Meet your new MEP – who none of you will have voted for

You may not have heard but the South East region has a new MEP to represent your interests. He is John Howarth, a Labour politician who has been elected by – well, no one.

How come? Well, under the EU’S list system if an MEP leaves or resigns, the next person on the party’s list takes the job and that is what has happened here. Annelise Dodds, who was an MEP, became an MP at the election for Oxford East and duly stood down to be replaced by Mr Howarth, who lives in Reading and hails from Tyneside.

According to his website, “he founded and operated an agency delivering advertising, brand and communications services to commercial, public and voluntary sectors” and had a stint as a county councillor in Berkshire and as a Reading councillor.

So now you know. And no, it doesn’t look like he has any connections directly with Kent.

Quite what came over Conservative county councillors who suggested some kind of blue plaque-style scheme to tell the world how much money KCC had spent transforming Margate is anyone’s guess.

The idea of emblazoning public buildings with KCC logos and the amount of money spent funding various projects and schemes is among the more perplexing ideas Off The Record has heard.

Are they really so insecure? We certainly didn’t think that Conservative county councillor Jeremy Kite, also the leader of Dartford council, would be behind such a hare-brained idea.

As plenty of people have said, in the interests of fairness there would have to be a way of publicising how investments had gone wrong. And if KCC really does want to advertise how much it has invested then it should really not be its logo plastered over buildings but copies of a few council tax bills. After all, that’s where the money came from in the first place. Who knows. It could be a novel art installation.

What has happened to a report produced by a crossparty committee at KCC on ways to improve social mobility in grammar schools? It is a question that one member of the committee would like answered. Asked how many of the report’s 16 key recommendations had been implemented, Cllr Andrew Bowles – a Conservative – said he was not aware of any that had been fully implemented. The report is now a year old. “We are coming close to a position where we will need to ask some hard questions,” he says rather ominously.