I can’t give wasteful Yorkshire Water the benefit of the drought - David Behrens

This was never more true than at the end of the long, hot summer of 1976, when James Callaghan appointed the hapless Denis Howell the nation’s Drought Minister, and charged him with persuading us all to use less water.

Put a brick in the cistern, he implored; share your bathwater. He was not two days into the job when it started raining and didn’t stop until the last autumn leaf had fallen.

His homilies about community spirit went down better than they would now. In a nation that still had more outdoor lavs than indoor showers, sharing a bath was still part of the national experience. Every adult remembered the war or its aftermath, and the sacrifice of a small civil liberty like the freedom to water the lawn was a relatively small inconvenience.

But the edict that from next Friday we will once again have to reel in our hosepipes strikes an altogether more sour note – coming as it does from Yorkshire Water, a company that leaks more than Whitehall yet which splashes out a reported £1.4m on its boss’s salary.

Its announcement was followed almost immediately by rain. A street in Sheffield was ankle deep in water as the drains gave up the ghost, despite having been hardly troubled all summer – a situation which gives you an idea of how Victorian the infrastructure still is.

But the predictably unpredictable British weather is not the point; the issue here is being told what not to do by someone who goes on doing it regardless. Sound familiar? It’s exactly the reason we don’t have a Prime Minister on the job right now.

The similarities between Partygate and the hosepipe ban – let’s call it Watergate – are striking. Don’t waste water, says a private company that has been losing 28 gallons per household during the last couple of years. Multiply that by five million customers and you can see how little difference a few hosepipes are going to make in comparison. What a shower.

And that’s not the half of it. Last month, Yorkshire Water was fined £1.6m for polluting Bradford Beck with unauthorised sewage. There were other such incidents in Wakefield and York.

On top of that, water companies across the country have been breaching their permits by releasing raw sewage into rivers more than 1,000 times a day, even when there’s been no heavy rain.

Yet none of that explains why being expected to take orders from this sodden bunch rankles so much. The real reason is that we haven’t forgotten the fiasco of 1995, when, with only 10 days’ supply left in Halifax, drinking water had to be brought in by road to fill up the reservoir. Meanwhile, a third of the available supply was leaking into the ground.

The resulting public inquiry made our county the nation’s laughing stock. Channel 4 famously filmed the comedian Mark Thomas taking a tanker of water to Yorkshire as a gift from the people of Ethiopia.

A generation on, restrictions on water companies have been tightened, but not enough. This week, the head of Ofwat, which is supposed to regulate these firms, sounded like their PR man when he insisted they were not being given enough credit for their actions to reduce leaks, and suggested the issues were too complicated for their critics to understand. What a drip.

He also defended the astronomical pay packets of the people at the top, saying it made them “more competitive in the global market”. Now, forgive me if this is too complex for the likes of me, but water companies aren’t global players – even if they’re owned by foreigners. They are local monopolies whose income is guaranteed by their customers – hosepipe ban or not.

The nearest we have to an international company is Severn Trent, whose area spills over into Wales. Perhaps that’s why its chief executive can command nearly £4m a year.

This Tuesday, the Environment Agency officially declared Yorkshire a drought zone. What did that mean exactly? Nothing, really. The designation did not automatically trigger any actions, it said; it just wanted water companies to “step up” measures to manage supplies.

The hosepipe ban is the most obvious of those measures – so it’s a good job it won’t stop raining. It saves us all the trouble of having to ignore it.