Cambridgeshire’s notorious Mayor, James Palmer, is to employ two extra spin doctors at taxpayers’ expense.

The plans were approved by his Conservative colleagues on the Combined Authority Board.

Each spin doctor will be paid £39,000 a year funded from the Mayor’s inflated budget. He promised his Combined Authority would cost £850,000 a year to run but now it’s a staggering £5.6 million.

This is hardly the first time the Mayor has used public money in a questionable way:

• Mayor Palmer has given well-paid publicly-funded jobs (one of over £100,000 a year) to two East Cambs Conservative colleagues
• The Mayor’s Charity Ball wasn’t for a charity but for an organisation based at a local Conservative Party headquarters
• The Mayor has lost four chief finance officers in two years Mayor Palmer is now becoming a frequent feature in Private Eye’s Rotten Boroughs column.

But it’s not just the Mayor himself. His Conservative friends and colleagues running the district and county councils:

• Overspent by £13 million on the Ely bypass, saying they didn’t realise how boggy the land was
• Overspent by £400,000 on the Ely Leisure Centre that has disappointed so many people
• Introduced charging for library computers that reduced computer use and ended up costing taxpayers money
• Claimed there was strong local support for 500 new homes at Kennett when the opposite is the case
• Prepared a Local Plan at a cost of over £300,000 then withdrew it, putting our villages under threat

But it doesn’t have to be like this

Things are different in South Cambridgeshire now, just one year after the Lib Dems took control of the council from the Conservatives

• Lib Dem South Cambs is building 70 new council homes every year, so that more local people can afford to live in the area where they work
   
• Lib Dem South Cambs will be carbon-neutral by 2050
   
• Lib Dem South Cambs is protecting villages from inappropriate developments
   
• Lib Dem South Cambs is making sure new homes are built in the right places so that extra traffic is minimised
   
• Lib Dem South Cambs will give special protection to valuable natural sites so that they can’t be built on by developers
   
• Lib Dem South Cambs has saved a local bus service from the chop