The Reform leader of Warwickshire County Council, Rob Howard, didn’t impress all that many people with his first few actions. The Coventry Telegraph lists amongst his many accomplishments him choosing to choosing to go on holiday over attending his very first meeting, and the time he told a newspaper that his council didn’t actually have any policies – despite their presumably rabid campaigning to get in.
Anyway, he’s gone now – claiming that now he actually discovered what the job he fervently applied for actually entails it turns out his health isn’t up to it. He’ll remain a councillor but no longer the council leader.
Fear not though, council leaders have deputies, so up steps councillor George Finch to run the place. Finch has the relatively unique attribute of being 18 years old.
I don’t know the guy, but it seems unlikely to me that just as I was leaving school I would have had quite the breadth of knowledge and experience to make a good job of running a budget of not far off half a billion pounds, managing 5000 employees and being responsible for the lives of 600,000 constituents.
When asked to sum his political self up in a few words, the first word he picked was Brexit, a policy that increasingly few people believe was good, and an increasing number want undone at least in part. Perhaps he’s forgotten a few of the details – Finch would of course have been aged around 9 years old when the Brexit vote happened, and 13 when the policy actually came into being.
The whole episode can be summed up in one reaction to the story The Coventry Telegraph shares:
Residents deserve better.
[…] 18 year old leader of Warwickshire council we covered recently, George Finch, has also failed to declare that in between running an entire council and attending […]