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.
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