‘I occasionally worry about getting sacked’
Molly Scott Cato to stand in county council elections
FORMER South West MEP Molly Scott Cato, right, will stand in next year’s Gloucestershire County Council elections.
The professor of economics and 2019 General Election Green Party candidate for Stroud was selected last week to replace councillor Eva Ward for the authority’s Central Stroud ward. She represented the South West as an MEP between 2014 and 2020.
Ms Scott Cato came third in last year’s general election in Stroud, losing to Conservative candidate Siobhan Baillie by 26,628 votes.
She said she will work “tirelessly” to improve transport systems, including reopening Bristol Road Railway Station in Stonehouse.
The Central Stroud ward has been held by the Green Party for more than a decade. Voters are expected to go to the polls in May 2021 for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic paused local elections earlier this year.
Ms Scott Cato said: “There is still so much to be done. If elected, I will work tirelessly to improve our transport systems, including reopening Stroudwater Station in Stonehouse for a direct rail route for us to the heart of Bristol.”
Ms Ward, 70, the current councillor for Central Stroud, has already said she won’t stand for re-election in order to make way for “someone with fresh energy and ideas”.
Meanwhile, long-standing Labour councillor and the current Labour group leader Lesley Williams has been deselected by the local party.
The Stonehouse councillor, who was awarded an MBE for her service to local government, has been a county councillor since 2001 and the Labour leader for 10 years but will not feature in next year’s local election.
HAVE I Got News For You star Ian Hislop has said he occasionally worries about being sacked from the hit BBC comedy programme.
Hislop, the editor of satirical magazine Private Eye, has been a captain on the panel show with comedian Paul Merton for nearly 30 years.
The programme has over the years courted controversy and the BBC is currently facing scrutiny over equal pay, diversity, free TV licences for the over-75s and competition from streaming services.
Media reports have recently linked former Daily Telegraph editor Lord Moore with the job of BBC chairman. He has since ruled himself out.
The Government is also reported to be supporting ex- Daily Mail editor and vocal BBC critic Paul Dacre to become chairman of broadcast regulator Ofcom.
“I occasionally worry about being sacked,” Hislop said.
“There was a previous directorgeneral John Birt and there was a point where Peter Mandelson was involved in both a sort of mortgage scandal and he was outed by Matthew Paris as gay.
“The director-general, who was a friend of Mandelson, sent round a memo to all BBC programmes saying there will be no mention of Peter Mandelson on this programme at all and nothing that happened in Peter Mandelson’s life will be mentioned.
“I was asked a question and I said, ‘Interestingly it turned out this week that Peter Mandelson turns out to be a home... owner’ at which point Paul Merton said, ‘Yeah, but why shouldn’t gay people have mortgages’. Again, I think we’ve got form on this front.”
Hislop, who was speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival to mark his 60th birthday, said critics of the show believed they were “Momentum-inspired, lefty lunatics”.
“I feel there was a moment where again in this sort of polarised world, somehow the director-general, or someone who was briefing others, got it into their heads that any criticism of the Government on a panel show suggests this is a bunch of sort of Momentum-inspired, lefty lunatics,” he said.
“I just now quote from the Daily Telegraph, who have really got it in for Boris, and ask just how rightwing you would like us to be.
“We’re sort of around the Spectator and the Telegraph editorial at the moment. There is quite a lot of that sort of nonsense about.
“We could be fired. That would be good.”
Hislop said the weekly satirical show had recently returned to the TV studio after all panel members appearing via videolink from home during the lockdown. He said his most recent favourite episode was when, during a monologue, he heavily criticised Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s adviser, Dominic Cummings, for a quarantine trip to Durham.
“The entire mission of the Government had been to tell the country to move on. We had this story he didn’t break the regulations so can everybody move on,” Hislop said.
“I just feel the great joy of my job is that I can just not move on and I can stay just where I am and say the same thing again and again and again.
“When he says, ‘I was doing it as an eye test’ and I can say you were just testing your lies and there’s nothing they can do about it. A huge number of our audience said what you did was made us feel better. I was particularly cross because many of you had obeyed the rules, particularly around care homes and not visiting people and we’ve lost someone and hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye.
“There were loads of people all over the country really trying to do the right thing and the Prime Minister’s special adviser was just taking the pi**. They just made you feel stupid.
“They tell people not to go to the beach and the people on the beach say, ‘I’ve only gone out once, why don’t you arrest Dominic Cummings?’.”