It will likely only be brief, but the government is in danger of looking half-sensible. Not only has John Healey backtracked from imposing a Capital Gains Tax rise on business, but the new energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh has this morning announced that the development of the Jackdaw gas field can go ahead.

The case for it is overwhelming, even on environmental grounds. The gas, which the owners say could start flowing within months, will be fed directly into the UK gas grid, with fewer carbon emissions than the gas it will displace: liquified natural gas (LNG) imported by ship from the US and elsewhere.

Critics keep parroting the line that it won’t take a penny off consumers’ gas bills because ‘it will just be sold on global markets at the global price’, but this is fundamentally untrue. There is no global gas price: wholesale gas prices are highly regionalised owing to the expense of transporting gas over large distances where no pipeline system exists. North Sea gas will be cheaper than imported LNG gas, though it won’t be enough to counter the general rise in gas prices this year because Jackdaw will only account for 6 per cent of UK production.

As for other possible new fields in the North Sea, forget........

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