Bolter Ferguson. Footsie Grutchfield. Generalissimo Ward (alright, not just yet). Your boys took one helluva beating.

And now Maritime Minns.

In the last year, I've had cause to reflect on the passing of quite a few local political careers.

Obituaries are never easy to write or read. That of Maritime, now ex-mayor of Hadleigh after he fell on his own marlinspike, is more complicated than most.

To coin an ecclesiastical phrase: he was something of a curate's egg. And I don't mean the Curate Editor of this parish newsletter, although Father Derek has caused one or two cracks to appear in Maritime's shell in recent months.

By all accounts personally affable, Maritime was at his apogee of goodness during the depths of the COVID19 pandemic.

Wisely using the pulpit that came with his blingy chains of office, he became a strong voice of calm in both bringing the community together and in supporting key health messages.

For this he suffered the silly slings and arrows of the town's small corpus of weirds, loons and general ne'er do-wells who queried everything from the lockdowns to the vaccines.

He also went out of his way to endorse and support a wide range of local events and groups, hence helping to demonstrate to everyone, whether they liked it or not, that Hadleigh is not male, pale and stale.

As such, Maritime became the first executive mayor, doing far more than wandering benignly around the town dressed like an extra from Poldark, as all his predecessors had done.

By contrast, once inside the ancient and not always hallowed halls of the Guildhall, Maritime's judgement frequently fluttered out of his grasp, only to return pooping onto his shoulder.

Like Lyndon Baines Johnson after Jack Kennedy, Maritime had the chance to adroitly use Hadleigh Together's majority to deliver the promises of openness and honesty that characterised young Steve Allman's term of office.

It was not to be. Maritime proved to be incapable of dealing with questionable behaviour in his own little party's ranks and appeared utterly intolerant of attempts by opposition councillors to hold him to account and query his decision-making.

By the time he resigned, Hadleigh Town Council looked like The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault, which depicts cannibalism, hopelessness and a total lack of direction.

But this precarious state of affairs is not entirely the responsibility of Maritime and his fellow mariners.

Any council is a partnership between its political poohbahs and its managerial head honchos. If one is too dominant or one's credibility is too open to doubts of Thomasine extent, then its effectiveness and legitimacy is imperilled.

The circumstances and unanswered questions surrounding the appointments of the council manager and the town clerk and the ways in which they have since discharged their duties, including sending out utterly self-defeating and threatening legal letters to residents leaves a bad odour emanating from the said curate's egg.

In the last week, it has become fashionable to quote Leo Amery quoting Oliver Cromwell. But his call "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" is an appropriate one in these circumstances.

I would urge all remaining councillors to stand down. What is needed is a fundamental reboot of and rethink by Hadleigh Town Council as to what it does, how it does it and how it truly represents the wishes of the good citizens of our community.

If this means it is incumbent on Generalissimo's Babergh to temporarily takeover the running of the Town Council, then so be it.

Act now and well, rather than later and poorly. And in so doing, I hope that the activities of the two senior paid - indeed very well paid - staff are investigated, evaluated and if disciplinary action is required, so be it.

Hadleigh certainly deserves better.

It also, I suggest, needs district councillors not to act in a hoity-toity and heavy-handed way. Which of course, Councillor Queenie Dawson has done over the issue of two banners advertising respectively one of the town's foodbanks and the Friday market.

More on the mini-monarch in my next sermon. But suffice to say at this stage: we see you Queenie, we see you.

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Hoity-toity Queenie

Maritime Minns' death throes as mayor