A personal view by East Devon leader Paul Arnott.
Did all you readers of the Herald and Journal publications enjoy the aurora borealis over East Devon? Yes, neither did I.
Like thousands of others on Saturday morning, I put the kettle on, and checked my phone only to see local Facebook pages bursting with images of the kind of night sky displays you’d normally have to cruise to Norway to see. The more I swiped up, the more I realised that my decision not to pass out on the sofa at the end of a busy week but to tuck up in bed at a respectable time instead, had caused me to miss a spectcle we may never see again this far south in my lifetime.
It's a classic little boy called wolf story. How many dozens of times had we stayed up for a predicted solar eclipse or a meteor shower only to witness a cloudy night with nothing whatsoever to see? It was in this cynical spirit that I lay my head on my pillow last Friday, only to miss a spectacle which three thousand years ago would have had ancient peoples cartwheeling around Stonehenge.
Back then ancient folk might have ascribed immense meaning to the spectacle, optimists predicting the beginning of a new era, pessimists predicting some great doom yet to come. Modern science has denied us all these mumbo-jumbo interpretations but for me, having now absorbed glorious images of multiple church towers in East Devon set against a pallet of pinks and mauves, it will always help me remember a propitious week at work.
I was extremely honoured last week to be re-elected by the majority of councillors at East Devon District Council to be its Leader for a fifth year. In June, the council will celebrate 50 years since it was set up and until I became Leader in 2020, the role had always been filled by a Conservative.
I do realise that for many readers this will not be gripping current affairs news up there with a hard right Tory MP defecting to Labour, but it is worth noting. I have always believed in my more than a quarter century living in East Devon and Exeter that it is a moderate place, centrist, more liberal-minded than patronising metropolitan stereotypes portray. In district elections in 2019 and in 2023, that’s how the majority voted, and in 2022 in a national parliamentary election too when Richard Foord was elected.
To be frank, however, much more important than my taking on the leadership for year five, on the same evening we appointed a new Chief Executive, Tracy Hendren. The excellent Tracy had won the job against an impressive 20 applicants in an exhausting and rigorous process. This really is a moment to celebrate.
It is the first time this crucial role for the people of East Devon has changed hands in more than two decades. That was a time when the way senior officers dealt with looking into both a planning scandal eleven years ago, and an enquiry into a failure to safeguard in 2016 after ex-councillor John Humphreys had been arrested on sex crime charges against young persons, concerned thousands of local people, not least me!
Those officers no longer work at East Devon. We now have a fresh and reinvigorated new management, and we begin again. I fully expect some very challenging matters to emerge from hidden recesses, but we have the leadership at both councillor and officer level to deal with it. I may have missed the aurora borealis, but for me the sky over East Devon looks a look clearer now.
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