Ferbrache has weird, paranoid obsession with me – St Pier

The States agreed ­– but only by a single vote – to note a report from an investigation panel which had recently cleared Deputy St Pier of abusing parliamentary privilege when he criticised safeguarding services and named Dr Sandie Bohin in a speech in the Assembly last year.

Earlier in the debate, Deputy Ferbrache claimed that Deputy St Pier had damaged health services in the island while pursuing a personal grudge against Dr Bohin and made a series of serious allegations about Deputy St Pier’s behaviour.

‘This is chaff that has been thrown up by, in particular, Deputy Ferbrache, apparently unable to act in any role other than as a contentious litigator,’ said Deputy St Pier.

‘He made some outrageous, unsupported allegations to throw mud in the hope that some sticks and to suck the Assembly down into the weeds of who said what back when.’

Deputy Ferbrache sat on the investigation panel and was in a minority of its members who believed Deputy St Pier had abused his privilege to speak in the States while immune from prosecution.

‘He doesn’t like being a loser. So he has attempted, disgracefully in my view, to re-litigate the panel’s findings on the floor of this Assembly. It’s a witch hunt and a kangaroo court where members have shown their bias without any evidence before them,’ said Deputy St Pier.

Deputies Ferbrache and St Pier have frequently clashed in recent years. Deputy St Pier told the States that Deputy Ferbrache had a ‘weird, paranoid obsession’ with him.

‘My advice would be knuckle down and do your job, instead of writing a trilogy of ramblings in the Guernsey Press that mentioned me in every other sentence and trying to impress a few sycophants with a 31-page minority report.

‘It is these character traits that make him such an unsuitable but more importantly totally ineffectual leader, leaving him as a captive of his committee, the committee for inaction this term that has delivered nothing it promised at its outset.’

Deputy St Pier said he had made his controversial speech of last year out of a duty to families let down by clinical and safeguarding services and because of a lack of progress on changes recommended by an independent review.

He started his speech yesterday with an apology to those families.

‘It is they and their experiences who have been almost entirely absent from this debate and I will bring it back to that,’ he said.

He concluded his speech with a series of requests to Health & Social Care, including calling for more independent oversight, regulation and inspection of healthcare in the Bailiwick.