive and his senior team were less impressed and could actually do very little about Mrs Goggins’s concerns around North Korean nuclear missiles, but the fact the letter was done seemed to make everyone feel part of a big Fratton family. I used to ask Phil why he pandered to them all. ‘Because every election day, they drag their arses to the polling station’, he replied; and he was right.
In Fratton ward, Phil and I never lost an election. We served multiple, overlapping terms together. Every December we would sit and sign 450 Christmas cards and fake imitate Mike Hancock’s signature on them - ours were genuine - and deliver them to local residents. Phil’s handwriting was terrible, like a trail of mess left by a wounded spider, so I would address most of the envelopes myself while he darted about delivering them at the crack of dawn for days in a row. We did a tonne of casework every week, year in year out.
He nearly got me kicked off the Council by mistake
In fact Phil’s handwriting was so illegible that he nearly once got me kicked off the Council, the bloody idiot. I was up for re-election and he was ‘organising’ my nomination. What could possibly go wrong? He completed and handed in my nomination form to the Election Office, on which I had painstakingly collected nominees’ signatures over the course of a week, and the election office transcribed my surname from his scrawl on the covering form as ‘Scutt’. With a few hours to go before the deadline for submitting the forms, I received a phone call from the Council’s city solicitor. My nomination was invalid.
I phoned Phil. He answered the phone in the bogs at work. I didn’t even bother shouting at him. As he would later recount it (it was one of his favourite ‘funny’ stories), I was ice cold in my fury. Eerily calm. ‘Phil’, I said. ‘I want you to listen very, very carefully, and I’m going to keep very calm. I’m not even going to shout at you. You need to get down to the election office now and undo the mess you’ve made with your bloody handwriting on that form. You know, on the bit that you did. Where my surname mysteriously changed from Scott to Scutt.’
He legged it to the Civic Offices and shortly after I received another phone call from the city solicitor. ‘We’ve decided,’ he said in his mellifluous tone, ‘to validate your nomination. However this is only because you’re already a city councillor, and we have reasonable grounds to say that we know your actual name’. Oh ha ha. Phil thought it was amusing too. That’s how annoying they all could be. My career, my stress, their laughs.
He ate the raffle prize
Phil rarely drank alcohol and it was pretty chaotic when he did. I recall an occasion when we were at a Lib Dem fundraiser in a Party member’s beautiful garden in the north of the city.
Phil took this photo of me to put in one of my first Fratton election leaflets. We had an argument about where I would stand. It’s actually one of my favourite leaflet photographs in that it ended up showing absolutely nothing of interest whatsoever. I wish I had the original set which will have some pictures of Phil.
Phil was hungry and started eating a banana from a fruit basket on a table resplendant with flowers and sundy toiletries. ‘Phil, that’s a bloody raffle prize’, I hissed at him. He said, ‘oh is it? I thought it was the buffet!’ And he got away with it, like a cute toddler would have done. Oh, oops. Phil was Phil.
He’d been active in Labour, then the SDP and then the Lib Dems over a period of decades, all with Hancock. Phil was a union man and a working man, and campaigned like crazy to help others in the Lib Dems get elected as well as himself. He ‘put the word out’ for new candidates and delivered thousands and thousands of leaflets for them over the years. People owed him. People liked him.
And then, the darker side
And then Phil’s stupider and darker side got the better of him. He could turn from excited to puppy to grumpy old dog in seconds, and he had a few inter-connected demons: his temper, his obeisance to Mike Hancock, his fondness for ‘the ladies’, and his occasional naive idiotic arrrogance.
For years, I'd noticed that he had different strands to his life that he kept compartmentalised, much of which I wasn’t privy to. But when something blew up, it was volcanic, and I soon found myself either dragged in or at least looking on from the sidelines.
It was arrogant foolishness that saw Phil removed from the Council by the Standards Board for England, at a hearing he attended with Hancock as his ‘supporter’. It was found by the unelected Board that he had abused his position as a senior councillor. (Fratton residents would definitely have re-elected him if they’d had the chance, and the Standards Board for England was abolished soon after, but hey ho.)
In a separate hearing held within Portsmouth City Council, I was put in the position of giving evidence against him as a witness to his outburst against a staff member in the main lobby; I told the truth, and he never held it against me; but funnily enough the senior staff decided I should have done more to ‘manage’ his behaviour. Er, no thank you. I’m not any bloke’s handmaid, especially when he’s bigger than me and going off on one.
After his banishment from the Council, despite its temporary nature, Phil was never re-selected by the Lib Dems to stand in Fratton, which is ironic when you think about the really grim things that we (and the police) now know some of them got up to. I’m pretty sure that there are a few awful secrets they’ll take to their graves, if the omerta persists.
A London boy with interesting food habits
Phil was born in London in August 1949. He was a life-long QPR fan, loved old trams and trolley-buses, and was what you might call a bit of a rough diamond. He told me he got into some bother in his QPR-obsessed youth that resulted in a spell in an approved school. Apparently all this explained the deep scar on his thumb; and his habit of chopping up and mixing his food before wolfing it down: it was so nobody else would want it or be able to lift pieces off his plate. An exception to this was the much-loathed egg white, which he always energetically hacked away from the yolk and shoved to the side of the plate before the big rapid mash-up & scoff began. He wouldn’t look up or make eye contact while he was doing this.
Breakfast with Phil at Wetherspoons was an immersive experience if you sat opposite him; so I didn’t. As we were usually eating in a group, after delivering leaflets or campaigning, I would guide the person I liked least into that particular viewing seat. He got his own back on me once. He spotted how queasy I looked while being regaled by a Lib Dem volunteer with her account of her recent stomach surgery while I was trying to eat my eggs benedict. As she made moves to leave, Phil said her, ‘oh no, don’t go! Stay and tell us more!’ I kicked him hard under the table and he actually chuckled.
Lee Hunt starred in his life story
No-one is perfect, and Phil was certainly flawed. His long-standing feud with Lee Hunt, a councillor and former police officer, was typical of his near-capriciousness where Lib Dem internal politics was concerned, especially when the Hancocks or Gerald Vernon-Jackson were giving out their instructions.
An absolute cracker was their view on Lee Hunt. You must despise Hunt, they told us at first, because he’s ‘vile’; but ooooh no, careful now, you kind of have to like him because he’s stormed out of the Tories and he might join the Lib Dems and give us better voting numbers. Yay. Here he is. Oh great.
In the days before the Great Rapprochement there was always something going on. It was bloody exhausting.
What a bloody mess. The whole ‘Standards Board for England’ was abolished not long after it was set up, fortunately. We moved to bare knuckle fighting in the car park after that.
One of the most bizarre incidents that Phil got caught up in with Cllr Hunt took place in full public view in the Civic Offices in the lift down from the members’ area to the main reception on the ground floor. Something happened in the lift and in the few seconds in took for it to descend, chaos had ensued. I’m told it wasn’t a dignified sight when the lift doors opened.
I don’t know where Phil found the cognitive dissonance required to welcome Lee Hunt into the fold, but he did. He went from rolling round on the floor of a lift with Hunt in the Civic Offices to - eventually - rubbing along all right with him. As he told me when I interviewed him and took his photograph in my kitchen, it was all water under the bridge.
Illness in later years
The last few years were not easy for Phil as a long-standing illness took its toll on his mobility and his health declined. He walked as much as could but eventually that was too much for him, and he needed assistance when he went out for his shopping in Asda. The last time I saw him there he still had his trademark dark suit and shirt on, albeit we’d all seen better days - him, me and the suit.
I have so much I could tell about Phil and his exploits - but maybe another time. Suffice to say, I’ll miss him and hearing his voice on the phone telling me his ridiculous stories and his reminiscences of days gone by.
‘Do you remember that time, eh, El? When you threw those leaflets down on the pavement on Renny Road and said, “deliver them your f*cking self, then!” Do you remember?’ And he would laugh with a flourish down the phone, and launch into a new tale of our shared council memories.
The last time we spoke he rang me from Harry Sotnick House nursing home, and we both knew he wasn’t well at all. When the news came that he had died I felt quite strange. I told my kids (now adults) and some mutual acquaintances in Fratton. That still didn’t make it really real.
To this day I find I’m still talking about Phil in the present tense. His number’s on my phone and I rather imagine it always will be. I selfishly don’t want him to be gone because he was my laughing, crazy link to the old days, when we got into all sorts of scrapes and wrote letters and speeches listening to Evergreen on the radio and had the adrenaline rushes of council meetings and felt for a short time like we ruled the world. It might have been a small world, but for a while it was ours. I’ll miss you, Phil.