Look at the fall of a brilliant Labour leader – and see why so many shun public service

‘London-based journalists rock up in Newcastle, hear Forbes’s list of the city’s thriving inward investments and jobs created – but go home to write only about grinding poverty.’ Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

Political talent is in short supply. So is a willingness to step up and take the burdens and the blows of office. The leader of Newcastle city council, Nick Forbes, has been toppled as a result of destructive tribal shenanigans, likely to deter others from giving up most of their life to become councillors. All political careers end in failure, goes the old dictum, and it’s usually so.

But Forbes’s career has been no failure. As leader of the council for 11 years, he steered his city through the lost decade’s savage cuts, protecting vulnerable people where he could and upholding Newcastle’s pride with ingenuity and political imagination.