Dame Shirley Porter Andrew Hosken

Dame Shirley and the subversion of democracy

Missing millions, shady characters and dodgy offshore investments. Welcome to the world of Dame Shirley Porter, writes Illtyd Harrington

Nothing Like A Dame – The Scandals of Shirley Porter by Andrew Hosken
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WE all have good and bad years but 1991 was the beginning of the end for one of the more grotesque of one of London’s political fraudsters. In the New Year’s honours list PM John Major made Shirley Porter – the over, but in reality under, exposed leader of Westminster City Council – a Dame of the British Empire.
Under increasing public scrutiny she gracefully laid aside her leadership burden and took up the trappings of the role that go with being Lord Mayor of that great city. Her eager and sallied reputation brazened it out even when on the December 13, 1991 far different sentiments were coming from the five senior Law Lords. They unanimously found her “guilty of political corruption” with a history of “pretence obfuscation, prefabrication” who “practised a deliberate, blatant and dishonest use of public power.”
The daughter of Tesco’s founder Jack Corin and wife of its one time chairman Leslie, Porter saw nothing irreconcilable in continuing her public offices as a JP and first citizen after such a broadside. On she went apparently unruffled eventually seeking the sanctuary of home.
Her misdeeds by April 2004 had been calculated at a cost of nearly £49 million. After 16 years of public scrutiny, Westminster city council did a deal with her. Former City colleagues flew to Amsterdam. They did this on a day trip so as not to expose her to legal action in Britain. And she settled up by paying £12.3 million. At one stage her apologists pleaded sadly that amongst her diminishing assets was a gold plated lavatory seat.
Andrew Hosken of Radio 4’s Today programme tells the tale of the consequence of allowing a megalomaniac to take over. Porter sold three cemeteries for just 15p and other adjacent properties for just 85p. Someone made a very good deal.
She practiced a local version of ethnic cleansing on the homeless, suddenly dispatching them to bed and breakfast accommodation on the outskirts of London. Poor families were herded into asbestos ridden tower blocks.
She went on to blatantly intimidate senior council officers, 48 senior staff resigned. Too many gave in to her blustering and bullying. Attempts were made by her and her lieutenants to keep tabs on their personal lives. Even Margaret Thatcher who she aped couldn’t stand her.
She lobbied for a peerage and to be made Minister for London. But it took a long time for Tories, local and national, to challenge her autocratic and anti-democratic operators.
The ultimate lunacy of her gerrymandering and uncontrollable demands to sell council housing came in her ‘building stable communities’ policy. This madness is best illustrated in the person of Dr Michael Dutt, a housing chairman and geriatrician. This zealot, specialising in the care of the elderly, had no moral problems in vigorously ordering the dismantling purpose built flats for old people near Regent’s Park and insisting on their instant conversion for sale. Later he committed suicide.
There was no widespread mourning.
Opposition hardened, but the rest of London seemed indifferent. Investigative journalist Paul Foot blew the cemetery scandals wide open in an article in the Mirror in October 1987.
Relatives of the dead and council tenants outsmarted the Dame. People power flexed its muscles. By 1989, the BBC’s Panorama was on the case and John Magill, the District Auditor – an independent financial watchdog – had begun unravelling the Byzantine world of Porter.
In January 1994, he found her guilty of “wilful misconduct”. His report had been delayed 15 times.
This solid impartial accountant concluded her policy “had been recklessly indifferent to whether it was right or wrong”.
Here the tale gets even more sordid with shady characters offshore funding and other private investments appearing. The question was, just what had happened to Porter’s millions?
Inevitably, the internet and email push out the evidence. But the citizens of Westminster have had to make up the £36 million shortfall.
Hosken has painted a salutary picture of the subversion of local democracy by lies and a “climate of fear”. Meanwhile, the Dame lives on as a respected and benevolent citizen with perhaps and is the best known widow in Tel Aviv.

• Illtyd Harrington was leader of the Labour Party in Westminster City Council in the early 1970s.

Andrew Hosken at the launch with Eileen Sheppard who campaigned against the sale of cemeteries for just 5p each

‘Some Conservatives acted like real heroes’
By Joel Taylor

WESTMINSTER Conservatives were noticeable by their absence at the launch of Andrew Hosken’s biography of Dame Shirley Porter on Thursday.
The only Tories there were figures who served the council at the same time as the disgraced former leader, indomitable figures such as Patricia Kirwan who bravely spilled the beans on the gerrymandering Building Stable Communities (BSC) policy of Dame Shirley, destroying her own political career in the process.
Andrew Hosken, who has spent more than two years working on the book, clearly recognises their efforts.
He said: “I hope that one of the things that does come through in the book is how many members of the Conservative Party acted heroically.
“People like Patricia Kirwan and (former councillor) Anthony Prendergast. They did what they could do within the political party structures.”
But no matter how hard the current council tries to draw a line under the whole scandal, dismissing it as something that happened a long time ago, it refuses to go away.
He added: “If someone (from the council) turned around and said they were really sorry, maybe that would help, but they haven’t.”
Andrew freely admits that he didn’t plan writing a book about Dame Shirley. He had posted a few reports on the Today programme over the years and he was the journalist to whom leader of the opposition, Cllr Paul Dimoldenberg, leaked council papers revealing Westminster Council’s “go-slow” in recovering the £42-million surcharge.
The process of the book only started when he was approached by the publishers Granta, who realised, after the final legal processes were nearly finished, that no one had ever written a book about the controversial Tory.
What amazed him so much was the shameless nature of the BSC policy – District Auditor John Magill even found notes by senior officers with phrases such as “g-mander” scrawled on them.
Mr Hosken said: “They were doing it for gerrymandering, it had nothing to do with legitimate aims.
“If they had said it (moving homeless families outside of Westminster) was cheaper it would have been alright, but they didn’t say that. The District Auditor described councillors sitting down in Regent’s Park discussing gerrymanying.
“This wasn’t just a couple of politicians, it was the whole council machine.”
But the aspect of the whole saga Andrew finds so disturbing was the moving of 122 homeless families in the asbestos filled Hermes and Chantry Points.
He says: “I can’t articulate a response. In January 1989 they discovered asbestos in the Strand underpass, closed it down immediately and spent £5 million making it safe. Four weeks later they moved 122 families into the two towers.
“What were they thinking about?”