Christopher Booker:

What is by far the most important Christmas and New Year present Theresa May could give the British people (apart, of course, from a sensible strategy for Brexit)? A clue to the answer might be an extraordinary talk reported on the front-page of last Monday’s Telegraph, given by Andrew Wright, formerly acting head and now a “senior partner” of our energy regulator, Ofgem.

Thanks, he warned, to our decision to phase out using fossil fuels to make electricity, in favour of relying increasingly on “intermittent” renewables such as wind farms, we will quite soon be facing such a “supply crisis” that this will make power cuts and blackouts inevitable. He even suggested that we may have to introduce a two-tier tariff structure: whereby only those who can afford to pay a much higher price can be guaranteed “as much electricity as they want”; while those millions who can’t will just have to get used to “sitting in the dark”. Unsurprisingly, Ofgem was quick to explain that Mr Wright was only speaking in a “personal capacity”. But all that made his remarks so astonishing was that he is the first senior figure responsible for our energy industry to admit the truth, still concealed by the Government, that to informed observers has long been glaringly obvious: that, as a nation, we are heading for an utterly crazy disaster. And most terrifying of all is the way that the politicians bringing this about are so blinded by groupthink that scarcely any seems aware of it.

There have already recently been windless days when all our 7,500 windmills were supplying barely 1 per cent of our electricity. Most of what we were using, not just to keep our lights on but our entire economy running, was being supplied by those coal and gas-fired power stations that our MPs, in the name of “decarbonising” our economy, are happy to see closed down – as they confirmed last July, by nodding through the so-called “Fifth Carbon Budget”.

I know I have said this far too often, but at last it is being openly acknowledged by an experienced energy expert sitting at the top of an organisation at the very heart of the crisis.

The prime cause of all this, of course, is the Climate Change Act, voted for in 2008 by all but five of our MPs, committing us, uniquely in the world, to become the only lemming to jump over the “decarbonisation” cliff – while China, India and so many other countries continue to build coalfired power stations like there is no tomorrow, as the cheapest way to make electricity.

The one person at the centre of power who has shown that he recognises this is Mrs May’s joint chief-of-staff, Nick Timothy, who, before entering No 10, memorably described the Climate Change Act as “a monstrous act of self-harm”.

Mrs May should ask him to set out on one side of A4 just why, unless we scrap that insane Act and wrench our energy policy back into the real world, we are heading for a catastrophe unparalleled in history. Then she should summon up the courage and common sense to act on it, before it is too late.