Leaders: Maude must pay for fuelling row

Adherents to the conspiracy option say the government’s advice to stock up on fuel – leading to panic buying, long queues, fuel shortages in many areas and widespread inconvenience and frustration across the entire country – was actually a Baldrick-like cunning plan. Its aim was to thwart the Unite union, which was threatening a stoppage that would have jeopardised fuel deliveries to forecourts during the Easter holidays. Some Tory sources say this was intended to echo Margaret Thatcher’s defiance of the miners in the mid-1980s. Just as she ensured stockpiles of coal would be sufficient to dent the impact of the strike, so a nation of car-owners with full fuel tanks would render useless any industrial action by Unite. Cunning, perhaps. But also calamitous, as anyone who has passed a forecourt in the past three days can attest. Public inconvenience cynically manufactured for political ends? A return to Thatcherism? So much for caring Conservatism and the Big Society. In some ways it would be better to be able to believe that the handling of the fuel issue was cunning, because that is a characteristic in a government slightly preferable to incompetence. However, given ministers’ lack of cleverness in recent weeks on a whole range of issues, incompetence is the verdict we have to arrive at.