“What would happen if an unstoppable force hit an immovable object?”

In a twist on the question that underpins the irresistible force paradox, we create an even deeper paradox with the question of the unstoppable farce.

The unstoppable farce is a force of nature, a series of calamities created by the Northants Police Fire & Crime Commissioner Stephen Mold in carrying out his duties. The immovable abject amateur is also Stephen Mold carrying out his duties as Northants Police Fire & Crime Commissioner.

He appears paradoxically to both be trying to do all he can to create sufficient scandal to remove himself from his job while also trying to steadfastly stay put and see out his full term that comes to an end in May 2024.

A true battle of wits, sans the wit!

Suitably confused with what on earth that opening is actually in reference to?

Good, then you are perfectly aligned with the good folk of Northamptonshire, wondering how we ever got to where we are now, with Mold claiming he needs to remain in post for stability, despite his being in post being solely responsible for the instability of the county having no Police Chief nor a Fire Chief, with both under investigation by the IOPC.

Before 2020 I’d wager many of you had never even heard of, much less had an understanding of what a Police Fire & Crime Commissioner actually does.

Police Fire & Crime Commissioners were touted as being a necessary evil, a political appointment enabling them to be voted out every 4 years and thus independent enough to act as a checks and balance system, holding Chief Police & Fire officers to account. The reality has been that they are all too often, a small cog in a larger machine of enabling corruption, especially when all cogs form part of the same political party machine and they have no desire to work against one another.

This is a brilliant system for the status quo, as most everyday folk are not really engaged with local politics, so the actions or inactions of PFCC go largely unreported and unknown by the electorate, who usually either vote tribally or use the vote for PFCC and local councillors as a protest vote against the incumbent government of the day. The end result is that a PFCC can pretty much act as they please, riding out their tenure and milking it for all it is worth.

Mold himself has enjoyed his 8 years in office, being insulated by a county of Conservative MPs (with the recent exception of Peter Bone who was ousted and replaced by Labour’s Gen Kitchen several weeks ago) a Police Crime Panel made up of 99% Conservative panel members and Councillors, and both local authorities of North Northants Council and West Northants Council being run by majority led Conversative Councillors Jason Smithers & Jonathan Nunn.

While Mold appears to have enjoyed his 8 years in office, it is safe to say the good folk of Northamptonshire have not shared in this enjoyment. Mold’s inability to understand what the meaning of the word oversight in his job role meant has resulted in him hitting the headlines regularly for oversights of an entirely different kind.

Thanks to his indiscretions & buffoonery making regular headlines, being a denizen of Northampton while he has been PFCC has felt like laying injured on a pavement and then being run over very slowly by a travelling freak show who are lost, going round and round in circles to keep repeating the process of running you over again and again.

Despite the inordinate amount of political wagons that once circled and protected him so consistently in the past, he has recently faced criticism from within his own party with the only wagon in his sights now, is one of a bandwagon that everyone from all sides are jumping on, calling for him to step down. With staff that he oversees, even requesting that he does not attend events where his presence will be deemed disruptive and counter productive.

Not the best position to be in as an elected public servant.

It is bad enough when all of your detractors are from such diverse backgrounds that you would not expect to see them sharing any common ground, yet they quite happily find their shared repulsion of you as sufficient to bridge that which divides them, thus uniting large disparate sections of the public against you.

When you then factor in how all of Mold’s one-time colleagues and allies are now turning against him, and have now become his detractors, you realise just what a PR shitstorm he is navigating and trying to front out.

The point of this blog post is not to call upon Mold to leave immediately, that is a given for the Fecal Midas touch that he has, fearing just what the next blunder(s) will be to befall us between now and May.

When you achieve something in life, it is very easy for someone else to appear beside you on the winning side, standing shoulder to shoulder with you singing the same tune as you just before the moment of victory. However you should always be cautious of those who arrive late to the party as this single moment in time does not define them, nor does it make them someone that you should trust long term.

Many people have joined the cause in calling for Mold to step down, which is demonstrably the right thing to do, however the motives in doing so, and many of the past actions of those now condemning Mold are something I think we need to shine a light on and not just blindly accept at face value. I feel that many people have sensed the direction of travel in terms of public opinion and opted to ensure they are visibly on the right side of the argument regarding Mold when does it all come crashing down, for no other reason than to improve their own PR image and keep the spotlight away from them.

I want to look at each of these people and groups in turn, but before we delve into the backgrounds of many of those, I need to address the elephant in the room.

I’ve been responsible for exposing incidents of Police corruption and misfeasance, and the only defence the Police have to this level of exposure, is to try to smear me and label me as anti-Police, in the hopes of discrediting me so people view me as a crank and ignore what I am exposing.

This is a very tired and well used trope, all too often used as a method of deflection. When a person or organisation is called out for bad behaviour in a professional setting, they will often claim the cause of the attack on their character, rather than being for the bad behaviour itself, is instead due to a specific characteristic, often a protected one as defined by The Equality Act 2010, making themselves the victim, gaining sympathy and shifting the narrative away from the wrongdoing.

On a personal level, anyone that has ever lived with or dealt with someone with narcissistic personality disorder will recognise that calling out the narcissist’s behaviour will result in them turning it into them somehow being the victim and your comments as hurtful and attacking them, never once addressing the actual issue you raised, but instead bringing up a plethora of other perceived injustices they have suffered.

The truth is that I am NOT anti-Police, but rather anti-corruption and have been for many years, first being a whistleblower in 2008 at the height of the Libor scandal, making a protected disclosure about my knowledge of the inner workings of banking and what I believed to be multi million pound fraud, just prior to that great financial crash that we played down with the playful name of “the credit crunch!” This resulted in a 2 year court case that had nothing to do with Police whatsoever.

Despite my somewhat critical billing of the Police, the records the Police have on me show how often my civic duty was performed by reporting crimes and helping the Police.

In February 2014, a child was reported missing in The Chronicle, I recognised this child from being on an adult dating website touting for sex and me questioning them at the time as I became concerned they were underage and being exploited. I rang up and reported this to Northants Police with the locations the child had given they were operating out of, in the hopes they might actually find this missing child and rescue them from a cycle of abuse and exploitation.

In 2017 walking to catch an early morning train, I reported online what looked like a break in to a van to help narrow down the window of when this could have happened. Then the same year after witnessing an obvious drug deal, I reported this online in detail with the method, time and vehicles involved.

In 2019 this was where Jeremy Corbyn joined us, where me and others were fighting to get more transparency regarding rail franchising after we had crowdfunded and taken The Department for Transport to court in a Judicial Review.

Full credit to Summer Dean Photography for the photo.

I shared a platform with Corbyn, this does not mean I am an extreme left winger or any other similar name I got smeared with back in the day. In fact I disagreed with a lot of what he had to say and couldn’t vote for him. By not voting for someone, this doesn’t stop me from sharing a platform with them where we have a shared goal.

Equally just because I did not vote for Jeremy Corbyn nor agree with many of his views, this does not automatically make some kind of far right extremist who will slander him or try to smear him.

We live in a society that has become so polarised where people forget that its all a big melting pot of different & varied opinions and views, and where it is possible to support the fundamental purpose of an organisation like the Police, while at the same time calling out the worst qualities of their culture and behaviours and demanding they address their own failings.

So with that little preface there, lets assess all the players on the board at present.

The Northants Police Crime Panel (PCP)

This is a committee of people whose sole remit is to hold the Commissioner to account. There were many loud voices of criticism at what would be Mold’s final PCP on 14^th March 2024, none more so than André González De Savage.

The time for criticising Mold has come months too late, with little to no appetite by them of holding him to account. This ranges from his wasteful £3.3 million Earls Barton property purchase in 2021 never being suitably challenged, to the exact reasons why Mold interviewing Nick Adderley in 2018 never addressed how his genuine date of birth and age of 25 when joining the Police in 1992 was at odds with his claims of over 10 years Royal Navy experience including fighting in the Falklands when he was 15.

This continues with the re-appointment of Nick Adderley in 2023 to circumvent pension restrictions and then when the medal scandal all came to light in July 2023, why Mold took so long to suspend him and did not dismiss him in the face of evidence in the public domain showing Adderley’s entire career assertions to be a tissue of lies. Mold is very good at the hiring, but fails at firing, as is his explicit responsibility as PFCC.

When Mold dragged Northants into the news regarding Nicci Marzec and appointing her without due diligence, then further appointing Nikki Watson without informing the PCP of her IOPC investigation, only doing so when this hit the media, even then the PCP failed to show anything more than mild irritation and refused to sanction or move against Mold.

If we were totting up what the ledger looks like before the PCP actually consider a line crossed and them needing to do something, we have the following;

• Millions of pounds wasted on an unsuitable building being sold at a loss.
• Not one but two failed Fire Chief appointments with no prior experience within the Fire Brigade.
• Over £775k on the salary of a Police fraudster who swindled the county out of this money for 5 years since 2018, being appointed as Chief Constable not once but twice by Mold when basic checks would prove he had lied to try to gain the role.
• The suspension salary being paid to Nick Adderley of £14k per month totalling £84,000 that could have easily been saved by dismissing him immediately in the face of the overwhelming evidence.
• The fact that for some 6 months the county is in the inconceivable position of having neither a Fire Chief nor a Police Chief as both appointments deemed as a safe pair of hands by Mold are under investigation by the IOPC.
• The constant dragging of Northants into the national media with scandals that all arise from Mold’s decisions or actions.

All of this in aggregate was STILL not sufficient for the PCP to break ranks and challenge Mold and is the level of which they are comfortable signing off how they think he is doing a good job.

It was the comment of “I’ll dump the bitch” earlier this month with the inevitable media circus that not only brought Mold’s days without a news scandal streak, however brief to an abrupt end, but what finally tipped the scales for the PCP. This was either on its own, or by seeing public opinion realising their chronic inactions would likely become the focus of the next story.

Just remember the above tally of events being acceptable, should any of the PCP stand for election as Conservative candidate for PFCC in May and tell you how they will do a better job than Mold if you elect them, when they were quite content to rubber stamp his years of his bad behaviour.

West Northants Council

The Council headed up by Jonathan Nunn have given stock answers when asked if they condemn Mold and failed to issue any support of him. While clearly picking a side against him, save for a few exceptions who have broken ranks, they have been altogether weak in their collective condemnation.

https://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2022-04-25/hypocritical-politician-who-assaulted-wife-helps-launch-anti-violence-scheme

Looking into the background of those who failed to speak out against Mold, this news article from just under 2 years ago in April 2022 shows Mold, at the “It Only Takes One” event. This event was designed to discourage people from being bystanders and speak up against sexual harassment and assault.

Quite the irony that in a drive to promote openness and transparency about violence, they opted to front it with a group with a past so chequered and colourful that laying it in a 2 page newspaper spread it would look something like a like a kaleidoscope has shat itself.

To Mold’s left we have Jonathan Nunn, a man who the news article confirms has a conviction in 2004 for assaulting his then wife, something that despite the message of the event being about speaking up to combat violence, the panel chose not to speak up themselves and highlight this fact.

Flanking Mold on the right was Detective Superintendent Joseph Banfield, Head of Protecting Vulnerable People at Northants Police. I am not sure if I were a victim, that I would want the person running a department charged to protect me, seemingly asleep at the wheel happily sharing a platform extoling the benefits of his latest scheme with a person whose main knowledge of the subject matter of domestic violence comes from gripping the rail of a Crown Court as a defendant being found guilty of said crime.

Thanks to “Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (DVDS)” also know as Clare’s law, Banfield runs the team and therefore is responsible for managing the register and releasing information about requests made by people wishing to know if their partners have ever been convicted of domestic violence. A list that Mr Nunn would have certainly been on.

That segues quite nicely into the next person on the list…

Detective Superintendent Joseph Banfield.

Banfield has also scurried out, eager to make a statement to the Chronicle, expressing his opinions that Mold no longer has the mandate to lead.

Speaking out in his role as head of The Police Superintendent’s association, with his role as head of vulnerable persons at Northants Police, and ignoring the above faux pas, you could well be fooled into thinking that Banfield’s comments are genuine, that he is an honest and competent officer, displaying integrity.

I’ve previously touched on Banfield having no issue with his DI Liz Basham not declaring a business interest on the register of interests, and being quite happy to lie about matters when challenged, refusing to provide any more answers like a petulant child throwing a tantrum saying how I shared his letter on social media out of context.

He fails to explain how the entire paragraph about a subject, concluding how he will not be discussing it further is somehow out of context. He also does not seem to like transparency, which is suitable context when seeing why he attended an event about domestic violence sharing the stage with someone convicted of the same crime and keeping quiet about it.

That alone is bad enough, but things go much deeper than that in why we need to question Banfield’s motives in speaking out now.

I’d also previously touched on how a rape I reported in 2015 was covered up for 8 years before actually being logged as a crime. The main issue being 2 different forces each blaming the other and as the letter shows, Thames Valley Police in January 2024 finally admitted their part in the error. Thames Valley having their name on the admission in no way absolves Northants Police of any blame as it was Northants Police that failed to log this when contacted by me for 8 years.

A little food for thought is how Banfield worked at Thames Valley Police in 2015 around the time this cover up began.

Banfield and his team of course deny any crime was made aware to them, yet seem unable to answer why all the calls I made to Northants Police since 2015 chasing up this reported rape do not seem to be logged on their system.

Despite this finally being logged in 2023, this rape case was never even passed to the CPS and was binned off by Banfield and his team, supressing evidence I have provided, claiming it doesn’t exist or can’t be retrieved as the justification.

If you were not aware, rape is a crime that is a mandatory referral with a charging decision needing to be made by a Crown Prosecutor, yet as you can see the CPS have no record of this case ever being passed to them.

As bad as this is, it is not the most shocking issue. In February 2022 I was a victim of a different and separate sex crime committed by an officer serving under Banfield. The evidence surrounding this was investigated by Banfield in a complaint I made.

Banfield replied in August 2022, meaning he would have been aware of his officer breaking the law, yet refused to uphold the complaint and began the process of covering up the crime.

I have reported this separate sex crime 3 times since July 2023 and had this incorrectly logged each time as either a complaint or just closed down. The victim statement I gave in January 2024 was edited by the Police officer taking it, removing the suspect’s name because they were a Police officer and they did not feel comfortable naming him. This culminated in Northants Police trying to coerce me into signing a statement that was NOT my account of events and makes no reference to their colleague. I even had the suspect’s DS who reports into Banfield coming around to my home, hammering on my door and windows on a Sunday morning last month wanting to “speak to me” about this matter, despite prior explicit instructions from me NOT to attend my property due to the obvious conflict of interests and me not being entirely comfortable with letting a lone male officer into my house.

Banfield’s team have since refused to cooperate with matters, simply telling me my statement I want to give (that is the same as the one they wanted me to sign but with more details and names the officer) is incomplete, but refusing to clarify what information is missing that they need in order to log this so I can sign this and make it formal, or why the statement with less information that does NOT name the officer is fine.

The only reasons I can see for this is that without a formal signed statement that actually names the officer, the crime is not formally logged with no formal record of the officer being a suspect, and the officer can carry on in his duties as normal while having his colleagues, which include Banfield who was aware of this 2 years ago, to rally round and cover this up in the hopes of smearing & discrediting me to mitigate this disaster.

I even put in an FOI about how many of Banfield’s team are under investigation for sex offences, forcing their hand to prove this is logged and a known sex offender is working on the sexual offences team or that there is no sexual offence logged, proving the cover up.

You will see from the FOI this was refused, as Northants Police do not feel that proving the number of serving Police officers working with vulnerable people on the sexual offences team while also being under investigation for sex offences themselves is something worthy of us lowly peasants knowing.

• So with not 1 but 2 different sexual offences I have raised that Banfield is personally aware of and quite happy with the first not being logged as a crime for 8 years and the second not being logged at all.
• Supressing evidence about a rape and not passing this crime to the CPS for a charging decision, instead choosing to bin this off.
• With the suspect of a sex crime happily working on Banfield’s team coming into daily contact with and having easy access to vulnerable people, who are themselves often victims of sex crimes.
• With Banfield quite happy to lie about his DI not declaring business interests that just happen to be in the same limited company that Mold was also a director of.

Do all of these events really add up to a man whose core values are being honest, open and protecting vulnerable people and that his motives in speaking out against misogyny are anything more than just self preservation from the inevitable scandal that Banfield is trying and failing to manage hitting the headlines?

Fire Brigades Union (FBU)

These guys have been calling out Mold from day 1 for his shambolic leadership and direction of Northants Fire & Rescue. If anything they are very much the OG voices here that everyone else followed, myself included, in publicly calling out Mold and his behaviour.

To be fair to them if I worked in an industry that was as heavily skilled as theirs and knew my craft inside out, I’d be pretty narked off to then be asked to fall under the scrutiny of a man who has about as much knowledge of the Fire service as someone slumped in their sofa, watching a UK Gold marathon of London’s Burning on a Sunday afternoon while nursing a particularly bad hangover.

The Fire service being lumped in with Police when it comes to governance has long been contested, with political oversight, being seen as a means to cut funding via the backdoor, with PFCC like Mold, happily marking his own homework of cuts made. Fire services are regularly understaffed due to cuts, with inadequate vehicles and equipment being not fit for purpose, and increased bureaucracy acting as a barrier to getting investment needed.

When you look at Mold’s appointments and realise they have even less knowledge of the Fire service than he does, you can feel the palpable anger of hardworking Firefighters.

The fistful of empty promises from Mold took me back to an email from the early 2000s, with an amusing critical look at children’s artwork. Specifically one about a fire engine that is on a par with Mold’s assessment and response to matters.

For anyone of the younger generation, this was before the days before WhatsApp and memes, when we used to get entertaining emails sent to us at work.

Returning to the seriousness of the situation, just recently we saw a service pushed to the limits trying to respond to incidents during Storm Babet. They raised the very serious question about what would happen if at the time of the floods a serious fire had broke out? Fire & Rescue are quite conversely being forced into being an either or service of now “Fire” or “Rescue” with an inability to cover both concurrently due to the chronic lack of investment and mismanagement of what precious little funds they do have.

But hey do not worry Firefighters, as Fecal Midas Mold knows best, as he purchased a combined workshop at only £3.3 million that stood empty for years, would cost £16 million to bring it up to the standard needed and will thus be sold at a loss, as he deems this a better use of money that you could use on equipment and crews.

Police Federation of England & Wales (PFEW)

This organisation acting for the interests of Police officers, with the Northants arm fronted by Sam Dobbs, appearing to mirror the FBU in speaking up for their members for the shame that Mold has brought upon their organisation. They have asked Mold not to attend any events on inclusivity for the obvious hypocrisy at having the man setting the tone for the whole organisation, seeming to contradict this position with his words and actions.

With Police now taking the unprecedented step of joining Fire in their criticism, this leaves Mold with very large gaps in his Outlook Calendar, being persona non grata at both organisations and locations across the county.

Sam Dobbs however was all too quick to jump in and defend Nick Adderley when the scandal broke, despite the clear evidence of Adderley lying.

Adderley left a trail of evidence a mile wide, with sufficient crumbs to enable someone like me to follow it back and gather the evidence of all his misdeeds that would make Hansel and Gretel proud.

You can see examples of this evidence I personally uncovered and exposed in previous blogs here and here

PFEW have begun to distance themselves and be a bit more considered in their vocalisations of defending the indefensible. This is altogether understandable when you examine the entire organisation, claiming to be the equivalent of the FBU supporting blue light workers, when in truth they actively work against them.

In recent years the cash reserves of the PFEW have dwindled down to a paltry sum from what they were several years ago with various “consultants” and other miscellaneous expenditure leaking funds from the organisation.

This might just be poor management from the various shell companies and property management firms used to create a tangled web of intra invoicing to complicate following the money, or it might be from the latest CEO Mukund Krishna having his focus split from also running his counselling business using a different name, while also drawing a salary as a CEO of PFEW.

Of course I may be being too harsh and the money may have been deliberately frittered away in order to ensure no money is in the coffers for when the writ hits the fan and judgements in the Broadbent Claim need to be paid.

The Broadbent Claim for anyone unaware, is a legal claim that that has just shy of 10,000 Police officers involved and is against The Police Federation of England & Wales, with claims of victimisation, age discrimination, monies missing from pensions and many things that you would not expect to see an organisation set up and designed to protect its members from the very things they stood accused of and have been found guilty of.

Judge Massarella, less than a month ago issued a reserved judgement where Police officers were successful in their claims with a remedy & compensation needing to be set as the next stage.

With financial ruin looming, PFEW just days ago made a derisory offer to all claimants as a means to drop their claims, with a caveat of trying to bully them into settling by saying 100% of claimants need to accept the pittance offered if any money is ever to change hands, ensuring that this sows dissent amongst the collective claimants, trying to make them turn on each other.

When you see this is how PFEW acts towards its own members who fund it, you start to question the character of those who appear proud to be a person on the inside of this club looking out.

Therefore any condemnation of Stephen Mold made by PFEW, however appropriate must be viewed through the lens of their own current media scandal they are trying to keep contained. The condemnation is altogether too late and made by yet another party all too aware they may soon be in the spotlight of scandal.

Conclusions

You need to remember how it serves the interests of those scared of being the subject of tabloid scandal to either have a bigger scandal in the headlines, or amplify an existing one to keep it there as long as possible. Weirdly enough this is exactly what happened with Stephen Mold and Nicci Marzec when the Adderley story broke, shifting focus away from him, making you question who stood to benefit from Adderley becoming the news story.

I am therefore naturally dubious of all those speaking out at the 11th hour who have their own questionable track records, and if they are doing so for the right reasons.

So when it comes to navigating the good ship HMS Northampton through the shitstorm of PR, it matters not how much it crashes on the rocks, nor how damaged everything gets, so long as everyone gets a chance at playing Captain to be seen as the hero.

When the PFCC elections come about on Thursday 2nd May 2024, I’d urge you to look at the background of all the candidates and examine their records and the company they keep and their actions to date.

The first thing I will be doing when the new PFCC is appointed, is to request an audience with them to discuss the issue of Nick Adderley and what actions they can take to conclude matters as quickly as possible, to ensure the drain of his salary is better redirected to serving the people of Northamptonshire.

I am quite happy to announce that I have reviewed the current candidates and made my decision that I will be putting my X firmly in the box of Ana Savage Gunn. Not because of any political leanings, but because she is a former Police Inspector at Northants Police whose has made very valid proposals at the recent WNC meeting of DBS vetting all Councillors as seen in the video above.

Her actions demonstrate a burning desire to be a force for good and to try to get our county out of the mire that Mold and his mates have gotten us into.