PANTS ON FIRE No 2 – TODD FOREMAN

Whatever would we do without Todd Foreman? Todd was elected as one of our Notting Barns councillors in 2010, having abandoned his native USA to settle in the UK several years ago. According to his profile, on the Kensington Labour Party website, he discovered his keen interest in politics at an early age, and always knew that his beliefs were left of centre. Apparently he’s an experienced lawyer specialising in banking and financial services regulation. He says that he feels privileged to represent the residents of Notting Barns as their Councillor, and particularly likes using his legal skills to assist residents in their dealings with the Council.

It’s a pity therefore that we have seen so little of Todd in the three years since he was elected to serve us, but then he has been a very busy man after all. When we asked Judith Blakeman why we had had no legal advice from Todd despite our very obvious need of it, she explained that he was  “not that kind of lawyer”. Of course we knew that already, because we have a copy of the declaration of interests he submitted to the Council in June 2012, revealing that he worked for JP Morgan, one of the biggest banks on Wall Street and deeply implicated in the BANKSTER crisis of recent years. This is not quite the kind of background you might expect a Labour Councillor to come from, at least not one who expects his so-called left wing credentials to be taken seriously. In any case JP Morgan must have kept him busy making sure their business practices didn’t breach financial services regulations etc.

Then, of course, there was the GLA. Within a couple of years of his election to RBKC Todd decided he could best serve the residents of Notting Barns by abandoning them to seek election to the West Central seat of the GLA in May 2012. He lost that one unfortunately. What a pity.

More recently, in June 2013, he announced, although apparently not to the electors of the Notting Barns ward, that he feels honoured to have been chosen by North East Somerset Labour Party to stand as their candidate for Parliament at the next general election.  He is, of course, grateful to Labour Party members for their support and the trust that they have placed in him. In return for this great honour and privilege Todd has promised that he will immediately move into that constituency and make it his home, and will spend the next two years canvassing full time in North East Somerset. It’s hard to see how he will find any time for his Notting Barns constituents during all this.    http://todd4nesomerset.com/

Incidentally Todd’s civil partner, Mark Sautter, is also, coincidentally, a serial Labour Party candidate in RBKC local elections, but hasn’t quite had Todd’s good fortune. He stood and lost in Campden Ward in the RBKC local election in 2010.  Following this he stood and lost to Louis Mosley (Con) in the Brompton bye-election in 2011, and lost again to Abbas Barkhorder (Con) in Brompton in 2012. Todd and Mark share their home in exclusive Campden Hill with a Belgian Schipperke dog, named Jackie (apparently named after Jackie Onassis). Strangely we could find no record of the dog Jackie ever having stood for election in RBKC or elsewhere.

It seems to us that the likes of Foreman and Sautter are typical of the kind of spiv opportunistic careerists we have come to expect from the Post-Blairite New Labour Party, more interested in climbing the slippery pole of political ambition than in representing the real needs of the underprivileged inner city communities on whose backs they climb to power. Of course we might be completely wrong about this. Foreman might really be a man of principle and high ideals and might genuinely have left-wing political instincts, as claimed in his Labour Party profile. And pigs might fly.

Meanwhile, he should do the honourable thing by resigning his seat at RBKC and allowing us to elect a new councillor who might just give a sh*t about the residents of this community, who need all the help and genuine representation they can get.