Energy Questions, 26 January
Waiting for the moment when it was ready to unleash questions to the Secretary of State for Energy upon perhaps 34 lost and lonely souls, the BBC's Democracy Live internet stream was broadcasting something it called "House of Commons sound". This consists of segments of high-pitched whine - a listening experience sadly otherwise lost from our lives since television went 24 hour - interrupted about every five seconds by a nice BBC lady with cut-glass vowels telling us what we were listening to.
The BBC has got it wrong though. Other than on those occasions when the House is being addressed by certain female denizens of the opposition front-bench, the high-pitched whine is not its sound. That is more like a long raucous babble, interrupted occasionally by the Speaker saying that the public doesn't like it. If the BBC were to bottle that and play it back while waiting for Chris Huhne to turn up, we would all feel a lot better prepared.
The sound receded and there was Mr Huhne, ready to do battle over something called the solar power feed-in tariff. Stripped of its jargon, this is a scheme where the government pays people with solar panels for the electricity they generate and send back into the national grid. A surprisingly large number of Labour MPs from Scotland and the north of England wanted to berate the Energy Secretary over this issue, immediately conjuring up an image of a Caribbean paradise north of Manchester where the sun beats down continuously from azure skies and canny householders count the fivers while their impeccably clean electrons whizz off down the wires. Quite where Scotland gets the solar power from to play in this league is anybody's guess. It may have something to do with the amount of excess radiation given off Alex Salmond's smug and rosy face after he has stuck another one to Cameron and the English.
Anyway, the tariff scheme is in trouble, because the government wants to halve the amount of money they pay the solar panel owners, and the courts have told them they can't, or at least not in the way they have gone about it. "Nothing can hide the sheer incompetence of the way the government has handled this" said Caroline Flint, who speaks for Labour on energy matters. Possibly not, though the Energy Secretary was certainly making good use of what cover he did have available. This included, apparently, the staunch support of the British Photovoltaic Association, always a great bunch of guys to have on your side, as well as the fact that the originator of the scheme was none other than Ed Miliband. In an earlier, and perhaps happier, existence, Mr Miliband once attended to the nation's energy needs, before unfortunately finding himself cast down as Leader of the Opposition.
Lucky is the cabinet minister who happens to have Mr Miliband as his predecessor. Mr Huhne - whose dealings in shifting the blame are a matter of some claim and counter-claim - played this luck at every opportunity. Listening to Mr Huhne's account of it, it is hard to imagine how hapless Mr Miliband could have made a worse hash of the policy. Specifically he stood accused of ignoring the German model and of failing to anticipate how the Chinese would get into the solar panel game and start knocking them out at 40p a sheet. The Germans, the Chinese and Ed Miliband: with that formidible trio of the country's traditional enemies arrayed against him, it is little wonder that Mr Huhne has fallen foul of the courts.
If there is one source of energy less reliable than sun from Scotland, it must be oil from the middle east, especially now the Iranians are threatening devilment in the Straits of Hormuz, through which we are reliably informed a fifth of the world's crude passes every day.
The Americans have sent an aircraft carrier and the Brits have sent a dinghy as back-up to keep the straits open. This, however, was not enough for Christopher Pincher, the Tory MP for Tamworth, who had energy security on his mind. Mr Pincher pressed upon the Energy Secretary alternative ways of securing access to the black stuff, including via something called the Iraqi Pipeline Across Saudi Arabia. This, one has to admit, does sound like a completely safe and utterly reliable option.
Except that, apparently, it isn't working at the moment. Much amusement in the chamber that said pipeline shares its initials, IPSA, with Parliament's standards authority, the body that also hands out the expenses. This has never been held to work.