WIRRAL Council voted to welcome the Secretary of State for Culture’s intervention in its libraries closure programme last night.

At a lively full meeting of the council at Wallasey town hall, Labour and Lib-Dems combined to support a Liberal Democrat amendment to a Tory notice of motion on the subject, although a 10-minute adjournment was needed after protests from the public gallery.

Lib-Dem leader Simon Holbrook’s claims to party unity looked fragile after one of his group abstained on the motion, and another “dissident” Phil Gilchrist described the closures as “a hard sell, but residents do not accept the sales pitch”..

Wirral’s controversial Strategic Asset Review (SAR) would see 11 of the borough’s 24 libraries shut and other cultural facilities transferred into community ownership, with £20m invested in hubs at strategic locations to replace them.

Labour leader Steve Foulkes insisted he welcomed the move by Andy Burnham to call the first such inquiry for 18 years.

Cllr Foulkes described it as a “deeply political issue” and Tory leader Jeff Green quoted Mandy Rice-Davies’s sarcastic comment from the Profumo Affair saying: “They would say that, wouldn’t they”.