PFCC election choices: Rock, Paper….. and Gun???
Ah the local police fire and crime commissioner elections, lets be honest now, the run up to casting a vote in these relatively new political appointments do not tend to ignite the fires of passion within the locals. They are overshadowed by being paired with the local elections for ward Councillors, something that in itself can never hope to generate more than mild voter apathy and serve as a protest vote against the main governing party.
For most people, while you may at some point have need to email and pester your local Councillor about an issue of overflowing bins or potholes needing to be repaired, by contrast the chances are that you will never have any reason to meet or contact your local crime commissioner. Their role is one of oversight and governance of Police & Fire services, being responsible for the hiring of Police & Fire Chiefs to manage the day to day operations of each service.
Even if you ever have need to complain about either service, then it is the staff of the commissioner’s office who deal with it, the person actually elected being a relatively unknown entity to the average voter.
The upcoming choice for our new police fire and crime commissioner is further buried into relative obscurity by competing with far more entertaining online content, which pushes said content higher up the search results for anyone trying to get some background info on the candidates.
If you were to go and use Mr. Google to search 2nd May, Police, Elections & Interviews, you would come across the now infamous 2nd May 2017 interview by a politician wanting to get elected and setting out her stall by explaining her promises for Police officer recruitment. If you’ve never seen it before you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a parody skit by a comedian.
In years to come, much like John Prescott punching the man who threw an egg at him in 2001 or Margaret Thatcher pushing ahead with the Community Charge in 1989, this interview will live on as one of the biggest political gaffes during an election and is the very epitome of a car crash interview.
How on earth can a local election of such a politically obscure person ever hope to compete with that.
Well like everything else, here in the county of the People’s republic of Northamptonshire, we always try to buck the trend and do things slightly differently. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year then I’d wager that even those not normally engaged with politics have a good idea of who the incumbent PFCC of Stephen Mold is, due to his numerous gaffes and involvement in scandals that have made multiple national headlines on a regular basis throughout his tenure.
He succeeded in putting Northampton on the map by demonstrating how critical a role the PFCC is, by showing us just how much havoc one lone elected person can inflict on a town. Corrupt Police officers can only flourish if their actions are covered up by their senior officers who encourage and nurture a culture of wrongdoing, bullying and punishing those who speak up against it. Domestic abusers can only be stopped if their victims feel empowered enough to come forward knowing they will be believed. The victims having their abusers crimes covered up, with senior Police officers they report such crimes to, standing shoulder to shoulder with their abusers as best mates is just one example. This rotten culture all feeds down from the very top, so ensuring the PFCC actually holds the Chief of Police to account as he or she is supposed to is crucial. Currently we are seeing the kind of person that gets through when no vetting or basic checks are done prior to any appointment of a Chief Constable, with the PFCC then avoiding the awkward decision to sack the Chief, instead passing the buck.
The Fire Brigade must also not be overlooked in this, they too demand strong leadership, but from someone with experience of the job, ideally from having been at the sharp end. Having slid down a Fireman’s pole is not essential, but doing so helps to build a rapport with your teams you will manage.
The litany of failed fire appointments speak for themselves. The first appointment openly coming out and confirming they have no experience or knowledge of sliding down any poles, Fireman’s or otherwise and whose only experience of being on the job comes from a previous professional working relationship being under the commissioner as a monitoring officer.
The further appointment approaching the realms of parody, with the suspension and investigation by the IOPC of Police Chief Constable Nick Adderley as something to aspire to, has Nikki Watson, a former Deputy Chief Constable sharing not just a similar name and rank, but equally bringing with her, her own ongoing IOPC investigation making her unable to take up the role, one that she is notably lacking any experience of firefighting in.
The old adage of pay peanuts and get monkeys has a lot of relevance and mileage here. While we the good folk of Northants cannot pick and choose who our Police and Fire Chiefs are, we DO have the choice to put into post the person who can pick who they are, and also have the benefit of seeing the consequences of making a very bad choice when casting that vote. The current PFCC being said bad choice, with all of his decisions appearing to be motivated by nepotism. Even when a situation that needs to be dealt with is a mess of his own making, he shies away from making the difficult decisions needed to clean up his own mess, passing the buck to the IOPC to deal with Nick Adderley while we all foot the bill of what is now an 8 month suspension salary totalling £110,000 as of May 2024.
Quite simply, elect a bumbling buffoon into a position they are woefully incapable of and ye shall be blighted with a term of bumbling buffoonery.
Therein lies the difficultly, most people generally WILL happily vote a buffoon into office and excuse away the consequences due to tribal political thinking. You only need to look at 2 current sitting MPs of Diane Abbott and Chris Grayling, both vying for the title of biggest number of gaffes and embarrassing headlines, with their constituents voting them in not for their actual record, but because they will only vote for a certain political party. Voters mistakenly seeing this tribal dedication to one’s party as some form of loyalty is a very dangerous catalyst for empowering politicians to act as they please, and something I’d encourage you to consider thinking long and hard about before voting in this pivotal election for the county.
I am what you might call a swing voter, in that apart from the Greens who have never stood a candidate in any seat I could vote in, since 1999 I’ve voted for every major party in some capacity. I’ve had some red lines I couldn’t cross for a certain election. I wrote about them here in 2017 and my views seem to have stood the test of time far better than the named leader’s careers. This doesn’t mean I write them off totally and that I’d never vote for these parties, just they need to address certain issues in order to win me back as a potential voter.
My message of the moment is very much, for a local election, vote for the person and the policies, NOT the party!
So with that preamble out of the way we move onto our 3 choices, with a choice that mirrors most general elections options in terms of rock, paper, scissors, each party seeming better than the last on one policy pledge, but having an area where the next party outshines them in a never-ending circle, where no one party or candidate is overall superior to the others.
Or perhaps not?
Rock
We start with clenched fist of rock in the form of Danielle Stone, representing the Labour party.
I’ve never really come across Danielle Stone in her career as a Councillor to date, this is not a bad thing as I approach her record with a very open mind and no preconceptions about what she represents and what her approach to the role will be. Her background is mainly one of education outside of her politics. This is not an essential skillset for the role of PFCC, nor does it appear instantly obvious as a transferable skill to enable her to deal with managing Police & Fire services. That said having worked in the public sector in frontline services, I’d agree she has an understanding of how broken and bureaucratic the public sector is and she likely has experience of the challenges of trying to cut through all of that.
When I was a hiring manager for an investment bank living and working in Singapore, I used to have to review many CVs before interviews for staff that would work in my department, one where we supported traders and bank staff across the globe. One of the best candidates I ever interviewed and hired did not look the best on paper, but she was a really great all rounder, giving a great interview showing she could adapt herself into any role and leverage on her skills. This event 17 years ago still sticks with me now about not judging a book by its cover and taking the time to find out more about the person. So even if being a teacher in her 70s doesn’t instantly fit the bill, I wanted to give Danielle every opportunity to set her stall out and show me why she was deserving of my vote.
I listened to the hustings at Northampton Uni last week and took stock of some of what Danielle said. The role of PFCC is currently a political one and despite her mild comments about the role not needing to be political, she failed to say anything to convince me she truly wanted to change this. She is standing on a Labour ticket so I appreciate she has to represent the interests of the party funding her campaign and her deposit, however she mentioned Labour 5 times during the hustings when answering questions about the role and local issues. Many of these comments had no reference to anything she would have powers to change and appeared to be about what an incoming Labour government would do. I’ll accept having the PFCC as the same colour as the main party of government will create synergies and open up opportunities for local change, but we are not at that stage yet, so its both presumptuous and conflates issues for voters and encourages the very broad tribal voting I am so against.
On a personal level I made contact with her in June 2023 about my own issues with regards to Nick Adderley’s corrupt behaviour and Stephen Mold being aware and seeming to take no actions, appearing to be covering this up. This was all prior to Nick Adderley’s fraud being made public.
I didn’t tip my hand about everything I was sat on, but wanted to make her aware of the corruption issues and to gauge if she was worthy of my vote, by trying to determine what, if any actions she would take to appropriately sanction Nick Adderley if she got voted in.
The response was polite but felt ultimately dismissive telling me more of what she could not do, rather than taking on board the issues and at least feigning interest in changing them with what she could do. Very much a politician’s answer and not a great one at that.
I’ve since contacted her twice in October 2023 and more recently January 2024, again about issues relating to other lies Nick Adderley has told that were covered up by Stephen Mold to see if voting her into office would bring about any change.
Both of these emails were ignored which naturally impacted my opinion on how she would approach issues regarding corruption if she replaced Stephen Mold and I had to contact her in an official capacity as PFCC when she was a lot busier.
Currently she is not an absolute NO from me, but she has done nothing to win me over, making me actively want to vote for her in favour of someone else. At best if there was no other candidate that was better, rather than spoil my ballot, I’d probably be forced to vote for her, which in itself is hardly an endorsement.
Paper
While the name Emberson doesn’t immediate resonate with “paper” in the same way Stone does with Rock, regular scandals making the broadsheet & tabloid headlines have been pretty much synonymous with being a member of the local Conservative party in Northants over the past decade. Mold, Bone & Nunn have all made the headlines with tales of sordid activities, all toiling away under the banner of the Conservative party who happily support them.
I’m limited by what I can judge Martyn Emberson on as a prospective candidate, mainly because he is quite elusive and doesn’t seem to want to put himself to the test of public scrutiny, by refusing media interviews. He was originally going to be at the hustings with his opponents last week but cancelled at the last minute.
Rather than try to sort out a new date for the original various media appointments that he dodged and bumped, the Conservative candidate opted instead to appear to show distain for voters, and ditch any potential reschedule of attending any hustings.
Me personally, were I trying to win voters over, being the continuity candidate for someone with a track record so colourful and chequered it looked like a kaleidoscope had shat itself, I would have tried a little harder to reschedule my diary and face some questions.
Alas no, as it seems for the person put forward to replace Mr Mold, he opted to ditch the bump!
With this in mind it makes it hard to know what he would do if elected that would win my vote in favour of the others. I was considering rewarding his absence by giving him the Roy Hattersley treatment.
For anyone not of a certain vintage who might not get the reference, on Wednesday 2nd June 1993, Roy Hattersley, the then Labour MP for Sparkbrook who had accepted the invitation from Have I Got News For You to take part as a panellist on the gameshow, cancelled on the morning of filming, leaving the show unable to source a replacement in time for transmission on Friday 4th June. Being the 3rd time this had happened the show went one step further than simply empty-chairing him, and instead replaced him with a tub of lard quoting that it was imbued with many of the same qualities.
To be totally fair to Martyn, his record at face value appears to be quite impressive in terms of the fire service, both having 34 years as a firefighter, with 9 as the Fire Chief in Northants. Perhaps if he loses the election he can consider stepping back into this role that we are in need of being filled.
Moving on from where he has been to where he is going, I have only his campaign leaflet and party soundbites over Twitter to try to determine what he might do that would make him the better choice.
His main campaign slogan includes the Tweet on 24th April with the very bizarre notion that Only a #Conservatives PFCC make Northamptonshire safer. Putting aside the caveman grammar, this is a line I could understand if they were saying Martyn personally can make the county safer than his predecessor, but this appears to be how only the party of Conservatives as a whole can do this. This is a strange position to take as they are currently the party in power, implying the county is NOT safe under them and only they can do better than themselves.
This line is repeated a lot on social media posts, such as the Tweet on April 19th in East Haddon, so is not just a one off typo to compliment the caveman grammar.
So the message I infer from this is vote Conservative to remove the current Conservative PFCC and put a Conservative PFCC into power who will make things safer than the current one.
Err right okay then.
How he will achieve this though does deserve a little more praise and recognition. He has promised in a tweet of April 13th how he will write “A new Police, Fire and Crime plan in consultation with you”
The plan being written by the PFCC is a mandatory legal requirement. This means Martyn is committed to doing the bare minimum expected of him in accordance with the law, so much so that he thinks this is something to impress & woo voters.
When you consider Mold appointed his monitoring officer Nicci Marzec as Fire Chief without following the legal requirements to hold a confirmation panel, failed to discharge his duties by performing any checks on Nick Adderley’s background claims of joining the Navy in 1981 at the age of 14 and then fighting in the Falklands War when he was only 15 before appointing him TWICE, and then compounded this by failing to actually sack Nick Adderley when this all came to light, actually having a PFCC who WILL obey and follow the legal requirements that the role demands IS actually quite a step up from the current clown show of Stephen Mold.
When doing the bare minimum is both an improvement on the last candidate and seen to be worthy of making the limited character space on a Tweet as a potential vote winner, this really doesn’t inspire confidence. The fact his own Twitter account is locked down and he fails to put himself before any public scrutiny means he is a total unknown in terms of what we would be letting ourselves in for with him.
I can therefore only judge his suitability on the basis of those who put him forward as their choice, the very same people who never actually deselected Stephen Mold as a candidate, meaning had he not bowed to public pressure and stood down, he would be standing for election with the backing of the same people who now hold Martyn Emberson in the same regard.
Since the first PFCC election of May 2016 these same people who made up the local Conservative ran Northants County Council managed to beat all others and get ahead of the cost of living crisis by declaring insolvency in 2018, leading to the biggest April Fools joke to date with the formation of 2 new unitary authorities of West Northants Council and North Northants Council coming into being on 1st April 2021, all run by the same Conservative Councillors and seeming to be on the same trajectory as their predecessor.
West Northants Council up until earlier this month was fronted by Jonanthan Nunn, a man whose position on domestic violence made the news in Private Eye in 2 subsequent issues. Mainly due to his stance of framing the claims of the 5 victims who came forward to speak about his violence toward them as baseless, somewhat contradicting the message of the “it only takes one” event.
An event where WNC got £800,000 of central government money to spend encouraging victims to come forward assuring them they would be believed and listened to with their message “it only takes one person to say enough is enough to challenge the attitudes and inappropriate behaviours of some men.”
It would seem in the case of Nunn it does not only take one, in fact it actually takes far far more than one, as even five women coming forward is not enough for any of them to be believed.
Nunn has yet to comment on what the threshold is that needs to be reached before they can be be believed. The WNC website page is currently down, no doubt waiting for confirmation of the actual number of women it takes so it can be amended.
The archived copy showing all the central government money awarded to Nunn, Mold and their colleagues lives on thanks to the Wayback Machine.
You might instantly cry out that Nunn has nothing to do with this election and my own words higher up the page were encouraging people to vote for people not party. I will stand by that statement and caveat it with looking at the character of the people both who you are voting for and who selected and backed them to go on the ballot paper. The very people who helped to select a local candidate have a very questionable record when it comes to how they approach wrongdoing and criminality of people in public office in their own party, not the best advert for putting trust in them to choose someone who will give suitable oversight to a service rife with corruption and scandal.
You just need to look at how, out of the pool of 63 Conservative Councillors in West Northants, only 4 took actions or spoke out against Jonathan Nunn when the 5 separate women came forward with historical allegations of violence against him.
The lady mayoress even came out publicly berating Cllr James Hill for doing so, asking where was his loyalty to a fellow Conservative, indicating that blind loyalty to your colleagues is what the party values most.
In the same way when Stephen Mold as the current PFCC dragged the name of the Conservatives and Northants through the mud, the Police Crime Panel, a committee intended to hold him to account, made up of 5 WNC Councillors and 5 NNC Councillors giving the 9 Conservatives Councillors any deciding vote, continually propped him up by looking the other way.
For this reason while Martyn may actually be a competent and decent bloke and worthy of voting for, the support of people who fail to speak out about domestic violence, nepotism and misfeasance and openly criticise anyone who does really is the kiss of death for his campaign. The lack of any public conversation to offer any challenge to the views of the electorate just cements it for me that Martyn is very much the continuity candidate, with no appetite to undo or correct any of the missteps of his predecessor.
An emphatic NO from me.
Gun
So having saved the best till last, we then move onto the scissors part of the metaphor, I could quote the late great Sean Connery in The Untouchables, about bringing a knife to a gunfight but I’m already stretching the metaphor beyond credibility as it is.
Suffice to say in place of scissors that can be bested in the game by being blunted by a rock, I’m offering up a gun as my alternative in the form of Ana Savage-Gunn who is backed by the Liberal Democrats.
First and foremost in what immediately got my attention and tipped the scales into being a potential voter winner, Ana while standing on a Liberal Democrat ticket for election, has announced that she has funded her own deposit, rather than being beholding to the party and donors. This is a strong show of character about Ana and how she is NOT a politician, merely seeing being elected into office as a stepping stone to other appointments, nor as a way to push a party political agenda. Ana speaks from the heart and puts herself forward as someone who wants to actually improve the county, and is taking positive action to do so. During hustings all of her comments were about actions she will take without any reference to wider political aims or aspirations of the party.
So being a person with some integrity is great, but does this translate into someone who can get things done? It is very easy to be swayed into voting by how slick someone’s advertising campaign is, or what a great orator they are.
I say this without shame as someone who voted Conservative at the last general election because I found Boris Johnson a very good political speaker, who connected with me and many others with his promises and the way he delivered them, not totally but far more than the other party leaders. I took him at his word with everything that he promised to do, but see now he was hopeless with details and had neither the intention nor ability to actually carry out much of what he promised.
Lacking a flashy campaign, with soundbites about party promises, I’ve only got Ana’s background and abilities to judge her against, so lets dive into what she has done that make her the best choice.
On 21st March 2024, she addressed the West Northants Council, proposing that all Councillors should be DBS checked in line with the Angiolini Inquiry as to how Wayne Couzens escaped detection for so long. This was before any recent mainstream media coverage of Jonathan Nunn and his criminal conviction for GBH against his then wife was supported by his other former partners. Getting ahead of the curve and proposing changes in a proactive way rather than becoming the news and needing to react to it, in how the current PFCC does is a quality that is lacking in many politicians now. You only need to look at Nick Adderley having an official complaint against him raised in July 2023, hitting the press in September 2023 and Mold being entirely reactive to public pressure, waiting until mid October until he actually suspended him.
In the same way Ana attended the Police Crime Panel meeting in February 2024 where she spoke out and formally complained about the sexist language of Stephen Mold, something that were any formal complaints not received, the PCP may well have succeeded in brushing under the carpet with their weak words of condemnation about him appearing purely performative. Danielle Stone was also in attendance and while she appeared to support the removal of Stephen Mold, she did not speak out in the same way as Ana did.
You might think at this stage this latest blog of mine is little more than a press release and advertising statement for Ana Savage-Gunn. In the same way of how others across the county have come out and offered to lend their vote to the Liberal Democrats for this to ensure Ana gets voted in, my support being offered here is quite obvious and I make no efforts to hide it. I mentioned previously how I consider myself a swing voter, not aligned to any particular party and how the last major vote that I cast was for Boris Johnson, which I hope goes someway to show that my support is not easily won.
The final and most decisive reason in what swayed me in voting for Ana Savage-Gunn is her background as a Police officer within Northants Police. For anyone who has read my previous blogs there is a lot to unpack with a choice of me putting support behind a former Police officer. The comments I have got have all revolved around the apparent contradiction of support for a former Police officer while also exposing corruption within Northants Police, with the assumption that through being a victim of Police corruption, I am naturally anti-Police.
Hard as it might be to square that circle, I am not inherently anti-Police. The sheer number of incidents where I have been harassed by officers and experienced them lying and covering up for their colleagues’ actions which in some cases have been criminal, means that yes, I find it very hard to trust the Police at face value and am always on my guard around them. They are not all inherently bad and I actually have a few officers within Northants Police that I consider to be very good friends that have helped me a lot this past 2 years.
What I am is anti-corruption and the terrible “us and them” culture within the Police whereby the “blue code” means officers back up their colleagues no matter what. The exact same culture that makes officers blind to the crimes that helped facilitate and encourage Wayne Couzens to become as bold as he did, whereas if they felt safe enough to speak out against him, could have meant he was stopped and Sarah Everard would still be alive today. This culture all feeds down from the very top, and with the man in charge of Northants Police shown to be a career fraudster setting the tone as it were. The morale of good officers who want to speak out against this rotten culture is being impacted by this and having a PFCC who firstly put this man in place without checking his background and then failed to remove him, brings with it its own question marks over that what motivated those decisions.
Recognising the morale as one of the the key issues and utilising her role as PFCC to change that is what is needed if the culture is going to change and the public are to ever regain any trust back in the Police. Ana having previously pounded the beat in the county from the role of PC up to Inspector means she has proper experience of how things are at the sharp end and is likely to gain more respect of the officers she will have overall authority over, through the Chief Constable.
Naturally running 2 services means whatever someone brings in terms of experience in 1 service, will mean a shortfall in the other, as very few senior leaders ever have experience in both. A former Police Inspector may not be the natural vote winner for any firefighters in terms of operational experience, however Ana has been bold enough to show she is willing to make the tough decisions and has gone on the record to state how she would reverse the appointment of Nikki Watson as Fire Chief and appoint someone with actual experience to run the fire service. If you do not have the required experience as a leader to know the nuts and bolts of the job that the people at the ground level who work for you do, then having the humility to appointment someone who does shows true leadership.
So having determined that Ana is neither a political sock puppet nor a one trick pony full of one liners just to win votes, but instead has demonstrable leadership experience and the will to make the tough choices needed to get value for money out of the budget she has, I want to know the actual person I’d be voting into office.
Having learned that during Covid, Ana worked in her mother’s care home and is quite happy to roll her sleeves up when needed, speaks volumes about her approach to her work and the commitment and dedication she will bring to the roll. I’ve spoken to Ana in person and found her to be personable and approachable, beyond that false way that all other politicians seem to exude. I believe her to be a capable person with a fundamental morality to her that she will extend to all staff she will lead to bring them with her, but also sensing she has a no-nonsense side to her, not shying away from making the hard choices that the role demands, no doubt honed from her years as a firearms officer.
So in conclusion of the three candidates we have to choose from next week, they all fit quite neatly into three separate categories.
Labour’s Danielle Stone has done nothing to deter me from voting for her, but equally she has done nothing to make me actively want to vote for her either. For some politicians, apathy from voters is potentially worse than scorn as it just means you’ve failed to connect enough to even be disliked.
Conservative’s Martyn Emberson has equally done nothing to sway voters through his notable absence, and when the default opinion of the Conservatives, both at a local and national level is one of sleaze and scandal, then his failure to challenge the narrative and move the dial means this is still an emphatic NO from me.
Liberal Democrat’s Ana Savage-Gunn was the outlier in this and someone who not really on my radar, despite her winning 15% of the vote in the 2021 PFCC elections and standing in the Wellingborough by-election when her colleague stepped down. The fact that she as a former Police officer has done so much through her actions to win my trust and support in such a short space of time speaks volumes of the positive force for change that she could be to others if she was elected. I do not throw around the emphatic YES lightly as it cheapens how tough it is to actually win me over, so when I say I’m voting for Ana Savage-Gunn on 2nd May 2024, know that she deserves it!
A Bride Too Far
While Nautical Nick, fluent in bullshit, had mastered the art of how to cheat and con his way into law enforcement with tall tales of invented exploits in the Navy, it appeared he could use a lesson or two in voter verification.
In this latest exclusive chapter in what seems like the never ending story of his charge sheet, he took the term “protect and serve” to a whole new level—protecting his mates in public office by obtaining fraudulent polling cards to vote them into power and serving notices of correction to the electoral commission as an afterthought. It’s clear that the Walt of Wootton Hall will need more than just a stolen CV or a fake medal to get out of this tangled web of wedded woes.
As the tales of crimes grow with ever increasing disbelief, they leave ordinary folk wondering how the hell he got away with so much fraud for so long. Quite frankly I’m astonished that in between all his affairs and fraud he is being investigated for, that this chap ever found time to walk the beat. His ego and the ever-increasing size of his lies proved to be his undoing as juggling multiple polling cards for multiple wives, fake war medals and fake officer caps proved too taxing leaving him to eventually fumble and drop the handcuffs as it were.
Now, as the legal drama unfolds, with the already problematic scandal of fraud and deceit that he built a career on culminating in a suspension and criminal investigation for him, this additional legal quagmire of a potential charge of voter fraud is yet another nail in the coffin.
This latest instalment just proves yet again what so many are saying to counter his supporters who are trying to play matters down by parroting how its a witch hunt because “he just wore medals on the wrong side”
ITS FAR MORE THAN JUST MEDALS!
Before you begin reading this latest chapter, please remember that without public pressure and media exposure, he will continue to bleed his salary from the taxpayer and laugh at the public that fund his lifestyle, as he arranges secret deals with his mates to cover up his crimes and let him off.
https://www.change.org/p/remove-nick-adderley-as-chief-constable-of-northamptonshire
To that end if you have not already, please take 30 seconds out of your day to sign and share the petition link above calling for his immediate dismissal, rather than the continual £14k per month salary he is STILL enjoying while the IOPC drag out his suspension, in the hopes we forget all about it so it can be brushed under the carpet.
The story of how he got to this point of no return has its origins at the same time as when his Walting helped start his series of stratospheric promotions under Peter Fahy.
2004 – 2005 proves to be a pivotal period in the Adderley backstory.
Already riding high on lying to get into the Police and promoted to being an Inspector and staff officer to the Chief Constable, Nick Adderley became even more emboldened. After all with the sheer ineptitude of no background checks done beyond a friendly handshake when joining in 1992, coupled with neolithic stupidity at no one ever challenging the basic contradiction of how a 25 year old could have a 10 year career in the Navy, rising to Commander, left him he pondering what else could he get away with.
Being impressed by lying and deceit seeing them as qualities to aspire to, Adderley was naturally inspired by reading of Isaac Lieberman and Zev Liebowitz pulling off a huge voting scam in Hackney in 1998. With Sam & Mark’s “With A little help from my friends” & Kelis’s “Trick Me” constantly blasting out on every radio channel and the lyrics resonating with him throughout the summer of 2004, Adderley set out to recreate his own poundshop version of voting fraud.
It would however be his obsession of collecting engagement rings to add to his collection like he was Thanos, that would prove to be his undoing. If Adderley had just left it at a single wife registered to vote at his house, this would never have even been noticed.
In 2003 while still married, Nick embarked upon his favourite pastime after Walting, one that allowed him to leverage upon many of the same transferable skills, the honourable pastime of adultery. When wife number 2 had moved out, he arranged very quickly for what would become wife number 3 to move into his Chester Road address, a house that he would have you believe he built himself. See here for more details on his construction fantasies.
In terms of voting, when someone moves into or moves out of an address, the main householder needs to update who is resident in the annual canvass letter that the local authority send out. Most of us will get this letter each year and think of it like a circular, paying it no attention due to very few changes happening.
In fairness due to annual electoral registers being a snapshot in time, you can often get a year with some crossover and lag, with records not being entirely accurate for that year. The example being that if you moved out of your parents’ house in 2020 to your first home, you might still be showing on the electoral register at your parents’ until the new updated register comes out in 2021.
With this in mind when you look at the 2005 electoral register, in force and up to date from October 2005, you will notice that Adderley has both wife 2 AND wife 3 registered to vote on there. If it were just Adderley on his own, or him and wife 2, you could accept that any notice of correction he has filed has not yet been updated, but the fact he has taken the time to update how wife 3 is living there with him, shows paperwork WAS filled in and filed by Adderley with the local authority.
Said paperwork was deliberately filled out claiming that far from wife 2 having moved out now that wife 3 had moved in, he completed it saying claiming she was still resident and there were now 3 people happily living in the Adderley household. This meant that as well as Nick & wife 3 Elizabeth getting their polling cards, a further polling card was also sent out in the name of wife 2.
I have researched at length, going through literally years and years of electoral register information and can confirm that from 2004, wife 2 was happily registered and paying Council Tax elsewhere and had carried out all of her legal obligations. Out of respect for her privacy as she is as much a victim of Adderley as anyone, I will not be publishing any evidence of her address history.
With that in mind, consider that the Decree Absolute was issued in January 2005 a full 10 months prior to the electoral roll being published.
When you then realise this was applied for months earlier in 2004 it becomes harder to try to say there was either some crossover or that Captain Pugwash did not have enough time to file the paperwork for it to be caught in time for the new register, as though an entire year was insufficient time.
You then have March 2005 where Adderley obtained yet another remortgage of his property taking out a LOT of equity to finance something. This mortgage application required him to declare anyone else resident who was registered at or could have a financial interest in the property.
Just as a little teaser for Part 2 of Moody Mortgages, what makes this 2005 mortgage application very unusual is that despite Adderley working as staff officer to Peter Fahy before taking the secondment to The Home Office in February 2006, this desk-based job where he would be coming into daily contact with numerous Police Officers and staff to witness his 2005 equity release, he chooses instead to use his new mother in law to act as the witness.
This unusual choice of person is further complicated by comparing the signature on the forms with her wedding certificate, granted there are a few decades between the two forms, but these two signatures would certainly not pass any verification checks in any bank purporting they were the same signature made by the same person. Assuming this is what it looks like, again out of respect for the privacy to his victims I’ve omitted the personal details.
Getting back to the relevant topic of suspected fraud at hand (you know things are bad when there is that much fraud at play you need to explain which instance you are moving onto next) having personally worked for 3 of the big financial names on the high street, with roles in conveyancing and underwriting amongst others, I know exactly what a thorny area adult occupiers can be when it comes to getting a mortgage. Letters to and from the lender act as a suitable prompt to ensure all records about occupants are up to date. Examples of lender responses to adult occupiers are listed thus.
1000 points for any banking employee that recognises which financial institution these templates are from when completing an MCF or MVR
Despite this very relevant paperwork being completed in March 2005, Adderley STILL failed to remove wife 2 from the electoral register. At this stage you might be inclined to be generous and say perhaps he filled in the paperwork but the local authority dropped the ball.
This might be credible, were it not for the fact that there were local elections held alongside a general election on Thursday 5th May 2005. At this point getting a polling card for someone he had divorced months earlier and had not lived in the house for years, with this STILL not being corrected in the following 5 months after, allowing the electoral roll to be published without any actions taken from him to try to correct it is more than just a little far fetched.
I always try to be fair when discussing the latest scandal that Nick AddALie is embroiled in. Cocking up paperwork and failing to remove your second wife from the electoral register is not a crime, nor is forgetting to fill something out and getting a polling card for someone else.
The moment you cast that vote either as a proxy or by impersonating the voter in question at a polling station THEN you have stepped into the realms of criminality, and we all know how much Adderley loves some cosplay.
Were this any other person in the land, this circumstantial evidence would be seen as trivial and not enough to warrant any attention beyond a dismissive shrug of the shoulders, much less a thorough investigation behind a detailed blog from a tenacious bastard like me. For someone like Adderley that has lied so much he has built a career on it to the point he is under multiple separate criminal investigations from multiple different Police forces for separate incidents of fraud and misrepresentation then it becomes a lot harder to dismiss. The actions I have exposed here are not evidence of any actual fraud, but equally that is something it would be nearly impossible to ever prove actually took place given the privacy laws around polling stations. What I have detailed is the catalyst needed to engage in voting fraud, and all the multiple opportunities afforded to Adderley where he could have corrected this error but chose not to.
Adderley ticks every single box of what you need to do to commit voter fraud, so much so that if you placed his actions on a Venn diagram with an actual fraudster who voted in someone else’s name, they would overlap perfectly.
Unlike most of his other cosplay capers, cavorting about as a Commander and lording it up as a Lieutenant, you might rightly wonder why Captain Pugwash would engage in this type of fraud that had no direct benefit to him, as it was not centred on either financial gain nor getting him kudos and attention that he craves.
It might not seem self-serving voting someone else into power but trust me when I say that it massively benefits Police officers who commit fraud, to ensure their mates with the same agendas are voted into office in the areas in which they operate. Equally it benefits elected officials with less than honest intentions, to have Police on their patch looking out for them. A relationship both symbiotic and parasitical at the same time.
For evidence of just how rotten that system can be in the very area Adderley obtained additional polling cards in I’d recommend you read up on what happened to Damian Harry, a resident of Warrington who tried to expose neglect and misfeasance within his local Labour run council at Warrington. He raised safeguarding issues regarding his daughter’s safety and the school of Birchwood High, concerned a child was in serious danger in 2021 from other dangerous pupils.
If this school sounds familiar to you it should.
It was where Brianna Ghey attended before being murdered.
As a result of raising perfectly legitimate concerns about failings, Damian has been relentlessly harassed and assaulted several times by Cheshire Police who have acted like a militia for elected officials in Warrington.
In August 2021 Damian visited Silverstone as many Grand Prix fans do, and despite having no connections to Northamptonshire, he was arrested by Northants Police acting under orders from Chief Constable Nick Adderley. Northants Police had been able to locate Damian as officers from Northants Police stated at the Grand Prix event, that they had found him with ease due to Warrington Borough Council fitting a tracking device to his 14-year-old daughter’s phone. Cheshire Police had contacted their old boss Nick Adderley to use the illegal interception to track and arrest Damian.
Despite complaining to Northants Police, Adderley ensured any complaints were ignored, supressed, and ultimately binned off to prevent any transparency that would expose how the actions of instructing his officers to follow and arrest Damian, were effectively doing a favour for his old force to intimidate someone into dropping their complaints.
Despite not living in nor having any connection with Northamptonshire, Damian’s story of being harassed by Northants Police & Nick Adderley has an amazing sequel!
In 2022, Damian Harry had been to London with his 17-year-old daughter to watch the Queen’s 70th Anniversary. With no stops within Northants and travelling back up the motorway home to Warrington, armed officers from Northamptonshire Police travelled at high-speed out of their jurisdiction in Northamptonshire into Warwickshire up the M6 motorway where they intercepted and stopped Damian’s car, put a firearm to his head with the officer threatening to discharge.
It is crucial to realise that all of these Police events spin out of Damian raising genuine concerns in 2021 about failings of the local authorities in Warrington, concerns that were validated in the most tragic and horrific way when Brianna Ghey was murdered in 2023.
Damian has commenced a Judicial Review into these and other matters, to demonstrate how deep the corruption in his own back yard goes, as well as further implicating Nick Adderley in yet more scandal he has thus far, failed to provide a suitable explanation about.
For any resident of Northamptonshire trying to join the dots between Police and politics, you just need to look at how Jonathan Nunn as a local Councillor and leader of West Northants Council, was so emboldened to host the “it only takes one” event in 2022 despite having a conviction for ABH against his former wife. The event encouraged women to speak up and reassure them that they would be believed if they came forward.
Unless of course any women were speaking out against Cllr Nunn in which case, in a complete contradiction to the message of the event, he has branded such claims as all unfounded allegations and part of a campaign of harassment against him where he was the real victim, with said allegations taking a toll on his mental health. Not quite as punchy as “it only takes one” but I guess when it comes to being punchy, Mr Nunn does not have such skills to woo an audience into submission.
Mr Nunn also shared a platform with his good friend Detective Superintendent Joe Banfield. Banfield who was fully aware of Mr Nunn’s past through Clare’s law and managing the domestic violence register at Northants Police, but still chose to share a platform with him, knowing the message this would send out to victims, namely how crimes of domestic violence reported to Northants Police against Banfield’s friends that landed in his in-tray, would get as far as the shredder.
I cover in a lot more detail examples of crimes that DSu Banfield has previously covered up and is currently working hard to keep covered up, including reported sexual offences by members of his own team. The point being that if any Police chose to go down the route of using their warrant card to help feather their own nest, some of the first people’s interests they will work to serve will be those of the local elected officials.
The reasons for this can be summarised by looking at the last 12 months. In West Northants, the majority Conservative led council make up the Police Crime Panel. A scrutiny board whose role is to provide oversight and scrutinise the elected Police Fire & Crime Commissioner, something they have hopelessly failed to do over the past 12 months, instead deferring that responsibility to the media to hold PFCC Stephen Mold to account in the court of public opinion.
So with these clear examples of politics and Police being intertwined and looking out for one another, it starts to look less and less likely that Adderley getting an extra polling card is just an innocent oversight, and while 1 vote will not tip an election, this by no means makes it acceptable and something we should turn a blind eye to.
To that end this matter has been reported and as you can see, this is currently with the economic crime unit of Cheshire Police. They have also been informed of the mortgage fraud several months ago, but in line with how the IOPC operate, that investigation is moving at a pace so slow they are being overtaken by stationary objects.
For now prior to formal charging taking place and media restrictions coming into play, I wanted to get this story out there so that wherever in the country you live (or perhaps the world as I do see some weird locations driving traffic to this blog) when it comes to casting your vote in the local elections on 2nd May 2024, this prompts you to take a moment and think about who you are voting for. Please take the time to investigate the candidates beyond their party political affiliations, seeing just what their motivations for wanting public office are, and whose interests they will be working towards.
And so we conclude. In the heart of Manchester, the legend of ‘A Bride Too Far’ became a tale told in pubs for years to come, reminding everyone that when it comes to lifetime achievements in Walting and fraud, Commander Nautical Nick Adderley sets a high bar that is unlikely ever to be beaten.
Who’s who in the Northants MCU – Superintendent Joseph Banfield
Imagine if you will a game a rock, paper, scissors. A game where everyone has power over someone else, but equally has another who has power over them. This simple game epitomises perfect balance and works on a series of checks and balances holding the system in check, a system that is replicated in the public sector.
The local Councillors that make up the Police Crime Panel, the Office of Police Fire and Crime Commissioner who are held accountable by the former, and the local Police force who enforce the law should the Council or its employees break it and are equally accountable to the PFCC.
Each has some power over the other, with no one party holding ultimate power and control over the other two, a system that in theory, keeps a series of checks and balances in place to ensure all parties act within their remit and the law overall.
In reality though what appears to be happening in Northamptonshire is the polar opposite, with everyone having quite a cosy relationship with one another and instead of holding the others to account, they are all abusing their powers to suitably cover up for misfeasance, corruption and in my own direct experience, crimes that have been committed.
Prime examples of this are with the Police Crime Panel failing to hold PFCC Stephen Mold to account for his library of failings and wastage of public money for years because they all belong to the same political party. PFCC Stephen Mold displaying extreme cronyism by appointing unsuitable candidates without proper vetting into appointments and then failing to carry out his duties and dismiss the Chief Constable Nick Adderley when clear evidence of fraud and corruption is presented, and finally Northants Police department having a responsibility to investigate crimes, but instead actively working to cover them up and sharing a platform with the very convicted criminals they are meant to bring to justice, just because the person convicted happens to be a Councillor and thus is integral to ensuring the Police remain protected and are not held to account.
A spotlight has been shone on some of the darkness and abuse that hides in dark corners, thanks to the ‘Rotten Boroughs’ article from the April issue of Private Eye, the magazine itself being a worthwhile purchase for less than the cost of a cup of overpriced train station coffee.
The Private Eye piece shines a light on how the man on the far left of the picture below, Councillor Jonanthan Nunn was convicted of ABH of his then wife Janice in 2004, yet despite this conviction for domestic violence, can be seen leading the event “it only takes ones” in 2022.
They say you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps. With the most infamous and well known person being the man at the centre of the back row of the picture in Stephen Mold, due to his collection of newspaper headlines, most recently and famously his swansong comments of “I’ll Dump The Bitch.”
After a string of disastrous appointments, misogynistic comments and generally dominating the headlines of the tabloids its easy to allow Mold to overshadow the other person at the back of the picture with an equally impressive CV of gaffes, and one who plays a crucial role in protecting people like Nunn.
For context, like most domestic abusers, this was not Nunn’s fault and in fact he would have you believe he is the victim of harassment. This is explained by him claiming this incident of battering his then wife was just a one off. However with partners both before and after victim of violence Janice, coming forward to bookend his criminal conviction with similar stories, it becomes far harder to dismiss this as a one off.
The children Nunn fathered in 2006, AFTER his 2004 conviction are now subject to a court order of supervised contact, due to their mother also reporting him for separate domestic abuse.
With an existing conviction for domestic violence, followed up by more complaints from different women and court orders preventing unsupervised contact with his children, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Nunn’s presence at such an event designed to tackle exactly this kind of behaviour and encourage women to speak up was as part of some court appointed community service order, intended to be as some for of restorative justice to victims, with Nunn speaking an ex offender.
Sadly for victims, Nunn was at the event proudly flying the flag on behalf of West Northants Council to act as some sort of spokesperson for how he believes victims of domestic violence need not live in fear and should speak out against people like him. The local Conservatives somehow figured he was the best person to front a campaign of this type on behalf of West Northants Council. Perhaps in hindsight putting Nunn in control of the £800,000 of central government money awarded to ensure “a ground-breaking programme to train venue staff to recognise and tackle predatory behaviour” & “challenge the attitudes and inappropriate behaviours of some men.” was not the PR win they thought it would be.
For anyone curious on the statement Nunn has made in that how he has been the subject of sustained harassment, I’ve dug out the article in question from 2004 so we can access what lengths this poor man has been through in this perceived campaign of harassment against him.
Not content with laying pinned down on a bed and harassing Nunn by hitting his fists with her face his then wife ran out of the house and harassed Nunn by luring him outside to chase her against his will. She cunningly enticed him out into the open where she viciously lay down in the street and harassed him by attaching herself to his arms forcing him to try to pull away as she made him drag her along the street, kicking her in self defence to stop this hideous campaign of harassment she was engaging in against him.
“Nunn ran after her into the street outside and was seen by neighbours kicking her as she lay on the floor and dragging her along before they came to her aid.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20161028131108/http://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/news/political-career-goes-on-after-wife-attack-1-903254
This is written with obvious satire and I mean no disrespect to Janice for what she endured, but I have written it like this for how absurd Nunn’s claims read as. Not content with just battering his wife in their home, Nunn then following her into the street to put the boot in, quite literally, for the man to then say he is a different person now, but paradoxically also complain that he is somehow the victim in all of this is just offensive and shows he has no remorse for what he has done, trying to frame himself as being a victim!
With his behaviour fresh in your mind, this odd juxtaposition of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse leads us nicely into the main subject of this who’s who article. The man at the back right of the photo. The third and least convincing effort in what looks like a poundshop Professor X cosplay contest line up.
Detective Superintendent Joseph Banfield.
The 2022 “it only takes one” event was a simple PR exercise to promote the scheme, with various stakeholder organisations coming together in partnership to help blow the £800,000 of central government money they had been awarded. In keeping with the theme of being simple, Northants Police wheeled out the man best suited to such a role, Joseph Banfield as head of the “protection vulnerable persons” (PVP) unit as their representative.
The Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (DVDS), also known as “Clare’s Law” enables the police to disclose information to a victim or potential victim of domestic abuse about their partner’s or ex-partner’s previous abusive or violent offending.
As the head of the PVP unit, Joe Banfield has responsibility to manage this information and work in the best interests of victims. In the old skool days of Gene Hunt, you can conjure up images of a thick manilla folder on an old mahogany desk, stuffed full of sheets of carbon copy paper about cases, or perhaps a wall within a CID with mugshots of repeat offenders and “prom noms.” However your mind displays this information stored for the purpose of Clare’s law, know that as a Superintendent running an entire PVP department, Banfield would be fully aware of Nunn’s background of convictions, court orders and multiple crime reports, needing to provide this information to any person making such an application under Clare’s law.
Banfield, ever keen to mimic his boss and mentor Nick AddALie and grift his way to some column inches for positive PR, was quick to jump on the bandwagon against Stephen Mold last month when he saw others calling him out, deciding the time was right to appear to feign disgust and look to be doing the right thing.
While no significant stories had yet made the headlines about Stephen Mold in 2022, with his headlines of “I’ll Dump The Bitch” to firefighters being merely an aspiration at this point, Banfield could be excused for standing alongside him.
What he cannot be excused about is how he thought it suitable to share a platform with a convicted domestic abuser at an event designed to tackle domestic violence. Never once thinking to raise this issue or question in the same way he did with Stephen Mold, either because he did not see it as an issue, or that he is just grossly inept in his approach to his Police work.
The issue with sharing a platform could have just been a simple oversight with Banfield simply getting confused over where he was and not realising the event was purely for victims of the event rather than a cross party event of all services users, irrespective of what side of the dock they stood in to take part in domestic violence court cases. While I fully subscribe to the theory that DSu Banfield is utterly useless aspiring to be like Frank Drebin, believing that The Naked Gun was a documentary series, when you start to add up all of Banfield’s his actions, you see very dark and sinister motivations at work and realise how dangerous it is to have someone like this within the Police at such a senior rank with so much control.
Regardless of the reasons why he did what he did, this action of sticking 2 fingers up at victims of domestic abuse also has a more sinister meaning. In the same way as during the Jimmy Savile scandal, many victims of his were scared to come forward thanks to his self-promoted cosy relationship with the Police and people in power. Were I a victim of Mr Nunn, and I saw him promoting an agenda of tackling domestic abuse with man that heads up the domestic violence unit at Northants Police apparently legitimising him, then my faith in Joe Banfield to do the right thing if I reported Nunn, would extend to about as far as I could push him with my piss!
This incident of Banfield showing contempt for victims, much like Nunn is far from just a one off, but in fact part of a pattern of behaviour that makes him wholly unsuitable for work within the Police service and a credible danger to residents of Northants.
If you’ve read any of my other blogs, you’ll know of my issue of reporting a rape in 2015 and giving a statement, and this then being covered up for 8 years, due in no small part to the soon to be facing criminal charges disgraced Chief Constable Nick Adderley, but also due to the PVP unit at Northants Police, actively working to block this for so many years, only finally logging this in June 2023. It’s a horrific crime to have to endure and at my lowest I came very close to taking an overdose, due in no small part to the treatment of Northants Police and their staff.
Having two forces involved allowed for a great excuse for both to blame the other, with Thames Valley Police finally admitting in January 2024 they should have logged the case and referred it to DSu Banfield’s team, firmly providing me the evidence that admits their wrongdoing.
You’ll notice the utter apathy in the letter, with a single line of apology for distress caused by not logging the crime for 8 years, said with all the enthusiasm and sincerity of a small child opening his Christmas present of a knitted jumper from his Granny. They couldn’t even be bothered to spell check it, showing how serious this issue ranked with them.
The crime that was FINALLY logged in June 2023 has also been stalled by Joe Banfield’s team, with him taking a personal hand in matters. I would hope that none of you ever need to become as knowledgeable as I am on charging, crimes and the CPS when it comes to rape. The Police will only refer a crime to the CPS if there is sufficient evidence, this is known as the threshold test.
Banfield’s argument as to why this got binned off is that there is insufficient evidence so his team never even bothered to refer it to the CPS, binning it off. The statement there is insufficient evidence is something which both he and I know is utterly untrue.
I do not wish to go into explicit detail (suffice to say the event was not one of my memories I enjoy documenting) but having photos of the suspect in my property on the night in question disproving their notion they were ever in my property, and how these have been provided to Northants Police, you start to question why Banfield states he needs something to be provided to him and his team that they already have.
He goes further by stating he wants access to my devices in order to search them for the evidence he needs as you can see from his letter here. Specifically he wants access to my PC and my mobile phone. This on the face of it all seems quite reasonable, however I just want to walk you through a few details that show how sinister this request is.
1 – Whatsapp messages after the event.
This event occurred in 2010 and at the time I did not have a smartphone, thus I did not have Whatsapp. This was an old Sony Ericson with basic text messages. My oldest phone was purchased in 2018 as you can see from the receipt.
This is 8 years after the event happened and thus this phone has no information from 2010 as the phone did not exist then.
Yet despite this phone have no evidential value regarding the rape, Banfield still wants to get his grubby little hands on it to have unrestricted access to it.
The only information is text messages NOT Whatsapp, I’ve included a selection of them below from the day in question:
2 – Information I placed on social media.
This is an interesting one, despite the whole nature of social media being quite public and the ability to view anything from anywhere with a decent WiFi or 4G connection, Banfield wants access to my PC to see what I posted online.
I am pretty sure everyone else much like me, does not have a PC from 13 years ago as these have a slightly longer life expectancy than smartphones but still only last a few years before they become obsolete and you replace them. Similar to the phone, my most recent PC was purchased in 2017 as the receipt shows, so this will hold no evidence of what was actually posted from it, years before it was ever made.
3 – Images of the person passed out at my house after the event.
Northants Police already have these photos but appear to have NOT included these in the file, instead claiming to not have them and wanting access to my PC to search for them instead.
4 – Vlogs made making reference to the suspect as “Pissy McRapist.”
This is a total fabrication on the part of Banfield’s team, I never once stated I made ANY vlogs about this, so by inventing evidence I am unable to provide (due to it not existing) this helps sufficiently muddy the waters and prevent the case from proceeding by sending it on an endless feedback loop to confuse matters with officers wasting time, and overall making it look weaker through evidence they cannot find, while also demanding access to more devices to search through.
Now to provide sufficient context on this situation that might offer some insight into Banfield’s motives. I was involved in a raft of court cases in both local County Court and The High Court amongst others, they were predominantly relating to fraud that I and other creditors had brought against several companies. I won’t go into huge detail but if I said it started in 2019, with all the claims made relating to companies involving people born and originally living in Northampton, and related to fraud we allege was carried out by these companies and their directors with evidence relating to several Police forces.
The main element of fraud was how we alleged that officers of the Court who carry out insolvency appointments and civil servants were deliberately obstructing investigations into matters and aiding those carrying out fraud through destroying documents and evidence. You might notice the names of politicians involved in this who ended up in positions of authority over the Police.
Reading all of this might seem somewhat like Deja vu and you might be starting to have a eureka moment, with the benefit of hindsight seeing how this all sounds quite familiar to the current mire we are in with Mold, Nunn, Adderley etc. You can see from these letters and court bundle appendixes from early 2020/2021 just how they long predate Adderley being suspended.
If you were not aware, documents that are either evidence in live court cases and/or that have been subject to professional legal advice are what is known as ‘privileged’ meaning that they have added legal protections. These protections specifically mean that even Police who can usually seize and search anything they like, are not legally allowed to get access to or see privileged information. In the same way if you ever watch a TV drama of someone being arrested, they get private meetings with their solicitor. This level of privacy extends to evidence and is the cornerstone of a fair process within the law. The main reason being to stop corrupt Police officers whose sole purpose is to investigate a crime, having too much power and attempting to pervert the course of justice by being judge and jury and determining the outcome.
I kept raising this not insignificant issue of legal privilege to Banfield, explaining how he was NOT having me authorise him getting unrestricted and unsupervised access to devices that had not been invented at the time of the rape so would hold no evidential value to him, but did hold evidence of fraud, a lot of which related to several of his Police officer colleagues.
Banfield huffs and puffs and makes out he has no interest in the legal privileged information, yet fails to actually articulate why he wants access to devices that he knows were not invented at the time and thus will not hold any evidence. When a direct question was put to him challenging him on this, he clammed up refusing to answer me as apparently I shared his last letter “out of context” on social media.
Hurrah for transparency in Police!
The only element of transparency here is the motivation behind Banfield wanting access to devices that hold ZERO evidence in relation to the rape, but would be career ending for several of his colleagues, so by getting access he can either tip off his mates or engineer to “lose” the evidence.
Putting his reasons for this aside, as much as I am somewhat humorous and cynical in how I deliver my blogs that can make you view my comments in a certain flippant way, please do not ever forget I am a victim of the horrendous crime of rape that was covered up for 8 years by Banfield and his officers. You’d think that after making such a monumental fuck up, he might firstly show a modicum of empathy, or at the very least be a bit proactive when being informed he has cocked things up again, and actually address this and try to rectify matters.
Alas no, the strategy of the head of the protecting vulnerable people unit in carrying out his duties of protecting me is by shutting me down refusing to reply to me and refusing to move the case to the CPS, using the manufactured evidence and my refusal to give him access to devices as the reason, knowing it to be totally Mickey Mouse.
The takeaway here is Banfield as a senior Police officer, will happily lie and misrepresent the evidence in a rape case, refuse to reply to a victim of crime nor seek to correct errors with a case that has been highlighted to him, but will happily see sharing a platform with a convicted domestic abuser at an event designed to tackle it as a positive PR move.
Banfield’s priorities and approach to his work appear somewhat backwards, with offenders ranking higher than victims in his estimation. The sad truth is you have a better chance of getting some positive interactions with Banfield and his team if you are the perpetrator of a crime rather than if you report being a victim of one.
This single issue of covering up wrongdoing by his team is not an isolated incident in the clown show that Banfield runs.
In 2022 I was the victim of a different and unrelated sex crime, unrelated in so far as that it has no connection to the offender of the 2015 case. It might shock you to learn the suspect in this case is actually one of Banfield’s team, who works on the sexual offences team himself. A serving Police officer!
This was initially reported in July 2023 and has been covered up by Banfield and his team ever since, needing no less than 3 separate reports to actually get it logged. This was further frustrated by my statement I gave being edited by the officer taking it, removing the suspect’s name in my statement because and I quote
“I do not feel comfortable putting this in the statement”
as though evidence collection is entirely contingent on the feelings of the officer taking the statement.
I challenged this as you can see from the transcript from the audio of the interview, where despite asking more than once, the officer refused to correctly take down my statement verbatim and would only present me with a statement to sign if I removed his colleague’s name. Naturally I refused to sign such a statement and anyone working within the criminal justice system will know that tampering with evidence in this way to protect a suspect and prevent a crime being investigated amounts to perverting the course of justice.
The matter then escalated to one of JB’s team, a DS wanting to visit me at my house. Consider if you are the victim of a sex crime, with the offender being a member of the Police sexual offences team, and you live alone, would you feel comfortable one of the same team coming into your house? Naturally I explained I was not comfortable with this and instructed them not to attend my property.
This was of course ignored and the DS came round on a Sunday morning hammering on my doors and windows trying to get inside and speak to me. He may claim it was to investigate the crime, but after it took 3 online reports being filed to get this logged, a statement was refused to be taken naming the suspect and he was told not to come to my house, it is hard to view this as anything but an intimidation tactic. The fact that we are now 3 months on and I am STILL not provided with a statement to sign and the DS continues to mess me around with no formal statement taken tends to prove me right.
I do not want to give away too much about matters as this is a live case and Banfield’s team are eager to goad me into revealing information that could help derail any successful prosecution of their colleague and mate, because just like Wayne Couzens, it matters not if they are a sexual predator, ‘blue code’ means covering up for your colleagues if a victim of their crime has the temerity to dare report it and want it to be investigated.
As it stands, the case does not appear to be correctly logged, they refuse to provide me with a statement to sign saying it is missing information (despite an identical statement removing the officer’s name is apparently perfect) and when asked what information the DS needs to progress matters, he either ignores me or tells me he needs for me to cooperate, evading the question of what information he wants me to provide to him.
If they had answered yes there is at least 1 person under investigation, this would confirm to me this was likely logged and expose how pisspoor Banfield’s management of the PVP unit is, having a sexual offences team staffed by Police officers suspected of the same crimes being investigated by their mates.
If this was answered as 0 officers under investigation, it would prove the case has not been logged and is being covered up by Banfield and his team.
As you can see Northants Police refused to answer at all, pretty much solidifying how this case is NOT logged and they do not wish to give information that would expose the cover up.
A cover up being overseen by the man at the top, DSu Joe Banfield.
So accepting how utterly crap Banfield is at his tax payer funded job of protecting the public through having staff who commit sexual offences on his team, covering up crimes and errors of judgement in sharing platforms with the very people who he is paid by the public purse to pursue and bring to justice, just what are the redeeming qualities of Banfield and how did he convince Nick Adderley to promote him all the way to Superintendent from being an Inspector within Thames Valley in 2015?
With many people promoted to their highest level of incompetence and showing very poor abilities in their job, sometimes they just lack experience but are great man managers, having the people skills needed to hold a department together.
Sadly in the case of Banfield, when it comes to managing conflicts and people, he is about as much use as the other half of the Countdown clock. If I told you that officers who report into Banfield who deal with sexual exploitation cases, post pictures online, commenting and laughing about how non consensual sex is funny, you would struggle to defend Banfield’s unique approach to managing a sexual offences team.
I am not making the online content here visible just yet, as this will just highlight the officers in question and give them a chance to cover their tracks and delete what they have posted. I can say that other media outlets have been provided copies and links which are still live and are working on this case in the background. When that story does goes live I will suitably unhide the missing paragraph and images from this blog so that you can see them and judge for yourself.
I would add that exposing this much corruption within the Police and elected officials makes me genuinely fearful for my safety, so should any ‘accidents’ happen to befall me, rest assured mechanisms are in place with several others to release EVERYTHING I have. This might sound like paranoia but when someone tried to run me off the road in July 2023 and the Police refused to log it, lying saying it was the responsibility of a different force and then not a crime but an insurance issue, you feel suitably worried how deep the corruption runs.
Keeping with his pisspoor management though, what I can share is how his DI Liz Basham holds a directorship of a limited company. We’ve touched on this before in previous blogs and I’ll be doing a far deeper dive on her in the coming weeks, but in fairness I need to say how being a director of a business is neither a restriction nor indication of any wrongdoing.
The only issue arises when this could become a conflict of interests, for example if DI Basham has to attend an incident at the business in question, or as a trustee responsible for the finances of the school, her Police duties require her to arrest and prosecute a customer of the business, potentially cutting off funding. This can occur in all walks of life and to manage this, Police have what is known as a register of interests. A location where they need to record such interests and ensure they are not assigned nor come into contact with any event that could compromise them.
Part of Banfield’s job is to manage his team with adequate supervision to ensure issues like this are on his radar and are dealt with promptly.
Imagine my surprise at how Companies House, a quite public and easily accessible resources, has Basham listed as a director of the same business Stephen Mold also used to be director of, and it is NOT listed on the register of interests.
With the litany of disasters listed above, you would think Banfield would be keen to avoid further scandal and address this matter with the degree of urgency it needs, more so when this escaped his notice and was brought to his attention by a member of the public, already armed with a library of errors displaying Banfield’s incompetence. Banfield reverts to type and just lies saying how Companies House has it wrong and Basham is NOT a director and he will not be discussing it further.
Much like the Angela Rayner story, if matters were as innocent as someone just not filling out a form on the register of interests, you’d think that killing it dead by correcting the error would be the simplest option to prove this is a non-story. The public care not about small admin mistakes and missteps, rather it is the cover up that fuels the attention and speculation and what we have here is Banfield lying and covering up not just his staff and their misfeasance, but his own woefully inept management of matters.
The fact that this is the same business interest once held by Stephen Mold, a man who has his own questions over cronyism and failure to manage the staff that he appoints make this all the more salacious.
So while the focus this week thanks to Private Eye is firmly on Councillor Jonathan Nunn, it is safe to say that questions will very soon start to be asked of Northants Police and why DSu Banfield seems to cover up more crimes than he actually refers to the CPS.
Joe Banfield is on a salary just shy of 6 figures and does precious little to prove that he is deserving of it, acting against the interests of victims of crime. If you ever watch him in interviews, he comes across as akin to a gormless oaf who has wandered onto the set of a porn movie by mistake and unsure of what to do, ending up standing in the corner taking everyone’s coats from them nodding and thanking them.
If this picture of him that I paint is in any way accurate, then perhaps it could offer an explanation as to why he employs, covers up for and mixes with so many of the sexual and violent offenders he is tasked to put away, as though to gain some form of insight into his job, as lets face it he doesn’t inspire any confidence that he has any clue what he is doing being asleep at the wheel as he is.
I am being slightly tongue in cheek here, but I genuinely find the man quite a pitiable oddball, whose only real talent he seems to posses that helped him get as far as he did within the Police was snorkelling in Adderley buttocks.
I personally see the salary being paid to Banfield as wholly wasteful. That salary could have been put to better use, like increasing the wages of existing nurses or perhaps helping fund recruiting more of them. Which when reviewing the above sorry saga is likely something that we will need more of with Backwards Banfield at the helm, cheering on abusers in photo opportunities and helping supress investigations from actual victims of domestic and sexual abuse committed by officers on his team.
Who’s who in the Northants MCU
When you read the acronym MCU, you’d be forgiven for defaulting to thinking of the most common use of this term with that of The Marvel Cinematic Universe.
For anyone living under a wrong for the last 16 years, this is a media franchise and shared universe centered around a series of superhero characters in films produced by Marvel Studios. Many of these characters have been around for decades in their own self contained stories, but in 2008 Marvel started world building, making new versions of the movies, creating connections between the characters, leading to crossover movies and shared backgrounds.
Now in 2024 it becomes very difficult to watch a single Marvel movie or television series and remember just how each character connects to every other characters or what the shared histories are. From Iron Man 1, 2 and 3, to Wandavision, to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to Avengers Endgame, there are literally weeks of media to sift through to get up to speed and understanding all the references in the latest movie.
In the same way, with all the misfeasance and corruption in Northants hitting the news on a monthly, weekly and sometimes daily basis, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of just what has happened, much less cross reference how each person, business and action relates to the others.
To that end, in the best comic book traditions, I’m compiling a companion series to my blogs of “who’s who” in our own Northants misfeasance and corruption universe. It may shock some people who have not fallen victim to the endemic corruption within our borough, to learn just how interconnected the entire web is, and how many of the people involved have connections to other national news scandals.
Like George Carlin famously said, “It’s a big club and YOU ain’t in it!”
You can take some small comfort though, in knowing your taxes you so diligently pay do help to fund these people that look down on us with utter contempt.
If you would like someone investigated to be added to the Northants MCU, please drop a comment below with your concerns.
Nick Adderley – a one man Village People tribute act!
While many of Nick Adderley’s lies have ventured into the criminal and are duly being investigated, by both the media and the IOPC (the former getting far better results than the latter) its worth reminding ourselves that being a pathological liar, Nick Adderley simply cannot help himself and will take any opportunity to answer even the most basic of a question by providing enough horseshite to rival a mischievous child let loose at Epsom Downs on Derby day with backpack full of laxatives.
A scenario I am suitably convinced that Nick Adderley fulfilled at some point in his youth, or even perhaps adult life.
This quite sad trait of having such a personality defect where you need to lie about everything to fill some deep seated insecurity means not every lie Nick Adderley told is covering up some criminal scandal or unlawful activity. They are often for attention and gratification, much like the rambling old drunk who sits in the corner of your local pub recanting tales of made up adventures, and rather than getting any respect, the only attention they gain is that of ridicule and pity.
This however does mean that many people who Adderley hoodwinked through his time, seeming to listen to rank and file officers, relate to them with stories and tell them exactly what they wanted to hear with his promises, are now waking up to the fact that anything he ever said was unlikely to have any semblance of truth to it. This can be very disappointing for some, who held him in high regard and took comfort in feeling their boss was listening to them and had their backs.
A smaller example of his lying was where in a Q&A session on Facebook on 9th August 2022 he claimed he built his own house.
Northants Live covered the main highlights, writing an article on some of Adderley’s responses.
The salient point I want to pick up on is how Adderley claims that he build his own house.
Broadway Partington M31 that he bought in 1985 and sold in 1986, was built prior to Adderley’s birth and even though we know of his amazing time travel powers he purports to have, I think we can safely assume he means the house he purchased in 1994 and remortgaged with every lender in the land with his alternative signature & ID, prior to knocking through to next door and selling as a single property in 2021.
Lets just analyse his exact words here, no confusion, he explicitly states to avoid any confusion how he did NOT contract the work out, he built the house himself.
In the same way as he talked about all the imaginary troops he led into battle at Goose Green that he saw killed, Adderley waxes lyrical to create an impression of his unending repertoire of skills, including building a house and doing all the work himself.
As ever, Adderley likes to pass off someone else’s hardwork as his own. In 2014 while only a Superintendent, he claimed he was the national lead for crime detection, an impossibility as the NPCC where national portfolios are held require officers to be at the rank of either ACC, DCC or CC.
Claiming you built your own house is not criminal, but still makes it seem that the hardwork of Stuart Collier in 2005 and Simon Mason in 2009-2010 is something that can be attributed directly to Adderley, when in reality his signature on the forms was about the only bit of creative artwork in the project that he put forward.
So far from being Bob the Builder that he would like us to see him as, this further example solidifies him more as Bob the Bullshitter, forcing us to question anything he has ever said no matter how trivial, proving him to be incapable of being honest about even the simplest of things.
The lies do perhaps speak to a deeper issue, as once you account for his lies of being in the Royal Navy, his lies to then getting into the Police to serve as an officer, his fascination with motorbikes being the National Police lead for motorbikes, and now his lies about being a construction worker building his own house, you start to wonder if the true aim of all of Adderley’s lies is that he is going all out to create his own one man Village People tribute act by fulfilling all of the roles himself?
If anyone has any evidence of Adderley as a cowboy or a red Indian then I’d love to hear about it!
YMCA aside, the worrying reason that the IOPC and OPFCC have acted as they have done in trying to drag out matters and fail to take action, is that they realise the scale of this man’s fraud and hoped that dragging it out would make people forget and allowing the media hype to die down to enable this to be quietly buried. Taking any action against Nick Adderley would mean trawling through every single one of his arrests, every statement he has ever given and every court appearance and statement of truth he has ever been involved in and accepting they are potentially fabrications, and then trying to unpick every case he has ever been involved in to work out just how many miscarriages of justice he has been responsible for.
While this is an unenviable and incredible task to even consider undertaking, the simple fact is that sheer volume of lies Adderley told about trivial events, mean that this extended into his Police work and how it stands to reason that many people who encountered Adderley in his role as a Police officer may well have had their lives ruined through Adderley’s lies & exaggerations. There will be false statements he gave to get a case over the line to obtain arrests and convictions, or worse by failing to investigate matters properly he allowed genuine criminals to roam free to offend again. We only need to look at the case of Andrew Malkinson to see just how wrong GMP got it by failing to correctly investigate evidence put before them.
Trying to cover up Adderley’s crimes and lies as a means to avoid accepting the scandal that he is a serial liar and a cheat, and hoping that failing to do so saves time and money by not needing to identify and compensate all of his victims, is worse than his original lies and their consequences and just shows the distain the IOPC have for victims of Adderley’s lies. The IOPC & Home Office realise only too well what a shitstorm they are facing and how the investigation into any case Adderley’s fingerprints are on will rival that of Operation Yewtree, both in terms of resources to carry it out and compensation claims they will face. This is in addition to the reputational damage caused by showing how impotent the vetting and checks are that are carried out by Police & The Home Office, raising questions about how many more Adderleys are still in post that should not be.
Sadly while Adderley continues to draw £14,000 a month in salary funded by the taxpayer, this matter is not likely to go away. People struggling to heat their homes seeing a rise in Council Tax, knowing services such as adult social care and pothole repairs are underfunded and being ignored, while against the backdrop of a proven liar creaming a salary he does not deserve out of the same pot, does tend keeps things quite fresh in their minds.
So while we laugh and pity Adderley’s Village People efforts with yet more of his lies where he claims he never contracted the work out to build his house, there is a more serious message here. Police Fire and Crime Commissioner elections are on 2nd May 2024, with whoever takes over from Stephen Mold, having the issue of Adderley being the top of their in tray. Whatever your political views I would urge you to set the date in your diaries and take the time to go out and cast your vote to get a better PFCC that will help stop this liar taking money out of the public purse, while sitting back laughing at us all.
roguetrader1980 