As I am often asked about what happened with Peter Davies I will set it out here and then leave it. Peter was our party's first great electoral success and if that had been followed up then our Cause would have been helped greatly. It is disappointing that this wasn't possible.
Most
of the details of Peter Davies’ life can be seen here in his entry in Wikipedia.
Click here for the details >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Davies_(politician)
For
my part, my first awareness of Peter’s existence came about because our then
Yorkshire organiser, Michael Cassidy (who had met Peter in UKIP and then the
Referendum Party) where we had got him standing in a local election in
Doncaster.
Peter
had automatically become a member of the English Democrats on the basis of
having previously been a member of a UKIP splinter party, Reform UK, which had
recently merged with the English Democrats. I then got good reports back during
and after the election that our message had gone down very well and that Peter
was delighted with the fact that he had more than doubled his best previous
performance.
I
do not think I actually first spoke to Peter until Michael Cassidy brought him
along to a National Council meeting. During the course of the next few months,
with my active encouragement the strategic plan emerged to stand as much as our
resources would allow in Doncaster and to start spreading our message and create
brand awareness so when it came to the Mayoral election we would be in a good
position to challenge. This plan went well with Peter standing in local
elections and Michael Cassidy standing for us in the Parliamentary election.
Incidentally
for those who think that it is practical to do a deal with UKIP, Michael
Cassidy’s experience is telling. He had been, I think, the Secretary of the
Regional Party of Yorkshire for UKIP and personally knew the organisers of UKIP
within Doncaster. He wanted to stand in the Don Valley constituency which would
have supported Peter’s local election candidacies, but UKIP’s local branch told
him that that is where they wanted to stand. Michael therefore agreed
that he would stand in North Doncaster, but when the nominations were announced
by the Returning Officer, it turned out that UKIP had not stood in the Don
Valley at all, but in North Doncaster in order to try and spoil our
vote!
By
the time of the run up to the Mayoral election and also the EU Parliamentary
election which was to be held on the same date, I was aware that Peter was
opinionated and seemed capable of making a good speech and dealing with question
and answer sessions in a robust and mostly sensible way. I do not think, even
with hindsight, that I had any information which should have led me to be wary.
In any case it was probably either to put Peter up as Mayoral candidate or not
to put up a candidate at all. I was keen to put up a candidate in Doncaster and
mostly funded the election. We not only stood Peter as our Mayoral candidate but
also put him on our Yorkshire EU Parliamentary list so that we would get a
double mailshot and we used the EU Parliament election free delivery to mailshot
the whole of Doncaster. I paid for this and for the Yorkshire EU Parliamentary
deposit.
During
the election campaign Michael Cassidy did tell me that things seemed to be going
well and he did not need any further help. We were of course standing in the EU
elections across England and therefore I was at full stretch.
I
have since been told that even during that election campaign Peter threatened to
resign. I understand that this was over the question of whether he could go off
for a week during the campaign to go to the horse racing festival at Perth in
Scotland. It was only when Peter came back from that and had the confirmation
from Michael that we were doing well, that Peter actually began to do any
serious campaigning.
We
then had the sensational result that he was elected by a squeak on the second
preferences. It was obviously a very exciting, if lengthy and drawn out count,
with lots of re-counts during which all sorts of stunts were being played by the
more partisan counting officials (including 600 BNP votes being mysteriously put
in hidden amongst the Labour votes!).
Immediately
after Peter was elected the first sign to me that he wasn’t going to be a “safe
pair of hands” was when he gave an interview to Toby Foster for which he was
totally unprepared and from which he flounced out in the middle of. When I
discussed this with Peter, far from being sorry about it, he maintained that it
was all the interviewer’s fault and that he would not give any further
interviews with either Toby Foster or Radio Sheffield.
I
did my best to repair the situation and did an interview with Toby Foster myself
the following week on my way up to Doncaster to our new Mayor’s invitation.
At
this time we were getting lots of media coverage and Peter was getting a flood
of people saying how delighted they were that we had got him elected. Far from
helping us respond to these letters and emails, he had his Council staff delete
all of the emails and we never got any of the letters either. That was the first
indications that things were not going to go smoothly.
Peter
invited some of us up to Doncaster to celebrate and during our meeting we talked
about the things that Peter could do to implement all relevant parts of our
manifesto and the need to appoint a political advisor as his Chief of Staff. We
had a National Council member available at the time, David Lane, who was willing
to do the job. The second indication was when Peter initially said he would do
it but didn’t in fact appoint him and became evasive about the reasons in the
following weeks. At that point I thought it might be that he did not want to
appoint David Lane, so I then invited him to appoint his close friend and agent,
Geoff Crossman. He would not appoint him either.
It was also becoming clear to
me at this point that Peter was very disorganised and had a very poor memory for
detail and was very inclined to make snap decisions without fully considering
the situation, whilst also having no tolerance for those people he was dealing
with in the Council who didn’t scurry obsequiously around him.
These
were worrying signs and it was frustrating that we had got somebody elected to a
high profile position of actual power, but yet he seemed to have no interest in
implementing any aspect of our manifesto. I had become aware that Peter was
volatile and headstrong, and it was unlikely that I was going to be able to get
him to do anything that we wanted him to do.
I
continued to try to get him to set up St George’s Day celebrations in Doncaster,
but he would not do that; to focus the substantial community budget more on the
English community, but he wouldn’t do that. He did not seem to have any
strategic view as to what he was going to be doing in the Council, which was
also frustrating. Having seen that the previous Mayor of Doncaster had fallen
out with Labour and been independent for several years before the end of his
tenure, I knew that I could not actually order Peter to do anything.
As
a result of Peter’s election a significant number of people had joined the Party
in Doncaster, but the reports that I was getting was that he was often falling
out with individuals and the numbers were gradually dropping off.
In
the first three years after his election we did nevertheless manage a
significant number of candidates and have continued to regularly get the kind of
votes that Peter had found he was getting once he started to stand for us.
There
was then a highly critical report by Government Inspectors into the operation of
Doncaster Council , which whilst it concentrated the heaviest fire on
Doncaster’s Labour Party and Councillors, it was also clear that Peter was
failing to respond to the situation in any sort of constructive way. I wasn’t
entirely surprised by this stage. We nevertheless did our utmost to support
Peter in what could have been a potential crisis.
We
continued to lose good members of the Party in Doncaster, at least in part
because of Peter’s behaviour but the next crisis was that Doncaster’s Labour
Councillors decided that they would trigger a referendum on whether to keep the
mayoralty. Peter had left dealing with this right until the very last moment and
he then rang me in a panic asking me to help. I did and we produced a leaflet
which won the day.
All
the while Peter was being attacked on websites and in dishonest, utterly
contemptible emails and blog entries from various sources including one
particularly repellent individual called Jonathan Snelling, who is a failed
Liberal Democrat candidate. It gradually became clear that many of the other
attackers were people who had been pretending to be English nationalists but who
were unmasked as being UKIP internet trolls (“UKIP’s Black Ops Team”).
When
we won the mayoral referendum it was clear that we were in a good position to
win the mayoral election again with Peter winning a further term. We now began
to pick up indicators that Peter’s egotism had disturbed his sense of proportion
to the point that he thought now, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that
he had been elected entirely because of himself rather than as a result
of any input from the English Democrats!
I
suspect the Labour Councillors who he was regularly mixing with were astute
enough to realise that Peter’s greatest weakness is his egotism and had played
on him to try to divide him from us so that they would have a good chance of
winning the mayoral election.
By
this point it was becoming clear to me that there was a danger that Peter would
spin us out long enough so it would be impossible for us to find an alternative
candidate before Peter became an Independent. I made it clear to him, not only
in conversations but also in writing, that if he did not stand as an English
Democrat we would nevertheless stand. Perhaps as a result of this crystal clear
warning Peter then started working on the active members of our Doncaster branch
to get them to stay with him if he stood as an Independent. It was also becoming
clear that he was openly trying to de-stabilise the branch and on at least one
occasion he flounced out of the meeting, hoping that the branch would collapse.
I
then invited him to a selection meeting by our National Council indicating that
we had another candidate and there would have to be a selection. At this point
he resigned and immediately began to attack the Party. He claimed that his
resignation was something to do with BNP members, although there were no ex-BNP
members in the Doncaster branch and he was well aware of the few people who came
over from the BNP to us had done so 18 months or so before. In short Peter’s
conduct towards us was not only a great let down and unwillingness to follow our
manifesto, but also devious and disloyal.
Perhaps
I should have immediately been put on my guard when he kept telling me that he
was “loyal”! These
words from his interviews in the media after his resignation show just what that
meant:-
Peter
was asked about his refusal to help us get St George’s Day properly celebrated
in Doncaster by the Local Government Magazine and he said, and I quote,: - “I
have never celebrated St George’s Day. I certainly think, in a racing town like
Doncaster, that meeting fraternal colleagues in Perth is a far better use of my
time than dancing around with a bunch of Morris dancers”.
Peter’s
commitment to English Nationalism was not even skin deep.
Peter
told the BBC last year that he had not been mayor very long before he “realised
that being an English Democrat was a total irrelevance”.
Peter
told ITV that:- “A good Mayor is a Mayor without a party. English Democrats
policies have never played any part in my running of the
town.”
By
now Peter had become an ex-supporter of six political parties, having, as he had
told me at one time, originally been a supporter of Labour and then for a
longish while Conservative, Referendum Party, UKIP and Reform UK and finally the
English Democrats.
If
Peter had been willing to maintain even the façade of loyalty, even though he
was never actually going to do anything that was English Democrat, he would
nevertheless now be starting on his second term of office as Mayor of Doncaster
as can easily be seen by the results, as together we would have had a majority
of over 4,000.
Peter’s
tenure office has been a disappointment but our troubles with him are by no
means unique for any political party in dealing with egotists. Those of us that
actually care about the Cause and are campaigning to make a difference for
England for the better will carry on and in Doncaster we are already looking
forward to the next elections. We saved our Mayoral Election deposit and again
we showed that we are the second Party in Doncaster after Labour. This result
shows that our support is good even in such difficult circumstances.
I
am glad to see that out of the 43 candidates that we stood this May we have had
a further 10,083 votes (plus an uncounted number of second preference votes in
Doncaster).
