I had a rather strange and unexpected conversation at the mayor making ceremony in Carlisle last week but let’s just rewind to earlier in the day ahead of the event.

It was last Wednesday and all day there had been rumours that the General Election would be called by the Prime Minister and around 4pm I got a message from one of my news editors that maybe I should pull together an article introducing the candidates for the constituencies I will be covering.

I had previously had a conversation with my fellow local democracy reporter who covers the south of Cumbria and we agreed that it made sense that I should cover Whitehaven and Workington, Penrith and Solway and Carlisle.

It took some time to get a candidate list but I managed to get a list together and file an article before I needed to head out to the Civic Centre.

Related article: General Election announcement

Now, bearing in mind it had been raining all day I underestimated the ferocity of the weather and I was drenched after what was a relatively short walk through the city centre.

Having said that the meeting went quite well until councillor Robert Betton, who leads the Independent Group and represents residents in the Botcherby ward which is a relatively deprived area of the city, tried to raise a point that once again the new mayor and deputy were both from the ruling Labour party and claimed that there would never be a mayor from the minority parties. But he was advised that it was not the appropriate time to speak during the meeting.

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Having said that when I put the claim to the new mayor he said that Robert had the chance to self-nominate and he knew someone who would have backed him. In the end I wrote two articles, one about Robert’s claims and the other was a straightforward report about the new appointments which were used together in Friday’s Cumberland News.

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But, bizarrely, when I was chatting to Cllr Betton in the council chamber I was approached by a man who I can only assume was an invited guest of the new mayor who demanded to know if I enjoyed “writing articles disrespectful articles?” I have since learned that the man in question was in no way connected to the new mayor so I have no clue who he actually was and there is no doubt a strange situation to find myself in.

To say I was taken aback would be an understatement and I can only assume he had a go at me because I was talking to cllr Betton at the time and he had tried to speak at the meeting. I could only say that I could only report on what I heard and saw during the meeting and I feel that what I wrote was a fairly balanced report on the meeting.

Having said that, given that my role as the local democracy reporter is required to hold Cumberland Council and other publicly funded organisations to account, then writing “disrespectful articles” is literally in the job description.