Mike Stoddart • 1940-2026

There is an awful lot that I could call upon in tribute to the OG, Old Grumpy (also known as Mike Stoddart!) who died last Sunday afternoon, exactly four weeks before his 86th birthday.

Robert Michael Stoddart and I have shared a special bond since I was first elected, aged 22, to Pembrokeshire County Council in May, 2012.

I was then the youngest councillor, since which time countless people have observed how Mike, fifty years my senior, took me under his wing.

What they might not have known is that my dad died when I was fifteen and I never got to meet a grandfather. Mike was therefore a fantastic mentor, but he was so much more to me than that.

Our contact began when I rang him up one evening some months ahead of that election. I remember exactly where I was sitting when I made the call.

I was a complete stranger, yet Mike was a great source of support and encouragement in my first council run – whether he thought I might win or lose didn’t factor.

In that same election the good burghers of Milford Haven re-elected Mike and his wife Vivien to PCC, and their daughter, Tessa, also got elected at her first attempt in Lamphey – so there was some inevitability that my path would cross with the Stoddart family at County Hall.

What I could never have imagined is how valuable a friendship that would become outside of this building Mike famously coined ‘the Kremlin on Cleddau.’

Blogging wars

Now that he’s passed I finally have no shame in saying that, like so many in the county, I had been an avid reader of Mike’s Old Grumpy blog which he always published weekly.

I can even admit to repetitively refreshing his homepage in my browser on Thursday nights, waiting for his latest postings to drop. The indignity was only limited by my knowledge that I was not alone.

Latterly ad hoc, OldGrumpy.co.uk is where Mike’s good-humoured investigative revelations of councillors’ dodgy expense claims or other shady shenanigans in public life were given the treatment in his trademark style.

But it was more than hilarious tales of snouts in troughs, it was a well-sharpened tool he used, in conjunction with his elected mandate, to fight the machine wherever he perceived abuses of power.

A fearless campaigner for truth and justice, Mike was the original blogging councillor, probably in the whole of the UK. Yet despite his well-earnt monopoly on dishing the Pembrokeshire political gossip, he relentlessly encouraged his readers to check out my own blog here at jacobwilliams.com, which I started soon after being elected.

He’d refer to me as “the young upstart” or “the whippersnapper,” and my blog as “that other website.” We’d wage faux online battles over our perceived dominance of the blogosphere, but we were, of course, on the same page.

Even that time I did a piece on a Milford Haven Town Council row – over which Mike fired back: “unfurling his banner on my doorstep I regard as a declaration of war,” and how “retribution will wait for another day.”

The most intelligent person I’ve known, Mike was an academic multidisciplinarian. He was faultlessly modest and self-effacing but, no matter how grandiose it sounds – and I can almost hear him cringing – he was, quite simply, a polymath.

What he didn’t know about the laws of thermodynamics, economics, anatomy, mathematical theorem, classics, or of any legal doctrine, wasn’t worth knowing.

But having a big brain was only part of Mike’s story – his record of achievement, across such varied fields, is a remarkable testament to his persistence.

Mike’s upbringing, from dirt poverty in testing circumstances, surely influenced his path to becoming the formidable champion of the underdog he’s now well known for – but he could turn his hand to anything. And did.

Fine journalist. Serial property restorer. Expert gardener. Five-handicap golfer. Prize-winning bridge player. County rugby player with unpursued professional prospects. Not forgetting his grammar school’s victor ludorum!

He applied himself extensively – there can’t be many people who can say they’ve created, from scratch, both a pub (Priory Inn, still trading) and a local newspaper (more later) and sold each of them as a going concern.

Among the hundreds of online tributes posted so far, a hint at how entrepreneurial Mike was can be seen from those fondly remembering how he gave them their first job or was the best boss they ever had.

His first enterprise was with his brother, Raymond. As teenagers in their native Cumberland they bred turkeys. Not only were they at the cutting edge by using artificial insemination, but Raymond, eighteen months Mike’s junior, tells me their method of breeding broad-breasted bronzes reached 95% fertility.

It was the beginning of a string of joint rural ventures to be undertaken by the brothers, both of whom had moved to Pembrokeshire by the early 1970s, where shortly afterwards they took over a sizeable dairy with its large coverage – five milk rounds – surrounding Haverfordwest.

Perhaps Mike’s most influential concern was in the building game, founding R. M. Stoddart Construction Limited, whose sizeable projects included housing schemes and municipal facilities.

So often when we’d be out in the car, Mike would point out one of his firm’s buildings – my response was always a variation of: “I’m surprised it’s still standing if you had anything to do with it!”

It was in his construction boss capacity that Mike was the star prosecution witness in a corruption trial, resulting from an insider’s attempts to encourage him to defraud a lucrative public construction contract.

Another incident I recall Mike telling involving the legal system, is what Raymond has described to me as “a turning point in Mike’s life.”

The brothers had their membership of Haverfordwest Golf Club summarily terminated, following a quarrel involving another member, who wasn’t banned.

This was a row of principle, which started when Mike took the golfer to task for spreading false rumours of the insolvency of one of his competing building contractors.

Mike headed to court. He sought an injunction, on the basis that the golf club had denied him the chance of a fair hearing.

The judge on the case was war hero and Victoria Cross recipient Sir Tasker Watkins, who would later go on to be an appeal court judge, deputy head of the judiciary, and president of the Welsh Rugby Union – described in his lifetime as “The Greatest Living Welshman.”

“I see that you disagree with Lord Justice Denning” said Sir Tasker to the opposing counsel, a courtroom remark which Mike correctly interpreted as a precursor to his swift legal victory.

Mike was left so impressed with the legal system, and how it allowed him to enforce his rights of natural justice, that he headed back to the classroom as a mature student, to better arm himself if he was to help others without his means.

Having studied chemistry at Keele in the late 1950s – where he met Vivien, and famously shared a bottle of Haig Dimple scotch and Passing Clouds oval cigarettes with Princess Margaret – Mike returned to academia, gaining a law degree from Cardiff University in his forties.

Overcoming the cover-up

Mike’s knowledge of bricks, mortar, blueprints and the law proved pivotal in what would become his most high-profile exposure: the Pembroke Dock grants scandal, which he started to unravel on his blog in 2013.

He uncovered how large sums of public cash had been claimed for historic property restoration work which was either not done to spec, or not done at all.

This was surely Old Grumpy’s pièce de résistance. Not just because he was right, but because in exposing the swindle he had been rubbished at every turn.

His vindication was hard fought – he faced not only council denials but those of quangos whose auditors’ supposedly clean bills of health were presented as disproof of his claims of fraud.

As part of the cover-up endeavours the minutes of meetings were tampered with, and Mike was smeared as a fantasist who didn’t have the truth on his agenda.

To those of us who knew Mike and his careful research to establish any claim he made, we knew it wasn’t luck or faith that was needed but an open-minded audience.

He wouldn’t find it at the Kremlin on Cleddau.

Old Grumpy had started this campaign using only publicly-available sources of information. But severely blacked-out freedom of information requests only got him so far. He worked on a plan – tabling a council motion that, if approved, would open up certain secret grant documents for councillors to privately inspect.

This may sound like an irresistible proposition, but it didn’t go smoothly. He lost the vote 27-32. But he knew what he was doing. The flak only made him stronger, exposed the cover-up to a wider audience, and drew more attention to his thankless efforts – not that he ever sought credit.

In the end it was Mike’s knowledge of local government law that allowed him to run rings around the cover-up agents.

Having got the matter before the council’s audit committee, he worked out that all councillors had a statutory right to inspect the documents in question.

However this right of access was blocked by the authority’s legal supremos, who reluctantly u-turned having been threatened by Cllr. Stoddart with High Court action.

They still prevented him taking copies – but soon backed down here, too, when he was able to show that he was entitled to them.

These details of council procedure might seem mundane, but to me they show two things which are quintessentially Mike Stoddart.

Firstly: how he still had to fight the system even though he had persuaded the voters to put him on the inside, and secondly: just how nobly he used his public role.

He combined his skills, knowledge, and privileged position not for his own gain but for the public good as he saw it, no matter how unpopular it made him with some, or how much fire he received in the process.

This was all driven by his deep conviction that he was there to represent the people, and not to represent the council, which too many others had seen as their duty.

It was fitting that I was involved in the turning point of the affair. Having now gained access to a vast wealth of previously off-limits documentation, Mike and I were in the same room at County Hall, poking through folders of grant files, when we hit the motherlode.

We turned up a document which, on its face offered incontrovertible proof that unaccountably favourable treatment had been given to a particular building contractor in what was supposed to have been a secretive competitive tender process. In other words: blatant fraud. It led to the police being called in.

And it wasn’t Mike who called the cops, but the council officers who had, to that point, been hopeful his wild claims could be swept under the carpet.

That nobody was ever prosecuted was both a travesty and yet another example Old Grumpy would experience of one public body washing the hand of the other.

As an excellent investigator and communicator, it’s no surprise that he ended up in journalism, firstly as a sports reporter for the Western Telegraph. Vivien had also been a reporter for the West Wales Guardian.

In 1992, and at the height of the recession, the family collectively took the plunge in establishing the Milford Mercury, which would be the first host of Mike’s infamous Old Grumpy column.

On the basis that he would have an irreconcilable conflict of interest in becoming a newspaper proprietor as a sitting councillor, Mike stepped down from Preseli Pembrokeshire District Council to which he had only been elected in May, 1991.

Blogging pioneer

After selling the paper in April 1999, and his column having been dropped by the new owners amid rumours of editorial pressure being brought to bear, Mike’s weekly jottings required a new home.

Jealously guarding his independence, Old Grumpy started another new outlet. As with the turkeys decades beforehand, he was ahead of his time.

He joked: “I have been approached by my fan club who tell me they are both missing my weekly ramblings. Truth to tell, I, too, have been suffering from withdrawal symptoms, so, for the sake of the three of us, I have decided to venture into cyberspace.”

It was on 20th November, 1999, that Mike registered the domain name oldgrumpy.co.uk, and his earliest post on his back catalogue, all of which is still available online, dates from exactly a year later.

Requiring at least some knowledge of web coding, Mike self-published his blog using primitive means. The content was formidable, and set the standard.

By my estimation – and it is probably not something that is easy to prove – Mike has a good claim to being the first political blogger in the country. And an even stronger claim to being the longest-running, possibly in the world.

In 2004, now long free of his newspaper shackles, Mike put himself before the ballot box again – standing for Pembrokeshire County Council, to which he was returned by Hakin ward voters right up until his death, having been re-elected in 2008, 2012, 2017 and 2022 to a term ending in 2027.

Thirteen years proved unlucky for some

Our time together on the council has been an absolute blast. At least it was for us, although it’s been suggested that there may be one or two bystanders for whom our near fourteen-year joint run won’t have been as enjoyable.

He had sound instincts, was unflappable in pursuit of his causes, and a capacity to retain information which meant he never took notes, never used a prompt, and had a joke or story for every occasion.

We sat on so many committees together, the experience was always fun. He could be depended on to rekindle the embers when the heat had gone out of a debate. He could also effortlessly torch those on the receiving end to a crisp, but always in his polite and entertaining way.

He was an equal opportunities offender. Labour, Tory, Lib Dem or any other political hue or none, he didn’t discriminate – if he thought they were being mad or bad, he’d give them a blast of his antidote: a dose of reality.

I think most would agree that Mike offered great value in every council meeting, and, if you hadn’t managed to keep up with him, or a chairman had cut him off mid-flow, you could usually read about it later on his blog.

Old Grumpy’s publishing method was archaic long before 2013, when I set him up on a proper blogging system in my capacity as his “technical support,” or as he also used to call me: “Help the Aged.”

The old boy was no luddite, in fact quite the opposite. But whenever he had an issue he couldn’t sort alone, he would be straight on the blower: “Hi Jacob, I’m having trouble with my laptop, I don’t suppose you know of anyone who could assist?”

We would usually then discuss payment in terms of how many lunches he would owe me. So often this fell on a weekend or bank holiday, and I’d have to remind him how inflated my rates were.

Mike was clearly more than a friend or a council colleague. It was whilst sitting around his dining table on Christmas Day, 2024, that his eldest – daughter Helen – noted how I was the only non-family member in her recollection to have sat around a Stoddart Christmas table.

I must have laughed at just enough of Mike’s jokes, or given him a sufficiently potent bottle of merlot – because the invitation was extended a second time, for the Christmas just gone. It went royally. Beef. Yorkshire puddings. The best of Mike’s stories, on request.

The last time I saw Mike was at a do on 30th December, but as recently as Friday 2nd January, two nights before his death, we were gossiping and plotting on the phone.

He was still on fine form, but coughing more than usual, which prompted me to re-tell our long-running gag – my advice that he shouldn’t go buying any green bananas!

Little did either of us know.

A lifelong smoker, he quit and turned to vapes a decade ago when diagnosed with the incurable lung condition COPD. Yet the fact his death still came as a surprise shows how well he kept things going despite the breathing difficulties.

I’ll miss him no end. A more loyal, generous, entertaining, original-thinking brainbox of a pal I cannot ever imagine making.

He was adamant that he wasn’t going to stand at the last election in 2022, but I among others forced him into it.

Mike usually had the last laugh – and I think the old duffer would appreciate that his death in office provides yet another case in support of his maxim that: “political careers tend to end inside one of two boxes: ballot or brass-handled!”

Mike’s funeral will be on the afternoon of Tuesday, 3rd February, at Parc Gwyn crematorium, Narberth, SA67 8UD. (Time will be confirmed shortly.)

BONUS PHOTOS