Simon Harris #4 He lost 5 stone, and gained 457 thousand pounds

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lilykestrel said:
Wonder if Jackie "You Have the Authority" Weaver was one of the "very famous" people who had some funds flow through Simon's account in her direction for her time and wisdom.

God pandemic era UK was loopy, you forget, don't you, and then you're reminded that a woman who chaired a local council meeting got a milquetoast lean in feminism book deal after some other people were nobs to her and it went viral. And an elderly Tory walked round his garden while recovering from hip surgery and his daughter went on to build a spa that broke planning permission. How will we explain this to the future generations
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This whole decade is mental.
One day I half expect my little nephew to ask me where I was when i heard that a formerly respected QC battered a fox to death while wearing his wife's kimono, or that a two bit baked bean blogger went viral for suggesting you could make cacio e pepe by rinsing a tin of spaghetti hoops.
 
lilykestrel said:
Wonder if Jackie "You Have the Authority" Weaver was one of the "very famous" people who had some funds flow through Simon's account in her direction for her time and wisdom.

God pandemic era UK was loopy, you forget, don't you, and then you're reminded that a woman who chaired a local council meeting got a milquetoast lean in feminism book deal after some other people were nobs to her and it went viral. And an elderly Tory walked round his garden while recovering from hip surgery and his daughter went on to build a spa that broke planning permission. How will we explain this to the future generations
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I swear the amusing bit about Jackie Weaver is that she ultimately didn't have the authority for the meeting? 😂
 
lilykestrel said:
Wonder if Jackie "You Have the Authority" Weaver was one of the "very famous" people who had some funds flow through Simon's account in her direction for her time and wisdom.

God pandemic era UK was loopy, you forget, don't you, and then you're reminded that a woman who chaired a local council meeting got a milquetoast lean in feminism book deal after some other people were nobs to her and it went viral. And an elderly Tory walked round his garden while recovering from hip surgery and his daughter went on to build a spa that broke planning permission. How will we explain this to the future generations
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For some people the pandemic was the most lucrative opportunity of a lifetime. Is it any wonder that so many tried their damnedest to never let it end?

Harris is just the tip of the iceberg. One of my mates worked his whole career in London, commuted from Essex 5 days a week. 3 hours travel a day at a cost of £4K a year. During Covid he was furloughed for a year, so he got a part time job working remotely from home for somebody else. He worked for 3 days a week for a whole year and had a combined income that was higher than before Covid, no commuting time and no rail fares. Nowadays he’s back full time but only in London 3 days a week, and he still picks up work on the side with the company he worked for during Covid.

Last week in the pub he had the cheek to moan about the cost of living crisis 🤯

Anyway that was slightly off topic. Harris is a twit.
 
Pkershaw said:
This is why it’s always a bad idea to get yourself involved with a toxic loose cannon who has an army of haters. If that’s the man you’re going to employ, make sure you’re as squeaky clean as clean can be, otherwise you’ll get caught up in his inevitable downfall. None of this would’ve come to light if Harris wasn’t such an arse.
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Years ago, I worked with someone who did a vaguely similar thing -seeing to it that contracts were awarded to a company in which she had an interest. She was also an abrasive, condescending and generally unpleasant person who thought that the sun shone out of her own...well, not the centre of the solar system, put it that way. She was nice to anyone she considered a peer, an utter crawler to anyone she thought superior and a horrid bully to anyone she deemed beneath her.

Her undoing came about when she accidentally used her condescending attitude against someone who actually had the power to act against her. All the financial shenanigans came out and she was quietly removed from the organisation. Like KOC/Harris, she'd have got away with it if only she hadn't been such an arse.
 
Pkershaw said:
For some people the pandemic was the most lucrative opportunity of a lifetime. Is it any wonder that so many tried their damnedest to never let it end?

Harris is just the tip of the iceberg. One of my mates worked his whole career in London, commuted from Essex 5 days a week. 3 hours travel a day at a cost of £4K a year. During Covid he was furloughed for a year, so he got a part time job working remotely from home for somebody else. He worked for 3 days a week for a whole year and had a combined income that was higher than before Covid, no commuting time and no rail fares. Nowadays he’s back full time but only in London 3 days a week, and he still picks up work on the side with the company he worked for during Covid.

Last week in the pub he had the cheek to moan about the cost of living crisis 🤯

Anyway that was slightly off topic. Harris is a twit.
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Here's the thing... We learned nothing. As a society, we totally failed to learn the lesson that people can do their jobs effectively wherever they are and their sense of teamwork and mission will get stuff done. Sorry to go political but working people completely failed to organise around the fact that we showed bosses that they need us much more than we need them. My last boss told the whole company back in January 2022 that "It was tough for me 2 years ago when I had to accept that people wouldn't be forced to work crazy hours in an office anymore. But now the wheel has turned and it's my go to say what's acceptable"

It saddens me that all we achieved is some cunning types learning how to take advantage.
 
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a Dubious Tit will now be my go-to insult
 
I'm coming out of lurkdom on this thread to say how bleeping delighted I am that this woefully unfunny, misogynist narcisssist is finally getting his comeuppance. I've loathed him for years and could never get my head around the fact that he has (or had - hahahaha!) so many followers. He's been stuck back in the noughties for more than a decade now, ranting about imaginary Barrys wanting to cancel Christmas and how awful the Torwies are, and it absolutely blows my mind that he's been paid nearly half a million quid (by a Tory council no less!) to tell people how to wash their bleeping hands. Jesus wept, you could not make this tit up.
 
Here's something interesting - may be taken down at some point:



From about 1:18 onwards in particular

Talking about their suicide prevention work

O'Callaghan talks about rolling out training - first of all in Woodham Ferrers (Morter's area) and says they trained "about 450" (voice goes up) people and then goes on to say they have "to date trained about 45,000" (eyes to the side) people in Essex. There are a lot of "abouts" with O'Callaghan. The coverage then shifts to coverage of guess who, someone who has done the training. And who might that be you ask? It is our friend Simon. And where is he you might ask - at the Monkey Bizness nursery in Hockley. And which social media and comms specialist in the Hockley area has done promotional work and fundraisers for them you might ask? Simon Harris. Absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. But, if there are "about" 45,000 grateful recepients of suicide awareness training in Essex was this the only person you could get to speak so highly of it - or was that just for "expediency"

Happy for this to be shared
 
Fred Santos said:
Here's something interesting - may be taken down at some point:



From about 1:18 onwards in particular

Talking about their suicide prevention work

O'Callaghan talks about rolling out training - first of all in Woodham Ferrers (Morter's area) and says they trained "about 450" (voice goes up) people and then goes on to say they have "to date trained about 45,000" (eyes to the side) people in Essex. There are a lot of "abouts" with O'Callaghan. The coverage then shifts to coverage of guess who, someone who has done the training. And who might that be you ask? It is our friend Simon. And where is he you might ask - at the Monkey Bizness nursery in Hockley. And which social media and comms specialist in the Hockley area has done promotional work and fundraisers for them you might ask? Simon Harris. Absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. But, if there are "about" 45,000 grateful recepients of suicide awareness training in Essex was this the only person you could get to speak so highly of it - or was that just for "expediency"

Happy for this to be shared
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It’s almost like a parody at this point 😂

One more bit of pertinent information to add, Simon’s wife R worked at Monkey Bizness. May still do so. I wonder if they were the recipients of any “grants” to cover the costs of being a venue for these training programmes or something 🤔
 
Fred Santos said:
Here's something interesting - may be taken down at some point:



From about 1:18 onwards in particular

Talking about their suicide prevention work

O'Callaghan talks about rolling out training - first of all in Woodham Ferrers (Morter's area) and says they trained "about 450" (voice goes up) people and then goes on to say they have "to date trained about 45,000" (eyes to the side) people in Essex. There are a lot of "abouts" with O'Callaghan. The coverage then shifts to coverage of guess who, someone who has done the training. And who might that be you ask? It is our friend Simon. And where is he you might ask - at the Monkey Bizness nursery in Hockley. And which social media and comms specialist in the Hockley area has done promotional work and fundraisers for them you might ask? Simon Harris. Absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. But, if there are "about" 45,000 grateful recepients of suicide awareness training in Essex was this the only person you could get to speak so highly of it - or was that just for "expediency"

Happy for this to be shared
Click to expand...

And KoC says training took place 'in a local pub'.
What are the chances we might know which pub that may be? :unsure:
 
And just, for one moment going back to Jackie Weaver. The same Jackie Weaver (who everyone is very fond of) who gave a semi defence/justification on Talk TV yesterday - something has been troubling me about that link (showing she had done work for the Essex facebook page - and therefore likely knew Simon and Kirsty - but didn't mention it when interviewed).

Here's the link again



90 likes but 80K+ reach. There's something in here isn't there about "ratios" isn't there?

I am not facebook expert at all.... but an idle google suggests that a good "ratio" would be as follows:

www.quora.com

On a Facebook page, what ratio is good for the number of post reaches to likes?

Answer (1 of 4): As an admin of 5 Facebook pages with more than 25k likes (all organic likes) I can tell you that it’s a data driven metric and it depends on a lot of factors, including time of your post, local / national / global events etc. But realistically, if I were to be measuring quality ...
www.quora.com www.quora.com
.

There are plenty of examples of "influencers" having been found to have amassed followers by, for example, buying them. I don't think for one minute that this is what has happened with the Essex pages - but I do wonder how the followers were acquired. And even if they were engaged (they obviously were not - based on this post) - some kind of geospatial analyisis of where the followers and engagements were from?

The comms team at Essex County Council would have known about all of these analysis techniques but the two functions seem to have been kept apart and I have seen no reports published that describe the geographic reach or the broader effectiveness of "engagement" leave aside the economic evaluation detailing the 500K spent on Simon - and more on others (yes, as LG hints - if you trawl through the spreadsheets you see evidence of others too). The evidence of capmpaign effectiveness seems entirely to be about physical mobilisation - "about 450" for example, but moblisation of people and volunteers was something the wider public sector was doing anyway - NHS, local councils, voluntary sector. Was O'Callaghan, in some way, trying to credit facebook, and in turn herself and Harris for all of this? It's notable that nothing like as many followers have been created in Suffolk - or is that just becuase of fewer "activations"...?
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Jelly Bean said:
And KoC says training took place 'in a local pub'.
What are the chances we might know which pub that may be? :unsure:
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Of course!
 
Pkershaw said:
Also, “we started the training in South Woodham Ferrers. In the local pub! Lol”

Well I wonder which pub that possibly could’ve been 🤔. If only Kirsty had connections to a pub which is a 6 minute drive from the centre of South Woodham Ferrers 🤔 That would’ve been perfect. Any probably expensive for the tax payer.
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I'd missed that - things are so bleeping obvious, that even I am beginning to miss things......
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By the way, I'd still like someone to tag Talk TV and Peter Cardwell about Jackie Weaver - she basically defended Essex County Council, but was then wide eyed when he told her that O'Callaghan and Harris had deleted their social media profiles. She knows them both - Simon had on his facebook bio (humour!) that he worked for Handforth Parish Council.
 
Jelly Bean said:
So this pub - had £150k from ECC for providing food to vulnerable people in the pandemic. Now being used a training venue, possibly for more money.
What exactly is Kirsty's connection to it? Why was one pub getting such special treatment? It can't just be it was her local can it? Was she getting a nice little slice of the money possibly?
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It is suggested that it was her local and there are pictures of her with the owners and also it is reported that she used to work there when she was younger. It is the only pub in Essex that was funded in this way
 
It has also continued to be used as a venue by Mid and South Essex ICS - where Kirsty went to work after leaving Essex County Council
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We are almost at the end of the thread. time for some suggestions?
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I am going to suggest strongly that it includes both his name but also that of Kirsty O'Callaghan. It helps with journalistic discoverability - and won't rely entirely upon titbits being picked up and posted elsewhere (something I have no probs with).
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This story has more to give and it is essential that there are sufficient lines of enquiry to keep it going - in the MSM
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What and who received funding from Mid and South Essex ICS is something that should also be subject to a FOI. The publication scheme there only lists payments above £25K
 
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You know what's sticking in my craw a little

Just looking at the Never Too Late, Mate page and the way the posts peak and trough, at one point it has posts on it, then it drops, then it gets picked up again to do a flurry of daily posts to advertise something that Suffolk council are doing, then it goes quiet again.

Now this isn't necessarily a problem if the plan is to have a brief campaign spike that hits 'eyes' and imparts that information and you've done a net good. But I'm getting the feeling these groups are also all used and picked back up and put down as part an interconnecting network and back-up to drive views and impressions to the next project. Do you get what I mean? Maybe I'm just being unnecessarily pedantic but it gets my goat a little, because it's not really establishing a long-standing service or resource. Maybe that's not what they were going for. Idk.
 
Oh this is just dynamite

Posted elsewhere but I have only just read it:

The Power of Virtual Communities

The Power of Virtual Communities project examines the role online groups play in creating opportunities for people to build new kinds of meaningful communities they often could not form in real space. We seek to understand the conditions under which onlinegroups are able to successfully become...
virtual-communities.thegovlab.org virtual-communities.thegovlab.org

O’Callaghan acknowledges the risk that Essex County Council’s work with Facebook may not continue in its current form if someday she is no longer there to support it. “I’ve had other team members say to me, ‘If you left the Essex County Council, this kind of work would die,’” O’Callaghan says. ECC's collaboration with Facebook groups depends on the political will of the Council’s leadership to continue to support the initiative. Local government authorities that want to replicate Essex’s success would need to find organizational leaders who are willing to take a chance on a partnership between the public and private sector as well as skilled and passionate public servants. As such, the transferability of ECC’s model to other jurisdictions remains to be seen.

Well, it's worked well in Suffolk hasn't it - so you know, the skys the limit.....
 
Fred Santos said:
It is suggested that it was her local and there are pictures of her with the owners and also it is reported that she used to work there when she was younger. It is the only pub in Essex that was funded in this way
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A pub is also a really inappropriate venue for a local authority to engage with vulnerable people, some of whom are likely to have issues with alcohol etc.
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Fred Santos said:
It has also continued to be used as a venue by Mid and South Essex ICS - where Kirsty went to work after leaving Essex County Council
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We are almost at the end of the thread. time for some suggestions?
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I am going to suggest strongly that it includes both his name but also that of Kirsty O'Callaghan. It helps with journalistic discoverability - and won't rely entirely upon titbits being picked up and posted elsewhere (something I have no probs with).
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This story has more to give and it is essential that there are sufficient lines of enquiry to keep it going - in the MSM
---
What and who received funding from Mid and South Essex ICS is something that should also be subject to a FOI. The publication scheme there only lists payments above £25K
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How about
Simon and Kirsty at the ECC, S.C.A.M.M.I.N.G?
(As a thread title suggestion)
 
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