To all but a small handful of others, he has become an embarrassment, an attention-seeking nuisance, a disappointment or some combination of all three.
Now, as he insists on making a complete fool of himself by affecting to claim political
asylum in the UK because he imagines that his rights or his wellbeing are in some way under threat from the Jersey authorities, he has left behind all claim to credibility and, it must be hoped, declared his involvement in the Island’s public life effectively at an end.
Senator Syvret has taken himself into voluntary exile in London because he refuses to recognise the authority of the Jersey court which requires his presence to answer a number of motoring and data protection charges and which has now ordered his arrest.
It may or may not have occurred to him that those charges, and the sanctions they could incur if proved, are hardly of an order likely to spark a manhunt rather than a patient wait for his eventual return. There is no point in going into hiding if no one is actually looking for you.
If such bad-mannered petulance were being displayed by a student agitator with an
over-inflated idea of his own intellectual powers, it might be understandable and even forgiveable. But this arrogant disregard for the administration of justice in a community whose laws he has sworn to uphold is instead the behaviour of a 44-year-old Senator of the States of Jersey who is, almost comically, Father of the House in its elected assembly.
By virtue of this currently unfulfilled public office, Stuart Syvret is entitled to draw an
income from public funds, in return for which the Islandwide electorate he was
chosen to serve is now receiving little or nothing in the way of representation.
It is not clear why he believes that the taxpayer should continue to subsidise his personal agenda to the tune, currently, of some £43,000 a year but he obviously has other things on his mind than the needs of the Island public and other demands on his time to which he has chosen to give priority, despite their irrelevance to the great majority of the
electorate.
That being the case, Senator Syvret cannot continue to present himself as a serious
Jersey politician. He has already promised not to seek re-election when his term of
office expires in two years but he is now clearly wasting the public’s money as well as time, and there is no need for him to wait. If he cannot rapidly re-apply himself to the concerns of anyone other than himself, he should do the honourable thing by resigning his seat in the States, vacating it for someone more willing to make a full contribution and freeing even more of his time to pursue his own interests.
