A tribute to my dad

I HAVE been neglecting the campaign trail for a few days now, the reason being that my dad died yesterday.
My dad, Bryan Thorne, had been in St Margaret’s Somerset Hospice, Taunton, after falling badly at home and suffering a knock on his head.
The fall triggered the end of his battle with cancer, which began in February, 2007, and seemed to have been won after undergoing emergency surgery to remove a large tumour from his bowel.
However, about 12 months ago, it became a battle with liver cancer and we were told it was inoperable and the end result was inevitable.
After the fall last week, my mother could no longer continue to care for him at home and it was agreed the only course open was to admit him to the hospice.
We were told he might last no more than a few days, but he held on for six days in total and passed away shortly before 9 am yesterday. He was 79 years old.
As the eldest of his five children, I was with him holding his hand at the end.
It is the most distressing and emotionally disturbing thing I have ever, ever, ever had to do.
Many of you reading this will probably have already gone through something similar in losing a loved one.
I now know how you felt and how you may still feel today.
I write this not for sympathy, rather just to try to clear my mind and try to refocus on the next few weeks.
My dad would have been upset if he knew he had disrupted my campaign. He always only ever wanted me to succeed in anything I did, and was always willing to help if he could.
I know my dad was very proud of me being a councillor although he was never a Conservative.
My dad was a lifelong Labour supporter, even defending Gordon Brown because he thought he was a Labour Prime Minister.
He said he would never vote Tory because of what happened in Suez in 1956. I could never understand the logic of his attitude.
My family have a tradition of helping others, a tradition steeped in trade unionism and I have been told accounts of my great-grandfather handing out union money to workers to help them through the hardship of strike action while they fought for a better quality of life.
In my younger working days I was also a trade union officer, albeit a right-wing one and often I found myself voting in a minority of one.
It therefore surprised my dad when, in the autumn of 2006, I told him I was standing as a Conservative candidate in the Taunton Deane Borough Council elections of May, 2007.
But he knew that in my own way I would be doing my best to help people, like generations of my family before me, and he supported me fully, despite the arguments we would have when talking politics between ourselves.
He often used to really annoy me with his attitude and it would require my mum to intervene and get us talking about something else.
Football was my dad’s passion, and he was a lifelong Arsenal fan.
Being a Liverpool fan myself, there were again many heated discussions - much more so than when talking about politics. One thing we had in common, however, was that we both disliked Man Utd.
He served in Navy and was stationed in Malta for some years, and my younger brother was born there.
In his latter years, my dad would take my mum back to Malta for holidays, staying several weeks at a time. He loved the country and I think if he could have afforded to do so, he would have moved there to live.

• The photograph shows my dad, Bryan Thorne, on holiday in Malta in 2005.

David Cameron comes to town

YOU know how you see some people on television, and then, when you actually get to meet them in person, they seem very different?
Well, today I met David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader - and he turned out to be exactly the same person whom I have seen on television many times.
He was just as tall as I expected him to be, he had exactly the same skin complexion, he was just as smartly dressed, he smiled in the same manner, he spoke in the same tone of voice, and his message was exactly online.
It was a little bit like being on the set of a TV show and somehow not quite real.
Here was the man who is going to be the UK’s next elected Prime Minister - in about 15 months’ time unless Gordon Brown messes up even more than he has already - and here I was saying hello to him and shaking hands with him.
I wonder if he will remember me, should I attend the Party conference in the autumn and bump into him again.
Probably not.
It was an interesting and rewarding experience and one which raised the hairs on the back of my neck, even despite the fact that as a journalist I have been used to meeting leaders of the different political parties, as well as Ministers, celebrities, sporting stars, diplomats, and captains of industry, and have been up close with the Queen and members of her Royal family, including the late Princess Diana.
David Cameron’s visit to Taunton brought home how important to the future of this country is the need for Conservatives to form the next administration at County Hall.
If the electorate go out to vote in the Somerset County Council elections on June 4 and throw their support behind the Conservatives in large enough numbers, it will surely hasten the next General Election.
In turn, this will see David Cameron installed in No 10 as Prime Minister, and he will change the course which this country has been taking under Gordon Brown.
Labour have shown their ineptness at running the country and have plunged us headlong into economic chaos the like of which we have not seen since the war.
David Cameron now needs to get into Government as quickly as possible to appoint the Conservative Ministers who will turn things around and steer the economy back into calmer waters.
And Conservatives need to get into power at County Hall to freeze council tax bills, reduce the county’s debt mountain, save our small schools, mend our roads and pavements, and bring much-needed change to Somerset.

• The photographs shows (TOP) John Thorne (left) with David Cameron and other county council candidates, and (BELOW) John Thorne (third, right) with David Cameron supporting the Conservatives' pledge to freeze council tax at the county council.

Free swimming 'con' attempt by the Lib Dems

HERE we go again. More untruths from the Lib Dem SatWav pioneers.
This time, they are peddling untruths in an effort to con votes out of people in Ruishton and Creech St Michael.
You may know that there is going to be a by-election in the ward on October 2, due to the death of one of my Conservative colleagues, Councillor Gwyneth Leighton.
Obviously, the Lib Dems have made themselves very unpopular locally with their callous decisions to close sports centre crèches, axe discounts for pensioners using leisure services, and demolish the only two proper pay-as-play public squash courts in the county town.
Decisions which, I am sure I do not need to remind you, they took in secret and without any consultation with the public or those who use our leisure services.
So, in a blatant bid to try to redeem themselves in the eyes of the public, their leader, ‘Reckless’ Ross Henley, has told the voters of Ruishton and Creech St Michael that ‘his’ council is going to give free swimming for everybody under-16 and everybody over-60 as from next year.
This crass claim has been shown by the council’s chief executive to be an untruth.
So, ‘Reckless’ Ross has been humiliatingly forced to put a retraction in their next leaflet telling people that in fact all the Lib Dems want to do is take up Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s previously-announced policy of free swimming for young people and the elderly as part of the UK’ build up to the London 2012 Olympics.
The Lib Dems have not yet even got as far as putting a proposal on the subject to the Deane council, where it will be properly debated before any decisions can be taken.
Of course, Conservatives support the idea of free swimming in principle.
But, unlike ‘Reckless’ Ross, we are not prepared to sign a blank cheque drawn on council taxpayers money.
As yet, nobody has any idea of the costs of meeting the free swimming promise, as we do not know how much take-up their would be, nor the impact on other paid-for swimming sessions, nor how much Gordon Brown is actually going to give us to help pay for it.
These are all things which ‘Reckless’ Ross should have been looking into before rushing headlong into print with false promises.
I hear that he is apparently blaming his agent for getting it wrong in the leaflet – funny that, as he was previously quoted as saying virtually the same thing in the Somerset County Gazette and Wellington Weekly News, and I am pretty sure his agent does not edit either of those publications.
Incidentally, it will not be ‘free’ swimming, it will be swimming that is paid for by people aged between 16 and 59 years.