A personal point of view from East Devon District Council Leader Paul Arnott.

This week’s column hangs on two well-known sayings. The first phrase, often but apparently wrongly known as a Chinese curse, is “may you live in interesting times”, by which it is actually meant, may your whole life is afflicted by chaos.

And interesting times have afflicted this week’s column. I had actually intended to focus on the superb new Pump Track opened recently in Cranbook. It’s a cracking example of Cranbrook Town Council and East Devon District Council working with others to fund a facility I would have adored when I was a kid. It’s a landscaped, profiled area in the Country Park, given an undulating hard surface to provide loads of fun for bikes, skateboards, roller blades etc. It opened, albeit in torrential rain, just in time for the Easter holidays, and I am told it has been packed with children ever since.

The reason I would have written about this is to show that with all the amazing hard work of local people in Cranbrook, facilities are arriving, albeit somewhat belatedly, and that East Devon will do all we can to try to cut through the red tape to help where we can. I might then have gone onto a bit of a serious think piece about how East Devon, having originally dropped the ball in planning the development of Cranbrook, with landowner and developer gain seeming to have been the priority under the Conservatives, is as keen as mustard to make amends for that.

However, that will have to keep for now. Because a second old saying has also come into view in these interesting times: “Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery”.

For there I was eating my Shredded Wheat on Friday when I was astonished to read in the i Newspaper online that someone had set up web addresses purporting to be for local Lib Dem MP Richard Foord which, on being innocently visited, took readers directly to a website for Conservative MP Simon Jupp. It’s almost a hundred years ago that the inimitable P G Wodehouse wrote a comic satire called “Something Fishy”, and heavens above, there’s something fishy going on here.

The story then gathered national attention from the likes of LBC’s James O’Brien and the very brave mathematical whizz-turned-commentator Carol Vorderman. Top class national broadsheet and broadcast journalists then spent hours trying to elicit from Mr Jupp any explanation. I understand that it was like getting blood from a stone and resulted in a six-word gnomic comment that he was “not responsible for the web domains”.

The problem for all people of East Devon is that with a general election looming this can’t be just written off as a bit of a lark. This week William Wragg, another Conservative MP, has been forced to resign various senior positions in the unfortunate matter of pictures of his anatomy and his somehow then providing personal data on other MPs to someone he met online!

With Donald Trump in the USA, and Conservative strategists in the UK, openly planning smear-based campaigns for 2024, we don’t want any of this chicanery in East Devon, and demand better. Mr Jupp can help with this by expanding his tight, six-word comment into six full paragraphs of what he knows, and who was responsible. And soon.

In the meantime, my thought for the week is directly attributable - to Sophocles - and has stood the test of time for two and a half thousand years: "I would prefer even to fail with honour than win by cheating."