TRUTHFULLY, I’m not sure his colleagues or possibly the Chief Constable himself will be over enamoured of his YouTube ‘viewing figures’.

I refer to Simon Parr’s decision to launch, in a blaze of publicity, a series of interviews on YouTube explaining his thinking behind this year’s spending plans.

Tune into YouTube and you can see the figures for yourself ... a miserly 174 having watched, by Tuesday night, his four-minute interview on ‘collaboration’.

He’s done better, but not much, with viewers for his interview on ‘performance’, raking in, again by Tuesday, 224 ‘hits’.

The videos have been online for nearly a week and one suspects he might have wished for better figures.

Happily his thoughts on the coming year’s police budget had reached, again by Tuesday, a more respectable 940 ‘hits’ but even he must, I imagine, be considering whether time and effort expended has reaped much of a reward.

Not that the viewing public has been entranced sufficiently, either, to pose too many questions at the end of each video.

The only comment to date has been a statement about “negatively impacting on frontline services” followed by the pertinent question of who conducted the interviews.

It was, says a footnote, “Sarah from our communications team”.

Nicely impartial, then!