NL: I have seldom heard such a farrago of wishful thinking and muddle.

OL (laughing): I detect that Nigel doesn’t agree with me!

NL: I don’t know where to start, the wishful thinking or the muddle. Perhaps some of the muddle can be disposed of first. I’m so glad to hear Oliver expressing a view which the Conservative party — because of the influence, I suspect, of Zac Goldsmith — has been a bit quiet about lately. It has been hostile to nuclear power, which is very foolish. This, coupled with the hostility to coal, means we have a serious problem, with demand for electricity, at anything like the present price, far outstripping the capacity to generate it. We have a real crisis, and we’re not the only ones; other European countries do too.

So that’s an energy security problem; but we have ample supplies of coal. Not merely do we have it, but many other countries do too, and coal, unlike oil and gas, tends to be located in parts of the world where you don’t need to have any great worries. So there isn’t really an energy security problem provided that we’re prepared to use coal, and we should be prepared to do so if it’s economic. But even with the imported gas from Russia or wherever, all you need to do is have adequate gas storage. The Russians need the money so badly that they are going to have to sell the gas. They’re not going to stop selling it, except for a short period, in order to exercise geopolitical leverage. So all we need to do is add adequate storage to cover ourselves over that period. It’s a relatively simple and cheap and obvious thing to do. And as for oil, there’s so much oil in the world. When I was Energy Secretary, people were talking about peak oil then, and there’s no such thing, it’s nonsense — the price may have to go up a bit, that’s all.