Now the Tories must make it their mission to repair the country

The centrepiece of Boris Johnson’s speech to Tory party conference this year was his Damascene conversion to the merits of wind farms. Some people used to sneer and say wind power wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding, he said — referring, of course, to himself, writing in 2013. Now, his post-Covid plan for Britain is wind farms powering every home by the end of the decade. But the Prime Minister was right first time.

When he was dismissing wind power, it was eye-wateringly expensive and was forecast to stay that way for the foreseeable future. No one envisaged, then, how global competition and technology would force prices down. The turbines being prepared for Dogger Bank wind farm, with their 100-metre blades, will be generating wind power at £40 per megawatt hour — less than half the price taxpayers will be charged for the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant under the deal disastrously negotiated by George Osborne.