Martin Vander Weyer: The BBC should replace Robert Peston with Grayson Perry

Prediction, as Mervyn King once observed, is ‘a stab in the dark’. Who can say with confidence where the wholesale price of electricity will be in ten years’ time, let alone 45 years hence at the end of the contract struck by Energy Secretary Ed Davey with EDF of France for the building of the £16 billion Hinkley Point nuclear station? We can be pretty sure the price will be a lot higher than today’s and it’s not mad to think it might have doubled by 2023, which is the starting assumption of the EDF deal. David Cameron might be right that energy costs will be ‘lower than they might otherwise have been’ thanks to Hinkley, but Davey’s suggestion of a £75 annual nuclear discount on household bills by 2030 takes stabbing in the dark to a new level.

On the other hand, if the pattern of supply and demand changes in favour of the consumer by 2023, we may feel that we were outrageously legged over in guaranteeing the French a ‘strike price’ of £92.50 per megawatt hour. But they can’t possibly know that now, and nor can their Chinese partners, however many bugs they may have planted in the GCHQ switchboard.

So what can be said for certain about Hinkley? The hardest fact is that we urgently need it, because it replaces a chunk — about 7 per cent of total UK electricity demand — of coal and nuclear capacity that’s scheduled to close down. After months of wrangling over the strike price, this deal embeds nuclear power where it needs to be, at the core of UK energy strategy with cross-party support — however much Davey’s Lib Dem colleagues hate the idea — and improves the chance of several other new reactors being built over the coming decades.

We’ll pay top dollar every time, because we have to attract foreign investors and contractors in the absence of British firms with the requisite capacity or appetite, and because there’s no taxpayers’ money on the table.