Pasties and jerry cans — who’d have thought that yesterday’s politics would descend into a roaring debate about two such innocuous items? And still the hullabaloo goes on. Most of today’s front pages lead with one or both of the stories, although I’d say it’s the jerry cans that win out overall. Thanks to Francis Maude’s suggestion that ‘a bit of extra fuel in a jerry can in the garage is a sensible precaution to take,’ we’re seeing headlines such as ‘Pumps go dry as ministers provoke panic’.
As with the pasty row, which James discussed yesterday evening, the political dangers of this stretch far beyond the actual matter at hand. The government’s fear will be that it becomes less about fuel and more about competence; a word that is being deployed like a weapon by Labour this morning.
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