Monday’s ill-conceived attempt to unseat deputy leader Cllr Paul Miller was even more of a damp squib than I expected.
It looked at one stage as if it might be a close run thing because the council is split 30:30 between Independent Political Group (19)/Conservatives(11) and the rest (Lab 10, Plaid 2, Lib Dem 2 and unaffiliated 16) who generally support the administration.
So there was every prospect that it would either come down to attendance, or the casting vote of presiding member Simon Hancock (Lab).
When three Tories tendered their apologies and two of his own side were absent, the calculations didn’t look promising and it was immediately obvious that the IPG leader Cllr Huw Murphy’s heart wasn’t in it and his weakly argued case was not helped by a barely-audible translation system that was a poor advertisement for bilingualism.
If he had any lingering doubts about his chances, Tory leader Cllr Di Clements soon put him out of his misery when she made it clear that her group had no intention of participating in this piece of political theatre.
With the arithmetic more or less settled, there was something of the going-through-the-motions for the rest of the proceedings, though that didn’t stop members spending over an hour saying not very much.
One interesting contribution came from former leader Cllr John Davies who was clearly uncomfortable with the whole charade, but deftly sidestepped the need for outright opposition by interpreting Cllr Miller’s earlier remarks as an “apology” which allowed him to abstain with a clear conscience.
There was also a contribution from another former Independent Political Group supremo, Cllr Jamie Adams, who prattled on about accountability while dispensing advice to Cllr Miller about being prepared to admit when you are wrong.
Given my past experiences with Cllr Adams only a separate post can do justice to his remarks.
However, as I said in my most recent post, the most interesting aspect of the whole business is to compare how members of the non-political, Independent Political Group (IPG) voted on this and previous motions of no confidence.
Of particular interest was that carried out in May 2014 with respect to Cllr Adams’ deputy, Rob Lewis, who, you will recall, had been found guilty by the standards committee of unlawful use of the council’s computer system to run the IPG’s campaign during the 2008 and 2012 local elections.
Now, you might think that trying to subvert the democratic process is a rather more serious matter than making some off-colour remarks about parents’ reasons for choosing to have their children educated at a Welsh-medium school, but that doesn’t appear to be everyone’s view because I can now report that Cllrs J L Adams, B J Hall, D G M James, M John and E A Morse were all happy to approve Rob Lewis’ activities while voting to censure Cllr Miller.
And they have the nerve to claim that the IPG is not, in effect, a block-voting political party.