#FracktheNorth – George Osborne, his father-in-law and the dash for gas

Last week George Osborne’s climate-change sceptic father-in-law, the Tory Peer Lord Howell, gave us a typically measured Tory statement on shale gas. It was OK to extract it, provided it was not done in ‘sensitive’ Sussex, but in the ‘desolate’ North East. Amid the resulting outcry, he tried to rescue himself - at least from …