New Medway Mayor

The excellent David Brake, Conservative councillor for Walderslade ward, was sworn-in as the new Mayor of Medway at last Wednesday's annual council meeting. What a lovely and warm person to have as our Mayor!

This was the first time Medway Council has chosen its mayor (and deputy, Cllr Vaughan Hewett) by straight election. As some of us expected, the Opposition members didn't attend the mayor-making as they oppose this system.

YourMedway carries the story, including both Opposition Party group leaders' comments, which if you read them straight do at first sight seem reasonable.

However there are good reasons why the majority of councils operate in the very same way that Medway has belatedly adopted, first and foremost in recognition that the Mayor is the First Citizen of the community and represents all its people, and comes from the body of elected local representatives of that community.

Of course, no-one can be said to represent the views of everyone, because they differ so widely; but the closest match must surely be someone who stood for election and was voted into office (i.e. in order to be in the running at all) on a platform that the greatest number of voters who expressed a preference (i.e. voted at the most recent local elections) chose.

Here is my comment (limited in length by their system) to YourMedway, which hasn't yet been published as I write this...

The opposition groups and the first commenter have this wrong. The Mayoralty isn't a nice "political bubble" game for the benefit of parties: the Mayor represents the community as its First Citizen, taken from their elected representatives.

Only someone who stood for election on a platform supported by the most voters who expressed a view by voting can have legitimacy, which no doubt is why the majority of councils do the same as Medway now does.

The Commons Speaker is elected in the same way.

UPDATE: my comment has now been published on their website, but not in this week's Letters; so I've written a separate letter expressly for publication in the newspaper proper.

Then I ran out of available characters(!) What I'd have gone on to clarify is that surely this is the only method in which the public can have confidence. I'd also have written that I personally enjoyed every one of the mayoralties I experienced during my time on the Council, and appreciate what all parties' mayors have done over the years; but that's not the point. It isn't for my benefit or of political colleagues that we have a mayoralty: it's for the wider community.

Finally, I'd have written that I'd be perfectly happy, should the Council's political balance shift, to have a successful of non-Conservative mayors and deputies. My view is obviously not partisan, but pro-Medway as a whole (something for which I am of course well known).

Why do the opposition members put their own party interests (and, my sources disclose, their personal covetous desires in a few cases) above the Medway people they purport to represent? That is a very interesting question, and one they shall need to attempt to justify. I cannot think of any reason why we ever had that oddball method in the past, with the possible sole exception of being a tie-breaker in the case of two (or more) parties tying in number of council seats; but even then a simpler method could be devised for just those (rare) occasions.

My mention of the House of Commons Speaker, by the way, is useful as that rôle is the closest in central government to that of a council mayor: chairing meetings of elected members of a body, and the various ceremonial and similar functions. In common with the majority of councils, the Speaker is elected by the members themselves, not via an arcane and opaque "points system".

I wish Councillors Brake and Hewett a really good and successful year in their new offices.