IT’S been quite a week at Worcester City Council – shocking, sensational, dramatic... the kind of tale worthy of a carefully scripted political TV drama.

Up until late Tuesday night, the authority was controlled by a Tory administration, propped up with Lib Dem blessing.

But amid hushed phone calls, closed-door conversations, pleading text messages and the politics of time, a Labour-led coup managed to wrestle control back for the first time in 13 years, helped by, yes, you guessed it, those Lib Dems who left them so bitter just one year ago.

The end result is a new beginning, a reversal of everything we knew at the Guildhall, and more sub-plots to fill an entire ITV series.

We’ve also seen completely differing views on why the Lib Dems and Tories fell out of love with each other in recent days – with the Conservatives saying their former bedfellows are secret socialists who have returned to their natural home, but the Lib Dems insisting the former leadership was slow in making progress, obstructive on certain issues and could not be trusted to protect services.

We’ve done our best at WN towers to bring you the reasons why the previous ‘deal’ fell apart, but the ultimate reality is that the Lib Dems never felt truly comfortable siding with the Conservatives.

And now, the stark truth is that nobody is quite sure if the new Lab/Lib coup will have any real legs in it either.

Politicians in this country, whether they are MPs or local councillors, are all too used to butchering each other, retreating to entrenched positions and in the end, returning to where they are most comfortable.

We don’t tend to do coalition politics, because deals like this mean compromise, and on the rare occasions they do occur, they very rarely last.

Worcester deserves a stable administration – we can only hope it gets one.

LAST week in this column we mentioned former Labour MP Mike Foster, wondering if he was eyeing up a return to politics.

Lo and behold his influence is still here – even having an unlikely hand in the new city council coup after a chance conversation with Green councillor Neil Laurenson.

The two came face-to-face at Tesco Express in London Road last Saturday, where the Green ’un swallowed his pride and asked Mike to help make his mind up.

The response? “I did advise him that whatever decision he came to, he should stick to it and not back out if the going got tough,” he said.