I once had an editor who convinced herself that David Blunkett was not really blind. The mission she set me was to prove it.
It was one I chose not to accept, just as I ignored her instruction to give Conservative MP Michael Fabricant’s hair a tug to see whether his straw bonnet style was a wig.
Her misconception about David’s fraudulent eyesight seemed to have arisen from a dinner party she had attended with the former Home Secretary.
She claimed he had flirted with her. “He must have been able to see me,” she declared confidently. Sometime later, I was accompanying her to a party at a Labour conference and popped along to another gathering, promising to return.
As I was going in, I bumped into David coming out. It turned out he had somehow got wind of her earlier suspicions. “I’m off to tell your editor how lovely she’s looking tonight,” he grinned mischievously.
Aaarrrgh! His little joke could go terribly wrong. I could see my career nose-dive because she’d think I’d told him. I gave him a couple of minutes to depart and then raced back to be by my editor’s side.
And I spent the rest of the evening steering her around the crowded room as far away from David as possible to ensure they would never meet.
We are developing a similar blind spot towards climate change and the need to get to net zero. It’s as if we have forgotten that sea ice ten times the size of the UK has already melted in Antarctica.
And if this continues up north in Newfoundland, the Inuit population will start falling through their own ice. The UK may only emit one per cent of the world’s pollution, but it is responsible for 15 per cent of global fossil fuel investment.
Nigel Farage went to a petrol station in Derbyshire to double down on his pledge to abandon net zero targets and cancel what the Reform leader calls “lunatic” green subsidies. And he’s demanding that Rachel Reeves scrap the five per cent duty increase in motor fuel set for September.
The blind truth about net zero will see out the war in Iran - Nigel Nelson
|Getty Images
The Chancellor may yet do that if the Iran war continues and pushes petrol towards £2 a litre. But the time for that decision is not yet.
Not least because she needs to find the £400million the Treasury will lose from elsewhere. I get that net zero carries a cost, and 2050 seems far away. But losing our nerve now has long-term consequences.
We knew 50 years ago, for instance, that a growing elderly population would mean changes and we did nothing about it.
Successive governments could have raised pension age gradually by, say, a month a year. But to avoid making an unpopular decision, they waited, which meant suddenly jacking it up in bigger chunks to 66, 67 and 68 later.
If we can become energy self-sufficient using nuclear, wind and solar, the cost will go down. As opposed to drilling for more North Sea oil and gas sold on world markets, making us dependent on globally set prices.
Robert Palmer of campaign group Uplift told the Independent: "The only route to lower bills is to free ourselves from oil and gas through homegrown renewable energy. That is common sense.
”For the record, Lord Blunkett has been blind from birth. We had a long conversation about it as he gave me a lift back to London with a Labour Party chauffeur from a visit we’d been on."
I was curious to know what his image was of a world he had never seen. David accurately described the houses we were passing – whether detached, semi-detached or terraced.
He could tell the difference by the air pressure and sounds as we sped along. I never did tell my editor her appeal was merely down to the air she moved and the noises she made.
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