PCC 2012: Melvyn Barrett Quits Commissioner Race

Mr. Mervyn Barrett OBE has withdrawn from the contest to become Lincolnshire's first Police and Crime Commissioner the Lincolnshire Echo is tonight reporting.  Mr. Barrett's decision followed a campaign which had fallen to pieces in recent days after a disastrous turn at a hustings event in Boston, the resignation of his entire campaign team on Saturday because of revelations which were subsequently published in The Sunday Telegraph regarding the financing of his campaign by a group likely to lobby for greater privatisation of policing services.

Mr. Barrett confirmed he was pulling out ahead of tonight's and Crime Commissioner hustings at Lincoln Drill Hall, organised by the Lincolnshire Echo.  Mr. Barrett said:

"I will be withdrawing from the election and will be issuing a press statement tomorrow."

The Telegraph's Andrew Gilligan, online, was quick to claim the scalp for the paper:

"Mervyn Barrett, the remarkably well-funded independent candidate to be police and crime commissioner in Lincolnshire, reacted with the standard huffing and puffing to our expose on Sunday about his links with a neo-con US thinktank. Not that he’s actually denied it, or anything else specific that we wrote, of course. And tonight, inevitably, two days after his campaign team resigned, Mervyn has followed them out of the door."

Mr. Barrett, one of the more high profile candidates, worked for the crime reduction charity NACRO for more than three decades and was granted an OBE in 1999 for services to crime reduction.