Rumpus on the red corridor

The House of Lords’ committee rooms are not ordinarily the setting for a ruckus; but there was rumpus in the Moses Room on Tuesday night, when the greybeards were musing over the Energy Bill. A witness tells me that Baroness Worthington of Cambridge, also known as the environmental campaigner Bryony Worthington, who was elevated from relative obscurity to a Labour peerage in 2011, ‘exhibited appalling behaviour.’

Worthington was ‘screaming, gesticulating wildly, referring to the minister (Baroness Verma) as ‘you, you, you’, whilst pointing in her face,’ says my man in ermine. At the end of the outburst, it is claimed that Worthington’s ‘Labour colleagues were hanging their heads in shame and deeply embarrassed.’

What was all the fuss about? Why, the iniquities of the proposed Capacity Mechanism of course.

Worthington says that my source is exaggerating. ‘It was a hot day and it is late July,’ she explains.  But she concedes that ‘things did get a little over-heated.’