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And so it came to pass. After biblical floods followed the wettest winter for two centuries, there was ample opportunity to indulge that great Whitehall pastime, the blame and accountability game. Who is ultimately responsible for the failure to dredge rivers or ensure effective drainage and flood plans? Is the state of our rivers ultimately the look-out of environment secretary Owen Paterson – so inconveniently out of action with a detached retina? Or is this the preserve of the Environment Agency? From its foundation in 1996, the Environment Agency, despite its name, was not an agency as such, but an executive non-departmental public body. As such, it operated at arm's length from ministers. Come the coalition's Bonfire of the Quangos, last year the Environment Agency did finally live up to its title and was reabsorbed by Defra as an executive agency. Eric Pickles clearly enjoyed playing to the gallery on TV and in the Commons in making clear he wouldn't wear an extra large T-shirt to save agency chairman and former culture secretary Lord Smith. But the stand-in-floods minister – unlike other ministers seen actually standing in floods in posh Wellington boots or even UKIP's Nigel Farage, attired sportingly in a pair of angler's waders – seemed not to catch the sombre tone that the situation demanded. Blaming the Environment Agency for providing duff scientific advice – as if it was the communities secretary's Audit Commission or LGA to provide good pantomime season knockabout comedy with – seems not to have been the best way of boosting the morale of staff involved in tackling the crisis. A furious Mr Paterson soon let it be known that the communities secretary was ‘grandstanding' in his stead. But perhaps this is the danger for a rather disengaged Mr Pickles. Having achieved all he set out to do with his localism agenda, what else is there for him to do but rack up more enemies to add to those already collected in Whitehall and in councils of all colours up and down the land? Semi-detached interest, as John Biffen found, can be as damaging as a detached retina in taking one's political eye off the ball.

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Inside View: Pickles was seemingly searching for new enemies

By Jonathan Werran | 18 February 2014

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