Hands in Pockets

In the trade minister Greg Hands, it is evident that Britain's vole-brained Minister for International Werritty has a worthy underling. A telegram has been released to Greenpeace under Freedom of Information rules, and the Government's innovative dynamism is immediately apparent in the fact that it was released first in its naked, unredacted glory and only shortly afterwards in the public version decently habited in blue pencil and wimpled in whitewash. Normal practice, in the interests of ministerial job security, would be to release them the other way round and thirty years apart; but it is, after all, quite difficult for ministers to get the sack these days. The telegram indicates that Hands lobbied Brazil on behalf of Shell and BP, although naturally the maintenance and strengthening of environmental regulations was absolutely tip-top priority for Her Majesty's Government and its jabbering environmental homunculus. Fortunately for his future directorships in the fossil fuel industry, Hands put the case for clean energy so incompetently that Shell and BP look set to benefit from deep-water drilling licenses and tax relief courtesy of the government of Brazil.