26 December - Boxing clever - or maybe not
Handing over the reins of BiB to a guest blogger at a time of the year when
no one has time to read blogs seemed like a good idea at the time but maybe it wasn’t.
A couple of them have made me think hard about whether they are appropriate, in
this case because the story is linked to Councillors who have sadly died and
they were entirely innocent parties.
The following story from @tonyofsidcup evolved from his assumption that everyone with the same good old English
surname must be related and in the case featured here there is no evidence that
any one is related to another. In fact when I asked the direct question of a
friendly Councillor he assured me that the two personalities were not in any way linked.
However the fact that @tony may have been barking up the wrong tree is not the
main point of his story. The real issue is that once again Bexley Council had
gone out of its way to give the appearance of dishonesty by refusing to answer
questions, looking to be thoroughly shady, and eventually taking their usual
cowardly way out by declaring @tony
vexatious. Sad to say, Bexley Council under Baroness Teresa O’Neill appears to
run a show every bit as dishonest as it was ten or twelve years ago. That is,
very.
6. Femme Fatale
Being a relative newcomer to Bexley - I didn’t even know the word until 2017, when a property viewing in New Eltham
brought me to Sidcup - I missed the golden age of Bexley Conservatives’ power couples, the time when the Bacons, the
Beckwiths, the Bishops and the Slaughters roamed the council chamber. [Note: Someone has forgotten the Hurts.]
The hallowed tradition of a husband and a wife firmly positioning themselves on the back of the Bexley taxpayer ceased
altogether in 2022, when Cllr Christine Bishop chose or was asked not to contest her safe seat, leaving her husband Brian alone
on the council’s salary sheet. (Ever the disciplined party soldier, Christine ran in a no-hope Bexley
Labour stronghold, and showed up in campaign photos with Bexley Conservatives’ favourite developer, a
gentleman with a history of health and safety violations and allegations of assault).
In late 2023, the last surviving member of one of the local Tory power couples, the former Blackfen
and Lamorbey councillor Brian Beckwith passed away. Brian’s wife Aileen, who had died years ago,
was for many years a councillor for the adjacent Sidcup Ward, @tonyofsidcup’s home patch. On at
least one occasion, the two councillors cast opposing votes: when the fate of Old Farm - Blackfen and
Lamorbey’s largest green space - was being decided, Brian, representing the ward, voted for
bulldozers, while Aileen voted against. Let me be frank - based on their Old Farm votes, I like Aileen
more than Brian. Even so, I could have avoided responding to the news of Brian Beckwith’s passing
with a Tweet - in my own feed, far away from the official announcement - recalling how, two years
ago, the Beckwith name came up in the Bexley Volunteer Event story.
In mid-2021, Bexley council decided to throw a party for the borough’s
volunteers who helped residents through Covid. The splashing-out did not feel right for a council
that - one of only four across England - applied for a ‘recapitalisation directive’ from the
government, a sign of financial trouble. On the other hand, the amount in question was not big - around
£50,000, a third of 2023’s ULEZ judicial review bill - with most of the money going to the caterer. In
a move that, again, was a bit odd for a council with money problems - but not against the rules -
Bexley chose not to advertise the contract. Instead, staff in the Mayor’s office, who were organising the
event, reached out to three or four companies, and obtained a single viable bid. That bid was from
a fairly new and, in retrospect, short lived company whose sole owner and employee was a Beckwith.
Wondering why a small company belonging to an individual with a familiar surname was invited to
bid for a sizable unadvertised contract must not seem outlandish to anyone aware of Conservatives’
“VIP Lane”. I revisited the Partygate after my Tweet prompted Twitter outrage from @bexleynews’
two moral compasses, Cllr Peter Craske and Cllr Philip Read. The duo lambasted me for besmirching
the memory of Cllr Beckwith, and at least one of them denied a - never claimed - family connection
between the company owner and the late councillor.
I found the businesswoman on LinkedIn and asked her if she was related to Cllr Beckwith. No
response. So I made a FOI request, asking Bexley if they knew whether the company owner was
related to the late Cllr Beckwith, and, more broadly, if they had any information about why this
particular company was invited to bid. The council said they did not have any: the employee who
handled the catering contract had retired. “The employee may be gone, but the emails remain”, I
reasoned, and asked for the council’s correspondence with the company. A month passed, then an
email from Bexley arrived, saying they could not meet the response deadline due to staff sickness,
and promising to respond within two weeks, by December 8. Then, on December 1, the FOI request
was dismissed as “vexatious”.
Did this query provoke the Bexley leadership into bringing down the vexatious hammer? Did Bexley’s
favoured caterer benefit from a family connection? (Maybe *we* did? What if a family connection
moved the business owner to patriotically offer Bexley a discount?) Was there a family connection to
begin with? I guess we’ll never know.
Note: except for the occasional comma, this and
previous @tony contributions have been presented unedited.