Jackie wakes up a net sensation

A WOMAN who went viral for her calm handling of a chaotic parish council meeting has expressed surprise at her newfound fame.

Jackie Weaver hosted a meeting of Handforth Parish Council in which councillors lost their cool and traded insults, leading to her kicking chairman Brian Tolver off the Zoom call. A clip of the December 10 meeting (pictured), which was put on Twitter on Thursday afternoon, had been viewed more than three million times by Friday morning, much to the shock of Ms Weaver.

She told BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour: “I suppose the surprise comes in large part because actually 99.99% – that’s an actual fact I’m sure – of council meetings are just not like that. They are often less exciting than we might hope.”

The meeting of the parish council in Cheshire marked the second time Mr Tolver had been removed, having previously been evicted from the earlier 7pm planning and environment committee call.

In the 7.30pm extraordinary meeting, Mr Tolver told Ms Weaver, chief officer of the Cheshire Association of Local Councils (ChALC), to “stop talking”, and added: “You have no authority here.” In response, Ms Weaver removed Mr Tolver from the Zoom call.