The Oxford Mail today reports that a Second Councillor Quits Lib Dems:

Sajjad Malik has thrown Oxford City Council's ruling Liberal Democrat group into chaos after becoming the second councillor to quit the party in six weeks.

My first reaction on hearing the news yesterday is probably unprintable, but after seeing the Mail's report today and Malik's statement that:

"I don't owe them anything, they owe me everything I am the man who made them alive in East Oxford. They were dead and buried before I joined them.

...I nearly drowned on my morning mug of tea. The astounding arrogance of the man! But then that seems to be the way with defectors, in the main. The world seems to revolve around them in their smug self-important way. Malik should perhaps be reminded that before he arrived on the scene we had won his ward both at city and county levels (albeit with one defection of our own after we had started to win the ward in our own right) and had taken one of the two seats in the 2002 all out elections, and pretty well reckoned, by another Labour member opining to me, without reliance on any Asian vote that he might have brought with him.

On the other hand, this is also the man who schedules month long holidays in April - perhaps not realising that the campaigning teams that got him elected are at their busiest then. The man who so wanted to be a Lib Dem MP that he organises to go on a new candidate development course and then fails to turn up (wanting to be an MP whatever one's abilities is a sure sign to me of an overdeveloped ego - then not turning up is just downright rude and disrespectful!)

And then it seems his new friends' New Labour spin machine takes over, because what follows is just so much bollocks it could only be concocted by a committee of crowing colleagues:

"I have been shocked by the way in which the Lib Dem minority administration has quickly turned their back on the city council's commitment to build much needed affordable homes in an urban expansion and on the agreed scheme for recycling plastics and green waste. I believe these new Lib Dem policies do not represent the interests of the community in my ward and I will continue to oppose them strongly from within the Labour group."

Malik knew when he was elected, indeed when he joined the party (because I explained it to him) that we were against Labour's knee-jerk response to Oxford's housing shortages of just piling more new housing on the edge of Europe's biggest council estate. He has never, it appears, taken the trouble to try to understand how the party's policy on affordable housing, such as the Community Land Trust project I'm involved with, might address the same needs more sustainably.

Equally he will also have been as involved as he liked in discussions about why Labour's unilateral plan for extending recycling, which prompted many negative comments on the doorsteps in May, should be reviewed and properly consulted on before imposing what for many people seemed impractical on the householders of Oxford. If he didn't understand that point of view, perhaps he should have said something at the time to his colleagues.

These were part and parcel of the messages that made us gains in May and landed him in the administration group (the notable exception being his own ego-riven ward amidst the fiasco he helped to orchestrate). If he's so spineless as to have to run away from "infighting" instead of standing his ground (and after all, the first anyone knew about this was yesterday so he clearly hadn't taken the trouble to take his worries to colleagues), Labour are most welcome to him - again.

But the Mail concludes with perhaps a salutory lesson from previous Oxfordshire defectors, and ones who will be remembered long after Malik is just a footnote, that even the rich and famous ones seem not to be able to hold onto their seats for the party they defected to:

Nationally, Shaun Woodward was elected as a Conservative MP for Witney at the 1997 election, but later defected to Labour.

And in Wantage, former MP Robert Jackson switched to Labour before retiring at last year's General Election. The seat is now held by Tory MP Ed Vaizey.

In the longer run, Oxford's Liberal Democrats will, I am sure, be better off without such pompous-arsed hyper-inflated egos - there aren't many more to winkle out!

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