Why did David Cameron send Owen Paterson to Environment if he meant to sack him? Paterson knew and cared about his subject. He wore green wellies with panache, loathed Europe and wind turbines, and argued with everyone. He was a sop to the shires and a bulwark against Ukip. Yet like his colleague Michael Gove, he was found to be ‘toxic’. He has told the Sunday Telegraph that he blames his downfall on the ‘green blob’, on ‘highly paid, globe-trotting, anti-capitalist agitprop’.
Paterson had discovered that the toughest job in government nowadays is no longer foreign affairs or defence, awash in grand crises, whirling dervishes and expensive kit. A Middle East peace treaty is a doddle compared with bovine TB, flood defences, wind turbines, EU grants and renewables subsidies. Paterson found the ferocity of some green lobbyists akin to those in animal rights, purple with rage and immune to reason, humour or courtesy. They are the Ranters, Shakers and Diggers of our age, treating disagreement as a matter not of debate but of extermination.
I chair a substantial component of Paterson’s blob, the National Trust, and can see where he is coming from. Many supposedly ‘charitable’ groups are nothing of the sort. They are affinity sects with blatantly political programmes, justifying every campaigning excess as ‘saving the planet’. Some are fronts for the smartest money around, wind turbine subsidy, which as Paterson claims, spends vast sums of public cash ‘rewarding rich landowners, with undetectable effects on carbon dioxide emissions’. At a recent meeting in Lincolnshire, I was richly heckled on the glories of wind power by the Prime Minister’s father-in-law, no less. I followed Deep Throat’s admirable advice, ‘Always follow the money.
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