Jacob Rees-Mogg's attempts to shame communities into backing fracking won't work - David Behrens

The budget last week was the fiscal equivalent of what you’d expect to happen if a 10-year-old stole the keys and tried to drive his mum’s Range Rover to McDonald’s. He’d have hit a tree before getting out of the driveway.

Kwasi Kwarteng may have thought he knew how to fast-pedal the economy but we soon discovered he was as lost as a minicab driver without a map. Never has a government crashed and burned so quickly – and this is an administration without the pluck or personality to crawl smiling from the wreckage.

So as the dust settled and the pound went through the floor, even the Tory stage managers who sent Liz Truss to Downing Street must have wondered whose side she and her Junior Showtime cast of characters were actually on. Who was pulling their strings?

Let’s put it this way: it was a good budget for the energy companies. No new windfall tax and the spectre of hydraulic fracturing resurrected across large swathes of North and East Yorkshire.

The PM’s assertion that this method of energy production – fracking by any other name – would reduce Britain’s dependence on gas from overseas and the likelihood of power cuts did not stand serious scrutiny.

It wasn’t meant to; government proposals seldom are. They are platitudes put before us in the hope that we will wander away because we don’t understand the science but don’t want to admit it. The same goes for the value of the pound.

But in the case of fracking, the arguments are already well known, and a persuasive lobby mobilised in opposition. And the Government seems in no doubt as to who is pulling those strings. It’s Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, said Jacob Rees-Mogg – who despite looking as if he’s just stepped out of the picture on a box of Quality Street is somehow now the Business Secretary.

Rees-Mogg’s plan to defeat those crypto-Communists who want to protect their landscape from being drilled within an inch of its life is to have fracking sites designated as nationally important pieces of infrastructure – a move which would remove local residents from the process of granting consent.

Lateral thinking like that is very rare in government, which makes it all the more of a travesty that it is being used against the community, rather than for its benefit. Why do politicians get creative only when they’re being Machiavellian?

Rees-Mogg knew that his boss’s campaign promise to allow fracking where there is measurable local support for it, is incompatible with actual drilling. No community will ever vote in favour. So he’s now trying to shame them into thinking it is their patriotic duty to tolerate “a higher degree of risk and disturbance” while there’s an energy crisis.

But in riding roughshod over legitimate public concerns – many of them germinating in Conservative heartlands – he is also choosing to ignore a few inconvenient truths about fracking. The first is the admittedly vague conclusion last week by the British Geological Survey that there remained “knowledge gaps” about the safety of the process and its likelihood to induce earthquakes.

The second and less arguable anxiety is that it won’t work anyway, at least not in the UK. This is now the contention of the founder and a former PR director of Cuadrilla, the oil and gas exploration company that drilled three wells in Lancashire and held 18 exploration licences in Yorkshire until Boris Johnson’s government put everything on hold three years ago.

This pair have now acknowledged that while there is indeed shale gas beneath Britain it is neither feasible nor economic to extract it. They learned this while trying to do so over the Pennines.

What’s more, they say, the output would be a drop in the ocean of the UK’s energy requirements. We would need to accommodate thousands of wells over the next half century to replace even 10 per cent of our natural gas. It’s not a quick fix.

The expense and red tape involved with drilling in Britain put them off, too, and that is presumably why Rees-Mogg is now falling over himself to placate them. But he must know the ship has already sailed.

Meanwhile, the 2019 moratorium has been placed on the bonfire of government vanities – policies that seemed expedient at the time. The signature on the bottom of that document, incidentally, was that of the Energy Minister of the day – one Kwasi Kwarteng. It will not be the last of his plans to turn to ashes.