The Liberal Democrats want the green bank to be a proper bank. But Whitehall's powerbase is determined to frustrate them
The Treasury is the most powerful department in Whitehall, but it is busy making itself unpopular even by its own abrasive standards. Jeremy Heywood, the most judicious of civil servants, was recently heard to say that the government's attempt to create a new green bank had become a battle of "everybody against the Treasury". Everyone, it seems, including the prime minister's wife.
The green investment bank has become a kind of philosopher's stone ? designed to help turn the UK's currently very low number of billions of pounds for green energy into loans underwriting 100s of times that amount. The aim is to get up and running the kind of renewable energy providers the country is going to need in a generation.
There are many greenies in the government. Inside the Cabinet Office there is Oliver Letwin who has left behind the days when he commuted weekly to New Zealand for the bank NM Rothschild. He's supposed to have flown so much he was once awarded with BA's award for that year's most frequent flyer. Now he's the agenda's most ardent champion.
Inside the department, Conservative Greg Barker is a man so passionately green he is said to have camped in the office of one official until they reinserted into legislation an especially environmentally sound item. There's Sam Cam and Steve Hilton both with illicit green voting pasts. But all are being outgunned by the Treasury.
So Nick Clegg convened a meeting with the intention of breaking the impasse. His man in the environment ministry, Chris Huhne, has become a "hero" to green campaigners, locked in a war of attrition with Treasury officials who wanted it to remain a fund, not a full bank. The liabilities of a GIB would have to go on the national balance sheet, they argued, and so the UK would lose its triple AAA rating. Huhne, a former bond analyst, wasn't cowed.
But Clegg's attempt to force a resolution was frustrated by the chancellor not turning up. Though the idea of a GIB is Osborne's own from opposition, he hasn't attended a single meeting. Osborne, colleagues say, is reticent to take on his officials after seeing Michael Gove duffed up for taking on his.
Lord Howell, Osborne's father-in-law, is said to be a climate-change sceptic at the heart of the Cameroon family, running a rival energy policy to Chris Huhne's. Currently a foreign office minister, he was energy secretary in Thatcher's first government, coined the word "privatisation" and now runs an energy thinktank. Said to prefer energy politics as geopolitics rather than the trendy green movement, so it's not hard to see why Howell would loathe the idea of a public bank.
Those present at Thursday's meeting say Clegg was pretty irritable. He told the meeting of 800lb-gorilla cabinet ministers they were failing to get across its message that it was "the greenest government ever". because it raises taxes.
Clegg said as much and that a form of words needed to be found - there is a view the government has been successful on the deficit because they agreed a line and stuck to it. Some civil servant is busy now working up a similar sentence that encapsulates what the government is doing on green growth.He told colleagues that they will now have a "green week" in early March in which they will all be expected to trumpet their environmental credentials. Whether it includes a GIB is still TBC.
Clegg is said to be persuaded that green jobs, lifestyle and industry is a way of enticing those "small L" liberals who deserted Labour over Iraq to stick with the Lib Dems. He gets that the environment is key to his bid to be the party of the centre, but party political advance is not a concern for Treasury mandarins.
Sorry, that seat's taken
Tory MPs have long been visiting a man called Roger Pratt whose job it has been to assuage their fears about the forthcoming boundary review, when the Commons will be shrunk from 650 to 600 seats. And Cameron told them all in a meeting of the 1922 committee that those displaced will get a different constituency or a place in the Lords.
For instance, Tracey Crouch's Kent seat may well get divvied up between neighbouring constituencies. In their more Back-to-Basics moments male Tory MPs have been heard to say: "Everybody wants a piece of Tracey".
But everyone also wants a piece of Malcolm. The former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind is assumed to be leaving the Commons for the Lords. When Shaun Bailey, who stood unsuccessfully for the Tories in a neighbouring seat at the last election, was announced as one of the PM's "big society" ambassadors last weekend, these MPs got jittery that the very, very safe Kensington seat was being earmarked for him. The word is it is being lined up by the chancellor whose Tatton seat might be carved up in the review. A seat that is lodged between Osborne's home and his office would certainly cut down his commuting time.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/17/treasury-nick-clegg-green-agenda
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