I am writing this with a damp tea towel round my neck, a fan pointed at my face like an interrogation lamp, and the distinct sense that my office has been relocated to the inside of a panini press.
Outside, the Met Office has slapped a red extreme heat warning across half the country and Britain is on course to beat its June temperature record by a margin that would embarrass a sprinter. Forty degrees. In England. In a country that historically considers a barbecue a high-risk gamble.
And do you know what our political class has decided to do about it? Reverse. Gently, apologetically, but unmistakably into the hedge.
Let me be unfashionably blunt, because that is what an oven does to a man’s patience. On the single clearest day of evidence we have ever had, every major party in this country is busy softening, fudging or flat-out binning the one policy designed to stop the thermometer doing this again. And they are all, to a man and woman, doing it because they have caught a nasty case of Faragitis.
This is the bit that genuinely astonishes me. Reform has been admirably honest about its position, which is that net zero belongs, in deputy leader Richard Tice’s words, “in the dustbin”. The party wants to axe the energy department, rip up fracking restrictions and, in a phrase imported wholesale from across the Atlantic, “drill, baby, drill”. You can read it in their own words on Business Matters, and I almost respect the clarity. At least you know where you are with a man who wants to set fire to the future to save four quid on his gas bill this winter.
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