In the sleepy world of Worcestershire Politics, the “Chain Gang” is one of the few sources of real excitement for many locals.
This is an assortment of mayors and mayoresses appointed by the various District Councils of Worcestershire, from the City of Worcester itself, all the way to the heady heights of the Malvern Hills.
Heads turning
They cut ribbons, they present each other with flowers. It’s all very lovely.
But a new addition to their number is likely to set some heads turning.
we refer to Cllr Sue Eacock, the newly-elected Reform UK councillor for Headless Cross & Oakenshaw in Redditch.
She isn’t exactly the sort of person you’d normally put in place for a role like this.
The appointment of Cllr Eacock to the role of Mayor seems to have come as a surprise to most people, not least, herself.
A more usual choice for a civic mayor would be someone with basic managerial skills to keep control of a busy council chamber, perhaps coupled with a friendly face for the cameras, and, if possible, a good public speaking voice.
Sadly, Cllr Eacock possesses exactly none of these.
What she does have however is a highly active social media feed.
400k posts
Since she joined X (then called Twitter) in May 2011, according to her own profile, she has posted to the platform no fewer than 440,700 times. Bloody hell!
That means that in the last 15 years, she has managed to post an average of eighty times a day. I hope that her work as a councillor isn’t going to get in the way!
Now we wouldn’t want to imply that Sue is one of your garden-variety social-media addicts who simply shares every post she comes across.
She’s an intelligent, sophisticated lady. And as such, she likes to add a thoughtful little bit of wit and humour, all of her very own.
As a councillor, she chooses her words a little more carefully these days. But this was not always so.
Such as a reshare of a photo of Tony Blair in 2022, which asks “What’s the first thought that comes to mind?” and Sue, answers, most wittily, with the single word “Gay!”
Or a reshare of a photo of a Great White Shark, a year later, with the biting observation from Sue, about how wonderful it would be if we could have one for the English Channel.
The posts which are most likely to cause some difficulty, however are the ones where she commented on things like diversity and highly visible black people.
So the question now is this:
Does it still matter that the newly-appointed Mayor of Redditch is a hyper-active right-wing troll, who wants Mayor Sadiq Khan thrown into the stocks at the Tower of London, on suspicion of celebrating Eid?
Or perhaps the people of Redditch will be rather glad to find that, at long last, they’ve got the kind of Mayor who’s not afraid to stand up for the interests of the all-important “man-eating shark in the English Channel” demographic.
