Nothing in the world is more important than petrol and pasties, of course. But our short-attention-span media might have made even more of this week’s jaw-dropping proposals from home secretary Theresa May to introduce draconian new web snooping powers (Big Brother WILL BE watching you! trumpeted the Independent).

May’s colleague Dominic Grieve, our dapper and dignified attorney general, must be smarting. For it was he who, while shadow justice secretary, pledged to roll back New Labour’s ‘surveillance state’ in a pugnacious policy paper railing against ‘an ever-increasingly intrusive government’. You can read it in all its indignant majesty.

That sentiment held as the sun shone on newlyweds David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the Downing Street garden back in May 2010.

The coalition agreement read thus: ‘The government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedom and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness. We will end the storage of internet and email records without good reason.’

Ah well. What more proof do you need of the old saw that civil liberties have plenty of friends in opposition - but very few in government.