On Friday I went to see the free entertainment offered by the annual council at the Town Hall.  I was not an invited guest so only stayed for the meeting and not the nibbles afterwards. I didn't expect to be invited of course.  The last two Labour mayors didn't invite me, so why should the new Tory mayor?

In the past this meeting was generally a formality, but with the council being more balanced it has been a lot more controversial in recent years.  A couple of years ago it went on for so long that there is now a provisional date booked for the next week just in case it over-runs. This time it all went fairly smoothly.

The Tories proposed Sally Blake as mayor, which went through unopposed and then Labour proposed Chris Redmayne as deputy mayor which went through unopposed.  I guess the Labour group got over their aversion to having someone do the job.  I was surprised that it was Chris, though I'm not sure who else I would have expected.  Poor bloke has to live with having a blue ribbon instead of a red one for the badge but that does mean he won't have to live with the baked bean stain on the old red ribbon… (not me – it was there when I got it off Jim McGough)

Likewise, the chair of Scrutiny went to Chris Redmayne and the chair of Development Control to Ian Irvine, so the Labour group managed to accept that as well.

Having got such important posts sorted out, the meeting turned into a farce when it came to the nomination for vice chair of the licensing committee. There were two candidates nominated, both of them Labour councillors. One was the previous chair of licensing, Ben Clay, nominated by the Tories, and the other was the previous executive member who had licensing in his portfolio,  Colin Lloyd, nominated by the Labour party.

It came to a vote, which was a recorded vote, and the Tories' nomination won, of course.  In the meantime Colin voted for himself and Ben abstained. The whole thing was as inevitable as it was embarrassing to watch.

I feel sorry for Colin. In such a situation it just feels wrong to vote for yourself, but I imagine this was a group decision and subject to the whip, so he had little choice.  I don't know what the protocol is in this sort of situation. What should Ben Clay have done when his own group nominated someone else? Vote against himself?  I suppose the decent thing would have been to decline the nomination.  That must have been possible. Perhaps going against the party whip at the earliest opportunity is just his way of saying that he will not be going for re-selection next year? At least he abstained rather than voting with the Tories, like he did back in January.

The Tories are not blameless in this. When the Labour group came up with an alternative nomination they could have withdrawn their nomination. Its not as if we came up with someone totally unacceptable with no knowledge of the topic.

But I never have understood what goes on in the licensing committee. I never served on it, but I went along a couple of times and never really liked the way it operates. I have never seen why the committee has to retire to another room to deliberate in private: it goes against all my ideas of transparency.

If anything, I was a bit surprised that vice chairs were being decided at the annual council at all. In recent years the various committees have decided their own vice chairs at their first meeting, and that is what the agenda said as well (recommendation 3 of the membership committee). Obviously the new administration doesn't want to leave anything to chance.

The other point of interest was in the small print, where portfolio responsibilities were tweaked a little bit. Responsibility for traveller issues was moved from community engagement to the deputy leader's portfolio. Bert Crane made a point of asking if that was the case, to make sure nobody missed it. I'm not sure it makes a lot of difference. If you had to pick the worst possible person to be in charge of traveller issues it would be a toss-up between those two portfolio holders.