You can call me cynical, you can call me paranoid. I probably am both. But why is it that the secretary of state for housing and planning, John Prescott, chose Brentwood, the constituency of the shadow local government minister Eric Pickles, to exercise his power under the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 to force the local authority to assess the needs of Travellers in their borough? This is the first time these powers have ever been used, and as Brentwood councillors have pointed out, there are plenty of other councils around the country who are failing to address the needs of the Traveller and Gypsy community.

While on the face of it this appears an esoteric, if not somewhat boring question, what has resulted has been explosive, as our story on page eight reveals. For a national newspaper to declare a war on a historically persecuted minority, even by the editorial standards of the Sun is extraordinary. For Labour to be calling Tory leader Michael Howard a racist and a bigot, while Mr Howard is countering that Labour is vulgar and abusive, even by the standards of our politicians, seems high octane. And it all links back to the powers invested in the secretary of state under this relatively obscure piece of planning legislation.

Mr Pickles has never been shy in coming forward with his views on Gypsies. In fact, he admits to being the author of Mr Howard's seven-point plan, which, he claims, aims to redress the imbalance in the law between the settled community and Gypsies. He also presented his own private members bill to parliament, which in his own words also aims to "regularise the law and redress the balance which currently favours Travellers over the settled communities."

So why choose this MP's constituency to exercise these powers? Could it be because we are in the run up to an election? Could it be that Labour mandarins wanted to draw the Tories out on this most unpleasant of issues, racism. If so, Mr Howard seems to have fallen squarely into the honey trap.

Politics is a nasty business, and no-one is accusing Mr Prescott of deliberately wanting to cause distress to Traveller and Gypsy communities. Far from it, the Labour policy on this issue appears to be enlightened and a genuine attempt to resolve what many see as an age-old but perfectly resolvable problem.

Our story reveals that there has been a genuine attempt by the ODPM to solve this problem and that Traveller groups support the government's actions. But, unfortunately it has been soured by what may be the intoxication of power. There are some really frightened people out there. Talking to members of the Gypsy and Traveller communities you can sense real fear in their voices. This is the sharp, ugly end of politics.