The revolving door chaos at Sandwell council continues unabated.
In, is the Right Honourable Jacqui Smith as Chair of Sandwell Childrens Care Social Trust.
Everyone knows that the consistent failures of Sandwell’s Childrens Service, run by Sandwell Labour council and directed by Cllr. Simon Hackett, led government to intervene and require the establishment of a trust, removed from incompetent council control.
But who’s this Jacqui Smith?
Well, surprise surprise she is a pensioned off, Labour politician. And keep in mind the “Right Honourable” bit.
Those with political memories will remember Jacqui as MP for Redditch and Home Secretary in Gordon Brown’s Labour government. After serving for just two years in that post she gushed “I hope I did a good job but if I did it was more by luck” confessing that she had “Never run a major organisation” before.
And the reason for her resignation? She had been “creative” with her expenses claims. Most, who do remember this, recall her claiming, from the public purse, the cost of porn videos watched by her hubby.
More importantly, Jacqui had counted her sister’s London property as her main home and the family house in the Redditch constituency as a second residence, so that she was able to inflate her second home expenses claim.
And claim she did. £116,000 expenses included scatter cushions, a patio heater, a tooth brush holder and, a tribute to her meanness, a bath plug. All at our expense.
Unsurprisingly, the electors of Redditch, at the following election, gave this woman the bums rush.
Not that resulted in her signing on at the Redditch job centre. Soon she was a consultant at accountants KPMG, then adviser to Savina Rosso Job Access, an organisation owned by a friend of the Blairs. A stint broadcasting on LBC followed; media is always on hand to help a needy socialist.
More recently she has been Chair of Public Affairs at Westbourne Communications, a public relations agency, Chair of Birmingham University Hospitals Trust and Chair of Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust and a trustee of the Kings Fund.
Her qualifications for these positions are unclear. Because, before her stint at the Home Office, in which 39% of Labour activists thought she was doing “a bad job”, as she admitted, she had “Never run a major operation”
It is hoped that she will not be distracted, by her other roles, from providing safety and security for the children of Sandwell and will bring to the task that attention to detail that led her to get the public to pay for her bath plug.