As a result, he and his ministers have been repeatedly caught out by environmental issues - whether it be the countryside, hunting, GM crops, transport, fuel prices or this winter's floods. They add that he has given himself until the end of this week to decide whether the epidemic makes a 3 May election impossible too. It is the final irony. A Government obsessed for the past four years with how it will win another term is having its plans ruined by the kind of countryside crisis it has so often done its best to ignore. Certainly the Prime Minister was in a thoughtful mood when he met environmentalists and businessmen privately in Downing Street last Thursday.
Top advisers say that the penny really has dropped now.
But we have a right to be sceptical. For they said the same last time, and the time before. Naively, I believed it the first time, when a previously uninterested Leader of the Opposition made his inaugural green speech five years ago, almost to the day, at the Royal Society. It was the coda that convinced me. It will be followed up with commitment in opposition.