THE COUNTY’S newest Member of the European Parliament (MEP) heads into an £80,000 plus post in Brussels this week and straight into a row over whether she should be there at all.

Two fellow West Midlands MEPs say Tory Anthea McIntyre, from Walford, near Ross-on-Wye, needed to fight for the seat rather than getting it on the basis of her Euro-election vote from two years ago.

Miss McIntrye narrowly missed election then, but gets her chance because the Lisbon Treaty allowed for another 18 MEPs of which Britain got one for the West Midlands.

The Electoral Commission analysed the West Midlands results of the 2009 Euroelections to decide who would have won the extra seat had it been contested.

MEPs are elected using a party list system in which different parties put together lists of candidates for election, with their preferred choices at the top, for seats to be allocated on a top down basis in proportion to parties’ share of the vote.

On that basis Miss McIntyre – third on the Tory list in 2009 had the votes to see her through in 2011. The post is reportedly worth £84,500 a year.

UKIP’s Mike Nattrass MEP, elected for the West Midlands in 2009, protested that this process was “deeply undemocratic” and did not comply with English law.

“But this is the EU where imposition is run of the mill. It is an outrage that somebody becomes an MEP on the basis of a decision by the Electoral Commission, rather than a decision by the people of this country,”

said Mr Nattrass.

Independent West Midlands MEP Nikki Sinclaire said a new MEP costing £2.1 million a year in salary, travel, expenses and office running was the last thing needed” when front line services in the UK were cut.

Miss McIntyre, who runs a consultancy business and is a partner in her family’s agricultural small-holding in Walford, said confirmation of her appointment came after many months of “seemingly endless”

bureaucratic process.

“I am delighted that I’m at last able to speak up for Herefordshire in Brussels. I want to see the European Parliament focus on things that need international cooperation, like completing the single market, and stop interfering in matters that do not,” she said.