At last Thursday’s General Election hustings in Bishop’s Stortford, Julie Marson, the Conservative seeking re-election for a second term as the local MP, told the audience that her two guiding principles were evidence and values.
Rewind to January 2020, the month after she became the first woman to be elected to represent our town at Parliament, when she told the Indie that she did not “want to be the Conservative MP for Hertford and Stortford, I want to be the MP who represents all of you and gives you a voice, and champions this constituency in Parliament and beyond”.
In other words, it was constituents over party.
We took her at her word and, in the spirit of working together to champion our town, we offered her a fortnightly column to keep our readers – especially those who are not online – informed of her work at “home” and in the House.
Two years later, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mrs Marson, a policeman’s daughter and former magistrate, refused our request to address in her column the major issue of the moment: the Partygate misdemeanours of her law-breaking Brexit hero, Boris (that’s disgraced former PM Johnson, not her pet dog). Instead, she brushed off his actions as “disappointing”, spectacularly failing to read the room on this issue.
She refused to continue with her column and imposed a two-year blanket ban on communicating with Indie readers, not even extending the courtesy to us of a “No comment” when we approached her on issues.
Issues of integrity and transparency such as:
why she was claiming £1,320 a month in expenses (at your expense, readers) for PR services from a Hampshire communications firm linked to Tory party HQ; and
why she felt able to pocket £4,479 redundancy cash for her 74-day stint as an assistant whip (a role which meant she had to put party first and constituents second) after Liz Truss had sacked her – 51 days before Rishi Sunak restored her to the same role.
What does that say to you about Julie Marson’s values?
