On Monday last week OnTheWight placed a call to Cllr Richard Priest asking him to call us urgently as we were working on a story. About mid-day on Tuesday we received a call back.
When he called, we’d hoped to run through a number of questions, but sadly weren’t able to progress past the first one. Why? Because we couldn’t get Cllr Priest to answer that question in a clear and straight manner.
We opened the call with, “We’ve had a number of people contact us, telling us that you’d been meeting up with Dave Stewart about this idea of forming a voting coalition with the Conservatives.”
Steering the conversation away
Cllr Priest’s response was a little surprising,
“Oh, I’ve heard something about that. What I think it’s to do with is that I’m supporting a Motion going to Full council next week – Which I’ve signed up to. The Motion is being put forward by Alan Hollands – and I was asked to support it.
“As I understand it, it’s got the support of colleagues on my group and the Leader.
“So I think it’s tangled up in something. A lot of people spoke to me about different things. The Motion is pretty clear and my signing up to it’s been pretty clear as well. So I think something’s got confused in that.”
We continued, next asking whether Cllr Priest what he thought of Cllr Ian Stephens as leader. His reply wasn’t a straight “I like him” / “I don’t like him”, it was “That’s not relevant” and a lot of referring back to the Motion that he’s a signatory to. He returned to the motion several times, despite us repeatedly asking him to ‘park the motion’ and just talk about Ian Stephens as a leader.
“Do you support Ian Stephens as the leader going forward?”
As we’d been told by others that Cllr Priest was mounting an attempt to unseat Ian Stephens, the current leader of the Isle of Wight council, we felt it was important to understand where Cllr Priest stood.
We just wanted a clear answer to a very simple question – “Did he support Ian Stephens as the leader of the Independents going forward?”
We spoke for ten minutes about this, without Richard once saying yes or no.
Sixteen times
We asked him his view of Ian Stephens sixteen times.
When we pointed out that he was ignoring the question, he’d say, “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
He kept referring back to the fact that he was supporting the Motion – which had nothing to do with the question we were asking – and trying to tie his supporting it with answering our completely different question.
On Wednesday last week, two days after OnTheWight published an article rumouring an attempt to overthrow the current administration, Richard Priest was sacked from his role as Executive member for Children’s Services.
Image: fabola under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license
