10 April (Part 2) - Marriage of convenience
Convenient
for question planting that is, not to mention the odd bit of Nick Clegg style nepotism and string pulling.
A well-wisher within Bexley council’s political classes dropped this little morsel into my inbox today after having second thoughts about his fellow
councillors stitching up question time
at last Wednesday’s meeting: the one where ex-councillor David Leaf addressed fake questions
to the council so as to deprive genuine residents of the opportunity to hold the council to
account. I have to be extra careful when handling leaks from council sources because they might
be false in the hope of compromising Bonkers by encouraging circulation of bad
information. However this leak seems to check out.
The images shown are extracts from publicly available on-line marriage records.
It shows that Ms. Priti Patel
(MP for Witham, Essex since May 2010) married Alex Sawyer in Bexley seven years ago. Ms. Patel
is, as I discovered last week, ex-councillor David Leaf’s employer, but
who is Alex Sawyer?
Well for those who don’t know, he is Conservative councillor for Northumberland Heath (£9,543).
So the stitching up and deceit goes rather further than I first thought. All
concerned probably think that they have been very clever to get one over Bexley
residents by manipulating council procedures. Poor Priti, probably innocently linked to Bexley’s
corruption but councillors need to learn that subverting democracy is not a good idea.