Hot Off the Agenda

Mere experts are again seeking to muddy the pristine waters of market forces and profitable frackability by blaming climate change for the recent heatwave and the disastrous fires that resulted. Utilising nothing more substantial than the once fashionable but now hopelessly passé and un-British expedients of "evidence" and "scientific method", an international coalition of citizens of nowhere calculated that climate change was most likely to blame. Forest fires killed sixty-four people in Portugal, where period of official mourning was declared; such emotional measures stand in marked contrast to the buccaneering sang-froid here on the mainland, where Kensington and Chelsea council have kept calm and carried on charging rent to at least one victim of the Grenfell Tower mishap. In a similar spirit, Britain's leading liberal newspaper and its social inferiors in the free and cantankerous press have decreed that the effects of climate change remain unworthy of the front pages; at best, they are classified as Environment stories, on a par with such categories as Sport, Entertainment, Dating and World News. No doubt this sense of priority explains why the jabbering journalistic homunculus now playing at being the Environment Secretary had nothing at all to say.