IF there’s a warm glow about this column today it’s because Spectator has been vindicated over a note which appeared in these columns in September, 2006.

The subject was webcams which Redcar and Cleveland Council had placed in several libraries. The idea was for residents to use them to contact the council’s new call centre “face-to-face” via a computer screen.

Spectator had the temerity to suggest that they would not be popular. This “disappointing”

comment was called Luddite by the then cabinet member for corporate resources, Coun Glyn Nightingale, of the coalition group in control.

“This is typified,” he wrote in a Letter to the Editor, “by the headline: ‘Council comes face to face with a lousy idea.’”

Now the council’s senior information officer, Carol McIntosh, has used exactly the same word – “disappointing”

– to report on the number of people using the webcams.

The problem, she said at the council’s East Cleveland area committee, “needs to be addressed.”

Or in other words they are likely to be scrapped.

What’s wrong with a telephone line? Much cheaper than the £1,000-plus cost of each webcam for a start. And people prefer to use them than to have their face flashed into a council call centre.

Learned opinion The business over the infamous John Blackie incident at the Richmondshire District Council’s chairman’s dinner last October rumbles on.

The case against him, of using words or behaviour likely to cause harassment or alarm to the council’s leader Coun Melva Steckles, is currently adjourned until the end of the month.

Coun Blackie strenously denies the charge; meanwhile the police are still in the process of gathering evidence.

The Crown Prosecution Service will have the final say on whether to press ahead with the matter.

One option still open to the CPS is to let the matter rest, on the grounds that it would not be in the public interest to proceed.

Spectator’s mole in legal circles says this is the most likely outcome.