Whew, August is over and Eric Pickles can chill.  Congratulations to his special advisers on their sterling bid to win the competition for who can post the most press releases during the summer break.

Any idea, however zany, will do, provided the headline contains the requisite boo words – council, bloated, town hall taxes, bureaucratic, spendthrift.

Parking is a perennial favourite, along with council tax, which Mr P would dearly love to abolish altogether if only councils would either disappear or magic up the necessary billions from some other source, as long as it's not tax.

Perhaps the only tax to meet the Pickles' seal of approval is the bedroom tax.  For him Michael Lyon's wide-ranging report on funding councils is like Galileo's treatise for Pope Urban VIII – a work of the devil to be locked away in a dusty cabinet.

Unable to get rid of council tax altogether, Pickles has spent the past two years tinkering with the Local Government Finance Act, 1992.  This of course is Tory legislation, brought in by Michael Heseltine, when John Major charged him with undoing the poll tax.

Of course populist Mr P would never contemplate resurrecting that.

His latest wheeze was spun as abolishing council tax on ‘granny flats'.  Cue supportive headlines in the Daily Telegraph, the rich old folks' favourite paper.

But the number of properties and amount of money involved are trivial.  Most
of the councils affected are Conservative-controlled: of the estimated 24,000 annexes in England, two thirds are in shire districts.

That's as well for Mr P because he wouldn't want headlines saying he favoured large migrant families (who tend to be concentrated in the urban areas and who are somewhat more likely to live in multi-generation households.)

Even if councils were forced to offer a 100% discount on annexes (assuming ‘granny' can be satisfactorily defined for the purposes of the Valuation Office Agency) it would cost only £16m a year in total, barely £600,000 in the met districts.

But size and significance don't matter when Pickles does politics.  As the ‘friend of the hard-working family' Pickles always positions himself as against the ‘town hall'.

Not county hall mind, because the shires are still a Tory bastion and when they stir themselves, which they do far too rarely, the shire leaders can appeal above Pickles' head to Number Ten.

In this guise, Pickles is against charges and impositions, witness his campaigns on parking and bins and of course council tax.

Of course this is the acme of irresponsibility.  As secretary of state he has charge of the entire system.  His approach however is partisan and partial.

Instead of proposing coherent reform, he chips away at bits and pieces.  His intervention on council financial reserves is typical.

As if prudent finance officers would not anticipate the worst and buffer their accounts, knowing that Pickles sacrificed council spending for the sake of getting a gold star in cabinet.

Did he learn nothing from his brief spell as leader of Bradford?  Pickles also illustrates the incoherence of recent public policy, especially in housing.

Don't free-market Tories favour an active market in which numbers of households and dwellings come into some equilibrium, and taxes used to get maximum efficiency from the available stock.

Insteadof encouraging home owners to stay put a free marketeer wants the generations to make their own arrangements, children to move on and out and housing capital mobilised for entrepreneurship and company formation.

‘Encouraging extended families to stay together will reduce social care costs to the taxpayer, and protect independence and dignity for the young', said Pickles.  What does that mean for women, on whose shoulders the burden of domestic caring is most likely to fall?

Does Pickles favour a reduction in female employment outside the home; if so, he is at odds with George Osborne, who is acutely conscious of Tory loss of support among women voters.  As for the young, surely the Government favours getting them to move and seek opportunities in fresh fields?

If Pickles knows his approach is inconsistent with Cameron's wider policies, he does not seem to care.

David Walker is a freelance journalist and former director of public reporting at the Audit Commission