Our Town Hall reporter, KEN LEE, on the latest digital difficulty to trouble council officials
Rory Bremner’s impossible job: who could possibly impersonate Jason Perry?
Jason Perry, Croydon’s £82,000 per year part-time Mayor, today issued an urgent plea to council colleagues to ignore him. Or ignore his emails, anyway.
The Tory Mayor was forced into issuing a message this morning through the council’s intranet system that fessed up to “reports of spam emails impersonating me”.
The idea of Rory Bremner “doing” his version of piss-poor Perry is sure to be mirth-making for residents from Coulsdon to Crystal Palace. And daunting for Bremner…
The “ignore me” plea comes only a week since the publication of the results of the council’s own polling that found that more than 2-in-3 Croydon residents are blissfully unaware of who Mayor Perry is anyway.
Mayor who?: Two years into the job, and piss-poor Perry’s recognition rate is… well, piss-poor
Katharine Street sources relate that this is the second time in less than a year that Perry’s emails have been subject to some kind of issue.
Perry, of course, would not be the first prominent Tory to trip into the darker recesses of the interweb, possibly through no real fault of their own.
Who can forget how Perry’s former council colleague, later Conservative MP for Croydon Central, Gavin Barwell, was ridiculed when links to XXX-rated sex sites appeared on his social media feed when he worked as chief of staff in Downing Street? (If you have forgotten, here’s a perfectly safe link to click on to remind you).
Perry’s latest digital difficulties appear more benign but nonetheless represent the latest worrying tech issue from a council that appears plagued with such problems.
“Dear Colleagues,” said the brief message from the Mayor’s office in Fisher’s Folly.
“Over the past 24 hours, there have been reports of spam emails impersonating me.” Just ponder that thought for a moment…
Damned those deceptive email addresses!: piss-poor Perry’s pleas this morning, inspiring even less confidence in those who have to work with him
“These emails may have reached your inbox…” Oooo! Missus! “… appearing to be from my address; however, they are originating from various bot addresses. None of these emails are legitimate…”, poor bastards, “… and are the result of email spoofing rather than a security breach or hack.
“I would request that you ignore these emails and delete any suspicious emails you may have received from these deceptive email addresses.
“For your safety and the security of our network, please avoid opening any attachments or clicking on any links within these messages.
“We have brought this issue to the attention of our IT team, and they are actively working on finding a solution to prevent further occurrences.”
Which must be hugely reassuring.
Read more: Perry pleads poverty when he has more Council Tax than ever
Read more: ‘Can’t deal with debt’ admits Perry as he borrows £38m more
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
What an embarrassing buffoon
Actually, his score may say something about the effectiveness of Inside Croydon’s unbiased coverage of the Executive Mayor?
Dear John. Do you really feel Mr Perry is Executive and Mayoral?
He is great at running up debt and blaming other’s for his own profligacy
Nice that you feel IC s coverage has jumped and you feel that 29% of the Borough are now reading each missive, not to mention the articles picked up by Private eye and other journals.
Clearly you have more info and data than the click counter.
Wicked – Rock on Johnny!
That would make him notorious John. Perry’s problem (one of many) is his anonymity; the survey shows most people haven’t heard of him.
So they can’t even protect their internal IT system from spammers!
Is there any part of Croydon Council that is working to an acceptable standard?
I think we know the answer to that!
Perhaps a rhetorical question – but I think parking enforcement is above average and going great guns, perhaps a tad let down by the digital balls up with PCNs but hey nothing perfect.
An IT expert must advise anyone to delete all emails originating from someone claiming to be Mare Perry. Since being elected he has been only a parody of a Mayor. So how can they identify anything genuine originating from his email address?