Energy debate still making the weather

The Cabinet Office is the ministry charged not just with ensuring governmental efficiency but also with contingency planning in case of disaster or emergency.

But when a huge storm blew into the south of England on Monday last week, the day of St Jude, their response was more Hey Jude.

The civil servants seemed to say “Na na na na” to the tempest while telling everyone else to batten down the hatches. Either that or they simply forgot that there’s currently a massive crane on top of their building.

Sure enough first thing the wind blew down was the giant hoist smashing it through the department’s roof, shutting the busy thoroughfare of Whitehall and causing traffic jams around Westminster.

Jam of another sort was occupying Lib Dem backbencher Tessa Munt who managed to secure a debate in parliament on the threat to traditional British preserves. She claimed plans to reduce the sugar content will amount to nothing short of the “end of the Great British breakfast as we know it”.

Perhaps the Cabinet Office couldn’t cope with such a storm in a breakfast teacup. This is, after all, the department that told people to stockpile petrol in response to a threatened fuel tanker strike last year only for a woman to unfortunately blow herself up a few days later.

Though, given the state of the current debate over energy, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to see staff from the Department for Energy out in a thunderstorm, trying to catch lightning in a bottle to feed it into the grid. Just as it has every week since Ed Miliband’s landmark speech promising a power price freeze, energy dominated Prime Minister’s Questions and the rest of the agenda.

Energy Secretary Ed Davey came to the Commons on Thursday to make the annual energy statement. This isn’t usually a landmark event but, in the current climate, it attracted more attention than ever before.

Annette Brooke like Munt another Lib Dem female backbencher, actually THE other female Lib Dem backbencher even seemed to be sporting a new set of glasses for the occasion. Though the striking red frames gave her the look of eccentric dresser Su Pollard, best known for playing Peggy the chambermaid in Croft and Perry’s classic holiday camp-set sitcom. It seemed appropriate given energy prices are extremely Hi-de-Hi!

There wasn’t much ho-de-ho but for one laugh when Davey set out his ambition to make it much easier to switch energy suppliers.

Currently it takes about five weeks he wants that reduced first to one week, then to just 24 hours. Seemingly without irony he explained, however, that this change “won’t happen overnight”. It was a line worthy of Jeffrey Holland’s camp comedian character Spike.

This was the second big energy event of the week after the top dogs at the Big Six energy companies were called before a select committee to explain recent price rises. With the bosses lined up in front of them they might as well have made it a Maplin’s holiday camp knobbly knees contest for all the information the members got out of them.

Most effective was Labour’s John Robertson fat, gruff and likeable, just like Ted Bovis in Hi-de-Hi! He seemed to give up on getting any answers and just repeatedly told the energy company chief executives how much people distrusted them.

One explained that he’d felt the same way until he got a well-paid job working for one of the companies.

His humour was unintentional, but if the in-house comedians at the likes of Maplins told ’em like that perhaps the nation’s holiday camps would still be a going concern.