All of the talk of removing Island Line trains from the franchise has attracted the attention of the highly-prestigious The Railway magazine, which has been reporting on all things rail since 1897.
The well-respected rail journalist, industry expert and the publication’s Chief Correspondent, Phil Marsh tells OnTheWight that he’s been working on the story for a number of weeks now.
All major players interviewed
He’s interviewed all concerned: Department for Transport; Office of the Rail Regulator; Rail Safety and Standards Board and Peter Vail, General Manager at Havenstreet.
Each of those has responded to his questions.
Two weeks to get the meeting
Naturally he wanted to interview Isle of Wight MP Andrew Turner. Phil told OnTheWight he’s been trying to arrange the interview for two weeks, being fully flexible, open, offering to meet them, “at a day convenient to them”, at Parliament, on the Isle of Wight, even proposing to travel to the Conservative party conference in Manchester.
Eventually, at the start of this week, a meeting was arranged to take place this morning (Thursday).
The journalist was told the MP wouldn’t be able to make the meeting, instead Nick Finney and Carole Dennett would meet with him.
Wasted journey
After travelling to the Island yesterday afternoon, specifically for the interview, he turned up at Andrew Turner’s constituency office at Riverside this morning. Andrew Turner’s secretary showed him into the office, only to return a little while later, presenting him with a print-out of an email telling him the meeting was cancelled.
Given no option he’s had to travel back to his home on the Mainland.
The journalist told OnTheWight,
“I shall be writing to the MP for an explanation as to why the meeting was cancelled without the courtesy of a phone call.”
OnTheWight wrote to Andrew Turner’s office to get their side of the story, but at the time of publishing, hadn’t heard back.
Subsequently, on Sunday, Nicky Finney wrote an email to Phil Marsh, which copied in OnTheWight, we subsequently published it in full on the Monday.
There’s more detail
Not knowing the local lay of the land, the journalist had earlier in the week asked OnTheWight to join him at the meeting, so as to be able to fill in local detail, which we duly wrote to the MP’s office about.
We didn’t directly hear anything back from them about it, but were called a short time afterwards by the journalist to be told that Carole had been on the phone to him and “appeared very nervous” about OnTheWight attending.
OnTheWight offered to not attend
We wrote the following email to the MP’s office and got a reply in record time – less that 15 minutes – telling us that ‘the concern was the arrangement appeared to favour one Island media outlet over others’.
Hi Carole – I hear from Phil that you appear very nervous about us attending tomorrow’s meeting.
I’ve no wish to get in the way of Phil’s important meeting, so suggest that I step back.
Perhaps we can arrange a meeting another time.
“Crossed wires” claim
Nick Finney also wrote to us some 15 minutes later (4:37PM) saying,
“Thanks Simon . I know Andrew feels game changed with Council statement so meeting with Phil maybe called off. Seems to be crossed wires over Carole being interviewed. That was never intended and Andrew was always in London at the H of C warmest Nicholas”
When OnTheWight questioned Phil on the alleged ‘crossed-wires’, he forwarded the email originally confirming the meeting to us, which read, “I am pleased to confirm your meeting with Nick and Carole at the Riverside Centre”.
Questions posed seven days ago, still unanswered
The journalist, Phil, also tells OnTheWight that, not only has he made himself fully available for this interview, but delivered his questions to Andrew Turner’s office a full seven days ago.
Those questions remain unanswered.
Update 16 Oct 2015 11:47: After a reader’s comment we realised that we’d left the detail out that we volunteered not to attend the meeting. It’s now been added.
Update 20 Oct 2015 14:12: We’ve added a link to the email Nick Finney wrote to Phil Marsh.
Image: Michael Coghlan under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license
