Out Of The Frying Pan…

He arrived with the determination to 'clean up this town' and earned a tough reputation for his pursuit of parking offenders.

But the heavy-handed manner of traffic warden John Woodgate has not gone down well with the residents of Sudbury in Suffolk.

So much so that they set up a website as a forum to vent their fury about the man nicknamed 'The Terminator'.

Actually, they didn’t - they set up a Facebook account, not a ‘website’.

Soon, nearly 1,000 motorists had signed up to the page on Facebook, making comments such as 'you jobsworth ****', 'get cancer' and 'the man is just a bully in a uniform'.

He obviously felt that his role as traffic warden wasn’t giving him enough opportunity to strut around ordering the people who pay his salary about, so he become a PCSO!

Needless to say, along came his employers to make things worse for themselves:

But Suffolk police have demanded it be shut down because it contained 'hateful, threatening or obscene material'.

Another inaccuracy – they merely requested that some of the comments be removed (still not something for them to get involved in, in my opinion); it was Facebook themselves that took the option to remove the page.

John McMillan, president of the town's Chamber of Commerce, said: 'The problem is that he is so bloody rude and offensive and is just not prepared to be flexible.'

Dock Roper, 63, said: 'The man is a real menace. He needs to be removed from office - he shows no humanity and I am not surprised that so many people don't like him.'

Suffolk Police may wish they hadn’t taken this action – they’ve removed a harmless way for motorists to vent, linked themselves with the bullying, petty dictatorship of this man, AND bought themselves far more publicity for the motorists’ cause than if they’d left well enough alone.

It’s almost as if they wanted to wind up the public, isn’t it…?