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A 'one-off' shot down in flames
Jan 16, 2008
I was beginning to think that our chums at Teesdale District
Council were losing their touch. It's been several months now since they shot
themselves in the foot, threw themselves off a cliff, made passes at the boss's
wife or shouted out in the carol concert.
Torpor and tedium must be setting in, I thought. Oh me of little faith...
All you have to do is give them a little time and opportunity; they won't let you down.
You may remember that the top brass had a really spiffing idea last year when they found out that the whole place was closing down.
They decided that the best thing the staff could do while the authority twitched in its death throes was to undergo a full inspection.
If I'd been a member of staff, I think I'd have leaned back in my chair and said: "Well thank you, oh mighty ones, for making our lives even more unbearable. This is a sign of leadership, compassion and insight, thank you so very much..."
Well, something like that, anyway. So the great machine creaked and grumbled into gear.
If we are to be inspected, the reasoning went, we must employ someone who knows an awful lot about it, to tell us what to do and how to be off sick on the day the inspectors arrive and how to make much look more.
So let's find someone who's just retired with a massive pension and lump sum, let's give him some more money which we could have spent on something useful and let's do just what he tells us to do and then, if we all work really hard, the inspectors might say that we have shot up the ratings from ‘totally useless' to ‘below average' or some hitherto undreamt-of height.
Now, having done that, all we need is for the councillors to accept this as a useful thing to do, get them all facing in the same direction, then Bob's yer uncle and Charlie's yer aunt.
Oh dear. Then comes the wheel-detachment episode.
In order to be accepted as below average, it does help if everyone agrees to play the game.
Dear old Newton Wood is the chairman of the overview and scrutiny committee, a body which, despite its ridiculous name, has a worthwhile function. It questions and blows raspberries at the decisions of the council (that is, if it's doing its job properly).
Though steering a fairly erratic course, Newton is a good stirrer; he loves the limelight and is extremely popular with the ordinary punters in the town. His enemies in the council cannot understand his popularity and some resent it.
Yes, sometimes he does and says things which are a little loopy, but his challenge is one for good and is against pomposity. He is also a pretty good scrapper.
So what is the last thing you need when you are about to undergo a self-inflicted inspection injury? Yes, you guessed it - someone upset Newton big style.
I understand they've sacked him from the Independent group, leaving him either free to join the Ever-So-Independents or become a Lone Star Supreme World's Most Independent Councillor Blokey.
This means he can't be the chairman any more because he was nominated by the Mainstream Totally Legitimate No-Messing Independents of which, they say, he is no longer a member.
This situation does not make Newton a happy chappy. The members of his committee, I'm told, have all gone on strike, so nothing can be overviewed or scrutinised.
"So perishing what?" I hear you cry. Well, if there's no scrutiny committee, the inspectors will almost certainly decide that Teesdale is about as good a council as Basra. And all this because of a failure to understand how people work.
All this is totally unnecessary.
Recent years at Galgate have defied description. Most dangerous is the inability to just write it off, laugh and hand it to the Kremlin at Durham and then see what sort of a mess they make of it.
Places like Teesdale need irritants and one-offs. There are more than enough worthy dullards. It is no accident that the major force in the local church has been Non-Conformist. This awkwardness is something to be cherished, not squashed.
Why does Jeremy Clarkson sell millions of books? Because he appeals to that part of people which is sick of PC and being told.
I fear TDC may have bitten off a bit more than they can chew, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if the inspectors decided the council was wonderful because they might be useless, too. After all, who inspects the inspectors?
First published in the Mercury, January 9, 2008