A Mason's outburst

This from today's Private Eye. Found in the Rotten Boroughs section.

One The Square

Tory freemason Bill Sharp has been suspended for two months from Castle Point council in Essex for calling its environmental director "a fucking liar" and for trying to influence planning decisions on behalf of property developers, one of whom is a mason he has described as "my brother".

Sharp tried to attend a meeting to consider a planning application made by a company owned by a pension fund of which friend Jack king was a trustee.

When refused admission he assumed environmental director Ian Burchill, with whom he had clashed before, was behind his exclusion, and was found in an office shouting down an internal phone to the council's monitoring officer: "Burchill is a fucking liar. I despise him. He's just doing this because he doesn't like me. He's a fucking idiot."

The council's standards committee also found that Sharp failed to declare that he was a friend of developer Gordon Sanders despite "a long social and business connection between [them]... additionally both men are active freemasons". At one point Sharp called Sanders "my brother."