JONATHAN YOUNG WRITES: This is no more than an educated guess but I reckon there must be a three-line whip out on the Isle of Wight Council’s great and good to show their faces when controversial decisions get a second look by the important scrutiny committee.

It’s the least implausible explanation I can think of for Cllr Ian Ward’s baffling response when outed on social media studying an online advert for gents’ trousers — while colleagues all around him were dutifully getting their teeth into the future of the Island’s fire and rescue service.

With either refreshing candour or a bone-headed lack of political nous and/or civic responsibility — you decide — Cllr Ward (Con, Sandown South, maj. 177) explained he didn’t really need to be at the three-hour meeting because the fire service wasn’t much to do with him. But “like most of the cabinet I went” and he tried to use his time productively. Hence the trouser advert, as well as an apparent cat-nap. Obvious when you think about it.

And Cllr Ward is, of course, perfectly correct when he says the fire service isn’t his brief. His brief is transport; his towering achievement to date — bringing the Cowes Floating Bridge project so flawlessly to fruition that it’s become a byword for reliability as far away as the Fairlee Road traffic jam. The more I think about it the more puzzling I find it that matters of life and death, such as fire and rescue (yawn...), haven’t been entrusted to him.

Seriously though, what a mercy it is the scrutiny of councillors and what they’re up to isn’t left entirely to internal mechanisms, such as the committee which Cllr Ward appears to have attended in body only; that technology has brought us to a point where Joe Soap in the public gallery — the territorial paparazzi, if you will, armed with nothing more than a mobile phone –— can catch politicians with their trousers down and publish their indiscretions to the world in seconds.

This is not how some politicians want it to be, and that should surprise no one. The resistance to real public scrutiny of their behaviour; to the use of social media as a tool of that scrutiny; is alive and well — championed in a number of lower-tier councils across the Island where the 2011 Localism Act has created a dangerous regulatory vacuum.

In Sandown, a decision has been made to boycott social media in favour of the “proper channels”, whatever they are; in Bembridge the official parish council Facebook page has been peremptorily closed down, without any apparent thought having been given to the fact that Facebook abhors a vacuum (enter the spoofers amid much hilarity).

Even at the IW Council, though, Cllr Ward isn’t the first to be exposed multi-tasking his way through a council meeting. The fact that nothing at all seems to have happened to his colleague, Cllr Chris Whitehouse, for similar antics means there’s little incentive for either of them, or anyone else, to learn their lesson — unless and until someone explains to them them that turning up, on its own, doesn’t really cut the mustard.

As if to prove the point, Cllr Ward, sporting his new rhinoceros skin suit with matching brass neck armour (available for next-day delivery on Amazon Prime), turned up at  cabinet 48 hours after his shop-and-snooze to rubber-stamp the oh-so-boring fire service decision.

In the absence of some proper opprobrium from somewhere, I see a real danger that the reaction to the (literal) oversight of councillors from the County Hall public gallery will be to change the seating plan, rather than the miscreants’ behaviour. That would be a good outcome for only a few people.