In response to a babyish interview on the Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Huhne wanted to put across two messages. One was that, as a longtime opponent of what he has described as the "failed technology" of nuclear power, he is not prepared to give any financial help to electricity companies wishing to replace our ageing nuclear power stations. (This we knew already since, although he didn't say so, any subsidy would be against EU rules.) The other was that "the most scandalous legacy of the past 13 years" is that we haven't been going all out for wind power, tidal power and wave power. This he now intends to remedy as the centrepiece of his policy.

Related Articles

All our ministers are 'Europe ministers' now

Britain's child snatchers are a scandal What is truly terrifying about putting Mr Huhne in charge of Britain's energy policy is that, like the rest of his Government colleagues, he clearly hasn't the slightest practical understanding of what is involved. Obviously, he has no idea of just how useless windmills are in providing any more than a derisory fraction of the electricity we need to keep our lights on and our computers running. The 3,000 already built provide on average no more electricity than a single medium-sized conventional power station, and the more we build, the more we will have to build CO2-emitting power stations, costing billions of pounds, simply to provide back-up for when the wind is not blowing.

Although the EU's new Industrial Emissions Directive has extended the time we are allowed to keep six of our ageing coal-fired power plants running, Mr Huhne will allow no new ones to be built unless they are fitted with "carbon capture and storage" – which, despite a Government-estimated cost of £14 billion, is never going to work.

There is no aspect of this Government's energy policy which is not based on wishful thinking and complete technical illiteracy. It talks of spending up to £30 billion on a Severn Barrage to supply "five gigawatts" of electricity, when in reality it would only intermittently produce on average 1.9 gigawatts, less than the output of a single coal-fired power station. For the same money, eight new nuclear plants could produce seven times as much power, reliably and round the clock.

Mr Huhne's only hope of keeping Britain's lights on – as he builds his thousands of hugely subsidised wind turbines – is that the largely foreign-owned electricity companies he appears to despise might build two dozen gas-fired power stations, putting us largely at the mercy of a highly unpredictable world gas market. This is precisely the danger that all the experts have been warning us against for so long.

There are only two possible outcomes of all those "green" delusions which Mr Huhne and Mr Cameron seem to share. First, our energy bills will soar to astronomic levels, pushing millions more households into "fuel poverty". Second, we can look forward to a time when power cuts are as common as they are in South Africa, which is now going for nuclear as hard as it can.

Britain is still the only country in the world already committed by law to cutting its CO2 emissions by more than 80 per cent over the next 40 years - although we emit less than 2 per cent of the world's total. In the name of fighting an imaginary problem, we are soon going to have an imaginary economy – and Mr Huhne's name will join all the others on its tombstone.