Advising local authorities that it would help if their bids for action zones, er, made sense, he related his experience of drafting the original EAZ framework and circulating it to colleagues.

“I received hundreds of responses with notes about guidance I might be infringing or breaking, but nobody said whether or not it was a good idea. So I went to an old hand and asked him ‘Does it make sense?’ He looked at me with a rather shocked expression on his face and said: “Make sense? That’s a pretty stiff test.”

Suddenly so many things make sense.