I was right that Luke Campbell would be a failure as Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire - David Behrens
You didn’t need Mystic Meg to foresee that the mayoralty of Luke Campbell would end in tears; even I could have told you that and as a matter of fact I did. The weekend after he took the reins in Hull and East Yorkshire I wrote this of the people with whom he’d be working: “At best they will ignore him, at worst mock him.” It took even less time than I thought.
This week he passed the milestone of 100 days in office and already the edifice is collapsing around him.
The election of Campbell, a former professional boxer with no previously declared interest in politics, was a missed opportunity to bring civic heft to a part of Yorkshire that has for too long been an outpost. His political honeymoon has demonstrated only that what he lacks in experience he also lacks in aptitude.
Campbell was a beneficiary of Reform UK’s chronic shortage of credible candidates. He was chosen because he was famous, not because he was any good. The turnout on polling day was just 29 per cent so the only real winner was apathy.
One hundred days on, he and his officials are openly at war: five senior members of staff have been asked to resign – apparently after three of them had already done so – and Campbell stands accused of running a toxic workplace and of flouting the rules by charging first-class train tickets to expenses.
The number and ferocity of the claims and counter-claims suggest an office in disarray; driverless and dysfunctional. No-one voted for that.
The Mayor has described his departing staff as civil servants who “think they can run the show, get paid a fortune and do as little as possible” and perhaps he has a point. But it’s hard to say because his utterances are so contradictory as to be meaningless.
We do not know, for instance, where he stands on the most urgent issue on his agenda: the future of the Vivergo bioethanol plant on the Humber, the largest in Britain, which faces imminent closure because the Government’s trade deal with Donald Trump has rendered it uneconomic. About 4,500 jobs are at stake, directly and indirectly, and Campbell has said he and his party are “all about protecting British industries”.
But he has also disavowed the net zero targets to which Vivergo contributes, for they are as repellent to Reform as garlic is to vampires. He cited the same reason for withdrawing at the last minute from an alliance with the Mayors of West, South and North Yorkshire which would have seen them working together to attract investment.
That episode illustrated the extent to which Campbell is compromised. Thousands of people in East Yorkshire work for green energy companies that Reform says would lose their subsidies if it were to take power. The local economy would be torpedoed and it would be his finger on the launch button.
He tried to explain his stance in a statement that turned fence-sitting into an Olympic sport. “I was not elected to support misguided net zero targets,” he said, before adding that he supported “green energy investment” and “cleaner air initiatives”. You can’t have it both ways: clean air initiatives are the beating heart of the net zero agenda.
If that piece of self-deception was written for him by one of his staff, it’s not surprising he wants rid of them. But the replacements he is putting forward represent a retreat even further into fantasyland.
His nominees are Robin Hunter-Clarke, a one-time ‘chief of staff’ to the disgraced former MP Neil Hamilton; and Jack Anderton, a 23 year-old ‘digital strategist’ who helped run the Hull election campaign on social media. Both are affiliated to Reform and therefore ineligible for the politically neutral roles proposed for them. Besides, Campbell doesn’t need Twitter twits; he needs heavy-hitters who will raise his game and make him look intelligent.
Reform itself should realise this better than anyone, for its Mayor has been walking a thin line. He could have been the party poster boy but in 100 days he has become its biggest liability, the embodiment of an organisation that talks up a storm but delivers only disappointments.
In Kent, where there is another new Reform administration, the penny is starting to drop. It’s closer to Westminster so party HQ has been quicker to notice the shortcomings of its local electees and is apparently now editing what they say in an effort to improve coherency.
The result, inevitably, is more division and dissent. Reform doesn’t know how to make policy; it knows only how to divide and rule. And while that may work on social media, real life is more nuanced. How many more hundreds of days will it take for those who believed the rhetoric to realise that?