There we were enjoying a peaceful sabbatical on the Debunking Yacht out on the Med, and we were alerted to a rather bitter argument in progress. On Facebook, unless you’d not already guessed that by the words ‘bitter’ and ‘argument’. This we thought was worthy enough to interrupt our lazing around, and we dispatched our Sea Urchin (we took the email Urchin on holiday with us and rebranded him) to the rigging to hold the aerial toward the nearest phone mast. We are much too tight to fork out for satellite Internet here at Debunking. He’s sitting up there bitterly complaining as we type this but we reminded him of his pending pay rise to 70p an hour, which soon shut him up.
So what gives, who was arguing with who? Well we put it in the title, weren’t you paying attention? It seems Councillor Jan Wadrup in a moment of frustration, lashed out at Labours recent election shenanigans in which Councillor Hadley earned her nickname from us when she and fellow Councillor colleagues tried to bring meeting attendance to the fore in pious election point scoring. At least that’s what we believe happened as Wadrups’ post was seemingly out of nowhere, and our research wench couldn’t see any other trigger for it. You can decide for yourself after all is read and done whether Hadley keeps her moniker that we thought was well deserved at the time.
Councillor Wadrup it appears has been having rather a fraught time of it recently, and we at Debunking wish her all the best and hope her husband recovers well. It shows unfortunately just how nasty comments from months ago by Council candidates can affect people later on. Not necessarily people who deserve it either, as Wadrup has never really been on our radar for anything we would consider covering other than ill advised toadyism towards Kingstone.
Even though Wadrup attempted to tag in Hadley’s council page, it would appear that she is blocked from doing so. This was perhaps confirmed by the appearance of Hadley on her personal Facebook page jumping in to vociferously defend herself against Wadrup, and make a few cutting allegations of her own. Even former Councillor Paul Thompson got mixed up in it having disappeared from the Tory party under a cloud. Wadrups’ allegations of bullying by her former Labour colleagues appeared to particularly irk Hadley, who then set about trying to destroy Wadrups’ name, questioning her “ability and attitude as a Councillor”. Ouch.
It wasn’t long before more people got involved in the war of words on Facebook.
We at Debunking even got a mention! In answer to a gormless bloke by the name of Mike Jewkes who is an apparent master at confidently stating incorrect information about Councillors attendance to make his ‘point’. One of the many armchair Facebook ‘experts’ who have little to no knowledge of anything but like to show it off.
It appears that everything came to a head with former Councillor Chris Cooke jumping in to give his round up of the situation and suggest that Wadrups’ issue handling has perhaps not been the best, and seemingly in defence of Hadley and her abilities as a representative. Interestingly Cooke also suggested that Wadrups’ post should be reported to the Borough Council’s monitoring officer. So whether this exchange ends up offline to be dealt with is now up to Hadley, unless a member of the public decides to complain about it. We’ve seen some epic arguments on Facebook between certain Councillors, and members of the public who really shine as valuable members of our gene pool. We’ve not seen an argument like this between two members of the council before. Maybe it’s the summer heat.
We are going back to lazing around now, and believe us when we say that if there’s little to nothing going on to Debunk, that suits us just fine. As we said to a commenter on the mailbag who lamented the lack of content recently, think of us as a form of mutually assured destruction. If people say or do something worthy of appearing here, especially of a political or Leicestershire troll nature, be assured it will. Just having people find us on Google looking for Brina is more than enough for us to keep this site going. However, even when we’ve not got any stories, the Mailbag is where it’s at. And our urchin will climb that mast for an Internet connection so long as mail keeps coming in during our holibobs.
