I feel duty bound to defend Torquay. Its charms are misunderstood and I have links. I once even worked in the English Riviera centre – the essence of the bay distilled into a municipal sports complex. But defending Torquay is getting tough. First there was Torquay-born Georgia “Toff” Toffolo, the Made in Chelsea alumna. Her less objectionable utterances include the assertion that Jacob Rees-Mogg is a sex god.
Now we have the “millionaire businessman” (a description that still carries peculiar cachet in Torquay) Ashley Sims. He’s taken it upon himself to weed out the town’s “fake homeless”. His style is to photograph rough sleepers and beggars in the town, threatening to expose those he deems “fake” on social media unless they leave. While he sees his service as invaluable, the local police do not. “The dangerous practice of ‘outing’ people as professional criminals, based on often unverifiable information, fails to acknowledge the very complex vulnerabilities and chaotic lives of those concerned,” said Torbay police.
A local newspaper columnist who accompanied Sims on one of his sorties said the vigilante reminded him of the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Still, Sims elected to give his regional campaign a nationwide airing last week, appearing on This Morning. In Devon he went down like a tonne of penguin guano. While he was pontificating on Holly and Phil’s sofa, Torbay stared down an impending red weather warning and the area’s dedicated rough-sleeper charities scrambled to try to protect the community’s most vulnerable, the very ones that Sims likes to photograph.
• Lucy Siegle is a journalist who writes about ethical living
