THERE was a great deal of face-saving to be done at the city council’s finance and governance committee on Monday.

Having upset everyone with their bright idea of moving our information centre into the soon-to-be-demolished Shopmobility dugout just as Novichok Mark II was wreaking economic destruction, and facing the wrath of a packed Guildhall, Salisbury’s Tory rulers were floundering.

Was there a U-turn? Who knows?

There was certainly a baptism of fire for newly elected chairman Simon Jackson, relentlessly heckled because the audience couldn’t hear him.

If the council’s got £35,000 to spare, why not spend it on making meetings audible to the taxpayers who fund its existence?

I did feel sorry for him, because the Guildhall acoustics are notorious.

But sympathy evaporated when his party appeared to simply gloss over the 4,800-strong protest petition online, and the 1,000-plus signatures collected around the city.

Public opinion? Pah! The next election’s years away!

Matthew Dean, the council leader, was helpfully advised by Labour’s Tom Corbin that he’d “dug himself a hole” but could still dig his way out.

Which he tried to do, making all the right noises about valuing the opinions of the various very politely angry and knowledgeable people who’d stood up to explain why it would be sensible to leave the TIC alone.

The plan had not been “clearly communicated” in the Journal, he insisted.

 Rest assured, there would still be a full tourist information service from the Guildhall - though via the front entrance, instead of the back.

Oh really, said one woman who hires the place regularly for functions.

So foreign tourists will be meandering in alongside wedding guests, asking for directions to the public toilets?

And all those local attraction leaflets littering the foyer will work so well with the floral arrangements!

There was a definite reluctance to say what would become of the present TIC.

Cllr Dean claimed he wasn’t sure. It could become council offices, or a café, or a shop?

Well, of course you shut something that works perfectly well when you don’t know what you want to do with it next. Good business sense, innit?

Ah but, we were then informed, the council was suffering from an excess of managers, and the whole ‘Community Hub’ combination thing really came about because it would create an opportunity to make savings, aka redundancies.

How nice for those affected to have their future prospects bandied about so publicly. How sensitive!

I suspect the Tories’ whole response was cobbled together on the proverbial fag packet because The People Have Spoken and can see quite clearly the value of a centrally-located award-winning tourist service to a city with a tourism-based economy.  Who couldn’t?

Step forward councillor Kevin Daley, fed up with a woman who quite reasonably insisted on knowing whether the committee was simply voting through funding to refurbish Shopmobility or whether the TIC move was inextricably tied in with it.

It wasn’t clear to me, either, by this point.

“We all know what it’s about!” he roared at her. “Get off!”

What a gent!

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