IT’S BEEN a while since he’s graced these pages, but David ‘Mack The Knife’ McElhinney is back in town.

Mr Brocklebank was avidly reading the report in which the Independent Panel on Members’ Allowances recommended Mayor Joe Anderson should receive £79,000 a year for his efforts, when he saw the LDL chief’s name.

Surely not! He wasn’t on the Independent Panel was he? Having the head of arguably the most controversial joint venture Liverpool council has ever tangled itself up in involved in setting how much Mayor Joe should earn would be an outrageous conflict of interest – and you wouldn’t need to consult Cherie Booth QC to come to that conclusion.

As it was, for clarity’s sake, Mack The Knife was not involved in the proceedings, but was mentioned in relation to another issue – that being, amusingly enough, his role in facilitating good relations between the council and the trade unions.

But Mr B was puzzled as to why, when all the other people namechecked in the report had their positions mentioned, the reference to Mack The Knife merely said ‘David McElhinney’. Either he needs no introduction, or no-one knows what he does, or he just does what he likes.

Readers can arrive at their own conclusions on that one.

ALL credit to Mayor Joe for refusing the generous offer of £79,000 a year to be Liverpool’s First Citizen.

Obviously it would be foolhardy, if not reckless and unprofessional, to merely run the council’s press release about the recommendation without checking with Mayor Joe himself, so Mr B’s studious colleagues asked the glorious leader and learned he was to reject the offer.

Sadly, the BBC – which is also generously funded by the taxpayer, Mr B might add – obviously thought this would be too much trouble.

And so the morning that Merseyside’s fine print titles were running that The Big Man had knocked back the reward, the BBC’s website was running, verbatim, the original council press release.

In fact, so faithful to the original was it that the only thing missing was the ‘Notes To Editors’ tagged to the bottom.

CLEARLY giving credit to Mayor Anderson is all the rage at the moment.

In fact, the likes of Saddam Hussein had to torture their subjects to be guaranteed the kind of praise Mayor Joe is having heaped upon him by his Labour minions.

So much so that Mr B has decided to launch a Private Eye-esque Order of the Brown Nose aimed at recognising the most obsequious, subservient and sycophantic praise that Mayor Joe receives daily from Labour tweeters, with the first winner to be announced next week.

Terms and conditions: Most fawning entrant may be rewarded with a cabinet position or at least special responsibility allowance at some unspecified point in the future.

But probably not.