IF you asked people when they were lying in corridors awaiting emergency health treatment or while they were protesting about the loss of their local libraries and museums whether they needed another tier of local government, it is unlikely they would answer in the affirmative.

Yet the Tees Valley is to get a new mayor in May and you will be asked to leave your sickbeds and protest group meetings and cast a vote.

The candidates in the race, therefore, have to overcome a lot of ambivalence – the turnouts for the first Police and Crime Commissioner elections in 2012 in Durham and Cleveland nudged 15 per cent, and it is hard to see there being much greater enthusiasm for the new mayor.

However, this week, the Conservative mayoral candidate, Ben Houchen, has said that if he were elected, he would look to abolish Cleveland Police because it has lurched from scandal to scandal over the last 20 years. The mayor will have no powers over the police, but never mind, it is a good discussion point, one which Labour has joined by swinging full square behind the force.

This takes me back 20 years to when Operation Lancet began and the Teesside Labour establishment swung full square behind the embattled Cleveland Chief Constable Barry Shaw. Labour then was seen to be unquestioningly defending a force that the public sensed was not in a good place. Similarly today Labour, which has had oversight of the force through the police authority and now the PCC for years, is positioning itself behind the force which the public knows has acted unlawfully.

Fifteen years ago, directly-elected mayors were imposed upon the Tees Valley towns of Middlesbrough and Hartlepool. In Middlesbrough in 2002, the public took revenge on the Labour establishment for its cosiness and elected the independent candidate Ray Mallon. In Hartlepool, a similar anti-establishment sentiment saw the election of the monkey mascot.

It is not too far-fetched to see Mr Mallon and the monkey as the first incarnations of Donald Trump. They were the first outsider, anti-establishment candidates to shock the two-party political system by winning power through a groundswell of support.

Today, a directly-elected supermayor is being imposed upon the Tees Valley. Labour is still so dominant that it would be a major shock if its candidate, Sue Jeffrey, was not elected in May – history doesn't repeat itself, does it?

THE big news of the moment has been the Spanish salad shortage where the wet weather has caused British supermarkets to ration their customers to just three iceberg lettuces. Civilisation is ending.

To distract myself from the panic, I looked at some of the words. Super crunchy lettuces were developed in the late 19th Century when they were known as “crispheads”. In the 1920s, it was found that these crisphead lettuces travelled very well over long US train journeys when they were packed with ice – and so the crisphead became known as the “iceberg”.

When we think “salad” we think of unadorned raw green healthy leafy stuff (it has been a joy this week to discover the existence of the British Leafy Salads Association which speaks up for all lettuce growers, be they wholehead or loose leaf).

But “salad” comes from the Latin “salata” which means “salted things” – “sal” for “salt” – because the dish was all about the oil, vinegar and salty salad dressing. Even the Romans knew that icebergs were tasteless and pointless – unless, of course, you were the Titanic.