Scrap the mayors, lets have strong city bosses

摘要

Last week the Newcastle Chronicle ran a story on the death of a former Newcastle City Council chief executive, Cyril Davies, who died at the very ripe old age of 91 and who had been chief executive from 1980 to 1986. There were three aspects to that story which stuck in my mind. The first was that a local paper nowadays, with a shrunken staff and short memories because the old hacks have long gone, would even bother to cover the demise of someone whose heyday was a lifetime ago. The second was that it would run an obit on a council chief executive at all. The third was that in a language quite unusual for the normally cynical media, he was described as 'loving his city more than life itself.' Fourthly, an accompanying picture from 1985 showed Mr Davies and the Chronicle's directors together welcoming the Queen Mother on a visit to the paper's offices.