Middlesbrough Council - News Forum - Setting a light to the News

9 September 2011
LEGAL NOTICE
URGENT – CONFIDENTIAL NOT FOR PUBLICATION

Sir Stuart Bell MP
To: Editors and Legal Departments
We act for Sir Stuart Bell MP, the Member of Parliament for Middlesbrough.
We write in relation to various reports concerning our client which have recently appeared in the media.
The allegations that have been levelled against our client in a number of these reports include the following:
1.
That he has not held surgeries for his constituents for 14 years
2.
That when reporters posing as constituents made 100 phone calls to his offices their calls and messages went unanswered
3.
That he lives France

“the Allegations”

We are instructed that the Allegations are untrue and therefore publication of them is potentially actionable in libel.
The Allegations are extremely serious and are very damaging to our client’s career in public office.
Our instructions are that the correct position is as follows:
1.
Our client meets regularly with his constituents by appointment
2.
Our client has no record of any calls or messages.
This is surprising given that his private office is run by three full-time members of staff
and the fact that the House of Commons switchboard is open 24 hours a day all year round.
3.
Our client does not live in France. He does not even own or rent a property there.
He has lived in Middlesbrough since November 1981.

Whilst we trust that now you are on notice of the true position you will not publish these false and damaging allegations or any similar allegations,
we must reserve all our client’s legal rights. If you are currently publishing such allegations on your website these should be removed promptly
and notification provided to us
Failure to so will seriously aggravate the damage being caused to our client by publication these false allegations.
We intend to write separately to a number of publishers in respect of the articles they have published.
All of our client’s rights are reserved.
Issued by:
Schillings, 41 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3HXTel: 020 7034 9000 Fax: 020 7034 9200
For further information please contact the following lawyers with conduct:
Gideon BenaimPartner, Schillings
Samantha DominSolicitor, Schillings

SIR STUART BELL MP

We refer to the above Legal Notice. Our client’s position has been made clear and all rights are reserved in that regard. We enclose an on the record statement by our client in relation to the Allegations and this is attached. The attached statement is for broadcast/publication should you choose to report the Allegations that have been made against our client, notwithstanding the issues we have raised. In those circumstances you should publish/broadcast our client’s statement in full. The provision of such statement should in no way be interpreted as consent to any defamatory or otherwise unlawful allegations about our client being broadcast / published.

IP whois for 6.172.88.79.rev.sfr.net
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role: LDCOM Legal Contact
address: SFR
address: Immeuble Quai Ouest
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Claims Sir Stuart Bell's constituents rang neighbouring MP's office as alternative

A LABOUR Party member who served as the assistant to former MP Frank Cook for 21 years says his office fielded calls from Middlesbrough residents who said they had struggled to reach Sir Stuart Bell.
George O’Neill worked at the office for Stockton North - a neighbouring constituency to Sir Stuart’s - until Mr Cook’s defeat at the election last year.
He said aides at the office had to turn away as many as 25 residents a year who needed help but said they could not get in touch with Sir Stuart.
Sir Stuart has not held a constituency surgery in Middlesbrough for 14 years, and does not have an office open in the town.
A Gazette investigation published on Tuesday revealed that we had made a total of 100 calls to the published telephone numbers at his Middlesbrough home and Westminster office over the course of several months before Parliament’s summer recess. None of the calls was answered, and all rang out to an answering machine.
Sir Stuart was paid £65,738 to serve as MP last year, and claimed £82,896 for staffing costs.
Mr Cook was a Labour colleague of Sir Stuart Bell’s until Mr Cook was deselected by the local party before the General Election. He later ran unsuccessfully as an independent candidate.

Read More http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teess ... z1Y6lIqEIB

Sir Stuart Bell finds a friend at the BBC
Ding Dong ... Sir Stuart Bell has some questions to answer
Sir Stuart Bell, the MP who the Teesside Evening Gazette tried to contact 100 times without success, surfaced on the national stage today to put his side of the story across.
In the process, I can’t help but think he actually made himself look even more ridiculous – and made Jeremy Vine, the former Newsnight presenter turned Radio 2 lunchtime host, look quite daft too.
Tony Blair used to be scorned for opting for the breakfast TV sofa over Newsnight for his interviews. Whether Sir Stuart knew he’d get such an easy ride on Vine’s show is anyone’s guess, but that’s what he got.
Sir Stuart still hasn’t been able to explain why, despite employing three people at the taxpayers’ expense, one of whom is his wife, 100 phone calls during office hours went unanswered. This is the same MP who hasn’t held a constituency surgery in the town for 14 hours because he fears being attacked by one man.
Dealing with my beef with Vine first. As soft interviews go, this was right up there. Most worrying was as Sir Stuart dismissed the story, there was no attempt to offer the Evening Gazette a right of reply. Here’s an MP saying the story was wrong, yet the BBC didn’t feel the need to address this with the paper involved?
It was actually the involvement of listener emails – crowdsourcing of a sort, I suppose – which made the interview worthwhile. One made the point that the police had offered to attend Sir Stuart’s surgeries to offer security, if he wished to hold them again. It was a point Sir Stuart failed to address, and certainly wasn’t challenged on.
Sir Stuart insists he does hold surgeries, but they are one-to-one surgeries, pre-booked, where he goes to people’s houses. Now, I might be being daft here, but shouldn’t an MP fearful for his safety actually be more worried about going to people’s own homes, than inviting them to attend pre-arranged surgeries which are entirely in his control?
The Evening Gazette stands by its story, and has presented both sides of the story very fairly, reporting at length quotes given by Sir Stuart on BBC Radio Tees yesterday. It also found people who supported the way he operated, although given the volume of comments on the Gazette’s site against Sir Stuart, it’s fair to say supporters are in the minority at the moment.
So many questions remain to be answered: If an office of three can’t manage to answer one of 100 phone calls, what chance do you have of getting an appointment with Sir Stuart? If he believes in accountability, which he says he does, why won’t he answer questions fielded from the public in the Gazette, as the other local MPs do? Why does he think he’s doing well to speak in 12 debates in a year, when most MPs do far more? And if no-one has ever complained after not being able to get hold of Sir Stuart, why are people coming out thick and fast in the Gazette now to say the opposite?
Indeed, on BBC Radio Tees, Sir Stuart says: “Nobody has a problem with me.” That quite clearly isn’t the case. He also says there were errors in the Gazette’s investigation. Two BBC interviews on, and we’re still none the wiser to what those errors are.
Lets hope the Labour Party is prepared to be a bit more thorough than some journalists have been when it comes to examining Sir Stuart’s justification for being accountable on his own terms alone.