Hmm. Have a good Easter, anyway, Mike.
Richard.
Richard Slater (Labour)
Member of Parliament for Ipswich
Hi Margaret,
What are you doing for Easter? Going to your parents’ place?
Becs xx
Dear Becs,
No, Easter is Dad’s busiest day of the year, I’d only be in the way. Last year I went home on Good Friday, but was back in college by Saturday lunchtime. There were white lilies in the bath, elderly soprano voices piping ‘Now the Green Blade Riseth’ in questionable harmony from the dining room, and my bed was barely visible beneath sufficient Cadbury’s mini-eggs to provision every Sunday School pupil in the home counties. This year I’m off to Gran’s. You?
Margaret xx
To Mum and Dad’s as usual. I think we’re all going to be home – me, Sam, and Emma with Tom and the children. Mum will probably have ordered a ten-kilo turkey. I swear the one we had at Christmas was really an emu.
Hugs,
Becs xxx
Hello Michael,
So, ASBOs it is. I called my mate Geoff Howard at the
Town Crier
and have fixed up for the two of us to accompany a pair of Suffolk Constabulary’s finest (Kev and Ian) on their patrol of the town centre on Friday night. All I need now is a fine evening, a fair wind, and for the youth of Ipswich to do their worst.
Richard.
Richard Slater (Labour)
Member of Parliament for Ipswich
I think you’re in luck, Richard – Friday’s forecast is for perfect binge-drinking weather.
While I’ve got you there – you’re the expert on constituency cranks, aren’t you? How do you manage to shake them off? In addition to my camphorous tartan shadow with the mutt, one of my long-standing serial letter-writers has joined the throng of regulars at my surgeries. It’s a whole long story about a pelvic injury at work and problems with disability benefit and a refused insurance claim. Pretty sure he’s an entrenched non-voter anyway, and there’s no good publicity in malingerers with unromantic maladies, but he tends to hang around and complain about my inactivity on his behalf, and he has an unusually carrying voice. How do I get rid of him?
Michael.
Michael Carragan (Labour)
Member of Parliament for West Bromwich West
What you need to do is to create a filtering system. I have my own honed to a fine degree of discrimination. As we all know, being seen to be doing Good Works in the constituency is essential to one’s image – even for you lucky sods who have one foot in higher places – but you have to pick the right issues. You sift through the mailbag and you select only those correspondents whose problems promise any political mileage. Good sob stories, which will earn you Brownie points if you appear in the local rag with the smiling beneficiary of your heroic efforts. Out go the popular turn-offs (teenage mums who can’t get a council flat, cabbies who’ve lost their licence, and anyone who’s ever been in prison) and also the plain boring (leylandii hedges, rising damp and the like). Instead, you pick out the few that look sexy and image-boosting, the kind of fights you want to see yourself associated with, and you invite them to attend your next surgery, giving an appointed hour and venue.
Then (and this is the clever bit), you dodge all the rest of the mob by moving your surgery around without telling anyone. Anywhere will do, as long as it’s obscure enough to throw the surgery squatters off the scent. Once mine used always to be held in the Mandela Suite at the town hall, but now they are all over the place: community centres, school halls, scout huts. I fully expect to be holding court one of these months in the gents at the back of a turf accountant on the Woodbridge Road. You can present it as ‘neighbourhood outreach’, all perfectly laudable. Of course, my well-trained constituency staff do advertise the venue in the
Town Crier
each month, though I’ve never managed to spot it myself – the notice is probably nestling somewhere in the small ads, between litters of golden labrador puppies and second-hand cross trainers. Result? – nice quiet surgeries, devoid of the shifting cast of crazies and time-wasters who used to inhabit the waiting room, and peopled instead by a manageable number of grateful, non-abusive, media-friendly petitioners, rich fodder for my Richard-Slater-as-Model-Constituency-MP campaign. Works a treat.
Richard.
Richard Slater (Labour)
Member of Parliament for Ipswich
42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich
Suffolk IP3 2DA
The Today Programme
BBC Radio 4
Television Centre
Wood Lane
London W12 7RJ
31 March 2005
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to question the balance of an interview which I heard on this morning’s Today programme.
Your correspondent was talking to a British Jewish couple who had gone out to build a house on the West Bank as part of the wave of Israeli settlement there. Asked why they had chosen to do this, the husband spoke of the need for ‘a safe home for the Jewish people’. This went wholly unchallenged by your interviewer. But the couple were from Folkestone. Wasn’t that a safe enough home? The people of Kent and the surrounding counties are not exactly sworn to driving the Jewish population of Folkestone into the sea.
Yours faithfully,
Margaret Hayton.
PS. I think John Humphrys is to be congratulated – he does an excellent job.
Hi Michael,
Well, I wouldn’t say my publicity event this evening was the greatest runaway success. There were Kev and Ian in their reinforced helmets. There were the pubs, pouring out the lager. All that was needed was for the drunken loutery of Ipswich to do their bit. I wasn’t asking for much: a little bespattering of the pavement with vomit, maybe someone urinating in the doorway of Next, perhaps a gentle jostle or the playful toss of a beer can or two in our direction.
But no! The pubs closed at the appointed hour, and their clientele, warmly befuddled and sporting affable smiles, swayed quietly away towards the bus stops and taxi ranks, where they formed orderly (if not indeed positively matey) queues, or else dispersed, in stumbling but benevolent twos and threes, towards cocoa and bed. Mindful of the date, I half expected twenty or so yobs with public disorder on their minds to jump out from behind Barclays bank and shout ‘April fool’. Even Kev and Ian were apologetic (perhaps mistaking me for someone empowered to cut their Friday night overtime) and kept saying that it is not normally this quiet.
Finally, at around 11.45, a likely-looking gaggle of shaven-headed youths approached us, taking up the whole width of the pavement in a promisingly threatening manner, and announcing to the world in general in cacophonous baritones that Norwich City stood in grave danger of relegation. Upon seeing us, they began to make those piggy snorting noises so wittily directed by crowds at the police. Just as they drew level, one of them – a thickset and heavily tattooed young man – accosted Ian with a jut of the chin and the word ‘Oi’, and a broad arm began to rain blows upon Ian’s shoulders and back. I was debating whether to intervene (the press being present, after all) or to follow my instinct and run like the wind, when it became clear that the bombardment which Ian was taking was in fact bestowed in a spirit of affection. It seems they had been at school together. It was when Ian produced a photo of his new baby, which was passed solemnly round the group of skinheads, that Geoff cut his losses and went home.
Any more bright ideas, Michael?
Richard.
PS. It wasn’t a completely wasted evening, however. I did acquire a Suffolk Constabulary souvenir keyring, which is also a lighter. Unfortunately, being neither a smoker nor an arsonist, I am unlikely to get much use out of it.
Do the Suffolk Fire Service have a matching one with a water pistol to put out the fires?
Michael.
And the ambulance service do one with a tiny oxygen mask and burns blanket. I may collect the set.
Richard.
WITCH
Women of Ipswich Together Combating Homelessness
42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich
Suffolk IP3 2DA
Mr Richard Slater, MP
House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA
6 April 2005
Dear Mr Slater,
As treasurer of WITCH I am writing to you, our constituency MP, about a matter of government policy which has recently had a direct impact upon our service provision, and about which we feel considerable dismay.
You are probably aware that asylum seekers are not entitled to any recourse to state funds unless and until their application for leave to remain in the country is successful. This means that even a voluntary project such as Witch House cannot offer financial assistance to an asylum seeker without putting our local authority grant at risk. In our view, this is an attack upon one of the most vulnerable groups of homeless people, and a serious impediment to a group such as ours in our aim to provide a service for those most in need of it. We are currently housing a young asylum seeker, and are having to fund-raise from charitable sources to meet the cost of her accommodation with us. If we cannot raise the sums required, she will lose her room and the support which we provide with it.
I am by this time fully aware that you do not consider correspondence from your constituents to be a high priority, but I urge you most strongly, please do not ignore the plight of this young woman and hundreds like her. I will soon be able to wallpaper my bedroom with your standard form letters. Or perhaps I will bundle them all up and post them to the Prime Minister to show him how much you care about your constituents’ concerns.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Hayton.
Hi Richard,
So if ASBOs did not prove a fertile area, how about PFI? It is rarely off the Rottweiler’s lips.
Michael.
Michael Carragan (Labour)
Member of Parliament for West Bromwich West
Michael, hi, and thanks for the suggestion. I’ve looked into it, and I am sorry to say that PFI has not so far exactly been a transformative influence upon health provision in Ipswich. No new hospital, not so much as a new ward. The sole achievement to date of private finance in the Suffolk Health Trust area is a small annexe to Ipswich General, providing an outpatients’ service in prosthetics and orthotics. I am not quite sure whether posing with a wooden leg is exactly the publicity that is going to get me on to the shortlist for ministerial office, but I am past caring. I have fixed up to visit the new facility, with Geoff Howard of the
Crier
in tow again (plus a photographer) on 19 April.
Tonight – you, me, beer?
Richard.
Richard Slater (Labour)
Member of Parliament for Ipswich
House of Commons London SW1A 0AA
11 April 2005
Dear Ms Hayton,
Thank you for your letter of 2 April, raising an issue of concern. May I suggest that you attend at my monthly constituency surgery, which will be held this Saturday, 16 April, in the Crawford & Phillips Memorial Hall, Felixstowe Road, Ipswich, between 9.30 a.m. and 12 noon. I hope that a 10.30 a.m. appointment will be convenient for you; if not, please phone the hall that morning on Ipswich 253440, and my secretary will fix an alternative time for you.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Slater, MP.