Stephen Horgan

March

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2 comments

Extremely sad news from Basildon , where the Deputy Leader of the Council, Stephen Horgan, has died of cancer,aged 47.

As the BBC have reported:

The deputy leader of Basildon Council has died at the age of 47, following a long battle with cancer.
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Stephen Horgan was a Conservative councillor for Billericay for 13 years and the deputy leader since 2009.
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The council said he died on Tuesday, leaving his wife Piera and children Eleanor, 12, and John, 10.

Stephen Horgan had his own blog, which we have included in our Blogroll for a long time now. When he wrote, he generally wrote at length and with precision. In one of his last posts, only last month, he took the opportunity to praise other politicians that he knew:

Congratulations Angela
It occurs to me that I missed a huge story in my blogging for which I apologise. We have a Baroness Basildon in the form of our former MP Angela Smith, and I cannot think of a more deserving individual. That may surprise many, given we sit firmly on the opposite sides in politics, but only a fool would not recognise Angela’s enormous talents and sheer commitment to the ordinary people in our community. People may rail against the House of Lords, but it works well to capture and retain such people in Britain’s public life. The work of that chamber is often very impressive, if inconvenient for the government of the day. Angela keeping a role in public service is case to point as well as a quiet satisfaction to many in Basildon.
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In fact Basildon has always been fortunate in our MPs. We now have the endlessly hardworking Stephen Metcalfe in Basildon proper. In Billericay we have John Baron, decent, intelligent and really holding the government to account on serious foreign policy matters of the day. For Wickford we have Mark Francois, brought up in Basildon and an astonishingly talented man. God knows where our community would be without such representing us at Westminster.

Poignantly (and surely bravely) he described himself as follows:

….. If you don?t know Essex, or England for that matter, Basildon is a semi-rural area encompassing three towns and with a population of around 170000. The Council is Conservative-controlled and I am currently the Deputy Leader of the Council. We have numerous challenges, but I won?t bore you with those. For those that are interested, I am married with two children and four dogs. Oh, and I survived cancer, at least so far.

Our thoughts are with his family tonight.

About the author, admin

  • Many long serving councillors, whether at Parish/Town, District/Borough or County levels, sadly experience the demise of colleagues on a far too frequent basis. In most cases that is perhaps rather to be expected in the natural order of life, given that many of those colleagues may already be well past retirement age, have at least seen their children reach maturity, and themselves have had very full and fulfilling lives and careers. Thus it is indescribably tragic to learn of the death of one so relatively young, able and full of even greater potential, leaving a young family.
    RIP Stephen.

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