IN the years since Badger first left his burrow and began tapping at his keyboard, he always found it amusing that some of Pembrokeshire’s less observant county councillors thought he was Mike Stoddart.
Badger considered it a backhanded compliment. When he spoke with Old Grumpy, he was bemused, too. It is safe to say that confusing Badger and Mike Stoddart, in person or in prose, is nearly impossible.
Mike Stoddart’s canvas was Pembrokeshire County Council. No detail, no matter how small, or factoid hidden in committee papers escaped him. He could use any of these to illustrate how the local authority conducted its business with public money. That was, as far as Badger could tell, what motivated Mike Stoddart. Too many people regard councillors as corrupt, self-seeking, and greedy. Mike Stoddart was ever alert to abuses of power. He was most interested in how the Council spent the money it received from different funding streams and raised from Council Tax payers.
Broad-brush claims were never Old Grumpy’s style. The devil was always in the details, and his prose illuminated those details, letting them speak for themselves.
Badger did not always agree with Mike Stoddart’s conclusions. When Old Grumpy disagreed with Badger, he always let him know. Still, Badger saw Mike Stoddart applying the level of scrutiny to council spending that every councillor should. Too many councillors see spending as if it were a deep ideological battle for Pembrokeshire’s soul. Mike Stoddart’s approach was more forensic and nuanced: Was the spending justified? Did the amount represent value for money?
Some of Old Grumpy’s bugbears achieved legendary status: John Cwmbetws Davies’s humble farmworker’s dwelling for a herdsman for a non-existent herd. Brian Hall’s use of a TARDIS on Council business. Ken Rowlands’s willingness to turn up at the opening of an envelope for a photo op. And, Badger’s favourite, Huw George’s ode to tarmac and the power of positive politics.
Mike Stoddart’s reporting about the above put a spotlight on how the IPG, then the dominant force in the Council Chamber, scratched each other’s backs, nursed each other’s egos, and silenced debate. And all very interesting and titillating it was, too. However, when he got into the details of how the IPG administration blew millions of public money on schemes of dubious value and even more dubious probity, Old Grumpy hit high gear.
The money the Council spent to help Oakwood, the money for local small enterprises, it handed to LNG and a luxury hotel, misspent and misallocated, town centre regeneration schemes, the casual way the local authority handled grant schemes and European funding. They all showed Mike Stoddart at his best and most fearless.
There were times when it seemed as though Mike Stoddart was a lone voice crying in the wilderness.
And then…
To say things unravelled at County Hall would be an understatement.
In Badger’s recollection, it began with a ten-line report in the Western Telegraph noting that Cllr Mike Williams had drawn attention to the number of grants in a funding scheme being directed towards one developer. This was before The Pembrokeshire Herald was a fever dream in a demented editor’s mind. This was back in 2011, when Badger wrote for Pembrokeshire’s Best Magazine.
Needless to say, it turned out that Old Grumpy was also digging into the story. It turned out that companies connected to one developer, Cathal McCosker, had cornered the market in Pembroke Dock’s Town Regeneration Scheme. Mike Stoddart relentlessly chipped away at the scheme’s internal workings. Meanwhile, Badger found a web of companies Mr McCosker used to get his mitts on the grant money. The key point was that the European money was supposed to go towards regenerating commercial activity in Pembroke Dock’s run-down town centre. Instead, most of the money was spent building bedsits over former commercial premises.
Mike Stoddart’s suspicions were aroused when he started looking at work that had supposedly been done on the roofs of buildings. An Audit Committee meeting took place out and about in Pembroke Dock. To the surprise of nobody, the visit turned up extensive evidence of graft. A former chemist’s shop in Dimond Street had supposedly been refitted by scratch. Badger pointed out to Mike Stoddart that the racking on the walls, which was there when Badger was a cub, had been painted over, and that the same applied to several other fittings.
Meanwhile, the then Cabinet member for Housing, David Simpson, took Old Grumpy to one side and led him into another room. They stared up at the ceiling. They looked at the bill of quantities. They stared up at the ceiling again. A council officer was summoned. He looked at the bill of quantities. He stared up at the ceiling. A short conversation followed.
It is always useful to sign off after you’ve inspected the building works to ensure they’ve been completed. The hole in the ceiling that David Simpson found, which he and Mike Stoddart discussed, allowed them to see through the void to the floor of the bedsit above. What was absent was all of the fireproofing and other work supposedly done to justify a claim for public money.
A subsequent Audit Committee meeting led to an opening of the scheme’s books. Very few councillors bothered to look at them. Mike Stoddart did, so did Jacob Williams and David Simpson. To even the meanest intellect, and all three were far smarter than that, it was obvious that corruption and incompetence were involved alongside a stupefying level of criminal complicity by council officers. Information provided to councillors had been deliberately misleading, and meeting minutes had been tampered with by a senior officer to make it appear that compliance checks had taken place when they hadn’t. At least one officer, later allowed to retire rather than be arrested, lied directly to two very senior officers about what he knew.
Then, when the Police got involved, they were run ragged by an officer apparatus, supported by IPG councillors, that moved heaven and earth to obscure the truth. A laptop carrying essential information was “lost”. Council officers spent hours concealing their incompetence rather than providing timely evidence to an ongoing investigation. An internal investigation, predictably, whitewashed officers’ actions but did not touch upon how gross and persistent failures were allowed to continue for so long. The answer – as ever – was that officers cared more about dotting i’s and crossing t’s than critically considering the evidence of their own eyes.
The affair metastasised and became a cancer on the entire 2012-2017 administration. Attempts to stop the flow of questions failed miserably. Bryn Parry Jones was paid off after his position became untenable. Efforts to ignore the scandal of how Children’s Services employed a paedophile despite a whistleblower’s actions, rumbled on and became a question of who knew what and when, and why a report into the affair remained under wraps.
And through it all, Mike Stoddart ground on in the face of abuse from councillors not fit to lace his shoes. John Allen-Mirehouse said Mike Stoddart didn’t care for the truth and imputed malign motives to him. David Pugh laughably referred to a non-existent side elevation of a terraced property. Jamie Adams had inspected the roof at Pembroke Dock’s former Coronation School and could testify that the work claimed to have been done had been done. It hadn’t.
Mike Stoddart ran rings around all of them. The spluttering officers, whose efforts he exposed to public ridicule, took to crying foul at the richly-deserved scrutiny their uselessness attracted.
A change of administration did not defang Old Grumpy. With his loathed IPG out of power, he continued to scrutinise, criticise, and hold the new administration to account. He continued to ask difficult questions, especially about how the local authority set its rents, and, as he had for over twenty years, continued to question the basis on which the Council set its annual budget.
Mike Stoddart would not be pushed, pulled, or bullied. Once he decided he was right, nothing could shake him. He never sought followers in the Chamber. He never sought leadership. He treasured independence and publicly scorned those who pretended to it. He could be bloody hard work, but Badger always knew that Grumpy had done the legwork and reading before offering his opinion.
Unlike the gobshites on social media, he never fell into contrarian nihilism. The purpose of opposition, Old Grumpy said, was to oppose. But that did not mean opposing everything for the sake of it. He shone a harsh spotlight into corners that needed illumination. Badger thinks Mike Stoddart would be disappointed if his efforts to educate and inform the public became synonymous with rank cynicism. That would make a mockery of Old Grumpy’s quest for the truth and his long career of public service.
At a time when instant outrage and knee-jerk responses have replaced consistent ideals, Old Grumpy remained, above all, an idealist. An unusual and singular type of idealist, but an idealist nonetheless.
Mike Stoddart believed in public service. He devoted his life to it. He believed in honour and the importance of honesty and plain-speaking. He was still arguing his point of view, almost right to the end. He was unstoppable.
And now, he has stopped.
Badger will miss Mike. Pembrokeshire will miss Mike. Even his adversaries will miss Mike, despite his 20-20 prose never missing them. However, Mike Stoddart’s family and close friends will miss him more. And it is to them, and to Old Grumpy’s memory, that Badger dedicates this column.
