EYE EYE, IT’S STEPHEN HUGHES IN THE NEWS

21-02-2008

Birmingham Council’s chief executive Stephen Hughes has strenuously denied allegations about his love life which have surfaced in the latest edition of Private Eye.

The magazine claims that Hughes has been having a relationship with a senior colleague in Service Birmingham – the joint venture set up by the Council with consultants Capita – to transform the city’s IT performance.

It’s even alleged that colleagues describe the couple’s apartment, “The Love Shack”.

Similar claims were briefly made on The Stirrer Forum recently but were swiftly edited because there was no evidence to support them – and when we checked with Hughes at the time he said it wasn’t true.

Since we have no reason to question his honesty, we dropped the story. 

For what it’s worth, we also found out who Hughes is sleeping with, but as there was no conflict of interest with his official role we didn’t publish the information – we’ve no interest in reporting on who’s sleeping with who for the sake of it.

The story then cropped up, again without names, in Paul Dale’s Iron Angle column in the Birmingham Post.

Now the Eye has repeated the original rumour, apparently without carrying out even basic fact checking.

We’ve checked the details once more with Stephen Hughes, and again we’re assured that the Private Eye rumour is completely untrue.