Marlow (O.G.)

Refreshing to note it isn't only Labour councillors who are corrupt in Doncaster. Sentencing the town's former Conservative group leader John Dainty to 15 months for taking a £5,000 bribe to smooth a 1994 planning application, judge Christopher Metcalf condemned his conduct as something which "struck at the heart of democracy".

Food for thought for Donny's new broom chief executive David Marlow, whose management - speak ambitions for the town - "Transformational Goals" - have been inflicted as tedious screensavers on all council computers. Writing a character reference for Dainty's court defence. Marlow described the bent burgher as "a man of strong principles and integrity". A goal of the "own" rather "transformational" variety, perhaps.

Private Eye 1061 23 Aurgust 2002

Former Tory Councillor

Former Tory councillor Louise Borrows failed to convince Doncaster magistrates that she was acting in self-defence when she was found guilty of attacking three children with a whip after a window in her house had been smashed. A 13-year-old boy was left with bruising to his left leg after being hit three times; a nine-year-old boy was hit twice; and a 12-year-old girl was slapped as she attempted to ride off on her bicycle.

The magistrates gave Borrows a six-month community rehabilitation order and ordered her to pay compensation of £75 each to both boys, plus costs of £300.

Unabashed, Borrows - who was accompanied by her partner, Labour councillor Keith Coulton - announced that she supports government policy on anti-social behaviour and has applied to join Doncaster Labour Party.

With a criminal record and brass neck of a giraffe, she should fit in well.

Private Eye 1063 20th September 2002

AH SOLE

COLIN WEDD, former leader of Doncaster council and chairman of its racecourse committee, really should have been a detective or a reporter such is his obsession with getting the facts.

Last year he flew to Pisa on a five-day “fact finding” freebee to investigate the running of the local racecourse (Eye 1022). Now he’s just back from another five-day “fact finding” jaunt – this time to Japan “to assess the economic impact of Kyoto’s horse-racing industry and newly developed airport in Kansai”. Wedd was accompanied by his wife Constance, Tory councillor Barbara Hoyle and her husband Derek.

The group was led by Doncaster chamber of commerce director Neville Dearden, who mysteriously says of Kyoto: “The similarities between our two towns is clear.” Whatever did he mean?

Perhaps he was thinking of one of the objects of the group’s interest, Kansai international airport. Since opening in 1994 it has been environmental and economic disaster. The project came in twice the original estimates and labours under a deficit of some $1.5bn, 30 percent of which is funded by local taxpayers. Commercially it’s a flop because major airlines are unwilling to pay its exorbitant fees. Billions of yen are needed for work to stop the runways flooding because the island on which the airport is built is sinking into the sea.

In 1990 Private Eye 736 wrote about the Kansai project as an example of a corrupt Japanese practice called dango, in which construction companies do secret deals to keep contract prices high with the aid of generous bribes to officials. In 1997, around the time Donny’s bent councillors started to have their collars felt. Hattori Tsuneronri, a deputy transport minister and president of Kansai International Airport Company, was arrested and charged with accepting a 2.7m yen bribe from a contractor. But that can’t be the sort of “similarity” Mr Dearden has in mind.

 PS: Cllr Wedd clearly regarded the Eye’s call to ask about his trip as impertinent. But he did say, before hanging up, that the history of Kansai airport was “all news to me”. For a “fact-finding” expedition, he seems to have come home with very meager facts.

Private Eye No. 1068 29th November 2002