Garnier hits back at Lib Dem claims

Councillor Helen Loydall's letter ("Tories used meeting to mislead residents", Mailbox, August 21) about the public meeting I chaired about Oadby & Wigston Borough Council's intentions for the car parks in Oadby is as intemperate and (for her fellow Lib Dem councillors) as embarrassing as her raucous intervention at the meeting itself.

I fear that she and her colleagues have been caught with their political pants down and it is not a pretty sight.

Facts often get lost in the intellectual lumber room of the local Lib Dem HQ but let me set a few matters straight so that Mrs Loydall does not in future repeat the errors in her letter.

Anne Bond has not been a member of the Conservative Party for some years and her contribution at the meeting was neither prepared nor endorsed by Harborough Conservative Association but was entirely her own.

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That said, it was received with rather more attention than Councillor Kaufman's rather puzzling rant about matters that had nothing whatever to do with the subject of the meeting.

The meeting was called by me, not by the local Conservative agent, and the numbers present suggest that I was entirely right to call it.

But what is important is not who arranged the meeting but what it was about and who is accountable to the local taxpayers and voters of the borough.

Sadly, after, in some cases, 20 years as councillors, Mrs Loydall and her colleagues appear to have lost the connection between office and accountability and I believe it showed at the meeting on August 3 and again in her letter to you.

I also believe the Lib Dems in this borough have become complacent, arrogant and lazy. Their job as the majority party is to listen to, and nurture, the aspirations of their residents, to do things FOR, not TO them, and to apply their brains to the overall benefit of the people who pay their allowances.

To read Mrs Loydall's letter and to hear her and her colleagues speak at the meeting is to smell the damp rot of a declining party that fears the electorate. They need to start thinking, planning and do a bit of work for the people who pay their allowances. Shouting at the public is silly and just a little unworthy.

Edward Garnier QC MP, House of Commons, London.