AND SO, readers, the massed forces of law and order have spoken and determined that there is no evidence of criminal conduct by anyone involved in the unlawful scheme to allow local authority fat cats to cash in on the supine and crass stupidity of those councillors charged with assessing whether they should be paid in guineas or gold doubloons. Now: Kevin Maggs, the Beloved Leader of the People’s Republic of Carmarthenshire, of whom Badger has written before, and a man renowned as one who cannot see a belt without hitting below it, is full of praise for the Police’s good sense in agreeing with the opinion that he says he held all along. Never one to miss out on the opportunity to place his own spin on events, the Council’s very own “Mr Expenses”, Jamie Adams, claimed: “1 have always maintained that though the decision in question may have been procedurally flawed, no individual had used their influence improperly.”

He then invites people to believe that – even though he rolled over and asked the Wales Audit Office to tickle his belly when faced with the prospect of defending the indefensible in Court — there was nothing “inherently unlawful” about allowing Bryn to avoid tax on his publicly-funded pension pot. What a weasel-word “inherently” is, readers! Let’s try a sample sentence to see how it works: There is nothing inherently dishonest about Jamie Adams’ intellectual position. There is nothing inherently immoral about rewarding
failure. There is nothing inherently wrong in giving a tax break on pensions to those at the top while screwing down the wages of those at the bottom. Yes: I think we can all see Jamie’s point. Weasel words for a weasel, after all.

Like most of his IPPG comrades, Jamie lives in a world devoid of ideals, idealism or principles. The ends, for Jamie, ALWAYS justify the means. Jamie likes to say that “It’s all about outcomes not processes.” Well Jamie, a flawed processes of which you were part had an outcome that landed the authority with legal bills and experts’ fees running into tens of thousands of pounds; the same flawed process has exposed the moral bankruptcy of your administration and its grovelling dependence on officers; the same flawed process has put local government in this county into disrepute. Yes, Jamie: it’s all about outcomes.

If Jamie didn’t think that Mac O’Velly was an Irish manufacturer of agricultural machinery, you’d think that his proclivity – like a Renaissance prince – for dishing out patronage and remunerated favours like sweeties was derived from actually doing his own reading, rather than being told what to think by reading about it on the back of an officer’s fag packet. How dim must Jamie be not to realise that the issue is not about what is lawful or unlawful? The issue is a moral one. There is not so much a moral vacuum in Jamie’s political understanding ‘°’ a moral black hole from which no light can escape. When it comes to political principles and moral choices, Jamie may as well be asked to translate Parsee into Linear B. He’s a bit like Mr Heslop in Porridge, in that regard, is Jamie.

“I read a book once. Green it was.” And that, readers, is the difference between Jamie and those like him and the rest of the world. Badger watched Huw George a few months back as he claimed — in Welsh — that Bryn had to be in the meeting discussing his pay to advise the Senior Staff Remuneration Committee. Not actually advise, you understand. But there so his advice could be called upon if required. Sort of being influential without offering any direct influence. An entirely novel approach to the issue which his leader has, rather pointedly, not repeated. And almost certainly not repeated to the Gloucestershire plod. Even on the !PPG benches there are those who can tell the difference between right and wrong. On those benches there are those uneasy about the contortions of language their leader and others have used again and again to defend a policy they know is both morally wrong and politically disastrous.

Even Huw George cannot be that stupid. Not with one head. They are rather like Tory backbenchers in the dying days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Aghast at the unwinding of a policy that was an unmitigated failure and a political canker, Tory backbenchers were loyal in public — to a point — but fretful in private. That festering realisation of impending doom, focussed a lot of Tory minds in November 1990. Suppurating away with resentment on the IPPG side of the Council chamber, there are decent people who are the prisoners of Jamie’s patronage.

In hock to allowances both internal and external, they have realised that whether they vote for Christmas or not, the turkeys don’t have much of a future. Jamie cannot easily lance that infection, not least because he publicly continues to defend an officer – and a policy affecting that officer — who has not so much lost the confidence of the Pembrokeshire public, as he has become a byword for a complacent, self-serving and self-regarding approach to local government. Mary Tudor, Bloody Mary, it was who is alleged to have claim that the word “Calais” would be found engraved upon her heart after death, as a memento mori of her greatest failure. Jamie and the !PPG will collectively be found with the words “Bryn Parry Jones” upon theirs.