The Lord Mayor of Leicester's head is too big for his hat

Ross Grant, Leicester's new Lord Mayor, has found that his head is too big for the Ruritarian hat that goes with the role.

Liberal England gives a meaningful look at camera 2.

Some kind person, the Leicester Mercury reports, has offered to buy him a bigger hat - and well done, incidentally, to the Labour group for allowing the city's only Conservative councillor to take up this role. I wish the Tories who run Harborough were so civilised.

Anyway, this story reminds me of a couple of earlier posts on this blog about the Lord Mayor of Leicester.

The first involves ill-fitting clothing too. Back in 2010, one of the winners of Headline of the Day was the Leicester Mercury's

Lord Mayor's trousers fall down at children's event

Perhaps mercifully, the link to the accompanying news story no longer works.

The second post dates from the following year, when we quoted Westwood and Simpson's The Lore of the Land:

An odd story formerly current was that the mayor of Leicester was chosen by a sow. According to an article in the St James's Magazine in 1762, aspiring candidates would each sit with a hat full of beans in his lap and the new mayor would be the one from whose hat the sow ate first.

Would a larger hat be an advantage in such a contest?