On 18 August, the Local Democracy Reporting Service revealed that Hillingdon Council’s Deputy Leader, Cllr Richard Mills, had spent months posting on Facebook under the name “DelightfulYuzu2877” – commenting on Council business and the conduct of residents as though he were an ordinary member of the public, while concealing that he was one of the people making the decisions being discussed.
When asked about his anonymous use of Facebook for a MyLondon news report, Cllr Mills said “I have used local community groups as a form of focus group to gauge public opinion on a variety of local issues.”
One of our committee members, Daniel O’Neill, wrote the following while describing his own experiences:
For months, “DelightfulYuzu2877” told me I was gutless. It told me residents’ associations are fronts “taken over by an egomaniac with his own political agenda,” and that people like me are “keyboard warriors” who lack the courage to face the electorate.
I always assumed I was being led into an argument with another resident. I now know I was arguing with the Deputy Leader of the Council.
That changes everything about how those comments should be read. This wasn’t one resident disagreeing with another online. It was the second-most senior politician on the Council, anonymously trying to intimidate me. When Cllr Mills called HARA a front “taken over by an egomaniac with his own political agenda,” he was talking about me – claiming I personally control an organisation I don’t. HARA is run by a monthly committee of volunteers from residents’ associations across the borough; I am one member of that committee, not the person in charge of it. That insult was aimed at me directly, and it was also an insult to HARA itself, and to every committee member who contributes to, reads, and approves what HARA publishes before it goes on the website – and, through them, to every resident those associations represent.
It’s also very hard to reconcile with what he’s said in public, under his own name, in the same period. In June, presenting the Council’s Annual Performance Report to Cabinet, Cllr Mills said that by openly reporting successes and challenges, the Council was “reinforcing its accountability” and giving “residents greater confidence.” Cllr Tuckwell’s foreword to that same report said performance reporting “allows our residents to hold us to account.”
A month later, in the Chamber, Cllr Mills told Full Council that residents “shouting online” – people using the Council’s own petition scheme, which HARA had done, properly and in advance of the vote – lacked “the courage to put themselves forward and face the electorate.” He said that about us while he himself was, at that exact time, anonymously doing precisely what he accused us of: shouting online, without his name attached, about the very same issues.
You cannot tell residents in June that scrutiny builds confidence, and then in July call the people providing that scrutiny cowards, while doing so from behind a cartoon lemon. Those two positions cannot both be honestly held by the same person at the same time. One of them was for show.
Calling it a “focus group” doesn’t survive contact with what the account actually did. A focus group starts a conversation and listens. Cllr Mills didn’t start a single one of these threads. He turned up, lemon mask on, in conversations other residents had already started, and set about giving them a virtual bloody nose – belittling them, questioning their courage, mocking their organisations. That isn’t someone trying to stimulate discussion. It’s someone trying to end it. You don’t ask an open question and then call the person who answers a keyboard warrior. You do that to shut them up. That’s not research. It’s cover.
The Members’ Code of Conduct requires councillors to be “as open as possible” about their decisions and actions, and to “promote and support high standards of conduct… by leadership and example.” Those aren’t obscure clauses – they’re the basic obligations that come with being a councillor at all: openness, integrity, honesty, leadership. Cllr Mills has fallen short of every single one of them, not by accident but by design, for months, while telling residents in public that transparency was exactly what his administration stood for.
I don’t think this is really about me, or even really about Facebook. I think it’s about whether residents can trust what this administration says about transparency and accountability – not what it says in a Cabinet report, but what it actually does when residents try to hold it to something. Gutting financial scrutiny in May. Raising petition thresholds in July with no evidence to justify the numbers, as our FOI request proved. And, throughout, a senior member of that administration anonymously mocking the people asking the questions.
Residents deserve a Deputy Leader who holds himself to the same standard of openness he demands of everyone else – in the Chamber, in Cabinet reports, and everywhere else, including Facebook.
Cllr Richard Mills describes the Hillingdon Alliance of Residents’ Associations as being controlled by an egomaniac who doesn’t have enough balls. While he posted as a lemon.
Commenting on his own decisions, anonymously
Beyond the exchanges Daniel describes above, the account weighed in repeatedly on matters Cllr Mills himself had a hand in deciding – always as an apparently disinterested resident, never disclosing that he sat in Cabinet.
On the closure of a West Drayton waste and recycling site, the account wrote that residents there had little cause for complaint, since “West Drayton chose a mix of opposition representatives on the council so probably part of what happens when picking the losing side.” West Drayton did not elect Conservative councillors in May. Read plainly, this is the Deputy Leader suggesting a ward’s council services were worse because of how it voted. It is not the kind of remark a sunglasses-wearing lemon would need to hide behind – unless, of course, that lemon had spent months accusing residents of “shouting online” and telling those who hadn’t stood for election that they were cowards for it, all while shouting online himself, anonymously, about the very same issues.
Deputy Leader of Hillingdon Council tells West Drayton that they backed the losing side in the election, and that might be why they lose their dump
The account also claimed, in the same thread, that a replacement facility was opening “in south of the Borough” – untrue; another resident pointed out at the time that the site in question is in Hounslow, some distance away. In a separate thread about HMOs in West Drayton, the account presented itself as a disillusioned Reform voter: “i voted for reform and was told that they won here and Yiewsley and Heathrow so why don’t they stop this hmo.”
Cllr Richard Mills, in his lemon alias, claims to have voted for Reform UK
Cllr Mills does not live in West Drayton, Yiewsley or Heathrow. He could not have voted in any of those wards. The claim was simply untrue. Did he mean it when he confessed, as a Conservative councillor, to having voted Reform? Perhaps this was true, or perhaps it was not – either way, it was not something the Deputy Leader of the Council was prepared to say under his own name.
Cllr Richard Mills, Deputy Leader of Hillingdon Council, posing as a lemon who wilfully misunderstands the MHCLG Best Value letter
Under a BBC News story on the government’s Best Value notice – a notice concerned with how the Council is governed, not how much money it has – the account wrote: “They need to issue a warning to the Government!!! Fund Hillingdon fairly,” recasting a governance failure as a funding grievance. It did so as a sunglasses-wearing lemon posing as a put-upon resident, not as the Deputy Leader of the Council the notice was actually about, and whose own conduct was the subject of such harsh and thorough criticism within it.
From Yuzu Lemon to Blueberry – Cllr Richard Mills changes fruit
Since being asked about it
Since the LDRS approached him, the account has been renamed from “DelightfulYuzu2877” to “CherishedBlueberry4754,” and its entire history of posts has since been deleted.
It is impossible to reconcile either step with the “focus group” explanation, because that explanation is not true. A legitimate exercise in gauging opinion would not need renaming the moment its existence became public, still less deleting the entire record of it. You don’t destroy your own research data when someone asks to see it.
Cllr Sital Punja, Hillingdon Labour, has called for Cllr Mills’s resignation as Deputy Leader over the conduct, saying “Richard Mills has shown nothing but contempt for the residents he was elected to serve. As Chief Whip and now Deputy Leader of Hillingdon Council, he had a duty to lead by example. Instead, he used a fake online identity to bait, mock and deceive the very people he represents”. Cllr Sophie Dror, Leader of Hillingdon Reform, described it as “deeply concerning.”
Cllr Richard Mill’s chosen online alias
The silence since
Cllr Tuckwell has not said, in public, whether he thinks his Deputy Leader’s conduct was acceptable. The LDRS asked him that question directly. He did not respond. The Hillingdon Conservative Group, separately contacted for comment, also did not respond. Hillingdon Council itself did reply, through a spokesperson, but only to say that “it would be inappropriate for the council to comment” beyond confirming that a complaints process exists.
This will sound familiar to anyone who read our article on the CIPFA report last week. We wrote to the Chief Executive, the Leader, and the Cabinet Member for Finance, giving them the opportunity to respond to MHCLG’s Best Value letter and CIPFA’s findings ahead of publication. A week later, none had replied. Now, weeks later: they still haven’t. The pattern is now the same whether the criticism comes from residents, from government-commissioned auditors, or from the press: the Council’s instinct is not to answer, but to wait it out.
That silence hasn’t happened in a vacuum. On 20 August – two days after the LDRS story broke – Cllr Henry Higgins resigned from his role as Vice Chair of the Audit, Finance and Performance Committee, the single committee now responsible for all of the Council’s financial scrutiny. He remains a Conservative councillor for Northwood, and has not resigned from the party. But he was, in practice, chairing that committee in the absence of a permanent Independent Chair – a recruitment process the Council has still not begun, months after abolishing the wider committee structure that used to do this work.
Cllr Higgins has been the only Conservative councillor willing to publicly acknowledge the severity of the CIPFA report into the Council’s governance, commissioned by government as a condition of its financial bailout. His departure leaves that committee thinner, at exactly the moment its job matters most.
The Council did not announce that resignation. It became public because someone – using an email address that has now sent seven separate messages to a distribution list of around 70 people, including every councillor, Democratic Services, other officers, journalists, and residents’ association representatives – leaked it, along with other information the Council had not yet chosen to release itself. We are not the source of those emails, and do not know who is.
What we do know is that a council whose own personnel changes are reaching councillors and journalists via anonymous leak, faster than via its own communications, is a council that has lost control of its own information – on top of a Deputy Leader who spent months running an anonymous account of his own.
While wearing his sunglasses and logged in as a lemon, Cllr Richard Mills posted that it was “very important to have transparency”
What happens next
We have shown some of the Yuzu/Blueberry account’s activity from the last few months. A number of the exchanges above involved members of our own committee, and residents’ associations we work alongside, being personally targeted by a senior member of the administration whose conduct residents’ associations exist in part to scrutinise.
Formal complaints under the Members’ Code of Conduct are being filed against Cllr Mills. Ordinarily, a complaint of this kind would first be handled informally by the Chief Whip of the Member’s group. In this case, that is not appropriate: Cllr Mills’s Chief Whip is Cllr Douglas Mills, the Ruislip Manor councillor – his father. HARA is filing a formal complaint collectively, with the support of multiple residents’ associations from across the borough. A number of individual residents are also filing complaints of their own.
None of this is happening in isolation. In the same fortnight: a Deputy Leader has been exposed anonymously insulting the people he represents; the Council’s own scrutiny arrangements have lost their acting chair, two days after that exposure; and information about the Council’s own affairs is reaching the public through anonymous leaks rather than official announcements, faster than the administration can explain itself. The government’s own commissioned review, published weeks ago, already found the Council’s governance wanting. Nothing since has suggested that finding was wrong.
Residents deserve a Deputy Leader held to the same standard of openness he has spent months publicly demanding of everyone else. They also deserve a Leader willing to say, in public and under his own name, whether he thinks that standard has been met. So far, on both counts, Hillingdon residents are still waiting.
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