Green day has finally arrived

WHEN he is droning on and on about biofuels and carbon emissions and global warming and energy efficiency and renewable energy sources, you feel like grabbing him by the lapels and saying: “Bertie, give us a break will you?”

A long time ago, Margaret Thatcher responded to the small threat posed by the incipient ecology movement in Britain by declaring: “We are all green now.”

Of course, the Tories were anything but green — if you were looking for a colour that characterised the 1980s and early 1990s in Conservative Britain it was gun-metal grey.