The pub landlord in office

The 'Conservative' Mayor of Saffron Walden

The Mayor of Saffron Walden is a local publican, a member of the Conservative Party who, according to an interview (not online) in this week's Saffron Walden Weekly News, believes in, erm, nationalisation. (Some mistake, surely?) He wants to re-nationalise 'the utilities' (by which people normally mean gas, electricity, water supply and possibly the telecoms system) and the railways.

He also declares that he hates the banks which his Party Leader is busting a gut to preserve from the envious and determined predations of Paris and Frankfurt and rightly so because, inter alia, they

• create 10% of the nation's wealth 
• pay 11% of the total UK tax bill: £54billion or about half the cost of the NHS 
• directly employ a million people — 4 per cent of the national workforce. 

Mister Mayor's If I Ruled The World dream is — wait, you'll love this — a not-for-profit bank. A 'people's bank'. He kids you not, it would seem. 

Apparently Mayor ('I'm a Tory, me') Treadwell also hates insurance companies, which 

• pay nearly 7% of all UK corporation tax: £10billion+ or about what the Home Office costs
• directly employ close to 300,000 people in the UK 

Maybe someone could ask Mister ('No, honest, I really am a Tory') Mayor to hazard a guess at how many of his electors commute daily, in not-even-standing-room carriages, from his hour-by-train-from-the-City town, to jobs in the finance houses of London — or indeed how many of them work in the town's many banks and insurance offices. Or how many thousands more of his electors are anxious for Britain's banks and insurers to survive and prosper, not least because their pensions, not to mention their (life) savings, are locked up in them.

Let's hope for the Mayor's sake that he doesn't need to go into any of his local bank branches during his year in office. It would be just awful if one of those pesky bank-employee voters were to recognise him. I mean, embarrassing or what?

The Mayor loves his holidays in Majorca, he tells us, although maybe this year he is planning a simple camping holiday — outside St Paul's, maybe? Lovely. He could enjoy jolly chats with like-minded souls (admittedly less fragrant and nattily-suited than himself) who would no doubt overlook his being a leading member of the Conservative Party (/facepalm/) and a capitalist landlord to boot, and rush joyfully to share their frugal collations with a man who so clearly identifies with at least some of their lefty, Flat-Earther nostrums.

The Conservative Mayor tells the townspeople that his hero is the wannabe Nemesis of his own party, Nigel Farage. Well, maybe some of Mister Mayor's ideas are straight out of the Gordon Brown Big Red Book of Stupid but he is not alone among Tories in admiring Farage, though it's a bit rich for a Conservative Councillor — nay, a Conservative Mayor in office — to say it out loud in black and white, even if half the townsfolk would agree. As they would. I mean, it's just not the thing, is it?

I dunno. His Tory colleagues in Saffron Walden must be chewing the carpet at what their Mayor has done for their next campaign with this stinker of an interview. The next Council meeting should be hilarious, though. And the letters from the usual suspects in next week's paper will be worth reading. Chortle.

Maybe UKIP could give Mayor Treadwell a berth when his year in chains is up? Or even the hard-line nationalisers of the Saffron Walden Labour Party? (Stop laughing. It does exist, I tell you.)