Even more disastrous for councillors would be an overwhelming show of support from the public for the original Forever Young design. Such a notion seemed fanciful at the time of writing last week; now it looks very real.

Councillors could not have known just what a dangerous game they were playing when they commissioned two new logo designs from the consultants.

The furious – and sustained – response to the original Forever Young design must have given them some comfort that at least knew where the people stood on that choice.

That was, it seems, until the people saw the new options. The reaction on social media suggests Step Beyond and Perfectly Timeless are even more on the nose than Forever Young.

Of course, social media democracy is a fraught exercise and we would never claim that a poll on the Western Advocate website might return anything approaching a statistically accurate outcome.

And it won’t be our poll results that are put before councillors in a report to be tabled at the December 13 meeting but, rather, the results of council’s YourSay survey on its own website.

When the Western Advocate asked for some running totals from that survey, though, we were told the data would not be made available because council did not want to “compromise the integrity of the survey”. Strange that the Australian Bureau of Statistics seemed to harbour no such concerns about regular updates compromising the recent same-sex marriage postal survey, but council sees it differently.

That’s fair enough, but without the official numbers to work from we can only be guided by our own poll, and it does not paint a pretty picture for councillors.

While it was previously despised, Forever Young is now the most popular option. But too many councillors have already denounced it for it to now be adopted.

And while four councillors have told the Advocate they favour the Perfectly Timeless option, it is currently running last in the poll.

So councillors can either go with the public and be labelled hypocrites, or go with their hearts and be accused of ignoring the ratepayers. If that’s not a lose-lose situation, then nothing is.