Miliband at the Hay Festival

Environment Secretary David Miliband, son and heir of the family of comedians sired by the late Spike Miliband, shared a panel today at the Hay Festival with Solar Century's Jeremy Leggett and climate change author Mark Lynas.

David's brother Ed was also at Hay, together spreading the Brownite smile as wide as they could.

David's body language spoke volumes:

• he was the only member of the panel to remove his jacket
• the only one to put his foot on the table
• the most animated in both attack and defence
• he peppered his speech and head movements with mannerisms that would have been equally at home on Tony Blair
• and was the only one to spread his legs alarmingly wide while scratching the inside of his thigh.

What does this reveal about future energy policy? That, I feel, it is to be just as aggressively impotent as before.

That is, a policy of doing as little as possible to support the indigenous renewables industry or to harm road building and our love of cheap air flights, a policy pursued with reckless enthusiasm and empty promises.

Afterwards the Low Carbon Kid buttonholed the man, before he sprang off to join his family, and asked him: wasn't he scared by the fear that if the UK builds more nuclear power stations, then it would give the green light to other nations whose security and safety procedures were not quite as rigourous as ours?

He said: they already are building them.

Er, like Iran?

That's alright then.

The breathless complacency of the energy policy extends, then, to a breathless complacency about safety and peace in a more nuclear world.