[Ken Moss]

Three hours of my life have now dissolved into the ether, never to return, and the ultimate ignominy is that I had to sit through vote after engineered vote as castrated as a chief eunuch.

The Independent group have 75% lived up to their name but in fairness to 75% of them they could see which way the vote had been skewed and just sat back from proceedings by abstaining.

For those who didn't see Paul Barton dragged from his hospital bed, it was a lamentable display of desperate politics which Cllr Britcliffe rather neatly pushed onto the Labour group. I understand it was Cllr Dobson who went to collect him but last time I checked he wasn't on our membership list....

Despite Cllr Britcliffe being on record as not particularly liking the noise from the room above during council meetings, it was a particular irony that the ballroom strains of 'Chanson D'Amour' drifted through the room as Malcolm Pritchard took his mayoral office

The major news of the day of course was not the re-election of a leader who jury-rigged the whole thing, not even John Broadley being backed into a corner over mayorality, but Peter Britcliffe's mysterious black eye.

As I said in the house, it is an honour to have been elected to serve the people of Rishton but I would urge everyone in the real world to just remember that nothing actually gets done in that exalted chamber at Town Hall, save a six-weekly pantomime where one man tells us how many golden eggs his whipped flock of geese is laying.