Title : Reputations in the Gutter
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Reputations in the Gutter
This was not meant to happen.As he dispatched his crack legal team for this final push in the County Court in Carmarthen last Thursday, the chief executive of Carmarthenshire County Council, Mark James, must have been confident of victory. By the end of the day he would have an order forcing the Thompsons to sell their home in weeks rather than months.
The lines had all been carefully prepared. She had brought it all on herself, his lawyers would say, and Mr James, the victim in all this, had been left with no other choice. Justice would be served in an Old Testament kind of way, with no mercy or compassion.
The Thompsons would be homeless, and the council would not rehouse them because, it would be argued, they had made themselves intentionally homeless.
If all of that did not stop her blogging, Dyfed Powys Police might be persuaded to press charges for harassment. They had, after all, been very cooperative and interviewed Mrs Thompson under caution. He might even apply to have her made bankrupt as she was unable to pay the massive legal bills he had run up.
In the event, the hearing at the County Court on Thursday was little short of a disaster for Mr James.
The Thompsons will remain in their home for the next 10 years provided they can come up with £250 a month, and the crushing court costs were slashed by the judge, who added what was left to the damages bill. Mr James will have to find £22,000 out of his own pocket to pay off his lawyers.
It remains to be seen whether Dyfed Powys Police will take Mr James's latest batch of complaints any further, but if nothing else, the PR debacle of the so-called "daft arrest" which triggered this whole saga should make them think twice, and it is hard to believe that the CPS would be willing to play ball.
If that was not all bad enough, the wheels are starting to come off the carefully constructed narrative which Mr James has spun, and the reputation he has been so determined to protect by silencing one of his most trenchant critics through the application of overwhelming legal force is beginning to look rather tarnished.
You can read Jacqui Thompson's own account here and a very anodyne BBC report here.
Gutter
What the BBC report does not tell you about is a development in the case which raises serious questions about Mr James's conduct and caused raised judicial eyebrows on Thursday.
During the course of the proceedings, counsel for the chief executive was asked who would be the recipient of the damages - Mr James in person or the county council, which is what councillors had been told.
The question caught Mr James's crack team on the hop, and they had to ask for leave to confer with their client.
In due course, the court was told that Mr James had changed his mind, as was his right, and that he could "stuff the money in the gutter" if he so chose.
It is only fair to point out that those words were uttered not by Mr James but his counsel, who had just spoken to his client. But they were spoken nonetheless, and it is fair to assume that they reflect Mr James's own response when asked.
The image of the most highly paid council chief executive in Wales contemptuously chucking £36,000 in the gutter in a county where average earnings are around the £20,000 mark is not going to go down well with the public.
Worse still, the controversial indemnity branded "unlawful" by the Wales Audit Office, was granted after the then Executive Board was told that Mr James would repay any damages to the council:
The Head of Paid Service has confirmed that he is not motivated by a wish to benefit financially and that accordingly should his action be successful any damages awarded to him will be paid over to the Authority and will not be kept by him.'
(Minutes of Executive Board meeting, 23 January 2012).
Two years later in January 2014 the WAO issued two public interest reports taking the council to task for the indemnity and the unlawful pension arrangements it had approved in what amounted to secrecy.
Mr James "stood aside" while a police investigation took place, and an Extraordinary Meeting of the council was held to discuss the findings. Councillors were told once again that Mr James would pay the damages to his employer, even though Mr James had told the press that he might give it to charity.
Mr James would certainly have been aware of the statement made to the Executive Board in January 2012. He was there in person, after all.
It is now clear that both the Executive Board and Full Council were misled, and took crucial decisions on the basis of statements which turned out not to be true.
And things may be about to get worse for Mr James because questions are once again being asked about the statement he made to the Madaxeman blog in 2011. It was that statement which triggered the libel case, with Mr James claiming that it had been shown to councillors and approved by them.
Reputations
It is not just Mr James's reputation that has taken a knock here. The Jacqui Thompson affair has now rumbled on for the best part of six years, and has hung like a millstone around the necks of three council leaders: Meryl Gravell (Independent), who was leader when the indemnity was approved; Kevin Madge (Labour) who was a member of the Executive Board which approved it and who went on to defend it; and now Emlyn Dole (Plaid) who inherited the mess and has taken to arguing that the affair is an entirely personal matter for Mr James.
Worse than that, the affair has tarnished the reputation of the entire council.
The idea that this was all an entirely personal matter is not how Mr James or the council portrayed matters until the chickens began to come home to roost and expose the disastrous nature of the advice dispensed by the chief executive in first adopting the indemnity clause and then triggering it.
Here is Mr James himself writing in Y Gair, the council's in-house staff magazine after his court victory. The first paragraph makes it abundantly clear that this was not an entirely private matter:
As you may have heard or read in the press, the Council last month had to defend an action in the High Court, by a blogger, Jacqueline Thompson of Llanwrda. This was a significant case, not only for the Council, but for local authorities generally. The result has been welcomed by Councils across the UK.
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Costs
To make matters worse for Mr James, the judge clearly felt that the legal costs the chief executive said he had incurred in bringing the action were inordinate, and the bill was cut from £21,763 to £14,348, with that amount being added to the damages.
Mr James will now have to raid his own piggy bank to pay the bills he has run up.
Even the reduced bill of £14,348 is reckoned by those with experience of these matters to be eye wateringly high for what in legal terms should have been a pretty straight forward affair, but Mr James required the services of no fewer than three barristers, including Mr Adam Speker, whose speciality is media law (libel and slander).
The judge appears to have been as baffled by Mr Speker's involvement in this hearing as everybody else, and he duly struck out that particular claim.
The fee for filling out a simple four-and-a-bit page summary of the costs Mr James wanted reimbursed was a modest £880, not including VAT. Not bad for something that would take about an hour to knock together, with time off for tea and hobnobs.
Elections
Whether by accident or design, the hearing took place just days before the county council goes into purdah ahead of May's local government elections. This means that the first opportunity councillors will have to digest the outcome of the case will not be until the summer.
They should have a lot of questions for their most senior employee and ask themselves whether a Head of Paid Service who "changed his mind" is someone fit to remain in post.
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