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Britain's energy policy is often ascribed to ‘Red’ Ed Miliband and his amanuensis Miatta Fahnbulleh, who has succeeded him as Energy Secretary. But they did not do it alone. As can happen in the arts, mentors behind virtuosi go under-acknowledged. Who moulded them?
Schubert was taught by the largely forgotten Simon Sechter. Shostakovich studied under Alexander Glazunov. Who he? How cruel is fame.
In front of the Commons public accounts committee sat Britain’s five leading energy officials. Here were the Sechters and Glazunovs to Red Ed and Moonbeam Miatta.
Clive Betts MP wished to check a figure. Was it true we were paying up to £8billion a year to wind farm operators to switch off their windmills? Mr Betts (Lab, Sheffield SE) found this astonishing. The civil servants were less fazed. One murmured: ‘We’re working very hard to bring that down.’
Mr Betts struggled to maintain his Christian charity. ‘I don’t doubt everyone’s working very hard,’ he snapped, ‘but the estimate is that the public purse is spending seven to eight billion pounds so wind turbines can lie idle.’
A long pause. Eventually the official conceded, creamily: ‘That’s the estimate of constraint costs.’ Such deftness of touch! In that answer we cognoscenti could hear the cadence of genius.
The reply came from Fintan Slye, head of the National Energy System Operator. That really was his surname. Brother Slye was of the Irish persuasion but the language he spoke was pure Whitehall-ese. Nearby sat Jonathan Brearley, permanent secretary at the Energy department, the Sir Humphrey who used to supervise Mr Miliband and has now won Ms Fahnbulleh in the raffle. When he mentioned Ms Fahnbulleh he touched his chest and spoke with a possessive air. He was proud of his little chick. Antonio Salieri may once have discussed the young Beethoven in similar fashion.
British energy policy is a disaster. Net Zero has made our prices among the highest in the Western world. Ms Fahnbulleh this week danced a hokey-cokey by agreeing to a new gas field but hours later indicating she will block a new oil field. Labour sees the economic problem but is in a panic about losing votes to the Greens.
Fintan Slye, head of the National Energy System Operator, spoke 'pure Whitehall-ese'
Jonathan Brearley, permanent secretary at the Energy department, kept sniffing and fiddling with his nose
Could there be power cuts this winter? Messrs Slye and Brearley would not put things in such stark terms. They were too busy gassing – if gas be the verb – about ‘delivery arrangements’ and ‘threat perspectives’ and those ‘constraint costs’ which mean we give billions to stop windmills on, er, windy days. The grid cannot cope with fluctuations in generation that Net Zero has made inevitable.
The committee heard that the system had become terribly tangled. That is what happens when political dogma warps capitalism.
Mr Brearley, who kept sniffing and fiddling with his nose, was an adroit buck-passer. ‘I suggest we ask Tim to talk about that,’ he said, or versions thereof. Tim was Tim Jarvis, head of Ofgem. He had the voice of a Dalek.
Tim, a hand-waver, was assisted by Beatrice Filkin, who also deployed her palms like ping-pong bats. With Aussie-style uplift she spoke of an ‘overarching spatial energy plan and getting that together at a holistic level’. Brother Slye also said ‘holistic’, three times. No word is a surer indicator of baloney.
The fifth member of the quintet was a drone called Emily Bourne, one of Mr Brearley’s underlings. In a defeatist voice she aspired to ‘speed up delivery through every bit of the value chain’. Not that value for the customer will henceforth be the sole focus. Someone proudly said Net Zero was now to be a shared ‘primary duty’. The eco crazies have soldered that into the state’s wiring.
‘Pathways’, ‘strategic policy objectives’, ‘central strategic network plans’, ‘full recasts’, ‘three-year cycles’, ‘strategic spatial energy plans’, ‘holistic network designs’: we had ’em all. Mr Brearley and damp Emily both said we were ‘on a journey’.
Mr Slye, meanwhile, was ‘working at pace’ to ‘back-check and feed-in to be consistent with the pathway’. The pathway to ruin.