• ARASH Fatemian has at least one reason to be pleased with his appointment as cabinet member for finance at County Hall.

But that reason won’t be because the job is an easy one.

Mr Fatemian told the press at a recent meeting that he was pleased to be rid of his former title cabinet member for “adult services”.

He said: “I will be relieved that I no longer receive so much spam on Twitter. You would not believe the connotations 'adult services' throws up in cyberspace.”

The Insider can only imagine the seedy services which were being peddled to Mr Fatemian, and we wish him luck in his new role.

  • POLITICIANS are public servants and as such you should know as much as possible about them – within reason.

But it seems that county councillor Nick Carter – whose responsibilities include communications – would prefer we knew nothing except his name.

Mr Carter refused to give his age to an Oxford Mail reporter when he was re-elected to the county council’s cabinet and went on to say that we didn’t need any other information either.

He may have been having an off day. But his reticence is a bit surprising, given that in a previous life he was a journalist and newspaper editor.

Our man decided not to push it. Editors can be a volatile lot, retired or not.

  • THE Oxford Mail appears to have ruffled some feathers in the UKIP camp. The Insider has been told that certain young members of the right-wing party are annoyed about the paper’s approach to reporting on UKIP.

It makes us wonder if we were perhaps a little bit unfair...

How appallingly we treated UKIP, when we extended our deadline by more than two weeks to include their candidates’ profiles.

How we shunned them when we put up with rude emails and heckling from local activists.

How biased we were towards other parties when several members of staff made last-minute calls to the UKIP press office to chase information about mystery candidates.

The party has clearly caught the imagination of large swatches of the general public, with their leader Nigel Farage pictured pint in hand at pubs up and down the land.

Ironic that, as far from being biased we just think they would struggle to organise a drinks party in a brewery.