If these are the government’s best ideas, they’d be better off running out of them

From Suella Braverman deciding to ‘start investigating crime’, to Michael Gove’s decision to allow more human filth into British waters – we’ve never wished for less from our government, writes Tom Peck

On a quiet bank holiday Monday, the home secretary Suella Braverman announced a bold new plan for the police to actually start investigating crimes again (PA)

Reputations, in life and in politics, are hard to shake off. It is still not a year since Rishi Sunak thought that, through the sheer power of his complete lack of personality, he could shake off the Conservatives’ reputation and re-badge them as the party of honesty, professionalism and accountability.

It doesn’t really seem to have worked. For most people, they are still the party of mindbending incompetence and shameless corruption, whose only true passion in life is to argue with itself.

All of which means it’s not immediately clear whether some kind of relaunch is underway. On a quiet bank holiday Monday, the home secretary Suella Braverman announced a bold new plan for the police to actually start investigating crimes again.

“There is no such crime as minor crime,” she said, while, we must presume not dwelling for too long on the two minor crimes Rishi Sunak has personally been done for, once while chancellor, the other prime minister. “Whether it’s phone theft, car theft, watch theft, whether it’s street-level drug-dealing or drug use, the police must now follow every reasonable line of inquiry."

It hardly needs to be pointed out that there is no good time, really, for a government to announce that the police will now try and solve crimes. But the middle of your thirteenth year in power is an especially bad one. It’s hard to remember, amid the neverending chaos, that the voters haven’t actually been asked their opinion on the government since 2019.

There have been three different ones since then. But the one they actually voted for involved Boris Johnson standing in front of police officers and promising to create 20,000 more of them over and over again, for so long that one of them genuinely fainted.

When you vote for 20,000 new police officers and get told four years on that, well, what do you know, crime’s suddenly a thing again, it is somewhat difficult to understand quite what these people expect from you, other than to laugh or cry.

If only that were it. For reasons only the government can truly understand, they have spent all summer operating to a strict schedule of big announcements. Governments often do this on the belief that if they don’t feed the news beast, the beast will come and eat them. But what they have actually done is to come up with new and ingenious ways to very publicly feed said beast, but with their own rancid flesh.

All of their big “announcements” have been absolutely no more than rolling adverts for their own uselessness. “Small boats week” was arguably the worst government campaign there’s ever been. “Education week” involved a record fall in top grades and the actual education secretary telling failing students: Don’t worry, no one cares.

Today’s big announcement involves the amount of human s*** in the rivers, but it doesn’t involve removing some of said s***, but adding more.

Michael Gove’s latest big plan for house building is to scrap the rules on ‘nutrient neutrality’ so that more houses can be built, with less concern with where the sewage from the people who live in those houses will go. Environmental groups have described it as an “apocalypse” for the country’s rivers.

Gove reckons he’s got some big ideas for taking some of the s*** out somewhere else so that it’s fine for all the new s*** to go in. Gove, as ever, speaks very confidently about subjects on which he knows nothing and is always, with absolute metronomic certainty, wrong.

You would think, would you not, that there might be someone somewhere saying that now’s just not the time to announce that you’re going to sign off on yet more water pollution, a subject that has been disgusting the nation every single day for more than a year. Just at the end of the second summer holiday in a row where families have had to sit on beaches and not go swimming for fear of their own safety and where an international triathlon competition ended with fifty of the competitors sick with diarrhoea through having had to swim in the sea.

At this point in a government’s life cycle, it is customary to describe them as out of ideas. If only that were true. This lot appear to be bursting with absolutely terrible ones. Being out of ideas might be the best idea they’ve got left.