Ministers can’t get out much these days without being heckled, especially by green campaign groups such as Just Stop Oil. So no surprise that last week the secretary of state for energy security and net zero, Claire Coutinho, struggled to make herself heard above the din of demonstrators in the hall as she delivered a speech at a business conference.
Her message was definitely not what those demonstrators wanted to hear (though they aren’t in the listening business). Coutinho criticised what she called the “net zero leviathan of central planning” and said that products designed to meet this target should not be “forced on British consumers”.
In one respect the quietly formidable Coutinho has been as good as her word. The government has postponed by
