How long do you suppose it takes Chris Huhne to shop for the most competitive energy bill for all seven of his houses? Ages, I reckon. If he had been driving during that infamous speeding incident on the M11 — and everyone knows, of course, that he wasn’t — then this would surely have been why. Racing home, for another thrilling evening of comparing the damn meerkat.
The spectre of rising energy prices is one of those bleak and terrible things that you know will have horrible consequences, but with which you cannot quite grapple until the bill comes. The spectre of the Energy Secretary and Prime Minister trilling on about it is an annoyance of a more visceral sort. ‘We want people to check their tariffs, and we want people to switch to cheaper tariffs,’ says Huhne. As if he genuinely doesn’t realise that that’s a week of my life gone, right there.
I haven’t the time. I’ll have to find the gas meter, which I could swear moves month by month, and then the electricity meter, and then tell which is which. Then I’ll have to spend an hour finding old bills with a torch at the filing cabinet in the shed, and then I’ll have to figure out what a therm is. Then I’ll type them all in and get a variety of quotes which are sometimes monthly, sometimes bi-annual and sometimes, inexplicably, deca-annual, and not mind because there’s a picture on the same screen of a fat opera singer with a funny moustache, whom I’d like to kick in the face. I know it’s not his fault. But I would. I’d like to kick him in the face.
Huhne and Cameron do say, of course, that they’d like all this to be simpler. But how simple? As simple as buying, say, rail tickets? Because it’s a renowned triumph, that system. There is nothing you could say to me, nothing at all, which would make me understand why it costs £220 to get to Manchester. I’m booking last minute? What of it? What do you care? It’s not like you’re laying on a special train made of gold going straight to my door. Is it?
These are the costs of life, and chivvying away at them is a full-time job. But I’ve already got a full-time job. Lots of us, even now, do. Cameron and Huhne wrote about the energy prices thing on a website called moneysavingexpert.com, run by a financial journalist called Martin Lewis who is clearly very clever, but can’t be much fun at parties. I feel a special sort of weariness looking at his site; one so heavy and distinct that the Germans probably have a word for it. If I switch my bank account, mortgage, credit cards, energy suppliers, insurance and broadband, it always wants to tell me, I could save £££!
But I won’t save £££, will I? Because I’ll switch my cards, and then my cheap advance train ticket payment will bounce because I’ll make it with the wrong one, and then I’ll get fined by my bank when I buy a vastly expensive new one because I’ve taken all my money out of it to chase an extra 0.7 per cent interest for the last three weeks of November and qualify for some Amazon vouchers, and I won’t be able to put it back in because I’ll be in the middle of switching broadband provider, not that I could plug the laptop in anyway because I only got halfway through changing my energy provider before I collapsed, repeatedly face-butting the keyboard in drooling self-loathing boredom and now they’ve cut me off.
What I resent, really, is living in a world where it’s not just a given that I want to save £££, and somebody else doesn’t do it for me. And what I also resent is the implicit coalition sanction of the world I do live in, where we’re all walking around as con men’s marks, and if we don’t get off our backside and save £££ then that’s our own lookout and we’re fair game for anybody. If the ruling ideology of this period is remembered for anything at all, it’ll be the endless presumption of these people that nothing is their problem; the way they want us to not only start schools and run the welfare system, but now regulate our own industries, too. This is the last straw. I won’t. I’m busy. Sod off.
• To Southwark Cathedral the other day, to fill in as the Dimbleby in a Question Time-style debate in front of sixth-formers from local schools. Simon Hughes was one of the panellists. At half-time, backstage in the, uh, rectory, he strolled in, deep in conversation with three of the audience. To be offensively reductive, for the sake of smooth anecdotage, they were a white male, a black male and a girl of East Asian extraction. They were talking about the subject which seems to make London youth more passionate than any other, which is police powers of stop and search.
‘How many times have you been stopped and searched?’ asked Hughes. ‘None,’ said the white guy. ‘None,’ said the girl. ‘Forty,’ said the black guy.
‘Fourteen?’ I said. ‘Forty,’ he said. Forty. Four zero. He can’t have been more than 17. I appreciate there are reasons why the police are disproportionately keen to search black kids; I appreciate this is one anecdote and may, in the wider scheme of things, tell us nothing. But still. I can’t get the three of them out of my head. None, none, forty. Bloody hell. Forty.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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