Mike Starke is an old-school, quality journalist that we’re lucky enough to have living on the Isle of Wight.
He’s the kind of hack that once he gets his teeth into something, he’s not going to let go until he get answers.
The unravelling of the mess that was the Undercliff Drive sham (at a cost of over £1.5m to us, the Island tax payers) is due in a large parts to his investigative journalism digging out the true facts, not what was initially presented.
We noticed that he’d sent in an excellent letter into the County Press this week (front and centre on page 27), so we got in touch with him to ask if it would be OK for us to also run it here on VentnorBlog.
Hope you enjoy it.
Right on cue, panto season comes to the Island in the form of the verdict of the Adjudication Panel for England on accusations of bullying levelled at Cllr Patrick Joyce.
“Behind you!” I call from the audience. Meaning there are two-and-a-half long years of bureaucratic bungling behind the panel’s pontifications.
“He’s guilty,” comes the retort. “Oh no he’s not,” I reply from the stalls. Why not? Well, for a start, as a council taxpayer who has spent two-and-a-half decades, rather than years, trying, with occasional success, to bring senior County Hall officials and councillors to book, I have no confidence in the findings of a body that held even part of its deliberations in secret. Cloak and dagger carve-ups are not my idea of justice.
Perhaps these secret sessions were to hear the uncomfortable truth that at the same time senior officials were constructing a case against half a dozen councillors, roughly the same number of officials were being wheedled out of the woodwork to face dismissal, sorry, “early retirement” with bags of our cash, due to the Undercliff law-breaking scandal I exposed. It was secrecy that nearly let them get away with it.
Maybe the secret sessions also heard how Cllr Joyce was instrumental in a series of investigations of his own, in one case leading to officials being disciplined over a dodgy beach-cleaning contract.
This was achieved by Cllr Joyce’s characteristic persistence, robustness and integrity, traits we should admire in a councillor and which are now, apparently, to be denied his constituents for two months, thanks to these attributes being construed by some sensitive souls as that oh-so subjective “bullying”.
Might I now ask senior figures who queued up to give evidence against Cllr Joyce to the panel to get back to work?
Maybe we could then get an all-Island development plan that won’t be embarrassingly hurled back in County Hall’s face as unfit for purpose and perhaps a planning enforcement list at something less than the current scandalous backlog of 700.
The last bit of farce is that, while councillors can be pilloried by the might of Standards for England, anyone with a legitimate grievance against a senior official is, by and large, left to their own devices, as I have found so often. In my experience, bodies supposed to deal with such matters on our behalf tend to be toothless bureaucracies reluctant to take on public service colleagues in County Hall.
I guess will have to carry on taking my part in the County Hall panto as the Demon King.
Mike Starke
