TO steal a Carry On joke, the councillors of Wycombe are revolting. I am referring of course to the numbers publicly proclaiming they are jumping ship for various reasons.

This week, it is the turn of Tory ex-mayor Paul Lambourne who dramatically announced he was defecting to the Liberal Democrats because he was unhappy with the leadership of his Conservative group, and was concerned about the behaviour of the current mayor in her public dispute with her predecessor.

Now, Paul (did he copy the movie and give them the LamBOURNE Ultimatum before he quit?) strikes me as a decent chap.

But I reckon he’s made a mistake.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with quitting your party in protest and of crossing the floor. Didn’t Churchill do that a couple of times?

But in my book, there really is no place for this in local government where party politics just seems to get in the way.

Meanwhile, nationally, the Tories and Lib Dems are in coalition so what is the point of all of this palaver?

The public don’t want top-level political debate in their town halls; they merely expect their bins to be emptied on time and services to run efficiently.

I’m not going to take Lambourne to the slaughter for this, but merely point out he would have done better to copy fellow Tory Dennis Green who quit to become an independent recently.

My dream is a council filled purely with independents working solely for the taxpayer.

That may be a vision the political parties find revolting, but it’s a revolt that is long overdue.