I have known Andrew Mitchell MP, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Sutton Coldfield, for a good few years through my media work and I regard him as a man of high integrity. I don’t know Sarah Edwards, Labour MP for Tamworth, but I have no reason whatsoever to think she isn’t a woman of equally high integrity, so an email from the Labour Party on Saturday evening, sent in Sarah Edwards’s name, rather stopped me. The heading was “Andrew Mitchell is lying. Please call it out.” Not wrong, mistaken, confused, badly briefed or even being economical with the truth. Lying. Sarah was “absolutely furious” and I was encouraged to go onto Facebook and challenge Andrew directly. Small problem, Facebook banned me some time ago for reasons Facebook has never cared to explain, so I couldn’t. Probably a good thing because instead of charging into somebody’s comments section I thought I had better find out whether Andrew Mitchell actually was lying.
And this is all about £1.70. Parking at Sutton Coldfield railway station went from £1.30 to £3 and Andrew called it “Labour’s ridiculous increase in parking charges.” When you go back through the history the irritating bit for Andrew is that Labour has actually got a point. The proposal for the £3 charge goes back to 2023 and Andy Street’s time as Conservative Mayor, before Richard Parker got the job. Except, and there normally is an except with these things, the increase didn’t actually happen until August 2026 when Parker had been Mayor for more than two years. So Andrew is wrong if he is saying Labour thought up and approved the original £3 proposal. But I can also see how somebody looks at a charge actually introduced after two years of a Labour mayor and calls it a Labour increase. That might be unfair politics, it might be incomplete politics, it might even be rotten briefing. I am struggling with the leap from there to knowing the man is lying.
Cllr Charlotte Fieldhouse, a Labour member of Royal Sutton Coldfield Town Council for Vesey, got a petition going, more than 900 people backed the campaign, Richard Parker eventually reversed the rise and good for them. Andrew and the Conservatives were opposing it too. Everybody can claim a bit of victory and everybody can be blamed for a bit of the mess, which is how politics usually works. What interested me more after thinking about it was Andrew himself because I have followed his political career for 30 odd years and I don’t really associate him with this sort of dog fight. He may have indulged in it and I have missed it, but I don’t recall him spending his career accusing opponents of being liars every five minutes. Maybe that tells us something because at the May city elections the Sutton Conservatives achieved the rather paradoxical feat, in a pretty dreadful election nationally for the old parties, of sweeping all ten Birmingham City Council seats across Sutton, including taking both Vesey seats from Labour. Andrew is the senior Conservative political figure in the town and perhaps keeping yourself above some of this stuff isn’t such a bad electoral tactic after all.
I was a politician myself for a good while and I don’t accept the fashionable nonsense that politicians are all liars. I certainly wasn’t. Did I blow my own trumpet? Oh yes. Did I perhaps make my involvement in something sound a bit more important than somebody else might have remembered it? Almost certainly. Have I got things wrong? Loads of times. But standing there knowing something was false and deliberately telling people it was true, no. And having known an awful lot of politicians over the years there are actually very few I simply wouldn’t trust. Most are decent types. Andrew Mitchell certainly is in my experience. Sarah Edwards may very well be too, I simply don’t know her. That’s why I keep coming back to the same question. Sarah, why get into the gutter when you had a perfectly respectable factual argument without going anywhere near it?
There is one lot where we do actually watch people attempting to deceive an official most weekends and that is professional footballers, although come to think of it mainly male professional footballers. Somebody gets the faintest brush on the shoulder and goes down holding a completely different leg, rolls about as though the St John Ambulance ought to be preparing the defibrillator, then has a crafty look to see whether the referee has bought it. A bloke knows he touched the ball last and still appeals for the throw in. We have even sanitised cheating by calling some of it “simulation”. Watch the women’s game though and, to my eye anyway, you see far less of that nonsense. They seem much more inclined to get up and get on with the game. Funny really.
Anyway, while Cllr Fieldhouse has discovered petitions and Andrew has discovered parking charges, I’ve got another one for them. Birmingham Airport. I got a black cab from there recently and there was an £8 charge added for the privilege of the cab going into the airport. The driver told me the black cab drivers have an annual charge as well, so naturally one way or another it ends up with us, the punters. Then there is Premium Set Down. Eight quid for the first 15 minutes. Yes, I know you technically get 15 minutes, but who uses 15 minutes dropping somebody at an airport? Case out of the boot, kiss Mrs Olley goodbye, shut boot, gone. Five minutes if you’re dawdling. At that rate you have just paid the equivalent of £96 an hour for occupying a strip of tarmac. Rob dogs. And before somebody tells me this is simply wicked private enterprise, the seven West Midlands councils collectively own 49 per cent of Birmingham Airport. Charlotte and Andrew together on that petition would be rather nice. I would sign it.
The more I thought about Sarah’s email the less this became about £1.70 at Sutton station. Politicians spend half their lives complaining that the public doesn’t trust politicians and then too many of them spend the other half telling the public that the politician opposite is a liar, a cheat, dishonest, crooked or worse. Dentists don’t do it to dentistry. Doctors don’t spend their time telling us the doctor in the next surgery is probably lying to his patients. Plumbers presumably have their moments but I have yet to see the Royal College of Plumbers campaign on the basis that all the other plumbers are crooks. Every occupation contains people who lie because people lie. That isn’t the same as turning lying into something we are supposed to regard as part of the political trade.
Andrew appears to have got an important part of this parking story wrong. Labour had the dates, the argument and every opportunity to correct him. It didn’t need “Andrew Mitchell is lying”.
I regard Andrew Mitchell as a man of high integrity. I have no reason to think Sarah Edwards is anything less.
Perhaps there is some guidance from football after all. If you are looking for tactics, Sarah, follow the women rather than the blokes.