Oil

Algy Cluff is the longest-serving oilman in the North Sea. He was one of the first to drill for oil there, in 1972, and at the last government handout of drilling licences, two years ago, there he was again, making a handsome gas discovery. Now 76, he’s also the least likely oilman you can imagine. Tall, rangy, dressed in Savile Row pinstripes; he is no J.R. Ewing. His diffident, patrician voice is so gentle that I have to turn my tape recorder up to transcribe this interview. Cluff’s Who’s Who entry lists membership of 11 clubs. But there is no clubman stuffiness about him. He’s full of wonderful anecdotes, many

Amber Rudd isn’t a flashy politician; her office at the Department for Energy and Climate Change has almost no personal touches. She has a poster on the wall for the new Edinburgh tram (she was a student there). Her one concession to vanity is a framed ‘Minister of the Year’ award from this magazine: awarded for uprooting the legacy of the Liberal Democrat energy policy and being (in the words of the commendation) the ‘slayer of windmills’. It was, perhaps, an exaggeration: she hasn’t brought down any of Britain’s 5,215 onshore wind turbines. But she has been busy pruning back the green subsidies that her department had become used to

Just after last year’s general election, George Osborne delivered a budget that he hailed as proof that his policies were working. ‘The British economy I report on today is fundamentally stronger than it was five years ago,’ he crowed, as he started to detail the record number of jobs created and a growth rate that had accelerated past our neighbours. ‘Our long-term economic plan is working. But the greatest mistake this country could make would be to think all our problems are solved.’ As it turns out, this final sentence summed things up the best. There was growth but a whole lot of debt as well. The national debt today

What is George Osborne’s Living Wage? Is it a ploy to shift cost from the taxpayer to the employer by reducing in-work benefit claims; or a sop to Tory MPs who were bombarded with angry questions about earnings inequality during the election, as well as a neat way of turning one of Labour’s few effective lines of attack? Or is it a principled act of fairness, acknowledging that the lowest earners bore the brunt of the recent recession? Knowing how the Chancellor operates, it is probably all of the above except the last: he is, as Sir Samuel Brittan once remarked, ‘one of those people who do the right things

A doff of my flat cap to Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who has been made a peer, a Treasury minister and George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ supremo. The metro-politan media is busy trying to find reasons why this project for improved links between northern cities plus elements of devolution is a bad idea, or has ulterior motives behind it. The Guardian, for example, reports that ‘critics of’ Manchester’s Labour leader Sir Richard Leese think he has been ‘lured’ into championing Osborne’s plan ‘by the prospect of a bigger empire’; and that while Leese and his chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein have pulled off ‘breathtaking property deals’ (there’s a

Helge Lund was widely expected to go into domestic politics when he ended his successful tenure as head of Statoil, the Norwegian state oil and gas company. Instead, he was hired to run BG Group, the troubled former exploration arm of British Gas, but on a promise of such ludicrously rich terms — up to ten times his Statoil salary — that shareholders, the media and Vince Cable howled in protest. An embarrassed BG board had to scale back the offer, though it remained pretty fat and as I wrote at the time, ‘no mention of Lund, however good he turns out to be, will ever omit a jibe at

BP’s profits are down, and the oil giant is slashing up to $6 billion out of its investment plan for the year. At Shell, the cut could amount to $15 billion over the next three years. At troubled BG, still waiting for new chief executive Helge Lund to arrive, capital spending will be a third lower than last year. I wrote recently of ‘consequences we really don’t need’ as the oil price continues to plunge: cheering though it is for consumers (and good for short-term growth) to find pump prices at a five-year low, the full impact will not be felt until a decade hence, when projects cancelled now might