There is a mole in Morley Town Hall. I was independently contacted twice yesterday with some furtive news of goings on in the Council Chamber after the last Annual General Meeting in May. It was followed by an extraordinary General Meeting, the publically posted Agenda of which was rather opaque. Now I wasn’t there (as I had some drying paint to watch) but the story I was told was that the Public were excluded for a short while then the meeting finished and they all toddled off to the Mayor’s Parlour as normal for drinkies & cucumber sandwiches. Now exclusion of the general public has to be for good reason, generally if publicity would prejudice the public interest by reason of the confidential nature of the business or for some other reason stated in the resolution. My Baker Bible gives the following reasons for treating business as confidential:-

• engagement, terms of service, conduct and dismissal of employees;
• terms of tenders, and proposals and counter-proposals in negotiations for contracts;
• preparation of cases in legal proceedings;
• the early stages of any dispute

Now the mole tells me (third hand) that it popped its head out of the skirting board to hear a motion to approve funding of up to £5,000 in order to retain the services of a solicitor. Now moles have poor eyesight so it wouldn’t have been able to tell that the only people in the Chamber were the Councillors (24 of them, if they were all present and correct) and the Acting Town Clerk. They have pretty good hearing though, and moley was surprised that nobody questioned why such a thing would be necessary and no reason for wanting to do such a thing was offered. This suggests to me several possibilities: that mot of them knew why, they were coached not to say anything, they were unable to get clues from their friends on the public benches or they were too thick to actually realise what was going on and ask. Bearing in mind that there are 23 Members of one quasi-political grouping and 1 Member of another widely detested one it is quite possible that it is a heady cocktail of all four possibilities.