Leicester's only Lib Dem councillor cleared

Just when you think Leicester politics cannot get any crazier, along comes a story like this:

A city councillor has been cleared of breaking data protection laws after a seven-month investigation. 

Aylestone councillor Nigel Porter was reported to Leicester City Council's standards board in February, weeks after passing on council spending documents to the Mercury. 

The documents listed all monthly payments over £500 made by the council – something the coalition Government had ordered all councils to do. Despite the papers being marked "for publication", senior officers at the authority flagged up the issue with his Tory group leader, Councillor Ross Grant. 

Coun Porter was suspended by the city's Tory group, and when he later showed the documents to regional party chiefs in an effort to clear his name, he was reported to the council's internal investigation body. 

This week, he was told he had been cleared of breaching council rules.

And quite right too. It all sounds a remarkable waste of officers' time.

The complication is that today Grant and Porter (now, not surprisingly, a Liberal Democrat) are the only opposition councillors in Leicester. The prospects of their working together must be pretty slim.

Labour blogger Vijay Singh Riyait asks if Ross Grant will now be apologising to Nigel Porter. He goes on to say:

I’ve also learnt that the there has been a bit of a mass exodus from the top of the Leicester Tory Party. It remains a local conservative association in turmoil with little purpose and no real strategy and abandoned by its Central Party!