It’s good to be back on the back benches

After the shale gas vote, I was literally sent to Coventry – to visit the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre. It is a remarkable facility that helps take batteries from development through to production. It means companies only need the hundreds of millions of pounds in investment once they have shown that their product works and is saleable. It was funded by the Faraday Battery Challenge, and I was there to announce a further £221 million of taxpayers’ money. This is one of the rather better ways the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy spends money, while some of our policies seem designed to ruin industry. I am particularly concerned about steel, where the price of energy is, in normal times, about 60 per cent more than our competitors. We then give subsidies to steel to keep their operations open. The emissions trading scheme makes this worse, as they lose credits if they do not produce loss-making steel, which they cannot sell. This ought to be sorted out, but the Treasury does not seem interested.

On the way back from Coventry, the news that Liz Truss was resigning came through. Liz is an admirable person and I supported what she wanted to do. Unfortunately, it did not work. The moment she went, the telephone started buzzing with potential candidates and slates. I wanted Boris back, as he had the mandate and his removal was a mistake. His campaign started well but then ran out of steam. This was clear by Sunday morning, when my slumbers were disturbed by the great man himself prior to the Laura Kuenssberg programme. Unlike the famous farmer, the lark is not my morning alarmer, so I was not entirely gruntled by so early a call.