So who’s in the Lendal red chair?

In this satirical scenario, dissenters were tipped from their seats and disappeared into a tunnel below the council’s new offices.

I wonder if those seats were in use again this week. Perhaps this time round they used that red chair from the Graham Norton show. The various parties who came up with the idea to close the bridge to traffic during the daytime sat in the hot seat to explain themselves. If the excuses seemed lame, the master of ceremonies pulled the handle and upended the guilty party (or so I like to suppose).

I imagine the buck was busily passed between hot hands after the Government’s traffic adjudicator, Stephen Knapp, declared that City of York Councl had “no power” to fine motorists who breached the rules on Lendal Bridge and Coppergate.

Incidentally, and I do love an ‘incidentally’, I had no idea such a role existed. Are there more Government adjudicators making formal judgements on other disputed matters? I like to imagine a Smug Ideas Adjudicator who sits in judgement on the Government policies, with a special role given to the Michael Gove Adjudicator (see below).

Anyway this experimental closure of Lendal Bridge has now ended. It was the most unpopular council policy since the Vikings dragged their longboats home. But does this mean it was a completely bad idea?

You cannot ask that question without being shouted down. But here goes.

My own mind has changed slightly over the past few months. I would now mark this closure down as an important experiment that was badly handled. Certainly, the fining of visitors has been a rotten way for a tourist city to conduct itself. That so many visitors have fallen into the trap indicates something wrong with the way the closure was implemented.

But all those arguments have been aired tirelessly over the past few months, filling the letters page of this newspaper day after bad-tempered day.

Yet it could be argued that the worst aspect of this closure is that it has been so badly bungled that any further such experiments won’t stand a chance.

The next time anything similar is mooted, a disapproving chorus of: “It’s another Lendal” will rise higher than the Minster.

Looked at now, the closure was a brave move – brave because it took on the car. Cars are both a blessing and a curse – a private blessing and a public curse, certainly in the centre of crowded cities. No one likes to be restricted in their car. Once you climb into that comfortable tin box, you want to be able to go anywhere at any time to suit yourself, whatever the consequences.

And I say this as a driver who occasionally gets as grumpy as any other.

Yet unrestricted use of the car leads to fumy chaos. Some restrictions are necessary and good. Surely no one would now want to see traffic trundling past York Minster again?

And with that, I shall go and sit in the red chair and wait for the handle to be pulled.

• ACCORDING to last Sunday’s Observer, Education Secretary Michael Gove has secretly been earmarking struggling free schools for “special fast-track attention” to avoid political embarrassment. The paper discovered confidential papers which warned that the “political ramifications of any more free schools being judged inadequate are very high and speedy intervention is essential”.

This suggests once again that sometimes politics is a bad way to run things – or at least the extreme politics of those who are convinced they have come up with a world-changing idea.

Free schools, it strikes me, are far less important than non-free schools – which is to say the ordinary schools attended by most children. If such a person as the Michael Gove Adjudicator really did exist, they would surely mark Mr Gove down for spending too much of his time and energy on a fringe policy.

Perhaps they would also tick him off for trying to change the world in one sitting.