The Pickles plan

Some Cabinet ministers develop airs in office. Eric Pickles isn’t one of them. Sitting at the head of a conference table that looks like it’s been purchased from a discount office supplies catalogue, he explains his outlook on life. ‘There are two kinds of people,’ he says. ‘There are those who open that door and courteously speak to people, and there are those who bellow. There are those who write long memos on the temperature of your cappuccino and those who are just grateful if you get a warm beverage, and I’m the latter.’

He would place himself in an even rarer group: a minster who gets things done. He boasts that ‘this department has fundamentally shifted from being on the side of local government to being on the side of council tax payers’. As evidence of this he cites the fact that his department is scrapping more regulations than any other.