Normally perfectly attuned to what right-wing newspaper press barons want, Boris Johnson made an uncharacteristic blunder when he announced he wanted to see offshore wind farms generating enough electricity to power every home in the UK within a decade.
“He had no idea the Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere, a substantial landowner, considers wind farms to be unsightly and has long been resolutely opposed to them,” whispers my man in Whitehall. “Johnson was dismayed when the Mail immediately ran a piece saying the initiative could set the taxpayer back by £50bn and quoted a Tory MP wondering if the PM would actually deliver on the pledge.”
Johnson has been concerned about his relationship with the Mail – read by so many Conservative members and voters – after the paper became strongly critical of his government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, and had earlier demanded the scalp of Dominic Cummings after he broke the lockdown rules.
The paper’s most recent headlines about wind farms ought to have made its position clear enough to Johnson: “Wind farms ‘could CAUSE global warming’ by heating up the planet’s surface and taking up huge amounts of space”, “Wind farm FARCE” and “Offshore wind farms built to provide clean energy to the UK could be the ‘final nail in the coffin’ for more than 1,000 endangered seabirds, RSPB warns.”
Johnson also managed to antagonise a number of Brextremists around him, who have little time for what David Cameron once called “the green cr**”. In 2017, when Johnson backed the Daily Telegraph’s “war on red tape” campaign, he cited the UK’s renewable energy strategy as the number one most costly “EU-derived” policy at £4.7bn a year.
Environmentalists naturally welcomed what Johnson had to say about wind farms, but, all things considered, they’d now be well advised not to hold their collective breath. https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news/tim-walker-mandrake-on-boris-johnson-3746274?fbclid=IwAR1HFBRs4PA7zfK7sE1ujnA88Icy7nB-MHhrT1VdFnWDjheZApSFTfQ1ARo
0 Comments