Wandsworth Council’s chief executive was given the power to make political appointments last night, one more sign of a near total breakdown in normal politics.
The clause passed on Monday night, almost in passing, as the council’s General Purposes Committee rewrote the rulebook for meetings, committees and scrutiny. Nobody in the room objected. It has a built-in end date. It exists, the council’s own most senior lawyer told the room, because nobody knows what the council’s numbers will look like in six weeks.
Here’s why. Ten days ago, Conservative leader Aled Richards-Jones resigned without warning. A few days later, his successor, Robert Morritt, won the leadership contest by the narrowest of margins, enough to lead the Conservative group, but possibly not enough to make him Leader of the Council.
Cllr Tom Pridham quit as a cabinet member within hours, telling colleagues he had “profound ethical and professional concerns about our new leadership.” Daniel Hamilton, the cabinet member for transport, followed on Saturday. Nobody knows if Morritt has the votes to actually become council leader on Wednesday. The council’s own paper admits it.
Wandsworth’s Conservatives govern on a knife-edge, 29 seats to Labour’s 28, and only with the backing of independent councillor Malcolm Grimston. It’s the same arithmetic behind the deal that put them there in the first place.
On top of that, a Trinity ward by-election on 27 August, triggered by Labour’s own deputy leader quitting her seat, could hand the Conservatives a 30th seat and end their need for Grimston altogether. Or it could not. Grimston could withhold his support on Wednesday. Conservative members could simply not turn up. Even that isn’t guaranteed.
Residents were told in May that a confidence-and-supply deal had settled who runs Wandsworth. Two months on, it hasn’t. A leader gone. A divisive figure in charge by one vote, if he’s confirmed at all. Two cabinet resignations in a week. And now, buried in a committee paper nobody challenged: a job councillors usually guard jealously for themselves, handed to the chief executive instead. The council’s own paperwork says what no politician will.
A meeting that didn’t quite trust itself
Monday’s meeting wasn’t really about committee appointments at all. Its real business was scrapping rules the previous Labour administration used to centralise power, rules that shut out Labour’s own backbenchers too, and which Grimston made a condition of propping up the Conservatives at all. Reversing someone else’s rulebook while your own leadership falls apart doesn’t build trust. It erodes what little was left.
“In light of the current position in terms of appointments to committees and the uncertainty brought about by the by-election,” said Abdus Choudhury, the council’s Monitoring Officer and Director of Law and Governance, introducing the clause, “to ensure that there’s maximum flexibility for the council membership to be properly constituted into the committees… this temporary provision that’s before you introduces a power to the chief executive acting as proper officer to make appointments to committees on nomination from the relevant group leaders.”
Nobody argued. Deputy Leader Peter Graham, the cabinet member for finance, gave the only comment. It wasn’t a defence. It was a shrug: “The point is that there’s a grandfather clause so it can be seen that this will just go away.”
The same evening undercut the reform Graham was there to sell. Defending restored pre-decision scrutiny, this administration’s flagship promise, he conceded that “on anything controversial the detail will be withheld.” Scrutiny restored, except when it isn’t.
Labour’s Cllr Rex Osborn named the real dynamic in the room: “Both sides end up assuming bad faith on the part of the others… and have done so in this case.” Cllr Sara Apps offered her solution, moving an amendment to build a formal trust-and-review mechanism into the new rules. “There’s a lack of confidence, which is partly based on experience and partly based on the two-party nature of our council,” she told the committee. “This was really about building that trust and confidence for the opposition.” The amendment fell. The chair offered to “minute it” instead of adopting it. Noted, not acted on.
Labour won one fight last night, over how many words a council motion can run to. It was an effort to be efficient and keep council motion to 150 words or less. The idea of being efficient is not something that has taken root in council circles. It was dropped.
Even the room’s own tedium became, briefly, the subject. “Sometimes it getting rather lost in verbiage, which I’ve just realised I’m in danger of doing,” said independent councillor Malcolm Grimston, catching himself mid-sentence. Nobody laughed. Nobody needed to.
None of this makes the CEO as political leader arrangement sinister. It’s bounded. It has an end date. It passed without a single objection from either side. But it doesn’t appear anywhere in the committee’s published papers, either, only in what Choudhury told the room on the night. That’s the proof of its own point: the council’s paper trail can’t keep pace with its own uncertainty.
If fairness I would be very if you let our new CE run the whole shooting gallery !! The appointment of Ana P is the only positive thing I have heard come out of Wandsworth Council in the last few weeks. She is quality.
The tribal nature of our local politics with the passive aggressiveness that I saw at the meeting last night does not bode well for our communities. We now have a situation with a crap shoot of a governance model, a civil war within the Tories and a busted Labour Party who are badly in need of fresh leadership and our residents just fed up with the powerlessness of the electoral system.
It is a banana borough …