IT’S time for David Cameron to sack Eric Pickles, that boorish, blundering, battering ram he put in charge of local government.

After nine months of insults, distortions and smears from the office of the Communities Secretary, council leaders have suffered enough. Sadly, I fear the gruff, grammar school-educated Yorkshireman – is just too valuable to lose from a Cabinet packed with private school posh boys.

However, that won’t stop me pointing out some of the numerous reasons why the man inflicting the most savage council cuts in living memory is not, in football parlance, fit to wear the (XL) shirt.

The first is that the fantasy world in which Mr Pickles chooses to live is a gross insult to the millions whose lives will be ruined by his attacks on local government.

It is bad enough that this arch-Thatcherite volunteered for the deepest cuts of any department, forcing town halls to axe vital services and sack thousands of workers.

Worse, he then parrots the fairytale that the pain of these cuts would disappear if councils would only tackle waste, slash executive pay and merge back-office functions.

And it’s all done in the inimitable Pickles style... branding council leaders “stupid” and telling Durham County Council that it receives grants that the likes of West Oxfordshire “can only dream of”.

There are reasons for that. Durham is a much poorer place, therefore collects much less in council tax and has more people who depend on its services. Every other government has recognised that.

These deluded sneers achieved their nadir last week, as one city – Liverpool – sacked 1,500 workers to help plug a terrifying £91m hole in its budget.

On that very day, Mr Pickles issued a “waste dossier”, listing tiny sums spent on bottled water (£15,000) and trips to China (£6,647) – and claiming Labour-run councils were slashing services deliberately, simply to embarrass the Government.

When considering this man’s unsuitability for office, don’t take my word for it, because only the war in Afghanistan has achieved such a cross-party consensus.

David Faulkner, Newcastle’s Liberal Democrat leader, called Mr Pickles “the worst secretary of state” he had known and some of the harshest condemnation has come from the Conservative head of the Local Government Association.

Margaret Eaton pointed out that councils are the most efficient part of the public sector – and that to slash grants by 17 per cent, while denying the inevitability of painful cuts, is to be “detached from reality”.

While I’m at it, Mr Pickles has made a dog’s breakfast of plans for directly-elected mayors.

They will now, farcically, be imposed as “shadow mayors” in the biggest cities – with promised referendums staged later. Oh, and guess who sent out his spokesman to condemn a stunning memorial to dead North- East miners as a wasteful “vanity project”.

Most services are provided by local councils.

Their future is too important to be in the hands of a man increasingly making a fool of himself.

ANYONE planning a protest against the closure of their local library could take a leaf out of the book (sorry) of avid readers in Stony Stratford, near Milton Keynes.

Local people borrowed all 16,000 books in their threatened library, leaving its shelves barren – and making a powerful statement.