#PCC Adam Simmonds is off to a flying start in 2013, what with his move from a trailer park caravan to the West Wing of Wootton Hall about to take place any day now.
Of course, we flagged this little detail up weeks ago, around the same time a few artefacts from police HQ were being taken off for a, er, spring clean.
Adam, however, really moved into top gear with an interview in The Guardian, that left-leaning broadsheet not normally known as the paper of choice for young Tories.
Headlined Adam Simmonds: A Young Man in a Hurry, there followed a pretty gushing piece on his progress thus far and how he intends to eradicate drugs and cut violent crime by 40 per cent by 2015. As is becoming the custom with Adam these days, the interview was littered with namechecks past and present from the political world across the pond. Not on this occasion, JFK, but how about the first American President?: “I am the George Washington of the system. The excitement for me as a 35-year old is to have all this power. I don’t have to follow in someone’s footsteps”. Or, fast forward a couple of centuries: “The language is a bit Reaganesque but it does what it says on the tin. I want to get rid of the problem rather than just manage it”. Or, more recently still: ““Look at what Rudolph Giuliani did to New York”. And thanks too, Adam, for the New Year’s Eve message which may have introduced a new generation to the great American poet, Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Brilliant. Keep it up.
Great to see Chris Heaton-Harris stepping out again on Twitter after that troublesome autumn gaffe. Particularly his proactive publishing of his declarations of interest between September and December. There’s the usual mix of local and national, from a dinner with Long Buckby Parish Council and a ticket to the Daventry Choral Society concert to lunch in the Park Plaza hotel with the Conservative Friends for Israel and the Sky News dinner at, er, that Party conference.
But the highlight, surely, was December 28, with the “fantastic fish finger sandwich & coffee bought for me at All Saints Coffee Shop, by Tony Ansell”. Wonderful. Did he have tomato ketchup with his sarnie? Was his coffee a latte? Did Tony take him for a spin in his new black Bentley with the personalised numberplate afterwards? We need to know.
Happy 2012 to full-time staff at The University of Northampton. Hope you spent the £100 bonus, dropped in the December pay cheque by vice-chancellor Nick Petford, wisely. Alright for some, etc...
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