Despite several days of anticipatory panic-buying, the threatened fuel protests failed to materialise on Wednesday. According to the BBC, campaigners were quick to declare that they never really wanted a big turnout anyway:

"Organisers said the campaign was meant to be symbolic and that it had put the government on the 'back foot'… Mr Spence, who was among a small group of protesters at the Shell refinery in Jarrow, on south Tyneside, said: 'We didn't want a lot of people here, I would rather there was just a handful of us'."

But the most amusing part of the report was from a refinery in Cheshire, where apparently two demonstrators turned up, only to be "frightened off by the size of the media pack"!