Fashion model Daisy Lowe has been recruited to advertise heat pumps by posing in Jane Austen-style regency clothes at Muncaster Castle in Cumbria. I’ve no idea whatsoever why the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero thought a privileged model parading around a grand stately home would encourage plebs like us to install heat pumps but then I’m not Ed Miliband.
And yes, before you ask, taxpayers are picking up the bill for the advert (but don’t worry, a Department for Energy spokesman insisted the campaign “met strict value for money criteria”, so that’s ok). Has the Government completely lost the plot? This patronising twaddle arrived in the same week as it was revealed the incoming boss of Labour’s Great British Energy will earn up to £525,000 a year – potentially three times the £166,786 salary of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer – and be allowed to work from home two days a week.
The eye-watering pay packet on offer emerged in a job advert for the chief executive role at the publicly-owned company. They will earn a base salary of £350,000 but be entitled to performance-related pay of up to half that amount.
Think of how many hard-up pensioners could benefit from that eye-watering sum.
I am beginning to wonder if Mr Miliband is a secret Reform UK or Tory plant. Surely he can’t seriously believe this is the sort of thing that is going to win Labour the next election?
Not content to bring the country, already facing the highest industrial energy prices in Europe, to its knees, he has to troll us, too!
We should be looking towards energy security but buying the kit from China at a cost of billions of pounds while our own factories and steelmakers shut down, bankrupting British industry, and forcing homeowners to spend thousands of pounds on new heat pumps that may not be suitable for their homes is no way forward.
At least not for a sane country. Neither is carpeting the countryside with huge new pylons, or forcing North Sea oil firms out of business. But both seem high on the agenda.
And neither is the idea that we can lead the world by example. Other countries will be falling over themselves with laughter as the arrogant Brits make fools of themselves with a net zero pipe dream.
We are living in increasingly dangerous times and, as I may have pointed out once or twice in this column, we have idiots at the helm.
