I see Labour’s Claire Ward has been elected as the first East Midlands mayor. I live in the East Midlands and might well have voted for her but, last Thursday, a Police and Crime Commissioner was the only post I got to mark down a vote for on my ballot paper. What’s going on?

It turns out that the region of England in which I live (comprising Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, Rutland and most of Lincolnshire except the northern portions) is not the same as the mayoral East Midlands. The new mayor only represents Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire and, although they are the largest two counties in the region they only contain about half the total population.

That doesn’t make sense to me and I haven’t yet turned a good answer. It strikes me as a sympton of the modern habit for appropriating words without due consideration for what they represent. I’m not necessarily against the idea of a new mayoral area but I wish a less confusing name had been chosen for it because Claire Ward is only representing a bit of the long-established (and still existing) region.