Claire Udy: Goodbye and good riddance

by Literal Violet

Councillor Claire Udy - she who helped lead the appallingly misogynistic protest outside the women’s FiLiA Conference in Portsmouth in October 2021 - did not stand for Portsmouth City Council in the latest elections. Her term of office has ended. She officially ceased to be a councillor on the 9th May 2022. As this ‘city father’ steps down from elected office and we reflect on her story (highlights of which include chairing a committee that granted a Sexual Entertainment Venue licence in a residential area), it’s also worth remembering how easy it is in politics to travel from obscurity to infamy and back to obscurity again in just a few lumpen years.

I want to stress that Claire Udy used to be friendly with a lot of women in Portsmouth. It would have been good to have her in the world of women’s rights, but she showed so much open hostility to vulnerable women at FiLiA that I’m struggling to come up with the architectural plans necessary to construct the golden bridge for her return crossing. Udy is truly captured.

Women have also been at the receiving end of Udy’s verbal venom on social media and in real-life situations, to the extent that the police have had to have words; and it’s hard not to see her story as something of a tragedy of misguided privilege. I think that’s what annoys me most about trans rights extremism - it’s a bunch of white privileged kids led by the likes of Udy pretending that they have identified into oppression by dying their hair and screaming at rape victims through windows. In fact, talking to Claire these days is akin to that scene in Independence Day where President Whitmore says, ‘can there be a peace between us?’ and the alien answers in a loud hiss through the shell of what used to be the lovely, eccentric Dr Oken, ‘Peace? NO PEACE!’

Rising Star of Labour

Back in 2018, Claire Udy was one of the rising young members of the Portsmouth Labour Party and it was no surprise that she was selected to stand for Labour in the winnable inner-city Charles Dickens ward.

I thought she’d be an asset to the Council. The Council needed and still needs more younger women, especially those who know about the realities of bringing up families and are left of centre and/or grassroots.

What was a surprise is what happened next, because whereas Claire Udy was elected for a four-year term, it was amid a flurry of controversy. Standing on a Labour ticket, she resigned from the Labour Party just days before the election. The ballot papers were already printed.

Anti-Semitism Allegations

Shortly before the 2018 local elections took place, a tweet from 2013 had re-surfaced that was widely described as ‘antisemitic’. The tweet was published in the Portsmouth News, at least one national newspaper, and across social media. Claire Udy had written,

‘Got a barely used travel system for baby that’s worth over £500 for £100 today also. Not even a Jew. Amazing.’

“Not even a Jew.” Amazing, indeed.

How Udy responded to this reveal was bizarre. I had assumed that she would either prostrate herself before the local Labour Party - people who were her long-standing Momentum mates and some other Labour colleagues - and face the disciplinary proceedings head on; or step away completely. To my surprise, she did neither. She chose to resign from the Labour Party while ploughing on with her candidacy under the Labour logo on the ballot paper. I had never heard of such a thing before, nor since.

Post-Resignation from Labour

The Portsmouth News then published a statement from Udy that mentioned unsupportive local party colleagues and the emergence of ‘further allegations’ against her. Among many observers though, this simply aroused more curiosity than sympathy. What allegations? Which colleagues?

Her decision to continue to stand on a Labour ticket had created a situation where Udy could be accused of deceiving the voters of Charles Dickens ward who thought they were voting Labour when they put that cross in the box. Indeed, I heard local people calling it an ‘electoral fraud’, and they were not happy about it at all.

Udy was indeed elected on that Labour ticket, but as an independent. She swore her oath and signed her Code of Conduct, making solemn promises to treat others with respect. In fact, the Code specifically instructs Members (councillors), among several conditions, that:

You must treat others with respect;

You must not bully any person;

You must not conduct yourself in a manner which could reasonably be regarded as bringing your office or Authority into disrepute.

It was never going to be an auspicious start on the council for Udy after the antisemitism allegation and BallotGate. However, the twists and turns of Portsmouth politics are manyfold; and with the council results so tight regarding overall control - it was neck and neck between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems - she was landed with a disproportionately significant vote in the council chamber from the very start

The Lib Dems, like coyotes, started circling as soon as she had won. They are very good at picking off fallen prey. And Udy, seemingly crashing and burning and probably tired of criticism, was ready to hear compliments about her ‘relevancy’ from not only her old Portsmouth University buddies in the Media Studies Department and the arty ‘gendered intelligence’ crowd, but also the Leader of the Council, Gerald Vernon-Jackson and his Cabinet colleagues.

Porn-Hub Furore and Matters Arising

Unfortunately, Cllr Udy’s time in role was not the success for which some had been hoping. She spent four years attracting the sort of attention and complaints that had council officers groaning under the workload. A lot of people, mostly women, were very hurt, upset and impacted by her actions, including a group of survivors of sexual violence in Africa speaking live from a refugee camp to an audience in the Guildhall, who were heckled and jeered by Udy’s protest.

Udy earned a reputation for trying to shut others down while expressing herself most vociferously and sometimes, to observers, unnecessarily offensively. There is activism on the one hand; and wildly inappropriate and inopportune ranting and raving on the other. Encouraging the intimidation of victims of rape as a weapon of war for shits-and-giggles ‘activism’ is never a good look.

Many complaints were submitted early on about Councillor Udy’s personal Twitter account, which she used to talk about many council-related and political matters. For a start, she had a link to ‘Pornhub’ in her bio. The bio also contained the catchy straplines ‘Fuck B*oris and Fuck the T*ries’. It was pointed out to her that it was unbecoming of the office of elected Member of the City Council of Portsmouth. But the bio remained up for a significant time. I never fully understood her intractability, given the Code of Conduct that she had signed, or the lack of action from the appropriate officers and other Members of Portsmouth City Council. Udy for some reason was Teflon.

The main mechanism for holding councillors to account, the Standards Committee (in Portsmouth it is part of the over-arching Governance & Audit & Standards Committee), was chaired during Udy’s tenure by Cllr Leo Madden (Lib Dem), and it appears to have done absolutely nothing to rein in Udy’s behaviour. It’s not even clear how many, if any, complaints about Cllr Udy were ever passed from council officers to the Committee for deliberation. It’s all a nice, big convenient secret.

Meanwhile, by late 2021 Portsmouth City Council’s name was mud with human rights groups fighting violence against women and girls around the world. One of the 'protest' signs at FiLiA displayed for passing women and children was, 'Suck my dick you transphobic cunts'.

More Complaints, and Being 'Nasty'

In 2020 there had been yet another furore. Even Tom Cotterill, the Portsmouth News’s implacable political reporter, had taken to calling her ‘outspoken’, and used the verb ‘claim’ about what she had told him. (One gains the impression that Udy had him on speed dial.)

‘Outspoken socialist Claire Udy, leader of the Portsmouth Progressive People Group, claimed to have called the police following a swell of abuse online yesterday’, Coterill wrote. This followed Udy’s own online activity where screenshots suggest that she shared a photograph of a vandalised statue of Winston Churchill and made a comment next to it that some found offensive.

Subsequently nearly 2,000 people signed an online petition to have her removed from the Council. Personally, I'm quite sceptical of online petitions as they can be signed by people from outside the city. (This happens with applications for licenses for lap-dancing clubs Every.Fucking.Time when suddenly it's imperative that Curtis from Wisconsin has the reassurance that there's a Sexual Entertainment Venue ready and waiting for him in Southsea should he ever visit our lucky, lucky town.)

Then there were also those numerous complaints and allegations of inappropriate behaviour relating to the FiLiA conference alone at the Guildhall. I personally witnessed some of this, and I’m aware of the nature of some of the complaints that were sent to the City Council’s legal service.

The Lib Dems and the ‘Portsmouth Progressive People’s’ Group

None of this prevented ruling Liberal Democrat councillors from agreeing to Udy’s appointment on a children’s committee. Indeed, one or two of them befriended her; and she lent the Lib Dem Group her vote in the Council chamber for several critically tight votes, such as electing the Leader of the Council.

In a hung council with years of control on a knife edge, that one vote mattered. In September 2019 Udy joined with a fellow ‘independent’ to form a council group she called ‘the Portsmouth Progressive People’s Party’. Out of the two members, Udy was elected the Leader, which made her eligible to claim an additional Group Leader’s 'special responsibility allowance’ courtesy of the taxpayer. According to the City Council’s published records, Udy trousered an additional special responsibility allowance of £3448.48 for that municipal year.

The creation of the ‘Portsmouth Progressive People Party’ also meant that there were now two votes to be courted on Udy’s say-so, which mattered a great deal when the council numbers were so close, with just one seat between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems.

And what did Udy receive in return for her loyalty to the Lib Dems? Well, the ruling Lib Dem administration would say 'nothing'; but coincidentally they permitted her appointment to the following committee posts and positions:

Children and Young People’s Champion.

Member of the Portsmouth Schools’ Forum.

Chair Of Licensing, where she presided over policies and practices such as the granting of licenses for Sexual Entertainment Venues (plus a bigger special responsibility allowance of circa £4,000).

The Liberal Democrats’ change in attitude towards the licensing of Sexual Entertainment Venues in the city - they knew what influence they were handing Udy - particularly stung as some Lib Dems, notably former councillor Terry (Theresa) Hall, fought long and hard in 2012 to persuade the Licensing Committee to introduce even a ‘nil cap lite’ (a commitment to no new Sexual Entertainment Venue licences in the city.) Now a hard-won ethical policy was chucked in the bin for the sake of a vote or two in the chamber.

It Always Ends With A Whimper

The Guildhall was the setting for Cllr Udy’s final departure from the city council benches, for that is where the election count took place on the night and morning of the 5th-6th May. She has left not with a bang but a whimper, and according to protocol will have been asked to collect her personal belongings and hand in her security pass by close of play Monday 9th May 2022.

Why did she not stand again? I would hazard a guess that she realised she would have lost without the backing of a credible political party behind her. I had wondered if the Lib Dems would offer her something; but it seems not. They may be vicious; but they’re not idiots.

Being a one-term only councillor, she is not eligible to become an Honorary Alderman, an honour given to long-serving councillors who have served the city with distinction.

She implies in a recent Facebook post that, in going forward with job applications, she has high hopes of being appointed to a ‘politically restricted’ position; and gives this as one of the reasons why she chose not to stand again. Personally, I don’t think she’s likely to be appointed to a role so senior and with such responsibilities that it would be ‘politically restricted’; and it does seem like a convenient excuse she put forward to save herself the effort and embarrassment of standing and losing.

Udy certainly won’t be politically protected from now on. She has come out of her pact with the Lib Dem devil very poorly served, and that same Lib Dem support which once emboldened her is a fleeting thing. She’ll also maybe find that a lot of other people who were happy to use her when she was a councillor will now drop her like a stone.

Meanwhile, we’ll always have plenty in the public domain to remind us of what, under the tutelage of the Portsmouth Lib Dems, Cllr Udy thought passed for leadership. Goodbye and thank you for your service. It was illuminating.