Old Joe’s Almanac: Lord Mike Whitby
What a year. Tory city council leader Mike Whitby began 2013 looking a shadow of his former self, clearly not liking life in opposition, but ended up with a peerage as a ‘working peer’ in the House of Lords. Who ever saw that one coming?
It didn’t take Lord Mike long to make an impact, although not in the way he would have wished. The Earl of Shrewsbury, a government whip, had occasion to write to Mike ticking him off with a warning that the House of Lords ‘isn’t a club, you know’. It seemed that his Lordship excused his absence from a Tory council group meeting in Birmingham on a three line whip in the Lords, except there never was any three line whip in the Lords. Whoops!
Whitby has insisted on continuing to lead the Birmingham Tories into the 2014 civic elections, before quitting his Harborne city council seat. So from May onwards, he will be working full time in the Lords. Probably.
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