Running away while constituents suffer has changed the respect circle in Northumberland.

 

Storm Arwen brought an awful time for many residents of England's most northerly constituency, Berwick upon Tweed, with many Councillors trying their level best to organise help for their neighbour's and constituents. 

The Council is currently run by a Conservative administration who were halted from being able to deliver what people needed throughout the storm period because their Leadership pairing were both away on annual leave.

Then without warning or much consideration for her constituents the local MP, Anne-Marie Trevelyan deserted the people in their hour of need and went off to the USA on a jolly said to bring American business to the UK. But in words of a local from a Berwick Facebook page "she's buggered off to get her Christmas shopping done". Whether that's correct or not remains to be seen on her return, but it was an interesting point of view.

This democratic void brought the spotlight onto a number of opposition Councillors who pulled out all of the stops and were praised so highly by those they had delivered for and to that Anne-Marie Trevelyan will have loads of competition at the next general election.

The four-way split across the circle of respect was extremely interesting to us at murky as the complement numbers rolled out on a constant and even footing shared between both the sexes and the political parties but this point we will form our initial list with girls first in alphabetical order then the boy Councillors, we will expose our not so very scientific run around social media later where we  collected and formed  a rough result.

Councillor Georgia Hill

Councillor Isobel Hunter

Councillor Steven Bridgett 

Councillor Scott Dickinson

All four managed the press and media in an admirable fashion and kept as many people informed as possible while their utility company problems existed. All four were also mentioned in dispatches as being a better bet than the current incumbent to become Berwicks MP at the next General election.

Their differing styles of reaching the same end brought forward compliments from a wide variation of respondents on comment sections of Facebook and the twittering world. With the action pair of Hill and Dickinson and the diplomatic version of council work undertaken by Hunter and Bridgett bringing out supporters by the score, many of whom had not bothered to get involved with any political side taking previously as far as we could see.

Our whole team got stuck in and searched through as many links and comments as possible with the end results very close indeed.

Our scores on the doors looked like this

1.    Councillor Bridgett.  207

2.    Councillors Hill and Dickinson 204 that's after 3 recounts

    4.     Councillor Hunter.    202

We didn’t find anyone praising Mrs Trevelyan, not even her office staff, even though they may be expecting a present from the states on her return.

Oh! We won't be accepting any further admissions to murky the waters of the Tweed and Coquet with a late flurry. Our results are final and as David Dickinson says, "this is certainly the real deal".