The strange story of the murky mayor of Worcester

And now for another municipal horror story. Earlier this month, Worcester City Council elected a new mayor. This is usually a quiet matter. Like almost all English towns and cities, Worcester operates a parliamentary system of government. The political party (or coalition of parties) with a majority elects a cabinet and a leader of the council, who is a sort of prime minister. The mayor is therefore not the executive leader, but rather a regal figurehead, responsible for promoting good causes, visiting local events, and generally representing all that is worthy in the City. Being a mayor is regarded as an honour and an envied reward for good service. As a result, the job is shared around and a new mayor is elected each year, usually from the most long-serving councillors. After election, the mayor is inaugurated in his or her robes and chain of office at a special service at the Cathedral.

Until this year’s May elections, Worcester City Council was controlled by the Labour Party with the support of two Liberal Democrat and one Green Party councillors. One of the Liberal Democrats was defeated in the election by the Conservative Party, with the result that the new Council had 17 Conservative, 16 Labour, 1 Liberal Democrat and 1 Green. The last three parties came to an agreement to maintain the Labour leadership of the Council for the annual general meeting on 3 June. But to (almost) everyone’s surprise a Labour councillor, Alan Amos, defected from his Party to become an ‘independent’, voted to give power to the Conservatives, and was elected Mayor. This all smacked of a deal, in which Amos had abandoned his party in exchange for the mayor’s robes. The local paper, the Worcester News, began referring to him as the ‘murky mayor’. To make matters worse, he announced that he would not attend the mayoral inauguration service at the Cathedral because he had booked a holiday for that date.

This is not the first time that Amos has switched parties. In 1978, he was elected as a Conservative councillor in the Borough of Enfield near London. Nine years later, he advanced to became Conservative MP for the Constituency of Hexham in the far North of England. Amos was notable in Parliament for his extreme right-wing statements, including advocacy of flogging criminals and his opposition to abortion. All fell apart just before the 1992 general election, when he was arrested and cautioned by the police for an act of alleged indecency on Hampstead Heath. His local Conservative Association deselected him, and his Parliamentary career ended. An approach to the Conservatives in Enfield was rejected, and he joined the Labour Party. In 2002, he was elected as Labour councillor in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. He lost his seat at the next local election in 2006, but reappeared only two years later as the successful Labour councillor in the Warndon Ward of the City of Worcester. He was later also elected as a county councillor.

Amos’ transition to Labour was accompanied by an apparent change in political beliefs. These now were on the extreme left and republican. On a television programme on the monarchy, he shouted that the Queen was responsible for “this nation’s dreadful decline”. She was “head of a rotten, class- ridden, corrupt social and political environment”, and the royal family were “parasites and hypocrites”.  As a Worcester City councillor, he proposed that the City be twinned with Gaza. It will be interesting to see whether Amos will now become an extreme independent.

In the meantime, there have been two other examples of murkiness in Worcestershire politics. The Conservative deputy leader of Wychavon District Council, Councillor Judy Pearce, has also been elected (in May 2014) as a district councillor in South Devon, 185 miles from her other council post. South Devon does indeed seem to be her main place of residence, although she does rent a flat in Wychavon. Her Wychavon work includes chairing the committee that has prepared the appalling South Worcestershire Development Plan. This proposes to cover large areas of the County with new houses - a fate Pearce has escaped by moving to South Devon.

The final murkiness is more mundane. Dave Small was elected as a UKIP councillor in Redditch at the May elections, but resigned after six days. His party had disowned him for bringing the party into disrepute, after it was revealed that he had posted comments on his website that were allegedly racist and homophobic. Small was 81 years old at the time of his election, and does not seem to have had any previous experience of public service (apart from editing a football fanzine called ‘Zulu’, named after a hooligan gang which supports Birmingham City Football Club). UKIP councillors and MEPs have a reputation for being expelled or resigning from the party, but Small’s six days must be the current record.

These cases of murky politics could be seen as a disease of politicians. But outright opportunists, chancers, and people with antediluvian opinions exist in all occupations. So do people who fiddle their expenses. In these respects, politicians are probably typical of those who elect them. But I suspect most people wish our leaders to be more capable, honest and public-spirited than the average citizen. If we are to achieve this, then more people must take some interest in their community and be prepared to serve it. After all, how many people In Redditch knew about Dave Small before his election, had any idea of his opinions or even what UKIP stands for beyond its policy of blaming the European Union for all the ills of our society.   

Read also: The Dark Heart of Suburbia

My father and the books

The 6th of June 2014 was not just the 70th anniversary of D-Day, but also the 100th anniversary of my father, George John Cumella. My father died as long ago as the year 2000, but I think about him every day. I had considered writing here about his life, but it has proved difficult to make a narrative of a mass of incoherent memories of my father, from when I was a child and an adult. Almost all of these are fond memories of a kindly man who loved his wife, children and grandchildren. But there are also memories of the quirks of behaviour that mark one personality from another. I can not fit these into a single short account, and so I will speak instead of one part of my father’s life that says much about him and his influence on me.

My father came from a reasonably prosperous family that lost its money. The only secondary education available was at a local fee-paying school. He passed the exam for a free place, but ‘failed’ the interview. As a result, he left school at 14 with no qualifications and did not become apprenticed. He worked in a wide variety of unskilled occupations, including lorry driving (before any driving test was required), chauffeuring, coal-hauling, and being a clerk in the local workhouse. He had psoriasis, and so was found medically unfit to serve in the forces in the Second World War. At some point after the war, he completed a trade qualification as a welder, and from then until retirement worked at the Land Rover factory. I remember him cycling to work through rain and snow, with his sandwiches in an old bag across his shoulder and a beret on his head.

Nowadays, my father would have gone to university and been a good student. He had considerable powers of application, loved reading and had a great respect for learning. In the absence of formal schooling, he educated himself by reading the books in our small local public library. Each Saturday afternoon, he would visit the Shirley Library and stay until the desperate staff begged him to leave at closing time. He was initially limited to the maximum of four books/lender allowed by the library. But as first myself and then my brother went to university and left home, he took over our tickets (as well as our mother’s tickets) and would return home on Saturday with a collection of 16 books. No-one could read this many at once, and so they were renewed from month to month. I suspect that he took pleasure from simply having the books around him.

My father’s respect for learning combined with his own lack of educational opportunity  made him transfer his frustrated ambition to his children. My brother and I were sent to the best local grammar schools and were encouraged to apply for university. Secondary school was for me a miserable experience, but I still became a sort of educational guided missile, eventually collecting three university degrees. My father did not seem to have any clear ambitions for us after we left university - it was sufficient that our education gave us the chance to escape work on an assembly-line, and he was very pleased that we had escaped his fate and had succeeded in finding well-paid white-collar jobs.

See also: Surviving school

What I did on my holidays (a long time ago)

One of the standard tasks that traditionally faced children when they returned to school in September was to write an essay called ‘What I did on my holidays’. I remember writing several such essays - what I do not remember at all well are the holidays that were their subject-matter. My earliest memory is from a holiday in North Wales when I was two. I remember being led by the hand over a railway line. My parents had rented a cottage with another family, but I recall none of that.

The first holiday I really remember was in Brynmill, in a boarding-house by the seaside just to the West of Swansea City Centre. This was particularly exciting for a small boy because getting to the beach involved crossing the Swansea and Mumbles tramway, and then passing under a tunnel which carried the British Railways branch line to Mumbles. To make things even more exciting, we were warned about a nearby unexploded bomb, left over from the War.

After that, family holidays involved trips to the seaside in North Devon. I can not remember how many times we went, but I do recall the ordeal of getting there. My father was an industrial worker, and therefore had the same two week break in August as the rest of Birmingham and the West Midlands. Each city in Britain had its usual holiday destination, and for Birmingham this was Weston-super-Mare and points further South-West. This meant that the holiday fortnight began with a massive migration in the same general direction by train, bus and car. My parents did not own a car until I was about 16, but for holidays they either shared a car with friends, or hired a car. There were no motorways, and all main roads led from one high street to another. Travel therefore involved a sequence of traffic jams of a scale completely unknown today, even with four times as many vehicles on the road as in the 1950s. Strangely, the worst such jam was on one of the few by-pass routes, around Exeter. Cars might wait here for hours - thirsty motorists brewed up tea by the roadside, while salesmen walked along the queues of cars selling ice-cream. Journeys were also prolonged because the cars of the time were unreliable. As a result, a trip to North Devon from the family home in Shirley near Birmingham could take from early morning to nightfall. I remember one journey ending one night as the car we were travelling in broke down trying to climb Porlock Hill in Somerset.

Our holidays in North Devon included a stay in (I think) a boarding house in the attractive village of Combe Martin. But later, we stayed in caravans further along the coast near Woolacombe. I did not like caravan sites, with their grubby toilets and showers, while some sites involved a long walk along the edge of muddy fields to get to the beach. Once on the beach, we spent our time doing very little. We made sand-castles, swam in the sea and used surfboards. It never occurred to us to stand on them. As I got older, I became bored with beach holidays. I remember wandering into the cinema in Woolacombe by myself to see Carry on Nurse. I was much taken with Shirley Eaton, and remember a growing frustration that I did not have a Shirley Eaton of my own.

In my later teenage years, our holidays changed after my parents bought a car. However, they were not intrepid travellers, and the limit of their ambition was to visit Scotland, which they regarded rather as Australians view the outback. This focussed particularly on touring what they called the ‘real Scotland’, by which they meant the Western Highlands. They were thereby immune to the glories of Edinburgh or the wonderful scenery of the Borders. While travelling in Scotland, my parents developed what in hindsight seems a strange daily routine. After a full fried breakfast, we would drive on the next stages of our tour and eat sandwiches for lunch. After a further drive, there would be a search for a bed and breakfast for the night. After that, we would drive to some lay-by or parking place and cook a meal on a primus stove, using food from tins. We had several windswept and generally unsatisfactory meals by this method.

After I finished my A-levels, I went on holiday by myself, although I did travel again with my parents once or twice thereafter. I do not of course write any essays on what I have done on my holidays, but I store photographs and retain the urge to write the occasional blog post about my travels.