THIS weekend some of the candidates for the Labour leadership are in the city, on a mission to persuade anyone who will listen of their case to take the reins of the troubled party.

Andy Burnham is at the Brighthelm Centre while Jeremy Corbyn will conduct a Q and A at Jurys Inn near Brighton Station. As they like to say at The Amex when the opposition’s sub comes on: Who?

It’s a fair question. Politicians of any stripe struggle to make an impact with the general public. Normal people expect the elected representatives to run the show with competence, if flair is out of the question. We want to be left to get on with our lives with as little fuss as possible.

That’s why it was bad news for the former Green administration in the city when their names became widely recognised – as it took a bin strike and a shambolic recycling record to do it.

The current leader of Brighton and Hove City Council's administration, Labour’s Warren Morgan, has no intention of repeating the experience. He is happy to stay off the radar. Or, at least that is the conclusion we must draw from his blog (yes, I’m his reader).

Morgan rejected any suggestion of an alliance with other ‘centre-left’ councillors, the Greens in other words.

“The thing about non-voters is they don’t vote,” he wrote this week.

I wonder why that is. Possibly because they are turned off by the negative refusal to counter any kind of dialogue with politicians who belong to another party but whose views and values are really very similar.

Warren Morgan grandly claims that his administration aims to tackle poverty and equality in the city.

Well he’s not going to do it by himself.

If he listens to other views and acts in a spirit of co-operation, he and his colleagues may affect some small change in the city and, who knows, a few of us might even remember who he is.

Brighton and Hove City Council has given the go-ahead to a plan to transform a dilapidated listed building into a place fit for a rock star or an oligarch.

The scheme for Marlborough House, on the Old Steine, includes a family room, TV room, kitchen, utility, plunge pool, sauna and wine cellar in the basement, with a drawing room, dining room, cloak room, gymnasium and music room on the ground floor.

The first floor will feature a master bedroom with en-suite bathroom and dressing room, five additional family or guest bedrooms, a bathroom and a gallery, while the second floor would accommodate staff and a games room.

But it will take a lot of work to make the Grade I listed building feel like a home.

I took a tour around the house this week, on the day the application was approved. It is in a sad state - water has seeped through the roof, the suite of rooms on the ground floor, described as ‘exquisite’ by the Pevsner guide to Brighton and Hove, are crammed with office furniture and tatty old files, and the walls are covered in graffiti left behind by squatters.

The owner, Tony Antoniades, bought the house from the council back in the nineties for a reported price of £500,000.

I met Mr Antoniades this week at his office in Blenheim House, also on the Old Steine, and he told me he is looking for a buyer for the house and will not fund the restoration works himself.

A house in a poor state of repair, facing on to a busy road, with a bus stop outside the front door – Mr Antoniades will need all his considerable sales expertise on this one.

Meanwhile, at the same planning meeting, the council threw out a plan to build 32 affordable homes on a site in Preston Road. The scheme drawn up by Yelo Architect practice is intelligent and sensitive yet the councillors, in their wisdom, were worried about a modern extension joining two Victorian villas.

So, it’s “yes” to one huge house that only a millionaire can afford, but “no” to a plan that would go a small way to fixing the housing gap for ordinary families.

This is not the way to build the future.

In scenes not very reminiscent of the film Jaws, a school of toothless sharks have gathered at Medmerry nature reserve near Chichester.

The smoothhound sharks – also known as ‘gummy sharks’ – pose no risk to humans but the sight of them circling in Sussex water understandably caused ripples of interest. It proves that along our coast, any fin is possible.