Jackie Weaver is a name you won’t forget in a hurry.
In Feb. 2021, a video of a chaotic Zoom parish council meeting burst into our lives and found viral fame online.
If you somehow managed to miss this sparkling nugget of internet gold, then you can recap the Zoom meeting at your leisure.
A video of the video meeting between Handforth Parish Council’s Planning and Environment Committee in Wilmslow, Cheshire, clocked up 5.8 million views and was basically an edge-of-your-seat drama-fest from start to finish. To summarise, Weaver attempted to deal with disruptive parish councillors by muting them and ejecting them from the meeting into the Zoom waiting room.
“You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver,” was one of the lines that proved particularly popular from the viral video. And, in a bizarre twist of fate, it turns out Weaver did not actually have the authority, according to a report.
An investigation into the disorderly conduct has culminated in six (yes, six!) reports being published by Cheshire East Council on the councillors’ behaviour in the infamous Zoom call.
A 145-page report determined that Weaver “was not acting in an official capacity at these meetings” but added as a caveat that Weaver felt her actions were necessary given the behaviour being displayed by a number of councillors. The reports also noted that it understood why Weaver acted as she did.
In a statement to the BBC, Weaver said she welcomed the findings of the report but was “deeply saddened that it took so long and cost so much to get there.” It was reported recently that the investigation cost over £85,000.
Weaver added: “We were still very vague about how virtual council meetings worked and I did not actually remove them from the meeting, in my opinion, I moved them to the waiting room.”
“A little later in the meeting the remaining councillors voted to remove them,” she concluded.
Despite the reports stating that several current and former councillors to be in breach of the council’s code of conduct, there have been no formal findings made against any individual.
Per the BBC, some former council members have rejected the findings of the report and do not accept that they were in breach of the rules. “In terms of the findings of the reports, we wholly refute the findings and view them as being extreme fiction. The investigations were in our opinion conducted with more than an air of mendacity,” they said.
An unsurprising response, perhaps, given what we witnessed in the video.
“Read the standing orders. Read them and understand them!”
