27/03/2017 Look East

Growing calls for the Clacton MP to call a by-election

after he leaves Ukip and goes independent.

He was elected as a Ukip MP, and he's no longer Ukip.

Therefore he should go back to the people and see

Andrew McVicar - a convicted murderer on the run,

The police warn people not to approach him.

I'm in Southend with one of the country's

longest serving managers, celebrating his fourth anniversary.

And I'm here in Bedfordshire where five family portraits are returning

First tonight, growing calls for another by-election in Clacton,

after the local MP once again decided to leave the party

Douglas Carswell announced his decision over the weekend -

he resigned from Ukip and will now sit as an independent.

Back in 2014 he left the Conservatives for Ukip -

This time he doesn't think that's necessary,

but members of his old party disagree.

Here's our political correspondent Andrew Sinclair.

This is a critical time for a party which has in the past commanded

Four years ago its tally of county councillors dramatically went

from two to 33 across Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex.

In the European elections it polled 34.5%

of the vote in the east - higher than anywhere

In the last general election its share of the vote

But over the last few months the party's been arguing

about what its role should be now that we're leaving the EU -

to lose its only MP does nothing to help.

When Douglas Carswell left the Conservatives in 2014 he thought it

right to call a by-election. So now that he is moving again should there

be another one in Clacton? No, as he is not standing for another party I

don't see why. Your personal people voted for you as a Ukip member, you

got to have a by-election. He's not going to back us so I think we

should maybe have someone else. He is a traitor. That is what many in

the local party think so that is why the clamour for a by-election has

grown. Today it was taken up by the big guns. We put considerable

resources into getting him elected to you is ago. It was the Ukip

tickets that got him in. He has decided he doesn't want to be Ukip

any more and he should put himself in front of his constituents or

bosses as he calls them to CFE has done the right thing. We will write

to every house in Clacton and see if they want a by-election and if more

than 20% do we will just find out how honourable Mr Carswell is. By

law he doesn't have to call a by-election. He argues this time

things are different. He is not taking on another party's believes

he's just going to be himself and sit as an independent. I'm not

saying I'm going to submit myself to the whip of a new party. If I was to

make that transition them quite rightly I would need the permission

of the electorate. But I'm saying I don't have a whip or rather I have

70,000 whips. They are the local people of Clacton. But all this is a

gift to the other parties on the day that campaigning for the local

elections began. Hopefully now this will spark the people of Clacton to

wake up and realise that Ukip are dead in the water. Ukip have never

really been a serious political party, they've always been a protest

movement. Now they have no members of Parliament I think that

underlines the point. They are subdividing and subdividing and who

knows? It might get some cohesion somewhere. The problem to Ukip is

that it isn't just happening in Clacton. Last week its leader on

Norfolk County Council resigned. Its leader in Suffolk went a few months

ago. Most of the county council is in Essex are not planning to stand

again. Ukip has often surprised at elections and may do so again but

this has been a weekend it will want to forget.

Patrick O'Flynn is one of the Ukip MEPs for this region,

and is also Chief Policy Adviser for the party.

Earlier this afternoon I asked him if he thinks

I think that's very much to be led by the people, the electors of

If there's an overwhelming demand then I would

have thought Douglas, a keen democrat, would listen to that.

What do you think it says about the state of

Ukip at the moment that he feels it necessary to leave?

I don't really think it's about the state of Ukip.

I think, with Douglas, he very much came to Ukip

He feels, yes, we won the referendum, and he sees the

triggering imminently of Article 50 as the moment of victory.

I'm rather less trusting than he is of

Theresa May, you know, and the Conservative Party.

Yes, formally, they've adopted the Brexit position,

but I think we do need a party such as Ukip to be the guard-dog

of Brexit and to hold them to account.

The state of Ukip is fine at the moment, is it?

Even though we're having trouble on Norfolk

County Council, Suffolk County Council and Essex County Council?

Well, look, I think no one can doubt that we've got a round of County

elections coming up which will be the most difficult local elections

that Ukip faces between now and 2020 and the general election,

and I would expect were we to break even that would be a fantastic

result, but we are braced for some degree of net losses.

When I was speaking to Douglas Carswell, he appeared to

sound as if he was going to rejoin the Conservative Party.

I mean, we'll see when the election comes.

It would be a very interesting 3-way fight in Clacton

between independent Douglas Carswell, Conservative and Ukip,

So I don't know whether that will be the case or whether it

be Douglas Carswell - Conservative candidate.

I mean, I'm clearly not in control of that.

Do you think that he was prepared to call a by-election when he joined

Ukip because he thought he could win, and now he is not

prepared to have a by-election because he thinks he would lose?

I thank him for the contribution he made to the run up

to the referendum and the course of the referendum.

I really can't speculate about motives.

Do you think he would lose if there was a by-election now?

I think Douglas Carswell has a very strong political brand in Clacton.

I think if there was a by-election now

and he was standing as an independent and Ukip were standing

and Conservatives were standing it would be interesting and lively,

and you'll excuse me from having put a lot of effort into the

Stoke-on-Trent Central by-election recently,

if I don't regard such a prospect with unalloyed enthusiasm.

It would be hard work and it would be a close 3-way race.

Patrick O'Flynn, thank you very much.

A man is on the run tonight - wanted in connection

Detectives say they urgently need to speak to Andrew McVicar

after a botched robbery at Hullbridge near Southend

Police describe him as dangerous, and have confirmed he served time

for killing another man in Dunstable when he was 15 years old.

This is the drive in Hull bridge. Eight days ago there was a robbery

here. One of the victims was injured and died two days later. Andrew

MacVicar is thought to have been involved. At the moment he is

certainly Essex Police's most wanted. They want you to take a very

good look at the picture you are about to see, and if you spot him

police want you to let them know. But whatever you do, don't approach

him. Police say he is dangerous and could be armed. He is 33 now but

when he was just 15 he attacked a stranger with a broken bottle. His

victim led to death. He is on the run after a robbery in Essex. Police

want the public to help find him. We be very grateful if they could look

at his picture, keep their eyes open for him, if they see him please call

999, do not approach him. We will catch up with him and I would say to

him, if you are watching this, hand yourself in. The robbery happened on

March 19. A group of friends were confronted by a gang wearing

balaclavas. A 57-year-old was pushed over, hit his head on a low wall and

died two days later. The man has family connections in Luton and

police say he was seen there at the weekend.

Let's give you a fuller description. Five foot nine. He has Scottish

accent. He has tattooed on his forearms Reading honour and pride.

He is stocky, it looks like he is into body-building. If you have seen

him call police on 101 or Crimestoppers on oh 800 555 111. And

police urge him if he is watching this, to hand himself in.

An inquest has heard how a patient with schizophrenia ran out

of medication while in the care of a local mental health trust.

42-year-old Neil Jewell from Norwich

died from a heart attack at a psychiatric intensive care unit

It's been revealed that the East Anglian Air Ambulance Which is based

in Norwich and often has Prince William as the pilot

came within half a second of a mid-air crash with a drone.

This is the East Anglian air ambulance.

A few months ago it faced its first near miss with a drone.

On board were two pilots and three paramedics.

Prince William, who's been a pilot for the charity for

All our staff are really important to us.

We've got some incredibly highly trained pilots.

We've got some of the best doctors and

paramedics that you can find anywhere.

But if there were an incident where a drone hit one of

our aircraft, it could cause serious damage and it could cause

potentially loss of life and of course

The near miss happened at 1900 feet over the skies of London.

It had just airlifted an injured boy from Basildon to hospital.

The drone was half a second from impact.

It was so close that the paramedic sitting in the seat could see it out

It had four blades, it was dark in colour and it had two lights,

and it was too small to be picked up by radar but large enough

The pilot assessed the risk of collision as high.

You're looking at a drone that probably weighs five or six kilos.

If that did hit the front of the aircraft there

is a good chance it would go through the Perspex.

That sort of weight coming at you at 120,

130 knots, which is 150 miles an hour, in a worst case it would

actually seriously injure or possibly kill somebody on the front

This drone footage was filmed by a professional operator.

He says a lot of the regulations are just common sense.

It's busy airspace, it was near a heliport,

so they really shouldn't be flying near there at that height.

They should be further than 50 metres from people and property

The operator of the drone which nearly

crashed into the air ambulance has never been caught.

The Civil Aviation Authority says anyone

flouting the rules could face up to five years in prison.

Jules with the weather for the week ahead.

And from the margins to the mainstream -

the classical music venue celebrating graffiti on the streets.

Imagine being told your son has a disease that affects only five

people in the world, then being told there

is nothing more doctors can do to save his life.

That's what happened to one family from Norfolk.

Callie Blackwell has now written a book about their ordeal,

and admitted she even turned to cannabis oil to try

Amazingly, Deryn - who's now 17 - is now well.

In a minute, we'll speak to him and Callie, after this

This was Deryn in 2013. Diagnosed with leukaemia and a rare cell

cancer. Admitted to an end of life hospice, even planned his own

funeral. We were going to get the ashes and put some of it in a

firework, some of it in a Canon, and the rest would be chucked off a

mountain in Greece. After chemotherapy and bone marrow

transplants he was given days to live. His mother turned to something

in secret, cannabis oil to ease his pain. But something happened. His

condition improved and his sores healed. One professor thinks more

research is needed. Our own research suggests you can get the opposite

effects if you are not careful. So self-medication is quite risky and I

don't advocate it. Cannabis is a class B drug. Possession can mean

five years in prison. The Conservative Government argues it

damages mental and physical health. At 28 states in America have

legalised it for medical use, and in Europe so have Germany, Italy, the

Netherlands and Spain. It is an ingredient in a medicine for MS,

made by a pharmaceutical company in Cambridge. There have been instances

of scammers selling people fake preparations that don't contain any

active ingredients whatsoever. Sometimes it doesn't even show up or

even worse you could be buying something containing something

harmful could poison you. Now Deryn has recovered his mother has written

a book. She has chosen to be open, as she wants answers.

I'm thrilled to say that Deryn is here, looking very well. How are

you? I'm very well. It's an incredible position to be and now

after all you have been through, to see Deryn like this. Can you believe

it? Sometimes. It feels incredibly surreal, if I'm honest. We had 70

times over the years where we were promised he was getting better and

then he would deteriorate further than we could believe he would. It

was a roller-coaster ride. I'm starting to believe this actually

could be for some time now rather than could go wrong at any moment.

But the threat of cancer returning is still at the back of my mind. But

for the time being he is as well as I have seen him for a very long

time. Fantastic. And you've talked about this decision to give him

cannabis oil, which I know was an agonising one for you. What were you

so worried about yourself? Obviously, the implications, I knew

I was looking at five years, he was looking at five years for taking it

and me a longer one forgiving it to him. I was terrified that social

services would get involved. I have younger son as well so I was worried

they would turn up and take him away from me. So not only was I scared of

losing my son to the failed transplants and all of these

infections, I was afraid I would lose all my children to the

authorities. But at the stage he took it it was palliative at that

point. You thought he was dying. Everybody thought he was. You don't

go to a hospice for a holiday. The consensus was he was dying. I had

filled in all the do not resuscitate forms. Every ounce of care other

than palliative had been taken away. We were waiting for him to die. The

doctors said it was a case of wait and see. And now we have to make the

point that none of it is proven, but you want to start a debate.

Absolutely. A debate and research into this will stop it had an effect

on him and it could have an effect on others. That is all I want to

see. This needs to come out, talks and discussions need to be had, and

we need to be serious about this. Meanwhile, Deryn, you want to be a

very good chef. Yes, I do. It's ironic, really. But yes. And you are

looking to the future with great optimism. It's wonderful to have you

both here. Thank you both for telling us your story. Come in and

do some food for us! In football, manager Phil Brown

celebrated four years in charge of Southend United by beating

Wimbledon on Saturday. He described it as the perfect

anniversary present .. Which keeps them in

the play-off positions. He's now one of the country's

longest serving managers ... And he has Southend aiming for

a second promotion in three seasons. Tom Williams went to

see him at training. He's been in football 40 years,

the last four spent very Phill Brown's as passionate,

as energetic as ever, and once again his team's fighting

for promotion, which looked a long Having started the season

so poorly, and I mean that, it's been

probably the biggest challenge of my career

to turn it round, you know, when you're

in a relegation zone, you're in a Never at any one stage did he say

I was close to losing my job. And for a manager to stand

here and say that the chairman would support me that much

is a rarity in today's game. Brown's also managed Derby

and Preston but he made his name at Hull, guiding them to

the Premier League and keeping them Some saw him as a gamble,

he's proved to be an inspired Has the club made the progress you'd

have hoped for during If we got promotion twice

in four-year is and also play-offs on three occasions

and that's a recipe for success. There's something

happening, then I've been building a football club or trying

to build a football club with foundations and infrastructure in

the background, aided and abetted, more importantly, by a chairman

who's thinking the same way. He marked his fourth

anniversary with victory at Wimbledon -

Southend's third in a row. They're in the play-offs

with seven to play. He obviously feels very enthusiastic

about his team spirit, and he wants And that's one thing that we've

definitely got in abundance here. He is determined to get back up

into the high league is himself and, as a team and as individuals,

we need to go with that and we're We want to make sure that we get

this club back into the championship where we feel

as though it could be. The commercial deals come,

the better cars come, the better lifestyle comes,

more money, etc, etc. Of course it's an exciting time

but there is still, as I say, a lot Right now all the hard

work's paying off. He'll do his best to get

them up - his players Two reports now on two very

different art exhibitions. Graffiti at a venue in Suffolk

more usually associated with classical music,

and 300-year-old portraiture It's a new exhibition looking

at some of the most influential But we start with Wrest Park

near Bedford, where five portraits have returned home more than a 100

years after they were sold. Moving is always stressful,

but ensuring the safe arrival of 300-year-old works of

art is an expert job. This company delivers fine art

around the country - hanging, The imposing gaze belongs to Henry,

first Duke of Kent, who inherited It was his vision

to lay out the formal gardens and carry out all sorts

of interesting features, woodland walks, waterways and canals,

and the wonderful baroque pavilion So this is him commemorating

the work that he had done to create the garden

and landscape that we see today. The canvases have hidden clues

to celebrate his horticultural work. The obelisk behind him, a statue

revealed next to his small son, his daughter delicately tending

a citrus tree. The house where Henry first Duke

of Kent made all those The stunning mock

French chateaux behind me was actually built

much later, in 1839. But Henry's gardens survived

and were added to throughout The portraits returned

to the library where they used Sold to a private collection 100

years ago, they were inherited by former University Challenge host

Bamber Gascoigne and brought back by 150 hours spent on cleaning

this painting alone. He had an incredibly dirty dark

varnish - very, very brown. In fact, so brown that

you couldn't actually see his blue robe,

and we were able to remove those natural resin

varnish layers and then we revealed these amazing bright colours again,

and now he's back on the wall For the first time in

a century the public will be able to visit these

wonderful paintings. 40 years ago it would have been

dismissed as vandalism. Now, thanks to people

like Banksy, most people now An exhibition celebrating some

the most influential artists of the past 40 years

has opened in Suffolk. Snape Maltings, world-renowned

for its music, its sculptures to. Snape Maltings, world-renowned

for its music, its sculptures too. It's also now a place where another

marginalised art form is being In the 1980s Errol Donald

was spray-painting walls in There was a sense that

what we were doing was purely negative and there was no sort

of positive connotations around Yes, there was an element

of criminality around it, because it was just totally foreign

to the British public. a public space was not

as familiar as it is now. But 34 years later, 35 years

later, it's a global From the margins to

the mainstream, the exhibition celebrates some of the most

influential graffiti artists of the It's a wonderful celebration

of the skills of artists that are continuing techniques

and traditions that have been handed down the generations,

and it's wonderful to explore these works

and For example, this work

here by the artist known as Shoe, who is celebrating the illuminated

manuscripts of a thousand years ago, but bringing it bang up-to-date

into a contemporary work of art. The exhibition, entitled

Masters Of Invention runs And if you thought graffiti

is something new, think again. This spray-painted

hand was created in a cave in Borneo, nearly

40,000 years ago. Now we had a beautiful weekend of

weather, didn't we? Is it going to carry on? It was a pretty bad start

the morning but as it went on we started to see the sunshine getting

to burning a lot of the cloud a wave. Things brightened up for most

of us. For most of us because a big difference between temperatures.

Over the last few hours a lot of the remaining characters cleared. But a

lot overnight night we will see a lot of it coming back and probably

some mist or fog reforming in places. Under clear skies it is

going to be a very chilly one. We are looking at close of maybe two or

three Celsius and with light winds that is low enough for frost in

places. Tomorrow this little feature is moving towards us. We start with

mist and fog in places but unlike today it should clear more readily

and then we should have a dry morning with some spells of

sunshine. By the afternoon wide we are expecting some showers. These

could be anywhere and they could be heavy and thundery as well.

Temperatures with highs of 18, but in the best of the sunshine we could

perhaps get to 20. That's well above the average ten or 11 we should be

seeing at this time of year. We'll finish the day with a scattering of

showers. That is Tuesday. On Wednesday the tail end of this front

gives us a cloudy start with maybe some patchy rain. But on the whole

it looks like a dry day but not quite as warm. Temperatures still

above average and it looks like the rate should stay away. Towards the

end of the week the weather influenced by this weather system

has some uncertainty but a cold front should pass through during

Friday. Thursday should be fine and dry with some spells sunshine most,

and again we could have temperatures possibly higher than these, up to

about 20. But as the cold front moves through Friday it will likely

introduce wet weather, but that should clear into the North Sea and

we should see brighter conditions behind it with some showers. That

sets us up for next weekend. Saturday with a good scattering of

showers, some possibly heavy or thundery. Sunday looking largely

fine and dry. That's pretty good isn't it. We'll

see you tomorrow night. Good night.