City to have its youngest ever mayor

Brighton and Hove is to have its youngest ever mayor.

Councillor Alex Phillips, 32, was nominated without opposition to the post at last week’s full council meeting of Brighton and Hove City Council.

If Cllr Phillips holds her seat in the local elections which are also in May 2019 she will become mayor in May 2019, after serving as deputy mayor to Cllr Dee Simson from next May, once the current mayor Mo Marsh has stepped down from the role and her current deputy Cllr Simson assumes the chains of office.

Despite only been 32 and mother to an eight-week old baby, Cllr Phillips is already the second-longest serving Green councillor in the chamber.

Alex Phillips, who represents Regency ward for the Green Party alongside husband Cllr Tom Druitt, said she was honoured and delighted to have been chosen for the role. It is an honour which is usually bestowed on a long-serving councillor on the cusp of retirement.

She said: “Brighton and Hove is an extraordinarily wonderful city and one that I have been proud to serve as a councillor for almost ten years.

“The mayoralty is a special honour and an opportunity to celebrate the place I call home.”

The charity campaign manager and former secondary school languages teacher said she was “very pleased” that a prominent position would be filled by a female Green politician.

Although Cllr Phillips will become the third female mayor in a row, within the Greens both the current and former leader, and both previous city mayors are all men.

The city’s youngest ever deputy-mayor-elect, previously worked for Caroline Lucas in Brussels when the Brighton Pavilion MP was serving as an MEP.

Cllr Phillips has said that she will fundraise for women’s groups and minorities when she becomes mayor.

Each mayor chooses the charities they wish to benefit from official backing. Former Green mayor Pete West broke the record for fundraising by increasing the number of charities from the traditional 3 to more than 25.

Alex Phillips said she would like to do something like Pete West – who raised £100,000 during his term as mayor.

Cllr Phillips says she wants to focus on women, children and minority groups.

She says it won’t be necessarily charities devoted to just that “but for example Brighton Housing Trust has a team which works with women, so the fundraising will be focused towards those kinds of workstreams.”

Alex Phillips became the youngest member of the city council in 2009, when at age 24 she won a seat in Goldsmid ward from the Conservatives in a by-election.

By Clare Calder