CURRENT city council chief executive, Colin 'Cover Up' Hilton is living up to his name again - this time with the fabled Mathew Street inquiry.First a panic-stricken 'Cover Up' rigged the inquiry, refusing Labour's perfectly reasonable demands for an independent investigation so he could avoid the blame .
He made sure the 'investigation' stayed in-house so it could be safely handled by the widely discredited city council internal audit team and (play)'acting' city solicitor Ken Unworthy.
That was bad enough - giving no one any hope whatsoever that there would be any determined attempt to get to the bottom of what went on and who did what (or didn't, eds).
But then Cover Up went even further in a desperate attempt to save his own skin and that of 'currently off work sick with a heart condition, but never to return and with a gi-normous pay-off on the way to the hacienda in Spain', Jason Harbarrowboy.
'Cover Up' first promised the report would be ready by the end of September. He broke his promise.
Then he promised to present Labour leader Joe Anderson with a copy of the full report on Monday of this week. He broke his promise again.
'Cover Up' told Anderson on Monday that he had sent the report back to legal experts and that it would not be published before Wednesday's full council meeting.
Cover Up had already shared the contents of the initial report with the wounded badly Lib Dem fireman Bradley.
The pair didn't like what they saw - even the sanitised version - and conspired together to order a hasty re-write (quelle surprise, eds).
He has meanwhile now advised Councillor Anderson that, as Opposition Leader, he must submit a written request if he is ever to receive a copy of the eagerly awaited report.
Of course, wounded Lib Dem Bradley has had his own personal copy of the report (Version 1, eds) in his back pocket for days.
It will be interesting to see if we ever get the chance to compare Version 1 with Version 2, or 3 or 4.
Or however many other versions it takes to get Cover Up and Bradley safely off the hook and thereby absolved from any responsibility for the Mathew St debacle.
So 'Cover Up' is playing ducks and drakes with the Labour opposition and using the city council's arcane procedures and accustomed incompetence to try and hide his complicity in the Mathew Street cover up.And to save his own skin.
As the city council's senior official, he has showed himself to be utterly contemptuous of the Opposition group and of wasting more than £40,000 in public money through this charade.
Worse, he has fatally compromised any last shred of integrity he was clinging to, by openly sacrificing all pretence at neutrality and impartiality.
We are promised that for chief executive Mr Colin Hilton, OBE, acclaimed architect of the The 08 Place whitewash and Summer Pops smokescreen, there will be a day of reckoning for his part in this latest testament to mendacious misrule - the Mathew Street cover up...
