WHEN it comes to shelling out a quarter of a million pounds of taxpayers’ money to cover legal and other costs it ran up in the public inquiry into the combined Tesco and Everton FC plans for Kirkby, Liverpool City Council has found itself over a barrel.

The council believes strongly that the retail part of the scheme is damaging to the interests of Liverpool, and therefore the strongest possible case had to be presented against it at the inquiry.

Indeed, having come to that conclusion, Liverpool had little option but to go ahead with the legal payments. If it really believed that the Tesco part of the operation was that dangerous to its own economy, but raised only a token squeak of protest, it would have been duly damned and rightly so.

But the question to be asked is why Liverpool manoeuvred itself over the barrel in the first place.

It is not a pretty sight, two neighbouring councils supposedly working for the common good of Merseyside, at each other’s throats in this manner.

Even now, with the money having been spent and a decision awaited from the planning inspector, we would hope that some measure of agreement can be found over the proper way ahead both for Tesco, the run-down centre of Kirkby, and Everton FC.

Maybe in an ideal world the Tesco and Everton applications could be uncoupled from each other. But they are so inextricably linked that they need to be taken together.

Maybe even now a suitable site for Everton can be found in Liverpool, and then the Tesco case can be argued on its own merits. Is that really too much to hope, and has the quarter of a million pounds been spent in vain?