Peter Wilson’s Wrap

You don’t have to be a signed-up member of the Tripping Up Trump campaign to feel a substantial degree of disquiet at the latest revelation to emerge – nay, be extracted – from Aberdeenshire Council as to just how far it and its officers are prepared to go in assisting the Donald in the realisation of his vision for a new town with golf course attached. This time it’s not one of the loony-toon councillors that’s been caught in the spotlight – no, it’s their very own Jessica Rabbit, Head of Planning Dr Christine Gore, who has had one of her letters to Don Combleone’s lawyers outed under Freedom of Information legislation. Clearly it was written on blue touchpaper, because the contents of the 7 April missive are nothing short of explosive insofar as they make clear that, even then, the Council was considering the application of Compulsory Purchase Orders to rid their hero of some troublesome characters whose houses happened to sit on land he didn’t own.

This would be questionable enough in itself, especially as a spokeswoman has now rather laughably denied wrongdoing on the Council’s part, saying that any discussions on the matter had to be in private out of respect for the residents who might be affected. The letter, it should be pointed out, was sent two months after Grumpy Trumpy notified the Council of his intention to seek CPOs to buy four properties not within his purlieu and one month before details of his plans to extend his development in this way actually became public. Presumably telling the said residents that discussions on the subject with the developer were quite advanced would be a bit of respect too far, especially as Dr. Gore’s letter makes clear that “in terms of public relations and management of the inevitable media interest, I would request that we be given at least a week’s notice of your intended submission date. Thereafter, close liaison will be required…in order that we can have a managed approach to what is inevitably going to be a difficult and emotive issue.” Yes, Chrissie, forced evictions can be a bit like that.

I suspect that all of you out there who have regular dealings with our various planning authorities would probably agree that Aberdeenshire’s planning boss has been unusually accommodating in her interpretation of fairness and objectivity. The correspondence obtained by Spinwatch, a Glasgow-based body that monitors public relations, even shows that Trump’s solicitors, Dundas and Wilson, had drawn up a report justifying why CPOs might be needed to acquire extra land within the curtilage, or on the edges, of their client’s estate. Fair enough you might think, except that it was drafted in Dr Gore’s name for distribution to councillors and, instead of being blown out of the water by the local authority for such presumption, was apparently “never used.” The 19th century French political thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, set out some pithily apt views on politicians in his book ‘Democracy in America’, included amongst which was the adage that “truth is simply a matter of timing” but at least in his day the people he came across were not complete strangers to the concept of honesty. Quite what he would have found to write about had he been asked to produce a volume on ‘Democracy in Aberdeenshire’ is anybody’s guess.