THE FIRE EXIT TEST

I gave Cllr Julien Pritchard a kicking last week. Then Druids Heath faced a frightening blaze and he reminded Birmingham what a local councillor is actually for.

I gave Cllr Julien Pritchard a bit of a kicking last week. Nothing savage, but enough to make the point. I had written to him about affordable housing, the deadline came and went and I began to wonder aloud whether the excellent ward councillor I had known for years was starting that familiar journey from representing residents to the Council to representing the Council to residents. It happens. A title arrives, somebody gives you a nicer chair, your diary acquires a guardian and before long the bloke who once answered you from a bus stop apparently requires three working days and a communications strategy. Then Julien replied. Properly. He answered the awkward questions and, annoyingly, ruined a perfectly decent story. So I put the record straight. Fair is fair and, besides, there is little point demanding answers from politicians if you sulk when they actually provide them.

Now he has gone and done it again.

Druids Heath had a thoroughly nasty time last week. Fires were breaking out across tinder dry ground in extraordinary heat and, if you live beside that ground watching smoke rise and flames move in the general direction of houses, it is not a climate change seminar or an emergency planning exercise. It is frightening. People want to know where the fire is going, whether their home is safe and whether anybody in authority actually knows what is happening. And there, in the middle of it, was Cllr Pritchard. Not dispensing thoughts from Victoria Square. Not appearing three hours later beside a conveniently parked fire engine for the photograph. He was on his patch, talking to people, passing information around and generally doing that rather old fashioned thing councillors used to be elected to do.

I am not turning him into Fireman Sam. I do not know that he carried anybody from a burning building, wrestled a hose from West Midlands Fire Service or personally beat back the flames with a Green Party manifesto, and I am certainly not going to invent heroics because the truth is good enough. What interested me was what came back afterwards. People noticed him. They noticed he was there when it mattered. Word travelled around Druids Heath remarkably quickly that their councillor had been visible, engaged and useful. My own son started singing his praises, which caught my attention because political enthusiasm from him normally requires a respectable quantity of cold beer beforehand. Julien managed it stone cold sober and without even being in the room.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised. Pritchard has always been rather difficult to squeeze into the usual party box. He first took Druids Heath and Monyhull in 2018 and became Birmingham’s first Green councillor. Four years later Labour sent in former Cllr Mike Leddy, a former Lord Mayor, a proper old Birmingham political heavyweight and nobody’s idea of somebody sent along merely to make up the numbers. If the intention was to remind Druids Heath that Labour regarded the seat as temporarily mislaid property, the residents appear not to have received the memo. Pritchard got 1,890 votes. Leddy got 454. You do not need Professor John Curtice and an enormous swingometer to interpret that. The electorate was saying, quite loudly, we know this bloke and we are keeping him.

This May they did it again. Pritchard polled 1,907, Reform came second on 734 and Labour managed 119. Now party labels matter, of course they do, but numbers like that tell you the label is only part of the story. I have friends and relatives around there who are about as naturally Green as the Aston Expressway and they vote for Julien Pritchard. I sometimes think you could put him in a time machine, send him back to the days when the Ecology Party struggled to get elected to anything more substantial than a residents’ association and he would somehow return clutching a council seat. Some councillors borrow votes from their party. Pritchard appears to lend votes to his.

Nor is this some mysterious Green superpower. Cllr Adam Higgs keeps winning in Highter’s Heath, another place nobody looking at Birmingham’s political map would automatically colour deep Conservative blue. Higgs retained it this May with 1,342 votes against Reform’s 877 and Labour’s 269. Bobby Alden, Leader of the Conservative Group at the Council House, has understood this for years. I see Bobby for coffee often enough and we can find plenty to disagree about, sometimes before the coffee arrives, but he has always insisted his councillors should be local councillors first. Be seen. Answer people. Know the streets. Become an absolute nuisance on behalf of residents when necessary. It is not terribly sophisticated political science, but Higgs keeps getting elected and so does Pritchard, which suggests there might be something in it.

Maybe we have made local government far too complicated. We now have portfolios, delivery frameworks, transformation programmes, strategic partnerships and enough corporate vocabulary to heat the Council House through winter. Meanwhile the woman standing at her front door wants to know whether her councillor knows which end of the street she lives in. Can I get hold of you? Do you know my area? If something goes badly wrong, will I actually see you? None of that requires a 76 page strategy, a PowerPoint presentation or somebody from Corporate Communications. Sometimes it requires a pair of shoes and a willingness to wear them out.

There are difficult questions around Birmingham’s Greens and GRIT will come back to them when the proper time arrives. Julien Pritchard is not simply a ward councillor now. He is Green Group Leader and Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council, and with those jobs come questions he will have to answer. There will be a day for that. This is not it. Journalism becomes fairly pointless if somebody you have criticised cannot subsequently earn praise because they happen to belong to the wrong political tribe. I asked Pritchard hard questions last week because they needed asking. He answered them, so I said he had. This week something different happened and it deserves saying just as plainly.

When smoke is rising over people’s homes they do not particularly need an organisational chart. They do not need somebody explaining whether the bit currently on fire belongs to Housing, Parks, Highways, Resilience or whichever department has possession of the laminated folder. They want to see somebody they recognise, preferably somebody they voted for, who knows their streets and is prepared to stand among them while the unpleasant stuff is happening.

Last week I wondered whether promotion was carrying Julien Pritchard towards the ivory tower.

Turns out the ivory tower has a fire exit.

And it opens onto Druids Heath.