Norris’s swansong: it’s all about me …
Did I ever mention that I was a minister? At the West of England mayor’s last meeting he stuck to his self-obsessed playbook
Sometimes it seems like it’s all coming together. For years we’ve been asking for an efficient council. But the last regime stumbled from one disaster to another. Bristol Beacon, Bristol Energy, Barton Hill – the crises kept on coming.
Then one day last week we got a council that worked. Roadworks were carried out quickly with the minimum of disruption at a time when the public wasn’t inconvenienced. Not the usual dig-it-up-and-disappear approach. Even the police managed to offer a rare presence to deter wrongdoing.
The only problem was that the 3am works for what Bristol city council called the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood struck terror into parts of the community.
Last Friday, some of those affected by the night of the long planters turned up at the West of England Combined Authority committee in Filton and made impassioned pleas to the authority that provided Bristol with the funds to carry out the works.
As Stuart Phelps said: “Our community is being split on race and class lines by the actions of the city council for the third time in a row. And each time that that split occurs, we have greater and greater problems trying to bring the community back together.”
Mayor Dan Norris was momentarily emollient. But then, as always, he turned it back to himself: “What I heard was you saying consultation, consultation, consultation. Rather like my good friend David Miliband wrote: education, education, education.”
After half an hour of emotional speeches, Dan Norris had to namedrop a failed former politician with a quote the rest of the world recall as coming from the lips of Tony Blair, not the pen of David Miliband. What was he thinking?
And followed by a boast: “I was told by one of my officers, we hold more of this kind of forum than most other combined authorities.” Well done for doing what you’re paid for, Mr Mayor.
As it was Norris’s last public meeting, tribute was paid to the £96,000-a-year, part-time mayor. The prize for post-modern irony went to Richard Bonner, who chairs the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership, representing business in the region. Bonner thanked Norris for “the collaboration and work that’s gone on across many partners for Temple Quarter, the establishment of the LLP, the ability to bring forward significant amounts of land for housing and jobs, so thank you for everything that you’ve done”.
I don’t want to burst any bubbles, but I have to offer a fun fact. Between December 2021 and March 2024, the Bristol Temple Quarter Strategic Board held eight meetings. Marvin Rees chaired all eight. Praise the recent lord of Ameresco! Dan Norris, a member of the board, attended two. And he didn’t even have a second (or third, if you count chairing the League Against Cruel Sports) job in those days.
Norris, who couldn’t abide Rees, failed to turn up so often that he became the butt of jokes – especially from Bristol city council chief executive Stephen Peacock, now Weca’s chief executive, say attendees. Peacock and Rees even gave Norris a nickname – David Brent.
Back in Filton, scrutiny chair Jerome Thomas was generous in his report, managing to avoid mentioning the question of Kevin Slocombe – the mayor’s personal image consultant at a cost to the taxpayer of £21,000 a month – that came up in the last committee. Fat good it did him. Norris was as dismissive of Thomas as he had been of the committee at last Monday’s meeting, which had left members fuming.
Norris: “I obviously was in front of you in your committee earlier this week and I think it’s a committee that I’ve attended the vast majority of meetings. Now some of the questions aren’t always the easiest to answer and they’re unexpected so that makes it kind of entertaining viewing, I guess. But it is an important thing. I know that my predecessor as mayor didn’t attend very many.”
(No Norris meeting would be complete without him badmouthing his predecessor, Tim Bowles, who disappeared in May 2021, expressing a desire to spend more time in Africa. Bowles, unlike Norris, was able to fill in four years’ worth of expenses to show he had been doing his job. Norris, by contrast, is said not to have claimed any expenses, although it recently emerged that the authority has paid for “tickets, etc”. I have asked for details about the tickets and the “etc” in a Freedom of Information request. It’s a funny old world where I can find David Lammy’s expenses with a few clicks but Dan Norris’s remain secret. As always, poor governance at Weca is being enabled by senior officers. Four years on, we have no clue what Norris has been up to.)
Norris had to get back at scrutiny after his appalling performance during which he took two personal phone calls. I’d like to see him do that in the Commons.
“The one thing I would just make a plea for, which I did earlier this week with you, is to ask that we try and encourage less knockabout, to sort of like catch the mayor out and maybe even give the mayor notice so they can give an even better answer, which would be more meaningful and more helpful to everybody, I think.”
Well, I suppose being given questions might have helped Norris recall that Lockleaze is not in south Bristol. Somehow I doubt it. He can’t stick to a script. And he usually betrays his ignorance with the certainty that nobody will point it out.
Another regular from the Norris playbook is the “when-I”. Discussing the Bristol to Portishead line. Norris said: “I want that to be a major success because let me tell you, not just as the mayor now, but as having been a government minister, there’s nothing more likely to get us future resources of size and scale to really make a difference than being able to point to things that we have done well of big scale.”
Were we ever be allowed to forget that he served as a very junior minister in Defra for a few months at the arse-end of the Brown government? This self-delusion is carried into his comments about the Best Value Notice, which will hold back the authority’s growth for another 18 months.
Norris: “We should have avoided it, in my view. And there may be a bit in my memoirs that will be more interesting and more juicy about why that happened.” Except that Dan Norris is so inconsequential that he won’t have any memoirs. Believe me, I have tried to sell newspapers stories about Norris and everyone asks: who?
The mayor wound up, as you might expect, with a piece of jaw-dropping hypocrisy. “I think that’s really important that we remember who we serve and who are the bosses. It’s not us, it’s the people,” he said. “These are qualities that I find hugely admirable I have to say. The rest of you, well, you know who you are.”
Well, yes, we know who we are. And we know what Dan Norris was. And we are beginning to find out how much he has cost the West of England.
