I was disappointed but not surprised when a leaflet dropped on my doormat this week with the grand title ‘The New Vision for Fiddlers Ferry Power Station’.

Apparently, I can ‘be involved in shaping a landmark brownfield redevelopment’ and what’s more, the plans for the first phase are ‘exciting’.

Sorry, I will have to beg to differ.

I very much doubt that anything I or anyone else says will play any part in ‘shaping’ the plans and I have seen very little about the scheme that gets me in the slightest bit excited.

Just to recap, the former power station will be demolished in stages over the coming years.

Four of the cooling towers will be the first to go and the freed-up land will be used for ‘new employment opportunities’.

Only at some point in the future, according to the leaflet, will we get ‘a new community and homes, and a new parkland’.

So what can the people of Cuerdley, Penketh and Warrington expect from the first phase?

Well, we are going to get four massive buildings totalling 1.5m (yes 1.5 million) square feet of industrial and warehousing space.

Trying to be reasonable about this (which I’m finding very hard to do) I understand that developers Peel NRE, who acquired the site this summer, have to make a profit. I also understand that developing on brownfield sites is preferable to digging up the countryside near our leafier suburbs in the south of the town.

But I am fearful that industrial and warehousing on this scale is just too much for the roads close to the site to stand.

The people of west Warrington have had to live in the shadow of a coal-fired power station since the 1970s and frankly, I think they deserve a little respite.

This may just be my imagination but the volume of traffic through Penketh seems to have noticeably increased since the opening of the Mersey Gateway bridge (yes, people do really want to avoid the tolls) and adding in all the extra heavy traffic going to and from huge industrial and warehousing units seems manifestly unfair.

So yes, I will be taking part in the on line public consultation, for what that’s worth, but I have no expectation of my opinion carrying any weight.

On another topic, by the time you read this, I’m guessing that former Tory Health Secretary Matt Hancock will have been evicted from the jungle following his stint in I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

I have to confess I have watched the show this year. I understand I really should know better than to watch a man cynically trying to forge a new post-politics career for himself while trying to re-write history about his catastrophic handling of the Covid pandemic.

So while it might have been funny to see him retching while eating fish eyes or being covered in entrails, I’m not laughing.

Think back to the first Covid wave in 2020 with elderly patients discharged from hospitals without being tested for the virus.

This is what the British Medical Journal (BMJ) wrote in April this year: “Government policy that exposed thousands of vulnerable elderly people in England to SARS-CoV-2 in the early months of the pandemic was irrational in failing to advise that asymptomatic patients sent to care homes to free up hospital beds should be isolated for 14 days, two senior judges have ruled.”

I don’t know what I expected from Hancock.

I had maybe hoped for some humility but no, that’s not what we got. Instead we had hubris by the bucketload.

Yes he wanted forgiveness for breaking the social distancing rules he introduced when he was caught on camera groping a senior aide. But his ‘crime’ according to Hancock was no more than ‘falling in love’.

The fact remains he seemed more upset and contrite for messing up a question that would have seen his campmates win bars of chocolate than for allowing tens of thousands of elderly, vulnerable patients to be discharged from hospital into care homes without being tested for Covid.

There were 35,000 excess care home deaths in the first two months of the pandemic in part because of the hospital discharge policy, but hey what’s that in comparison to a bar of chocolate?