Event: John Major

The PM’s low-stakes policymaking makes John Major’s Cones Hotline look like the Marshall Plan. On 12 August, UK prime minister Andy Burnham convened an immediate sitting of the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms (commonly referred to as COBRA). This is the committee that tends to deal with national emergencies: terror attacks, pandemics, riots and that kind of thing. What had happened this time? Ebola in Ebbsfleet? A nuke in Nuneaton? No, Burnham had gathered his entire suite of national-security advisers together to issue a Very Important Announcement. It was to tell retailers not to sell disposable barbecues to members of the public during the current spell of warm summer weather, as they had a mind-numbingly obvious potential to cause fires in dry areas. Then, just to reinforce the scale of the threat, an ‘emergency’ alert was sent to every smartphone in the country, warning citizens definitely not to buy and then grill a single open-air bratwurst or chipolata. As emergency proclamations go, it’s hardly 'this country is at war with Germany’, is it? This is small beer (or small sausages) indeed, but it’s all part of a much wider – and sadly deliberate – pattern. Since seizing power in July, Burnham has made a habit of presenting legislative molehills as mountains, laying out a whole litany of the most insignificant ‘policy’ announcements ever known to man. We’ve had Andy giving people an average of 86p off their electricity bills each week (temporarily, for six months) in order to ‘bring back hope’. We’ve had Andy capping bus fares at a maximum of £2 per journey, in order to 'build a country for everyone, everywhere' (except those who don’t live on a bus route). We’ve even had Burnham introduce regulations to force companies to provide consumers with ‘clearer up-front information’ about the precise…