This week’s extract from Councillor Mike Stray’s diary.
Thursday 21st May
Woke up to a missed call from my sister and three from Greg. Switched the radio on and there it was, second item on the local news: “A Reform UK councillor has resigned from Mardon District Council, less than a fortnight after being elected.”
It was Donna. Donna Whittaker, who’d taken Mardon East off Labour by ninety-eight votes. I’d had three pints with her at the count and she’d seemed delighted. Apparently she has now stood down due to “a significant expansion of her business commitments”. Donna sells candles on Etsy. From what I understand, you don’t really expand the candle business between a Thursday and a Tuesday.
The party line on Donna is in the WhatsApp group already. “Please use only the agreed statement,” says Darren. The agreed statement is three sentences about Donna’s contribution and her wishing the residents well. The thing under the agreed statement, which someone called Kelvin couldn’t help posting, is a screenshot of Donna’s old Facebook posts which contained remarks about asylum seekers that I would not put here even if I thought you, my diary, were broadly sympathetic. Darren has removed Kelvin’s screenshot and Kelvin from the chat. The chat is now down to thirteen people. We won eighteen seats.
Sharon, to her enormous credit, came in with a cup of tea and said, “Mike. Your Facebook.” I told her there wasn’t anything on my Facebook. She said let’s just have a look. We had a look. There is, it turns out, a video from 2018 of me at Steve’s stag, in a Pikachu onesie, saying something about Angela Merkel that I had genuinely forgotten about. There’s a photo of me holding a pint shaped like a boot, another one of me asleep on a bouncy castle. There is – and this is the worst of it – a meme I shared in 2022 about Meghan Markle which on a second reading does not look great in the cold light of being an elected representative. Sharon, very calmly, scrolled and deleted, scrolled and deleted. Thank God I never got into Twitter or Insta or any of the other things people seem glued to. Sometimes, being behind the times on tech has its advantages.
Group meeting at six. Twelve of us in a function room above the Royal Oak, which Darren had booked because he didn’t trust the council building yet. First item: flag policy. We have to decide our position on flags: Union, St George, county, Mardon district, Pride, Ukraine, Armed Forces Day, Windrush, the lot. Darren said the line from head office was Union and St George only, but then somebody on the Zoom from Party HQ said no, also county flags, and then somebody else said it depends what you mean by county. There were forty-five minutes on this. I had three pints. Greg WhatsApped me under the table saying go easy, mate. At least I learnt one thing – St George and Georgian flags are not the same thing.
Second item: scrutiny committee allocations. I am on “Children’s Services Scrutiny”. I asked Darren what Children’s Services was. He said it’s social workers and SEND, mostly, and that the budget was a nightmare. I said I didn’t really know what SEND was. Darren said neither did most of the council. He said I’d pick it up.
Third item: DOGE. Reform has a DOGE now, like in America, that goes round the councils looking for waste. The Kent lot tried it last year, Darren said, but apparently they couldn’t find any: the leader admitted as much on the telly. Said they’d assumed they’d come in and find all this “craziness Doge found in America” and they hadn’t found any of it. Darren said we’d find some here, you mark his words. Mardon has a budget gap of fourteen million on adult social care. Darren said again that we’d find something to save money on. Money.
I came home. Sharon was at the kitchen table with a calculator and an envelope. She’d done the maths. The mortgage, the bills, the council allowance, what she earns at the surgery. There was a number circled at the bottom and it had a minus in front of it. She said: “When’s the next election, Mike?”
Wonder if Donna needs a hand selling those candles.
A note for readers: The original name given by the author to this councillor was Mike Sutton. However, after publication, we were contacted by a real Essex councillor called Mike Sutton, who is not a Reform councillor. We would like to reassure readers – and him – that the Councillor Mike Sutton featured in this diary is entirely fictional. The name match was an unfortunate coincidence and while he was clearly amused by it, we can only apologise. The author has now changed the name to Mike Stray – checked against a register of councillors’ names and appears safe. For now.
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