Ledbury councillor rapped for “sexually inappropriate” joke

A Herefordshire town councillor has been rapped for telling a “sexually inappropriate” joke, then trying to deny it.

Coun Tony Bradford of Ledbury Town Council told the joke to the unnamed person in the council’s reception area last October, according to

Herefordshire Council’s monitoring officer who assesses allegations of breaches of councillors’ codes of conduct in the county.

Her report of the case says that Coun Bradford’s response to the complainant’s objection to his joke was to say he would deny telling it.

The allegation led to an investigation earlier this year by a senior governance lawyer, who concluded that Coun Bradford had indeed breached the town council’s code of conduct.

This was backed by the monitoring officer, who said that Coun Bradford then refused her proposal to resolve the matter informally, necessitating a formal Standards Panel hearing which was held in private on April 2.

“The panel agreed that the content of the joke could only be considered as of a sexual nature,” her report of the meeting said – without revealing what it consisted of.

“Coun Bradford had showed poor judgement in telling the joke and then not taking the opportunity to defuse the situation,” particularly as he did not know the complainant well.

The panel were “disappointed” that he “had allowed this complaint to get this far”.

They concluded that Coun Bradford had been “disrespectful” on this one occasion, but had not bullied or harassed the complainant, nor had he been discriminatory.

They acknowledged there was a difference in the two parties’ account of what had been said, even though there were witnesses to it.

But they also found that Coun Bradford saying to the complainant he would deny telling the joke amounted to an attempt to intimidate a person involved in an investigation – a further breach of the councillors’ code of conduct.

It is now for Ledbury Town Council, at a full meeting this evening (April 17), to decide whether Coun Bradford “should apologise to the complainant for his poor judgement”, the wording of the apology to first be agreed by the monitoring officer; whether he should undertake training; whether the town council should take action “to try to build trust and confidence between Coun Bradford and the complainant”; or all three options.