Mayoral Campaign Turns Nasty
2016-11-04
With less than a week to go before the Rotherham mayoral election, campaigning on both sides has turned personal, with accusation and counter accusation flying back and forth.
Last month, we reported on alleged sexual improprieties perpetrated by leading candidate and offal magnate, Norman Fettle. Immediately after publication we received a call from Maureen Bolster who is a former Miss Cow Heel and Tripe. The Cow Heel And Tripe Pageant was a Rotherham baths based beauty competition which Fettle ran, and controlled with a rod of iron in the 1980s. She told us “Norman Fettle spoke about contestants in a derogatory manner, particularly the ones who were fat, ugly or stank. And with those of us that looked alright, he was always trying to tempt us with a pound of chitterlings or some bag. He used his offal as a lure. It was disgusting, but who’s strong enough to resist that kind of temptation? We were only human.”
Just as it was starting to look like curtains for Fettle’s campaign, fresh allegations about the conduct and fitness for office of his opponent, Irene Fiddler have emerged. Regular readers will recall that three months ago Fettle called Fiddler’s health into question after she was seen in public having difficulty walking and even appeared in pain while sitting. Few of those readers will forget the graphic pictures provided by Fiddler’s team to explain the malaise, nor the photocopy of the ointment prescription we published.
But now Norman Fettle’s campaign team say that Irene Baker has been running a secret email account from her office in the council buildings and records reveal that she used it for personal use to order her big shop from Asda, a Barry Manilow CD from Amazon and some type of oversized Rabbit from a mystery retailer on the Canklow industrial estate.
“Supermarket shopping is bad enough, and Manilow is inexcusable” said Baz Scupper, Fettle’s campaign manager “but livestock is something else altogether. I’m sure that must break some laws and Norman will be looking into that when he’s elected. I didn’t even know there was a pet shop on Canklow industrial estate.”
Polls are showing the two candidates running neck and neck as the race reaches its final stages. It looks like both are in for a rough ride in the run in, something that they’ve both experienced many times before, but just not together.
