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.
Read moreMargaret Foster, Friend of the 'Hancock Dynasty', and Jacqui Hancock To Be Voted on as Honorary Aldermen
A close friend of Hancock's wife, former councillor Jacqui Hancock, Margaret Foster was found to have conducted herself in a manner which fell far short of the standards expected of her in the council chamber.
Read moreMike Hancock and his 'Category X' Parliamentary Pass - His Victim ‘Annie’ Says ‘Enough’
It’s been a busy old week in politics, and in the midst of it Mike Hancock, disgraced former MP and alleged ‘pro-Putin’ ‘Kremlin lobbyist’, has reared his head again. The Liberal Democrats are no doubt thrilled to be reminded of their erstwhile colleague. Better than that - they can still take tea with him in the Mother of Parliaments! The Mail on Sunday has reported that 7 years after the man left Parliament, and 8 years after the Lib Dems were finally forced, red-faced and squinnying, to sideline ‘Mr Teflon’, Hancock is still able, if he chooses, to swan around the parliamentary estate courtesy of his special ‘Category X’ pass.
Read moreFireworks Ahoy - the Questions That Still Exist for the Portsmouth Lib Dems
This will be the shortest blog piece I’ve ever written. In 2014, I put in a dossier of complaints and concerns to the Lib Dem Party after I resigned from the Portsmouth Council Group (and Cabinet) over its mishandling of the Mike Hancock scandal and the toxic culture that enabled it all to happen. I had a one hour meeting with Tim Farron in London, and received correspondence from him and Nick Clegg saying that my compliants and concerns would be investigated. To the best of my knowledge, despite pushes from me, no such investigations have ever been undertaken. A lot of questions remain about the conduct of the Portsmouth Liberal Democrats from 2010 to date. The fact that the Lib Dems haven't answered the questions doesn't make the questions go away. I haven’t gone away.
Read moreToo Unwell To Talk, Not Too Unwell To Speak - Hancock's Still Spinning
You might recall from my recent piece, 'Hancock's Back', how The Guardian reported last week that Mike Hancock has been censured by the Council of Europe (PACE) for not giving evidence to its ten-month judge-led inquiry concerning politicians and Azebaijan. The reasons he has given to the media for his non-participation are (a) being unwell, and (b) not having anything to do with the Council of Europe any more. One would perhaps be forgiven for thinking that Hancock must have been debilitated throughout the whole period of evidence gathering and report writing up to that point.
But lo! He was risen - and to be precise, he was filmed, recorded and photographed at a conference in Paris on 9th February 2018.
Read moreHancock Calling - And He's Got Gerald's Number
In a short piece in the Portsmouth News published last Saturday, its political reporter Ben Fishwick wrote about a recent conversation that he had had with former MP Mike Hancock, including some overbatim details of that conversation.
Hancock is reported to have said:
‘I’ve phoned him, I wish him all the very best.' ‘I wish him luck and I hope it goes well for him and working with Liberal Democrats and Labour.' 'I hope they work well together.'
What can we potentially gather from this reported conversation? And who is Hancock really talking to? I've come up with 8 things. (Just the eight?, I hear you ask …)
Read moreHancock's Back
And in true Hollywood style, just when the Liberal Democrats were banging on again about Hancock being 'old news', his past as a Lib Dem MP rose up off the ground and threw itself back into the fray.
Reported first in The Guardian and then in the Portsmouth News, just a few days ago, his previous well-publicised activities in Azerbaijan have finally come under current scrutiny. And this one isn't going to go away quietly - the Council Of Europe's assembly known as 'PACE' and the Speaker of the House of Commons are going to need to decide what to do with him.
Read moreShout Out To the Lib Dems who Want to 'Just Move On' - You Are the Story Now
Dear Former Lib Dem Colleagues,
Despite the Police talking to a couple of you, and despite the fact that many rational, reflective commentators are telling you to learn from and reflect on what's happened over the past few years, a number of Lib Dem Party members persist in posting online comments about Hancock's victim 'Annie' which are unnecessary and, frankly, pretty vile.
To these people I say: Stop. Just stop. You do yourselves no credit, and you bring down a once great political movement which I worked hard for for over 14 years.
Read moreThe Liberal Democrat MPs, an Alleged 'Russian Spy', and Their Teeny Tiny London Flat
You really have to wonder how a married man can actually spend four years living in a small flat in London with his Russian lover and another Lib Dem MP, without anyone else seemingly knowing.
And then, a tribunal of SIAC - the Special Immigrations Appeals Commission - apparently believed Zatiliveter's account concerning what it judged to be an 'enduring' relationship. Go figure.
Read moreThe ‘Best Deal We Could Get’ – The Role of Alistair Carmichael MP, Chief Whip, In a Scandal
Five very important men sat in a small room in the heart of the Parliamentary estate in London on a warm afternoon on 3rd June 2013. One of them was accused of sexually harassing and abusing a vulnerable female constituent, 'Annie'. Three of the other four had either been written to by her, or had met her to hear her allegations in person. They were all high-fliers - four Members of Parliament and a hotly-tipped successor, senior figures with illustrious careers behind and ahead of them. Or so they thought.
Read moreIf The Lib Dems Care About Women's Well-Being, They've Got A funny Way Of Showing It
Vince Cable has been a bit quiet lately on the scandals of sexual harassment of women and young men that is wrapping itself round Parliament. I've not seen anything at all from Alistair Carmichael MP, the Lib Dem whip who supposedly 'investigated' the circumstances whereby one of their own MPs crossed the line (and then some) with a vulnerable constituent, 'Annie'. I find it strange behaviour - especially when the Lib Dems reckon they care about women's well-being and mental health. I've got a whole archive of Lib Dem leaflets telling me just how much they care - all with photos of women being looked at very caringly indeed by a Lib Dem politician or a health practitioner.
For me it is a glaring Liberal Democrat dichotomy that whilst the party's members regularly boast of their support for mental health initiatives in their literature, many of their number have participated - and continue to participate - in behaviour that denigrates and demeans people with mental health issues, and some of them seem to have a real issue with women. In fact I think it's more than a dichotomy - it's a disastrous hypocrisy that feeds into an unpleasant narrative that anyone who has ever spoken of having a mental health issue, must naturally lack credibility and integrity, and be a liar and a 'nutter'.
Read moreShaddock Vs Hunt - The Rumble In Hancock's Jungle
"The back-drop to this was the old enmities and a council culture of complaints and complaining, and Phil Shaddock and Lee Hunt were no strangers to this. There's plenty in the public domain about the antagonistic relationship between Phil Shaddock and Lee Hunt. In fact you only have to Google both their names together to see them enmeshed forever in cyberspace, bound together for eternity by the crawling tentacles of searchbots, their story one of high emotion interspersed with bizarre action sequences - and, of course, the Standards Board for England."
Read moreFrom Nuttall To Hancock - The Strange Arts Of The Political CV
More than one of Paul Nuttall's autobiographical claims - or as he would have it, biographical claims - are currently being contested. I'm not surprised, to be honest. But it isn't just UKIP that has the reality of its members' web pages and public claims being under the spotlight. Every political party hosts biographical pages full of 'facts' about its leading lights - and they are all subject to scrutiny in the online age in a way that they previously weren't.
Recently I decided to have a look at Mike Hancock's Wiki page, the claims on it, the relevant references at the foot of the page, and the supposed sources for those claims, and I contacted the NSPCC, Mencap and the Liberal Democrat Party to see what they had to say. They were all aware that I might relate their responses on this Blog. The results were, shall we say, illuminating, and seem to suggest that while Hancock was a Liberal Democrat MP, the Liberal Democrat Party hosted material about him on its website that is easily contestable - and it makes you wonder how much more of this stuff in going on.
Here's Hancock's Wiki page - an exceptionally well-referenced piece - as it existed last month, on 25th January 2017. I'll pick out the relevant bits - you don't need to read it all - it's simply here for completeness and accuracy.
Read moreNeil Gaiman - An Apology
I would like to apologise to the world famous, brilliant, awesome fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. When the chips were down - and those would be Cllr Lee Hunt's chips, that Cllr Mike Hancock MP pissed on - instead of naming a beautiful road after you, Mr Gaiman, which the Cabinet could have done, honouring you and your family - perhaps a sweeping route where Portsmouth seems to reach across the water to Portchester Castle as the sun sets behind the haunting, towering Roman and Mediaeval stones - well, instead you got to unveil a street sign placed in front of a hedge in a teeny-tiny bus-only road in Southsea. You were a great sport about it, and maybe you really didn't mind about the bus lane thing, but I honestly wish we could have done better for you.
This story, for me, began at an Informal Cabinet Meeting (i.e. behind closed doors) one morning and it would have been around the early part of 2013, looking at subsequent news reports. Lee - the then Cabinet Member for Culture and Leisure - was excited. That was Lee's style - forceful, excitable, loud and brash. He had news to tell us and he wanted us all on board with his idea, which was to name a road in Portsmouth after Neil Gaiman. It was to be a 'big win' of positive publicity.
And this proposal turned, as agenda items so often did at these meetings, into a ridiculous squabble.
Read moreWhy Weren't Hancock's Texts Enough?
I've often wondered why Hancock's wildly inappropriate text messages sent to vulnerable constituent 'Annie', which emerged in late 2010 and which he never denied sending, weren't enough for any kind of action from the Liberal Democrat Party at that time, given that he was a Cabinet Member of Portsmouth City Council with oversight of policies and practices which affected the lives of vulnerable people.
The Liberal Democrat Party, either locally in Portsmouth and federally, or both, could and should have acted on the behaviour which Hancock admitted to in 2010 - irrespective of any other pending matters. In fact as far as I can see, those pending matters became a handy excuse for inaction, and helped set up a convenient screen that the local Party and the federal Party chose to hide behind. For years. They left a victim in painful limbo for years. That the Police weren't charging Hancock was transmogrified by leading Lib Dems into 'alternative fact', as they tried and tried to cast a spell upon us all that no wrongdoing had been shown to have taken place. And at a number of points the inaction and delay in dealing with the wrongdoing were blamed upon the victim having complained.
This was the deception that was spouted by Lib Dems from Portsmouth up to London and repeated ad nauseam. So to some extent, this is an essay about the nature of collective denial, protection, fear and illusion-making within a group of people, using what is to me a very stark example of wrongdoing at its heart. For me, living through it, as a colleague of both Hancock and the Council Leader Gerald Vernon-Jackson, both forceful characters, it was troubling and worrying, and life within the Council Group became a toxic miasma of shape-shifting and discordant echoes. The day I finally resigned was a bitter-sweet liberation.
Read moreHancock and the 'Independent' Blue Letter
I want to write about Hancock and 'The Mystery of the Blue Letter', because I personally think it's pretty revealing of the mindsets of the Portsmouth Liberal Democrats who allowed it to happen. It's also the tale of a very funny co-incidence - a real-life 'you honestly couldn't make this shit up' moment - and I've taken the trouble to create an oscar-worthy re-enactment of a particular scene which took place on my own doorstep, using a model (well, a bemused friend), for your entertainment. I hope you enjoy the story.
So what's the significance of a 'blue letter'? It's the invention of Lord Rennard and a classic Lib Dem campaigning tool, and the 'blue letter' will always hold a place in Lib Dem election folklore and Lib Dem hearts & minds. That Hancock used and was allowed to use a blue letter to campaign and defend himself from 'ALL' the complaints against him - including the 'crossing the line' activity that just over three weeks later he admitted to doing - is pretty extraordinary, especially given he wasn't even standing as a Lib Dem.
Read more'The Knives Are Out For You, Eleanor'
I'm going to keep this piece blunt, because no-one likes a pity party. (Although if anyone wants to throw me one, I think you can work out the name of the new cocktail that could be served by the end of this post. Or indeed this paragraph,) This is an account of the unexpected blow that was landed on me in my early days of becoming a city councillor - the nasty, misogynistic lie of my supposedly being 'caught' doing Sex-In-The-Men's-Toilets of the civic offices with a male councillor - a lie promulgated by some of my own Liberal Democrat colleagues. I was, effectively, falsely accused of committing an indictable offence by colleagues - actual city councillors - attempting to strip me of my dignity. I'd not experienced behaviour like this ever before in my professional life. Smearing. Lying. Objectifying. Isolating. I want to tackle it head on in this piece. It's time.
Read moreEl's Politics Blog - An Introduction →
My major diversion away from archaeology and into politics not only lasted longer than I expected (2002-2015) but ended very differently than I expected, with a media gaze upon me because of my resignation from a job that I valued immensely. This narrative blog has been a fair while in the making, given that I resigned on the 25th January 2014 from the Liberal Democrat Group and Cabinet in Portsmouth over the Mike Hancock saga, but sometimes it takes a while to build up to catharsis, for all sorts of reasons.
Read more