Even by Michael Gove’s prolific standards, he has had a busy few weeks. When not strong-arming housebuilders and manufacturers to pay for safety remediation works – few fault his aims, though many disagree with the means – he’s been weighing into a big London development (yes, another one). This time freezing plans to bulldoze the former ITV studios to make room for what critics call “a swollen deformity for the South Bank”.

And that was before the secretary of state started publicising his levelling up bill to ram home the message that the idea of radically reforming the planning system in England in pursuit of building 300,000 new homes a year had been chucked overboard.

It can sometimes be hard to see past Gove’s rhetoric when trying to predict where policy will actually land, but soon after the Queen’s Speech details of the bill were released and it became clear he had been true to his word. If housebuilders are feeling shell-shocked right now, it is easy to see why. After all, the Conservative party has traditionally been their friend, and now Gove writes a column in the Mail on Sunday saying he will take on the “vested interests” of major developers that are “used to imposing their wishes on communities”.

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