Panic stations! Gordon Brown has convened crisis committee Cobra once a fortnight since becoming PM

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Gordon Brown has been accused of 'interfering' in every department

Since he became Prime Minister, Mr Brown has convened the Government's crisis committee Cobra at an average rate of once a fortnight.

The sessions involve gathering together the heads of the security services, the police and the civil contingencies secretariat, as well as senior ministers.

The meetings have previously been reserved to deal with the gravest of national emergencies.

But according to a list compiled by the Conservatives, Mr Brown has convened Cobra 20 times so far - ten times the rate of Tony Blair - including once to discuss bad weather.

Cobra, which stands for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A after the room in which meetings are usually held, was gathered to deal with 17 crises under Mr Blair, an average of once every six months.

Conservative Cabinet Office spokesman Francis Maude said: "This is typical Gordon Brown, completely unable to let go and interfering in every department, not letting his ministers get on with their jobs.

"Cobra is meant to be for extreme emergencies, not for when Brown hits the panic button. It seems that at every opportunity Brown turns a molehill into a mountain. He's clearly a Cobra-holic."

On March 9, Mr Brown convened a telephone Cobra session as storms approached the UK and two meetings were held last November to discuss the threat of tidal flooding.

Between September 12 and 23, five Cobra meetings were held to discuss foot and mouth disease.

Five more were convened between August 3 and 6 to discuss foot and mouth and bluetongue. Last July, two Cobra meetings were held to discuss flooding and five in June and July on attempted terror attacks.

Other meetings may have been held in private, with details not emerging in public.

Mr Brown's fondness for convening the emergency committee so often has become a source of amusement and some exasperation in Whitehall.

It took Mr Blair two years after becoming premier before he called his first Cobra meeting, to discuss military action in Kosovo in 1999.

A source close to Mr Brown yesterday disputed some of the meetings on the Tory list, insisting there had been no formal Cobra meeting to consider this month's bad weather.

He added: "The Prime Minister has called Cobra meetings to deal with terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, flooding last summer, foot and mouth disease and then flooding last November.

"At what point are the Tories saying we should have sat back and said let's allow these problems to take care of themselves?

"Do they really think that these incidents were not sufficiently serious to be handled at the highest level?"

 

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