CHRISTOPHER BOOKER THE LAST WORD

Donald Tusk’s proclamation about Brexiteers without a plan hit the nail firmly on the head

Despite its horrified reception elsewhere, readers of this column will not be unfamiliar with the point so deliberately made by the European Council president, Donald Tusk, when he said “I’ve been wondering what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.”

In 2015, before the referendum, the Vote Leave campaign was presented with a long and detailed analysis showing why the only way for us to leave the EU completely without seriously damaging our economy was to join the European Free Trade Association, thus remaining in the European Economic Area with free access to the EU market (and no Irish border problem). Vote Leave, however, decided against proposing any specific exit plan as that would only provoke fractious argument.

After the referendum, Theresa May initially insisted that she still wanted “frictionless” trade with the EU, but was then persuaded by her ultra-brexiteers that she should trigger Article 50 quickly without any practical idea of how this could be achieved.

For two years we stumbled on through the negotiations, with the Brexiteers coming up with one unworkable proposition after another, none of which showed any understanding of the reality of what we were up against. Thus we have reached the present complete impasse, which has made it ever more likely that we could face the ultimate disaster of leaving without a deal.

I’m afraid Mr Tusk was entirely accurate in identifying the real cause of this insanely unnecessary shambles, the catastrophic consequences of which may be with us for decades to come.

Last Sunday it was revealed that a small family company run by the chairman of the Climate Change Committee, Lord Deben (John Selwyn Gummer), had received payments of more than £600,000, mainly from firms involved in renewable energy and electric cars.

To grasp the full significance of this story we must appreciate just how astonishingly influential is the Climate Change Committee (CCC) in driving Britain’s energy policy. It was set up under the Climate Change Act to advise the Government on how to meet its target of reducing Britain’s CO

2 emissions by 80 per cent.

Although the CCC likes to be called “independent” and its website boasts that its members are obliged to “act impartially and objectively”, and must “avoid conflicts of interest”, their record shows why they are all united in pressing the Government to go ever faster and further by every conceivable means, from promoting electric cars and “biomass” to offshore wind farms.

One CCC member is a director of an offshore energy firm. Another works for Drax, which receives annual subsidies of £700 million for converting its power station from coal to biomass. Deben himself, on becoming chairman of the committee in 2012, had to resign as chairman of the company building the world’s largest offshore wind farm.

Yet, of all the payments reportedly made to the Gummer family’s funds, the largest came from a firm heavily involved in electric cars, while others came from firms involved in biofuels and biomass (including Drax), as well as investors in offshore wind.

Deben insists that these payments were for work that didn’t involve climate change issues. According to his lawyer “allegations of conflict of interest and other improprieties are wholly false and misconceived”; and he “has, at all times, made disclosures in accordance with the advice he has been given by the House of Lords and the CCC”.

Make of this what you will. But now all this has been brought to light I know I am far from being alone in suspecting that we have not yet heard the end of this astonishing tale.

During last weekend’s enjoyable snowfall, I was intrigued by how often BBC reporters referred to its depth in inches, thus defying the BBC’S long-standing insistence that its employees should talk only in metric. I have often been amused to see its interviewers babbling away in millimetres to flood victims, only for these members of the public to reply that the water in their living room had been “five feet deep”.

From many years reporting on how Britain was metricated, I concluded that, for scientific purposes, the metric system has much to commend it. But for everyday human purposes, like cooking or announcing the weight of a Royal baby, the old imperial system is much more easily comprehensible and user-friendly.

Back in the Nineties, when we were faced with a final blizzard of enforced metrication to comply with EU directives, I was filmed by a young BBC interviewer, who scornfully claimed that no one under 40 any longer understood those obsolete old measures. When I asked how tall he was, he replied “five feet, eight inches”.

Needless to say, when the BBC broadcast the interview that exchange was omitted.