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Bernard Ingham: An Energy Secretary who's dancing in the dark
YOU will be seeing less of me on television now that John Sergeant has abandoned his ballroom dancing career for the cruise-liner lecture circuit. Editors will have no excuse for screening my contribution to Sergeant's first rave TV performance, in Paris, in November 1990.
I should perhaps explain why I got in the act. As a civil servant, I
had no status in Margaret Thatcher's Tory leadership election woes. But I had a duty to the media to see that they could cover the outcome properly.
So I arranged for a microphone to relay whatever she said to a "pool" of journalists to whom she would give her reaction to the election result to the scores of reporters in the other half of our Embassy courtyard, all up against deadlines.
I noticed that this microphone had disappeared while Sergeant was doing his sorely ill-informed live broadcast – he said she would not be coming to speak to the world just as she descended on him – so, rather put out by this interference with my arrangements, I ran down the steps after Mrs Thatcher asking: "Where's the microphone?"
Given the abuse I have received since, Ingham's first press liaison law is that you cannot help the media with impunity.
My second law is that somebody always gets it wrong. This is currently being amply demonstrated by a combination of Ed Miliband, our new Secretary for Energy and Climate Change, and the Environment Agency, which ended its annual conference last night.
The UK never, of course, has a Department of Energy until it runs slap bang into an energy crisis. We last got one in the middle of an oil, coal and political crisis in 1974 only to lose it during the North Sea years of energy plenty in the 1990s. Lord Carrington asked me to join it five minutes after it was formed.
Since the lights have not yet gone out, we still do not have a fully-fledged Department of Energy, even though the nation would grind to a halt without coal, oil, gas and nuclear power.
Instead, we have a Department cobbled together out of Green global warming fanatics from Defra – the old Environment department – who see no place for low-carbon nuclear and realists from the old DTI who are deeply concerned about the security of our energy supplies.
The "Green" Miliband and his Minister of State, Michael O'Brien, have in their first few weeks amply demonstrated which faction of their department has the upper hand by their public utterances. While being careful to say we need nuclear, they have waxed lyrical about unpredictable, totally unreliable and highly expensive wind power.
And so inevitably Miliband turned up at this week's annual conference of the politically correct Environment Agency, which runs away with roughly 1bn of the public's money every year.
The first question we have to ask ourselves in examining this outlay is whether we consider the nation is a better place to live after the Agency's 12-year tenure.
Do we sleep sounder in our beds when it is raining? Not on the basis of its flood prevention in Yorkshire and elsewhere. Can we see an end to house building on flood plains? Not that I have detected. Is our coastline likely to be better protected? More likely to be abandoned to the waves, it seems.
Do we think the Agency will preserve the green belt? Far from it, what with Gordon Brown dead keen on what he pretentiously calls eco-towns and the Government's mad desire to concrete over the whole of the South East.
Is Britain a cleaner, tidier place? Is fly-tipping under control? Not that I have noticed. Frankly, the place is a dump.
Is our wild, unspoilt countryside in safe hands? You must be joking. Why, this very organisation – this so-called Environment Agency – is actually proposing to build wind "farms" down some of our lovely
river valleys.
Contrary to what it seems to think, the turbines won't power a thing if the wind doesn't blow. They are also by common consent among those who have studied their economics the most expensive and unreliable option for reducing carbon emissions. What is more, we consumers foot the bill for this waste.
By their deeds shall ye know them. My advice is that with Miliband and Co, and the Environment Agency around, you would be wise to invest in a home electricity generator if you want to be sure you can watch Strictly Come Dancing – minus, of course, Sergeant and me.
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Weather for Yorkshire
Friday 25 May 2012
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