Adrian Cohen at the election count after being alerted that he might have won in Hampstead Town by a CNJ tweet

• THE serious side to your report about the Labour councillor, Adrian Cohen, resigning after less than a month in post, is who is paying the £20,000 for the consequent by-election.

I asked one of our councillors to find out if this sum was correct, but got no response.

One Tory MP claims that you could get a meal for 30p – probably nonsense – but if true this £20k would buy almost 67,000 meals provided by Camden food banks.

If the £20k is coming from council tax payers this is yet another example of the local Labour Party’s cavalier squandering of our money.

From other comments in the CNJ it would seem that Mr Cohen had no intention of being a councillor since he had to be roused from his bed during the votes count. As often reported, the same Labour councillors voted some of their colleagues an extra £10k per year.

Meanwhile back in Gospel Oak the council is evicting some of its tenants and demands on the volunteer-run food bank grow daily.

Surely it should be the Camden Labour Party who should pay for this unnecessary election or, more specifically, the panel which selected Mr Cohen.

This very same panel deselected seven sitting councillors; yet another example of how the local Labour Party political élite stick two fingers up to democracy and the vulnerable.

Any day now I expect one of them to say to our poor “let them eat cake”, given the dramatic rise in the cost of bread.

MICK FARRANT, NW5