John Penrose, MP for Weston-super-Mare and Minister for Tourism & Heritage

Well that worked pretty well. In my last column I mentioned that I was going to have a go at the Highways Agency about putting one of those brown tourism signs on the M5, to advertise the Grand Pier.

So I did and, last weekend, my office received a reply saying that they’d changed their minds. The pier will have signs at both junction 21 and 22 too. I don’t know if they were won round by the logic of the arguments in support of the idea, or that it had Ministerial backing from me, or simply that some people at the Highways Agency changed their minds and we got lucky. But either way, I’m delighted and impressed that they’ve done the right thing – it’s very easy to slag off government officials when things go wrong, so it’s only fair to praise them when they go right as well.

The brown sign saga proves a bigger point too. I’m discovering that, in Government, little things can mean a lot. That’s why I’m terribly proud of another small achievement in my two months as a Minister to date. In a budget that was generally full of bad news, the Treasury agreed to preserve some special tax rates for self-catering holiday accommodation. They’d been earmarked for the chop in Labour’s last budget but, if they’d been cancelled, a large slug of Britain’s tourism industry would have gone down the pan. The pain would have been particularly nasty in places like Weston too.

So, when I got a call a few days before the budget to say we’d won the argument and the special tax rates would stay, I was delighted. It was a little thing for the Treasury – an insignificant detail amongst the millions and billions elsewhere – but it meant a heck of a lot to the tourism industry. Here’s to small victories!