How address books snobs tried to annexe historic Essex town (From Echo)

How address books snobs tried to annexe historic Essex town

10:20pm Thursday 27th May 2010 in Memories By Tom King

ON the map, Essex looks a rock solid presence. The rest of the world may exist in a state of permanent flux, but Essex, presided over by its county council, flying the proud banner of the three sea-axes, passes unmolested through the centuries.

As long as the Thames and the Stour flow through their present courses, so long will Essex’s borders stand. Or so you might think.

History, though, tells a different story from geography. The historic message is that no Essex resident can afford to drop their guard, or they may wake up living in foreign parts.

An extraordinary episode of attempted piracy is recalled in the memoirs of Arthur Butler, a one-time political journalist who became an expert lobbyist in Whitehall and Westminster.

At the age of 81, Mr Butler has finally decided to retire. No longer professionally bound by the need for discretion, he has spilled the beans on some bizarre episodes, straight out of Yes Minister.

For inspired, category-A looniness, however, nothing can quite match the plan to hand Colchester over to Suffolk.

This weird stratagem emerged as a bastard offshoot of the local authority reforms leading to the 1972 Local Government Act, the biggest shake-up of councils since the 19th century.

It was a time of feverish lobbying and, for Arthur Butler, a baptism of fire.

He found himself without a job following the demise of his newspaper, the Daily Sketch. He briefly toyed with an offer from Carry On director Gerald Thomas to write Carry On Fleet Street. In the end, he accepted a job from a public relations agency, Partnerplan.

Back then, PR was a far more slap-happy world, run, in Mr Butler’s words, by “scallywag and smooth-talking men with pink carnations in their buttonholes”.

The former newspaperman feels he was able to inject “a touch of journalistic professionalism” to the industry. He found a ready market. At this point in their history, councils needed all the professional help they could get.

Mr Butler’s first job was to organise a campaign on behalf of the city of Cardiff. Under the reorganisation plans, Cardiff was due to lose its unitary status, and become a mere district within the new county of East Glamorgan.

In a textbook campaign, Mr Butler marshalled grassroot resistance, targeted decision makers, and gathered industrial quantities of newspaper column-inches and TV footage.

Far from being downgraded, Cardiff was granted new status as a county in its own right. The Financial Times hailed a “perhaps precedent-setting political public relations campaign run by the City of Cardiff”.

In the wake of this success, Mr Butler found himself headhunted by other local authorities. Late in 1971, he answered the phone to an agitated bigwig at Essex County Council.

The tale this Essex man had to tell concerned a land grab attempt of mind-boggling magnitude, a heist flagrant enough to make even Robert Mugabe blush.

In Mr Butler’s words: “Local government minister Peter Walker had been persuaded by some Tory snobs, who disliked having an Essex address, that this ancient town [Colchester] and a large area of land should be transferred to the more upmarket county of Suffolk.”

Butler says: “There was no political logic for this, it came down to sheer prejudice against Essex.”

This may sound extraordinary, but the extent of county snootiness among the traditional squierarchy should never be underestimated.

Our present Essex generation, accustomed though we are to Essex man and girl sneers, has it easy. It is hard to appreciate the level of snobbery directed at the county back in the Sixties and Seventies.

Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s only son, lived in East Bergholt, on the Suffolk side of the River Stour. His attitude typified the shire-dweller’s approach.

Unflummoxed by the knowledge that his father had been an Essex MP, he was firmly in favour of the annexation of Colchester and points north “because I object to seeing Essex out of my window.”

The Colchester pirates might have had the ear of Peter Walker, but they swiftly found themselves pitted against two formidable political operators.

One of them was the veteran parliamentarian Sir Bernard Braine, MP for south east Essex, the constituency covering Rayleigh and Benfleet, who later became the first Castle Point MP, and Father of the House of Commons..

Although not directly connected with Colchester, Sir Bernard was fiercely loyal to Essex as a whole, and ever ready to take up the cudgels if he felt that the county had been casually disparaged.

The other protagonist, of course, was Mr Butler. For him, the Colchester campaign was more than just a public relations contract. It was personal. Like Sir Bernard he, too, was rooted in Essex. Raised in Gidea Park, he had been educated at Chingford and Wanstead grammar schools.

“Essex did a lot for me. I regarded myself as an Essex lad. I felt a strong personal commitment to this campaign,” he says.

Sir Bernard and Mr Butler joined forces, with the MP as front man and Mr Butler advising on the campaign behind the scenes.

It was the sort of role he had always coveted, even as a schoolboy, the role of “grey eminence”.

Mr Butler paints himself as the invisible man, unknown to the public, but quietly influential, and an expert on tactics. With the battle honours of Cardiff on his CV, he also knew how to win local government feuds.

He advised Sir Bernard on which newspapers to approach, which people to talk to, how to phrase a press release.

“It was all over quite quickly” he says. “With Bernard entering the lists, secretary of state Peter Walker backed off, and Colchester was allowed to remain in Essex.”

So ended the audacious attempt to kidnap England’s oldest recorded borough in the name of address-book snobbery.

Of course, all this happened 40 years ago. Nowadays, Essex borders are impregnable, aren’t they? Some chance.

This week, the coalition government announced the effective winding down of the East of England regional development agency, the last vestige of John Prescott’s regionalisation policy.

The policy was designed to abolish traditional English counties, replacing them with nine EC regions.

Without reference to the public or parliament, an East of England regional assembly was set up, all ready to absorb the powers of county councils. The attempt to annexe Colchester looks small beer by comparison.

Thirteen centuries ago, the county of Essex was carved out of the dark ages, a world of feuding warlord, predatory pirates and border-raiders. Once created, Essex required constant defence against these raiders and pirates. Arthur Butler’s book is a reminder nothing much has changed since then.

l People, Politics and Pressure Groups – Memoirs of a Lobbyist, by Arthur Butler is published by Picnic @ £12.99 ISBN 9780955861369