I DO, quite oddly, feel a twinge of sympathy this week for David Shakespeare, the leader of Bucks County Council, after his battering in the national media for comments about jobless northerners.

Shakey took a right old kicking for apparently saying at a meeting: “The north may replace the Romanians in the cherry orchards. That may be a good thing.”

He insists his comments were made in jest, but there have been calls from Labour for the PM to make him resign.

This, in my view, is an over-hyped side-show – a true case of Much Ado About Nothing for Shakespeare.

Make him quit, by all means, if he is proven to have done a lousy job as council chief. And criticise him all you want for his various policies. But should our most senior councillor in Bucks really be made to eat humble pie over a throwaway remark?

No – I suggest it should be more of a case of cherry pie. Bucks has a proud tradition of cherry-picking, and there’s even a fayre in its honour in Flackwell Heath. We’re proud of our cherries here and is it really a disgrace for anyone, southerners or northerners, to work in our orchards?

By the way, we’re also proud of our NHS. But when services were being transferred from Wycombe to Aylesbury, the national media weren’t interested in covering it in depth, despite the howls of anguish from residents.

It’s ironic then that they home in so quickly on what is at worst a tactless poor taste joke. If only there had been so much national outrage about the NHS changes, then perhaps something could have been done to stop them?