​A WEEK IS A LONG TIME IN POLITICS....
And even longer is the gap between penning a magazine article and it arriving through people's letterboxes....
This situation has now been resolved by an emergency council meeting on 3 June (I had to come back from a family holiday for it!) which led to a Conservative led coalition with the Lib-Dems running Colchester City Council.
However, no-one should be in any doubt that the reason we ended up with the worst crisis on Colchester Council in living memory was that newly elected Reform councillors and 3 councillors who had fallen out with the Labour party voted against BOTH proposals for leader of the council without putting forward any positive alternative of their own. That meant BOTH candidates were voted down. The Labour councillors knew what they were doing. The newly elected Reform councillors were warned in advance of the likely consequences of their actions - and recklessly went ahead anyway....
Anyway - read the article and see how close we came to staring over the cliff edge as your local council because of their actions...