DOES ANYONE ELSE worry that these hosepipe bans may have a counterproductive effect? Have you ever met any man? Not to be too gender essentialist about things, but there’s pretty much only one foolproof way to get a man to do something around the house, and that’s to threaten to take away the means by which he might do it.

Threatening to sell the tools he never uses, for example, or suggesting that it might be best to simply get a professional in to do the job he’s been putting off for god knows how long. Don’t worry, I’m a man, some of my best friends are men, I’m allowed to point this out.

The hosepipe ban seems much the same. There must be thousands of people out there who’ve been putting off watering their garden who hear the news they’re not allowed to and immediately suffer from an acute bout of oppositional defiance disorder. I don’t even have a hosepipe, or a garden with any grass, and the second I was told I wasn’t allowed to use one I started to fantasise about other ways I could waste water. I settled on filling up a bucket of cold water and throwing it over talk of a border poll, but it turns out that Prime Minister Andy Burnham already beat me to it.

Ever since the days of David Cameron, each UK Prime Minister since has been engaged in a high-stakes game of pass-the-parcel. Sooner or later, one of them is going to be caught in possession when either Scotland or Northern Ireland finally decide that they’ve had enough. Maybe even Wales, now that those Plaid Cymru types are finally in the ascendancy. Nowhere is safe!

That was the prospect raised during Andy Burnham’s first visit to Northern Ireland as........

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