An angry cross-party backbench revolt appears to have been responsible for saving Birmingham City Council from the preposterous position of discussing the impact of last week’s riots behind closed doors, much to the disappointment of West Midlands chief constable Chris Sims.

Five hours before 120 councillors, MPs and Mr Sims were due to gather, the council was insistent that the session had to be held behind closed doors.

My attempts to campaign via Twitter for a more grown-up response, which began four days before the meeting, appeared to be going nowhere with council leaders, although the clear view of the social media was that Birmingham would look pretty foolish meeting in private given that MPs managed to stage an impressive debate in the immediate aftermath of the trouble.

Even my entirely sensible suggested compromise, that the first part of the meeting could be in public and the second part in private enabling the chief constable to speak candidly to councillors and MPs, was rejected out of hand at 10am on Monday, five hours before the meeting was due to begin.

Something happened suddenly to change minds, and that something was a growing feeling of resentment by backbench councillors who felt ignored and left out of the loop by leaders of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition who insisted on secrecy.

Twenty-four hours after the riots subsided deputy council leader Paul Tilsley was warning that he didn’t want “political grandstanding” by members, which was why the special full council meeting would have to be in private.

Now is not the time to discuss the comic possibilities of Coun Tilsley coming out against political grandstanding, but it was clear a trend was emerging at the top of the city’s Liberal Democrat group.

Cabinet member Martin Mullaney was present at a hastily convened cabinet meeting along with his Lib Dem colleague Ayoub Khan which took the decision to keep the meeting closed, and he fought valiantly for four days to have press and public barred.

Coun Mullaney, possibly in training to become an Oxford Professor of Logic, spent some time arguing about the difference between a secret and a private meeting. If it was secret you wouldn’t know about it but a private meeting merely means it is, er, private, was the gist of his hypothesis.

Initially, there had been talk of filming the meeting and relaying coverage to the Big Screen in Victoria Square, but that idea was ditched almost as quickly as it was proposed.

It has always seemed odd to me that so many Liberals in Birmingham are anything but liberal in their politics, often proclaiming a quite authoritarian approach to running the city. If the chief constable asked for a closed meeting, which he reportedly did, then that was good enough for Tilsley and Mullaney.