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by Paul Linford, former Derby Evening Telegraph political correspondent

With the obvious execption of football management, politics has possibly the highest casualty rate of any profession. There are, after all, only a limited number of top jobs to go round, and for every new MP that arrives at Westminster and succeeds in climbing the greasy pole to ministerial rank or higher, another five sink into backbench obscurity.

The trend in local government is, if anything, even more marked. With elections every year in the case of the district and unitary councils, and every four years in the case of the counties, the turnover of local councillors has always been high.

During the late 80s and early 90s, I worked at the Derby Evening Telegraph covering the activities of Derby City Council, then Tory-controlled, and Labour-run Derbyshire County Council. It was an interesting time to be on the local government beat, an era of big personalities as well as big ideological battles.

Yet when I returned to the county in 2004 after nearly a decade working at the House of Commons in London, I was struck by how few of those big personalities remained active in local politics.

The two key protagonists on the local political scene at the time could have been made for eachother. They were David Bookbinder, the left-wing leader of the county council in the pre-Blair days when Labour still had its local mavericks, and Nick Brown, the Thatcherite leader of the city council who stopped his desk calendar on the day the Iron Lady resigned.

Mr Bookbinder's subsequent history is reasonably well-known. He stepped down from the council leadership in 1992 to concentrate on his business activities as chair of the council-funded Derbyshire Enterprise Board. He eventually left the Labour Party in protest at the Blair government's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

As for Nick Brown, he lost his seat on the council and was last heard of as chair of Derby South Conservatives, having apparently fallen out with the former council colleagues now running the city's Tory Group.

It was something of a fall from grace. Brown had fought Derby South at the 1992 election with high hopes of dethroning Margaret Beckett. In an interview with me before the campaign he said his ambition was to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, which did not seem such a ludicrous idea at the time.

Other key figures who have moved on to fresh fields and pastures new include Martin Doughty, who took over from Bookbinder as council leader and served in that role for nine years before embarking on a new career as a green quango boss, chairing first English Nature and now its successor body, Natural England.

And while Mrs Beckett is still around, most of the Conservative MPs who served for Derbyshire constituencies around that time have long since disappeared from the local scene.

Edwina Currie lost her South Derbyshire seat in 1997, famously published a sensational set of memoirs, and eventually wound up as a radio presenter and "bonkbuster" novelist. Former Amber Valley MP Philip Oppenheim was defeated at the same election and opened a Cuban bar near Westminster which is still frequented by some of his former parliamentary colleagues

Greg Knight, Derby North MP from 1983-97, eventually returned to the Commons for another constituency, but his namesake Angela Knight, MP for Erewash from 1992 to 1997, left politics altogether and was recently appointed Chief Executive of the British Bankers' Association.

Some of the key figures from that era still remain. Pauline Latham was the Tories' highly effective education spokesman on the county council. She now the Mayor of Derby and likely to become MP for the new seat of Mid-Derbyshire at the next election.

Chris Williamson, now the Labour leader of Derby City Council, was then the leading light in the local League Against Cruel Sports. He was elected to the city council the year before I left the Evening Telegraph, but even then I had him marked down as a future leader.

Two other young guns of that era who were notable for their personal rivalry are also still around - Philip Hickson, chair of housing under Nick Brown and now Tory Group leader, and Labour's Martin Repton, who won back his seat on the city council in May 2007.

At one memorable council meeting the two of them lost it with eachother so badly that the Mayor, Ray Baxter, had to call a halt to proceedings to allow tempers to cool. Happy days....

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