Neil Wilby Media

A Neil Wilby Media article published on 23rd December, 2023 has provoked another serious row between a local authority and a journalist responsible for a lengthy series of damaging exposés.

Another previously unreported exodus of paid senior officers from crisis-riddled Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council was highlighted following information received from several highly placed sources (read more here). 

The Labour administration and, notably, the Council Leader, Cllr Arooj Shah, and her chief executive, Harry Catherall, had sought to conceal the departures, both internally and externally, of a raft of high ranking officers (read article in full here).

Worse still, they since have doubled down on the lie, given in an official statement belatedly attributed to Harry, that ‘there is no impending departure of senior paid officers’ and ‘no decisions have been taken’.

The latest communication from Head of Communications and Strategy, Jeni Harvey, also introduced the issue of alleged ‘distress caused to individuals by highly personalised reporting’. As one would expect from Oldham Council it came from left field and completely absent of specification.

As investigative journalists everywhere are acutely aware, whilst always trying to balance the public interest, freedom of expression and right to a private life, the almost standard redoubt of public figures under scrutiny, and particularly over their misdemeanours entering the public domain, is to cry ‘distress’ or ‘harassment’ in an attempt to stifle criticism

But Jeni, whose richly endowed but dysfunctional press office, and the Council’s bizarre media strategy, have both come in for repeated criticism by Neil Wilby Media (read more here), got more than she bargained for by way of a response. This is the email sent to her in reply:

“As mentioned in my email to you yesterday, this is the second of two emails in response to yours below. The first remains unacknowledged and unanswered, despite its very high significance.

“Given that this email may well be read by a district or circuit judge at some future date, the header has been changed [from ‘request for statement’ to ‘alleged distress’] and the ensuing paragraphs are numbered. It is expected that your response will follow that protocol.

“1. For emphasis, these allegations are repeated from your penultimate paragraph (i) As we have discussed in the past, (ii) the highly personal content of some of your pieces is also causing very significant distress to individuals. It would be remiss of me not to remind you of this.

“2. (i) There has been only one such discussion in the past, in December, 2022, when you called me with a quite extraordinary request that a Neil Wilby Media article, headlined ‘Scared of his own shadow’, concerning a catalogue of the Borough Solicitor’s failings, presented fairly and in a balanced way, be taken down. It had, allegedly, reduced him to tears and he had left the office early after reading the article. Neither ‘distress’ (in the legal sense) nor ‘highly personalised comments’ were mentioned then, nor were they alluded to, even remotely, in a lengthy [telephone] conversation that took place very recently, on 20th December, 2023. Exception is, therefore, taken at your sly inference that this is a matter you have raised regularly in the past. It is absolutely not the case.

“(ii) (a) You are invited to specify, as a matter of urgency, which paragraphs in which articles have caused ‘very significant distress to individuals’.

“(ii) (b) You are further invited, also as a matter of urgency, to provide an explanation as to why such objections, if they actually exist, were not raised at the time, either by you or the individuals allegedly affected.

“3. Requests for statements, rights to reply or specific questions put to senior officers or elected Members, either made to yourself or via the generic press office email address, are routinely ignored. Emails to you, in particular, routinely go unacknowledged or unanswered. Please provide an explanation why that should be the case and why it should not become a code of conduct matter.

“4. In over twenty Neil Wilby Media articles and in over forty emails, across the past six months, I have raised the issue of the persistent, long-running campaign by your Council’s senior officers and the Leader of the Council to vex, annoy and harass a journalist doing his job of holding an utterly failed local authority to account. Please provide details of what action has been taken, or will be taken, by the Monitoring Officer to deal with these well-founded allegations.

“5. The same well-founded allegation has been filed above a Statement of Truth in civil proceedings extant against your Council.

“6. The same Council, as part of the same campaign to vex, annoy and harass, allows the same journalist to be smeared and/or defamed in a highly personalised manner in public questions, in the chamber itself by at least one Member, in emails sent out via the oldham.gov domain and on the WhatDoTheyKnow platform. Please provide details of what action has been taken, or will be taken, by the Monitoring Officer to deal with these issues.

“7. Please do not regard the above list, set out in paras 3 to 6, as exhaustive or limiting, in any way, my rights to take appropriate action and seek legal remedy.

“8. The final paragraph of your email mentions ‘a background conversation’. It has been explained to you on numerous occasions, in writing, that I have little or no interest in such conversations. The principal reason, of which you have been made plainly aware, is the necessity to have matters on the record and an audit trail of exchanges between your Council and myself. Well illustrated by the points articulated at para 2(i) above. The other factor militating against such conversations is that I do not trust you, for reasons shared, in writing, with both Shelley Kipling [assistant chief executive] and Amanda Chadderton (as Leader of the Council) in February, 2023. At that time, measures were instituted so that contact with you could be circumvented. Nothing that has happened since would give rise to a change of stance over that aforementioned trust. Indeed, your conduct recently has merely underscored those concerns.

“Conclusion

“9. In all the circumstances, the provisional view is that the issue of distress to individuals within Oldham Council has been randomly introduced by you (and, very likely, Paul Entwistle and Cllr Shah) as a form of defence mechanism against both the reporting of the appalling misconduct and law-breaking routinely uncovered within Oldham Council and, moreover, a distraction from the genuine distress caused by a persistent, grotesque campaign of vexing, annoying and harassment against me by a cabal of officers and at least one Member of your Council. Actionable in the civil court if I had, lying around spare, the estimated £60,000 necessary to take these matters to trial.

“Legal authority

“10. The leading legal authority on this topic, and one you might wish to study in detail, is McNally v Saunders [2021] EWHC 2012 (QB). Whilst in no way do I condone the style of writing of Julian Saunders (a retired solicitor and now citizen journalist) the legal principles relied upon and the findings of fact made by Mr Justice Chamberlain are hugely significant in extant matters between your Council and myself.

“I look forward to receiving, by return email, the requested material at para 2 subsections (ii) (a) and (b).

“Obviously, it is understood that your response to the rest of this email may take a little longer.”

That email, as one comes to expect of Oldham Council press office, and Jeni Harvey, in the majority of cases, remains unacknowledged and none of the requested details of the alleged distress have been provided, despite the urgency of the matter being stressed to Mrs Harvey.

Neil Wilby and Oldham Council are claimant and defendant, respectively, in court action over ‘industrial scale’ data breaches and the matter is likely to be heard in Manchester Civil Justice Centre in late 2024. The Council, and, notably, its Leader and her Borough Solicitor has refused every entreaty to either narrow issues or settle the claim. Instead, opting to potentially waste at least £40,000 of taxpayer funds (read more here).

It may not be the only occasion those two opponents face off in a civil court.

Follow Neil Wilby on Twitter (here) and Neil Wilby Media on Facebook (here) for signposts to any updates.

Page last updated: Sunday 31st December, 2023 at 0655 hours

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