YOU’VE got to hand it to Worcester politician Simon Cronin, who’s been making very loud noises about what’s been bothering him recently.

The Labour councillor has suggested motorists are fed up with traffic lights littering the city, insisting there are too many, and that a load of them should be hurled “into a skip”.

He may have been taking it too far when he suggested to the Worcester News that highways officers at County Hall are on “some kind of a retainer” for putting the blasted things up, but more power to his elbow.

Incidentally Coun Cronin is leading a review of the city centre, and only a few weeks ago said Worcester has too many seagulls, and too many A-boards.

His stance is raising some chuckles at the city council, where the “too many” theme is beginning to get noticed.

As one colleague puts it: “Maybe he’d like to use the traffic lights to smash up the A-boards.”

* THE Source loves nothing more than gossip and rumour, and the latest one is that Trish Haines, the county council’s well-renumerated chief executive, used to be a member of the Labour Party.

During her first spell at County Hall in the 1990s, when she was climbing the greasy ladder as a social services manager before leaving for a director’s post in Warwickshire, rumour has it she was a fully-paid up Labourite.

* IF you live in the Harvington area of Worcestershire and want to contact your local councillor, you may want to use the telephone, judging by what Tory Clive Holt told fellow politicians at County Hall this week.

He said: “I get bombarded with unwanted emails all the time - I shall be writing to one constituent in particular to say he has verbal diarrhoea, I get so many.”

Crikey!

* TO celebrate Bill Longmore’s first year as police and crime commissioner for the region, we asked his press team if he could conduct a telephone interview with us.

But rather than front up himself, his deputy Barrie Sheldon made the phone call to Worcester News towers, while he was at Bill’s house, with the man himself sat in the background.

What’s he scared of?