On the whole, I subscribe to the view of the Prime Minister’s supporters that “Boris gets the big things right” (while getting lots of the smaller things wrong). He got Brexit right, and vaccination, and he is getting the Ukraine war righter than any other front-rank Western leader.

On Thursday, he is expected to announce his much-contested energy strategy. Unfortunately, he is being told that the Big Thing to get right in energy is the climate change ‘‘emergency’’, and the attainment of net zero by 2050. He must therefore, they go on, renew renewables. These will address the acute problem of energy security in the process, they say, since their energy is domestic.

This is back to front. The Big Thing emerging from the current energy crisis and consequent price shock is the immense importance of a supply which is balanced, secure and economic – and the immense danger of dreaming dreams rather than facing reality.

It is not true, for example, that wind power is cheap. If it is, why do we still subsidise it so heavily? Capital and operating expenses are high, as are the costs of system balancing and grid construction/maintenance.

Nor is it true that we can rely on renewables when the wind fails or the sun doesn’t shine. We need fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Nor is it true that voters, especially Tory voters, are so keen on “saving the planet” that they want the country infested with wind turbines. Opponents of fracking object to its supposed uglification of the countryside: it would be as nothing compared with, say, Scottish Power’s onshore scheme for east Suffolk or Sunnica’s plan for more than 2,700 acres of solar panels on the Suffolk/Cambridgeshire border.

To have expensive and unreliable energy in the modern world is like having no motorways or only 20th-century computers. That is the genuine emergency we face – impoverishment in the name of idealism.

What should the Beeb look for in its next political editor?

The BBC is slow in choosing a political editor to replace Laura Kuenssberg. We should not complain, however, because a different vision of the job is needed. It may take time to think through.

All recent incumbents – Andrew Marr, Nick Robinson, Ms K – have been highly talented, but unsuitable. They have been expected to hype up stories, seek exclusives and over-interpret. Their analyses, especially those on the website, inevitably slide into opinion. They have been beneficiaries, but also victims, of a star system rather than an information service.

Given the BBC’s duty to impartiality and accuracy, its political editor should be an inconspicuous personality. He/she should tell the listener or viewer what is happening without trying to add excitement or spin. He should speak only what he knows, avoid prediction and retain some modesty. He should not be trying to provoke leadership crises, splits, rows etc; nor, of course, should he conceal them. If he searches for scoops, he will tend to unbalance the corporation’s coverage. If the BBC cannot rise above lobby chatter, what other media will?

Within the BBC, journalists preen themselves on “speaking truth to power” but, given the compulsory nature of the licence fee, it is better to concentrate on speaking truth to the public.

I shall not name any candidate currently in the frame, since endorsement in this column would be the kiss of death, but the sort of reporter I admire is one in whom no view whatever is discernible. Think of Hugh Pym, the BBC health editor. He just tells the viewer, intelligently, what is happening. It is a simple requirement, but not easy for journalists to fulfil in an age when they are supposed to raise their profiles on Twitter. How stylish if BBC reporters were the only ones in the trade who never tweeted.

Wanted: a Covid Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Helen MacNamara has reportedly been fined £50 for attending a lockdown karaoke party in the Cabinet Secretary’s Whitehall office in June 2020. She was in charge of Whitehall “propriety and ethics” at the time. She has since left government.

I must declare an interest. When I was studying unreleased government papers for my biography of Margaret Thatcher, Ms MacNamara was in some sense my boss. If there had been a bad dispute – which there wasn’t – about a secret document I wanted to print, she would have been the arbiter. I liked her very much. She was rare among modern civil servants in understanding why proper historical records are vital to good government. She was genuinely interested in them.

So perhaps I am biased, but it does seem to me that her offence was trivial. Personally, I don’t think any public official should be in charge of propriety and ethics: such a person is being set up for a fall. Rather, every public official should be proper and ethical. It was not proper and ethical for government to set up a system of on-the-spot fines in the first place. Such fines go against our basic principles of justice – particularly if, as now, they are being used to discredit officials, advisers and politicians in public. The only melancholy satisfaction is to see government hoist with its own repressive petard.

The current recriminations about parties during Covid have understandable causes, but the involvement of the police is grossly disproportionate and lands them with an impossible task. Can’t we have an amnesty and a Covid Truth and Reconciliation Commission instead?