EXCLUSIVE: The Greg Brackenridge Investigation Report [Part 2]

In the latest development of the Greg Brackenridge “Stolen Valour” Cover-Up scandal, the Labour-controlled Wolverhampton City Council (Wolves City Council)’s Ethics subcommittee has decided to accept in full the findings of the independent Kenyon Brabrook report, of which relevant parts have been exclusively published first by The Narrative Shaper on 1 July 2025.

Greg Brackenridge is now officially found guilty of “stolen valour” owing to his false claims of having once been a serving Royal Marine prior to entering politics. In the written decision summary published by the Ethics subcommittee, words were not minced in the scathing assessment of Brackenridge’s behaviour which was equally evasive and truculent both within the report’s description as well as during his attendance of the meeting on 28 July 2025.

Four code of conduct clauses were determined to have been breached: treating other councillors and members of the public with respect, using one’s position improperly to the advantage or disadvantage of oneself or anyone else, bringing the local authority into disrepute, and failure to cooperate with any Code of Conduct investigation and/or determination.

It should however not be mistakenly believed that this latest turn of events signify in any shape or form anything close to a show of public accountability by both Greg Brackenridge who continues resisting growing calls for him to resign as councillor of Wednesfield South, as well as the Wolverhampton local Labour Party (Wolves Labour) which has conveniently hid behind what they claimed was the 2011 Localism Act’s lack of empowerment for local-level governance ethics bodies and councils in general to suspend, remove a Councillor or reduce allowances.

The sum total of Wolves Labour’s punitive sanctions against Greg Brackenridge has simply been to remove him from the Resources and Equality Scrutiny Panel, suspend him on the local party level, and mandate for him to make a future public apology at an as-yet undetermined date. If the precedence that Wolves Labour had set with regards to the releasing of the full Kenyon Brabrook report (that is to say, the breaking of promises made to Jane Haynes at Birmingham Live covered in a 25 June 2025 article) is anything to go by, it is entirely likely that even this flimsiest of sanctions regime meted out against Brackenridge will fail to be enforced.

In fact, two massive problems of scandalous significance have been highlighted by the manner of Greg Brackenridge’s ongoing downfall as Labour councillor. The first problem being of political accountability and transparency, and the second being one of pursuing identity politics at all costs for the purpose of winning votes.

The actions of Wolves Labour as well as Brackenridge himself who is still in public perception a Labour councillor continue to perpetrate the worst of what is now an established pattern of unaccountable, evasive behaviour as well as questionable and inconsistent political strategy that goes all the way up to the top of the incumbent Labour government led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Starmer’s comments following the fall of former Northamptonshire Police Nick Adderley back in June 2024 were explicit in expressing the belief for actual codified sanctions to punish “stolen valour” behaviour.

“Stolen valour is really serious and it really impacts all of us, but it particularly impacts those who have served, and it needs to be taken seriously. There does need to be sanctions. It’s for the force in the first instance to decide what the sanctions are but do I think their should be further sanctions? Yes I do. But first it needs to go to the Police and Crime Commissioner and then the Home Secretary so we’ll see what that process yields. But, yes, I do believe there should be more sanctions.”

As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. The lack of even any public statement of acknowledgement from No. 10 or any high-ranking Labour frontbench minister since the official recognition of the Kenyon Brabrook investigation report’s findings on 28 July, confirming Greg Brackenridge’s own admission of stolen valour which has been a matter of public record since 24 June, thus constitutes a deafening silence entirely in contrast to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s public comments barely a year ago regarding the Nick Adderley “stolen valour” scandal.

Nor is this the only unexplainable contrast in attitude by Labour HQ and senior Labour leadership between the handling of Nick Adderley and Greg Brackenridge’s “stolen valour” scandals. Back in October 2024 when news first broke of Greg Brackenridge being accused of faking his Royal Marines career, the national Labour Party suspended him whilst the local Labour party didn’t. As explained in Part 1 of this series by The Narrative Shaper, suspension on one level does not equate suspension on the other level.

This time round however, it is the local Wolves Labour that have suspended Brackenridge, whilst national Labour HQ has not. Talk about inconsistency akin to flipping Indian paratha flatbread for dough (or in this case, accountability)-stretching purposes!

Nowhere does the slogan of “Democracy Dies In Darkness” from the internationally-renowned Washington Post apply more than the current Labour-controlled Wolverhampton City Council.

For one thing, the Ethics subcommittee convened to action on the Kenyon Brabrook report that Wolves Labour had failed to effectively suppress was made up of all but one non-Labour councillor. Conservative councillor Simon Bennett was the lone non-Labour elected official present at the meeting on 28 July, the latest example of the state of affairs surrounding the investigation of Greg Brackenridge’s “stolen valour” that had previously been described as “taking too long and not transparent in nature” by other non-Labour councillors in Wolves City Council.

For another thing, no effort was spared in keeping the meeting key to deciding Greg Brackenridge’s fate private as much as possible. This went to the ludicrous extent of not only the subcommittee invoking section 100A(4) of the Local Government Act 1972 concerning the “prevention of confidential information disclosed to the public in breach of the obligation of confidence” to bar all public and media attendance of the meeting discussing an issue of public interest, but also the exclusion of Oliver Lee and Richard Woodward who as former Royal Marines with past professional interactions with Greg Brackenridge during their past fire service careers provided key witness statements used within the Kenyon Brabrook investigation report.

Imagine being a key witness in a court case, yet not being invited to the final conviction and sentencing hearing. What manner of respect or accountability does that display from Wolves Council and Wolves Labour over the disrepute brought about by the stolen valour of one of their councillors?

Oliver Lee himself would remark in a LinkedIn post shortly afterwards that he was disappointed at how any censure meted out to Brackenridge was “almost non-existent”. Lee also highlighted how back during his stormy and brief tenure as Chief Fire Officer at West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS) his attempts at highlighting how governance issues have gone very wrong and was damaging the fire service did not go down well with Greg Brackenridge who was then the chairman of the local Fire and Rescue Authority (FRA), a man whom he now described his working relationship with as “being built on a lie told to me from the outset”. Coverage of the fallout suffered by Lee has been done by the Narrative Shaper in Part 2 of the Wayne Brown/WMFS Cover-Up series.

This silence and indeed refusal to even acknowledge or show any contrition goes all the way down to Greg Brackenridge’s wife Sureena, who is currently the Labour MP of Wolverhampton North East after wresting it from the Tories’ Jane Stevenson in the 2024 general election.

Much of the 18% swing in votes that secured Sureena Brackenridge’s electoral victory in July 2024 was not just built on a general national mood overwhelmingly seeking to end 14 years of Tory rule, but also on Sureena’s personal and active portrayal of herself and her husband Greg Brackenridge as “knowing what public service means” owing to her past career in teaching and Greg’s bogus Royal Marines career.

Since 28 July, The Narrative Shaper has received multiple anonymous and personally identifiable anecdotes from some voters residing in Wolverhampton North East as well as the Indian and Sikh community active with various local gurdwaras such as the Wednesfield Gurdwara, Wolverhampton Cannock Road Gurdwara, and Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Smethwick. The common narrative of these anecdotes is that the Brackenridges have constantly highlighted Greg’s bogus Royal Marines service in their community interactions and Sureena’s own doorstepping campaign during the 2024 general election.

According to one individual, Sureena Brackenridge had brought up Greg Brackenridge’s Royal Marines service entirely unprompted during their interaction when she was conducting her doorstepping campaign. And according to multiple individuals who identified themselves as regular active participants in the three main gurdwaras where the Brackenridges had an active presence in, Sureena Brackenridge has stayed studiously silent and refused to even so much as acknowledge or show contrition for what they described as “betrayal” and “a community relationship built on lies about her husband’s past” whilst continuing to show up at the gurdwara and other public engagements.

Some of these individuals have speculated that Sureena Brackenridge’s behaviour, be it personally motivated or acting on damage control orders from Labour HQ, is done so as to portray the narrative of herself being totally ignorant and kept in the dark about her husband’s fake Royal Marines career which both had curried so much political capital with during a time when the national mood was solidly for restoring trust in government ethics.

But as one of these individuals remarked to The Narrative Shaper, “if we not only trusted her lie of her husband being a Royal Marine in the past but also his own lie to us years ago (at the Saragarhi Memorial unveiling) about training with the Gurkhas, why should we trust Sureena now if she tries to claim that she didn’t know the man she has been married to for decades had never been a Royal Marine in the past?”

In any case, it seems that for the time being, the reputationally-destroyed Greg Brackenridge will continue to cling on by his fingertips to his Wednesfield South councillor position with Wolves City Council. The ethics subcommittee is sadly right in claiming that it had no powers to sack Greg Brackenridge as an elected councillor, for he would remain on as an independent councillor even if Labour expelled him as a party member.

That however does not excuse the fact that other local councils have implemented the councillor equivalent of “recall petitions” used to sack elected MPs. One such example can be found in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, which in 2015 introduced what it called the “Councillor Recall Scheme”.

Whilst it does not have statutory basis in national law, this scheme has been a prerequisite for every sitting and subsequent elected councillor at Kingston upon Thames since 2015. It remains to be seen if the Brackenridge “stolen valour” scandal will sting Wolves City Council enough to implement something similar to empower themselves in the manner which they claim to be powerless to act, although with the fallout widening to Sureena Brackenridge who is an elected parliamentary MP, there still remains the damaging prospects of her being subject to a “Recall Petition”.

Such a “Recall Petition” can be triggered by at least 10% of her constituency’s electoral roll voters as long as they sign such a petition within six weeks of any potential future investigation into her complicity with her husband’s “stolen valour” resulting in either parliamentary suspension or criminal conviction with a custodial sentence (suspended or otherwise).