Wicks Fix

The former Minister for the Relief of Impoverished Energy Company Shareholders, the granny-tagging Malcolm Wicks, has signed a deal with a transnational consortium to decommission the Sellafield nuclear accident, starting a month from now. Concerned as ever to ensure that the costs are borne by the appropriate people, Wicks agreed to an unlimited indemnity, at the expense of the taxpayer, if anything should go wrong. Thanks no doubt to his British values of hard work and fair play, Wicks ensured that the indemnity covers accidents which are the consortium's fault, thus pioneering the strategy Gordon has used more recently to force the banks into line. Doubtless with the usual New New Labour dedication to the truth, Wicks claims that the reason he rushed the deal through parliament, without consultation, was that the consortium threatened to pick up its toys and walk away if he didn't do as he was told. The deal, as any deal must be which includes corporate profits, taxpayers' money and nuclear waste, was so swooningly attractive that Wicks caved in and left it until ten weeks after the expiration of the time limit for queries by MPs before he deigned to make the details available.

According to a spokesbeing for the Department of Uranium, Petroleum and Extortion, "There is only an extremely small possibility of the indemnity ever being used", which no doubt is why the consortium turned it into a deal-breaker; "and so the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority assessed that the benefits" to someone or other "of engaging the contractor would far outweigh the small risk" to someone else "that the indemnity may be called upon". Malcolm Wicks is now the government's "climate change envoy"; a post for which he appears to have qualified in much the same fashion as the former Vicar of Downing Street qualified for his own transfiguration into a peace envoy, and which he will doubtless fulfil with much the same quality of result.