The Westminster Whistleblowers: Shirley Porter, homes for votes and twenty years of scandal in Britain’s rottenest borough
Paul Dimoldenberg
London: Politicos, 2006, £12.99, p/b
The author was a Labour councillor in Westminster during Porter’s ‘reign of terror’ and was instrumental in eventually bringing her down. With an insider’s view he has written an immensely detailed account of this extraordinary episode of what Tony Frewin called ‘demographic cleansing’ – the attempt to rid Westminster of its Labour voters by squeezing them out of the borough. Since the outline of the story is familiar, what interested me most was the enormous turnover of senior council staff as they were either fired by Porter or fled the scene, unable to stand up to her. It is not always possible to identify the guilty parties but in this version of the story they were the weak-willed or career-minded officers of the council who knew what was afoot, knew it was illegal but did nothing. Among the Westminster council’s senior staff there was not one person willing to tell Porter to ‘Fuck off’ and march straight out to the newspapers to blow the whistle, or even to go to their union or professional association and begin proceedings against their loopy, tyrannical boss.
The Thatcher/Blair duo’s greatest achievement was getting home-ownership in Britain up to around 70%. There’s nothing like having to worry about mortgage payments to reduce the uppityness of the average British citizen.