Banbury councillor denies alcohol fuelled afternoon debates amid call to lay off 'lunchtime ritual'

Questions have been raised over the manner in which debates were conducted at Oxfordshire County Council after members had retired for lunch.

Some Conservative councillors no longer stay at County Hall since the decision to offer only vegan food, preferring to eat elsewhere.

The usual political point scoring was on display during Tuesday’s discussions but the leader of the opposition Councillor Eddie Reeves (Con, Banbury Calthorpe) was asked by monitoring officer Anita Bradley to withdraw a comment targeted at Councillor Tim Bearder (Lib Dem, Wheatley), the council’s cabinet member for adult social care, having called him “an incredibly small man”.

A monitoring officer is a neutral presence who is there to oversee the legality of council business and the conduct of councillors and officers, although Cllr Reeves was unhappy that a comment from Councillor Charlie Hicks (Lab, Cowley), referring to Tories as “hypocrites”, was not also pulled up.

In between Cllr Reeves’s jibe and the monitoring officer’s intervention, and during discussion of an unrelated matter, Councillor Duncan Enright (Lab, Witney North & East) said: “May I urge members to encourage their more enthusiastic comrades and colleagues to take lunch easy because it has been a much nastier atmosphere this afternoon and I know that there are possible lunchtime ritual reasons for that. Please, let’s not go there.”

All of that had followed Councillor Kieron Mallon (Con, Bloxham & Easington) commenting on his pub lunch during discussion of whether councillors should be fed at meetings.

“I feel energised, madam (addressing the chair), energised post my lunch because I had a full quota of protein, a very small portion of carbohydrates and I can assure you I had a good portion of my five fruits a day,” he said.

“Not in a (interrupted from elsewhere in the chamber)... and for comments that come back later on, some of us can remember when the second half of this day was far more entertaining and probably one of the reasons we turned up.

“I and I am sure others have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has ever taken out of me. Because we went around the corner, we had a full choice, I went round the corner to Wetherspoons where you can have a vegan, a vegetarian, a carnivore, and you can do it all for ten quid.”

When contacted by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Cllr Mallon said he had partaken in “one standard measure of wine with a set meal”.

“My colleagues and I have clearly made a stance that we do not think the public should pay for councillors’ lunches, if the lunch that is available is purely vegan I would be hypocritical to take lunch in county hall,” he said.

“Therefore I and a few of my colleagues went to a local pub for a pub lunch which had included in the price a glass of wine.”

Cllr Mallon estimated that six or seven or his Tory colleagues had gone to the pub but said that not all had consumed alcohol. He could not recall whether Cllr Reeves attended, pointing out that councillors often have other matters to attend to during lunch breaks that are typically less than an hour long.

He added: “The reason the second half of any county council meeting is more buoyant is because that is when the motions, many of which are quite contentious, are taken and debated.”

Asked whether the nature of the debate had nothing to do with alcohol, Cllr Mallon replied: “Nothing whatsoever.”

He added that it would be “wholly inappropriate” to get involved in Cllr Reeves’s comments towards Cllr Bearder but felt that linking that to his comments about attending a pub at lunchtime would be to take them “totally out of context”.