Monday, August 20, 2012
Is the grass greener on the other side for aspirant leader
The leader of the Green Party in Wales has become the subject of social media interest over the last few hours as a result of an article in today's Independent that reveals that she drives a 10 year old Jaguar x-type car.
Pippa Bartolotti is seeking to make a virtue of her apparent faux pas, as the paper points out. She 'accepts that driving the car which made John Prescott politically notorious (in his case, as "Two Jags") is likely to be a handicap in her ambitions to lead the low-carbon, public-transport-orientated Greens via their forthcoming internal election, but is unrepentant.
"Yes, it does damage my image within the Green Party – but I've got the same problem everybody else has got," says the former fashion designer and company owner. "Am I suddenly going to pay 25-grand for an electric car which I can't charge up hardly anywhere, because there's no infrastructure, and even if I could charge it up, a lot of the energy would be coming from dirty, coal-fired power stations? It might look nice on the face of it, but that would be cosmetic."
Ms Bartolotti, 59, a mother of three grown-up children who is currently leader of the Greens in Wales, says she knows she could have sold her 10-year-old Jaguar X-type ("market value about 1,800 quid") but decided not to.
When asked why not, she said: "Because I'm a real person. I'm a woman of the world. I know what the issues are really. And you can make all sorts of, you know, trendy leanings towards what should be, but I'm real."
Whether this is enough to convince her fellow party members of her commitment to their cause has to be seen. The hustings events may well be quite lively, especially if attendees also raise this article on the Guido Fawkes website where she was pictured raising the flag of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, which he says is a fascist organisation whose members give the Hitler salute, use a swastika as their emblem and base their party anthem on ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’.
Nice to see that the hitherto purist Green Party has some real characters in their ranks who are not afraid to air their differences with party policy.
Pippa Bartolotti is seeking to make a virtue of her apparent faux pas, as the paper points out. She 'accepts that driving the car which made John Prescott politically notorious (in his case, as "Two Jags") is likely to be a handicap in her ambitions to lead the low-carbon, public-transport-orientated Greens via their forthcoming internal election, but is unrepentant.
"Yes, it does damage my image within the Green Party – but I've got the same problem everybody else has got," says the former fashion designer and company owner. "Am I suddenly going to pay 25-grand for an electric car which I can't charge up hardly anywhere, because there's no infrastructure, and even if I could charge it up, a lot of the energy would be coming from dirty, coal-fired power stations? It might look nice on the face of it, but that would be cosmetic."
Ms Bartolotti, 59, a mother of three grown-up children who is currently leader of the Greens in Wales, says she knows she could have sold her 10-year-old Jaguar X-type ("market value about 1,800 quid") but decided not to.
When asked why not, she said: "Because I'm a real person. I'm a woman of the world. I know what the issues are really. And you can make all sorts of, you know, trendy leanings towards what should be, but I'm real."
Whether this is enough to convince her fellow party members of her commitment to their cause has to be seen. The hustings events may well be quite lively, especially if attendees also raise this article on the Guido Fawkes website where she was pictured raising the flag of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, which he says is a fascist organisation whose members give the Hitler salute, use a swastika as their emblem and base their party anthem on ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’.
Nice to see that the hitherto purist Green Party has some real characters in their ranks who are not afraid to air their differences with party policy.
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What a pity that Menzies Campbell bowed to similar pressure when he became LibDem leader and sold his Jaguar.
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