How would you feel if some dodgy geezer smelling of mung bean fart, green sanctimony and greasy banknotes in a brown envelope came round to your house and told you that you’d have to get rid of your gas cooker because “climate change”?

Probably the first thing you’d do is tell him where to shove it: “I like my gas hob. It gives me better heat control than electric and it’s also more versatile. Plus, for your information Mister, I’ve yet to see any evidence that ‘climate change’ constitutes any kind of threat, nor that stopping me from using my gas cooker would make any difference either way.”

Then, once you’d discovered that his name was Lord Deben, you’d set the dog on him.

And quite right too. Dodgy Lord Deben, as we know, is – allegedly – as bent as a nine bob note. He is currently being investigated by the House of Lords sleaze watchdog over a £600,000 conflict of interest scandal. And according to Guido, this is but the tip of the iceberg.

The formal inquiry into Lord Deben continues over the £600,000 in payments his family-run ‘Sustainability Consultancy’ Sancroft International received from taxpayer-subsidised ‘Green’ corporations – in what appears to be a flagrant conflict of interests with his role as Climate Change Committee chair. Now, confidential documents seen by Guido appear to show that on the very same day as Deben was arguing in Parliament in favour of expensive renewable energy subsidies, his firm was meeting with cash-guzzling, wood-pellet-burning, biomass generator Drax Group in a secret meeting that resulted in a £15,500 payment for Sancroft. Not bad for a day’s work…

Remarkably, this growing scandal is getting very little coverage in the mainstream media, despite the fact that Deben, a Conservative peer, is a public figure of great influence. The recommendations of his Climate Change Committee have a huge impact on government environmental and energy policy. So why isn’t he being brought to book?

The suggestion is that, as far as the Establishment is concerned Deben is – as someone put it to Guido – “on the side of the angels.” In other words, he’s so completely on board with the government’s position on sustainability, energy and the environment that nobody wants to rock the boat.

Deben’s latest wheeze is that he wants to ban gas hobs in all new homes by 2025.

As he told the Telegraph:

Simply put, there is no way in which the UK can meet the legally-binding climate change targets that Parliament has determined unless we take the measures outlined in this report.”

Actually, that isn’t true.

A report produced for the government in 2016 by Lord Oxburgh (another green trougher and true believer: so he can’t be accused here of anti-environmentalist bias) showed that decarbonising heat – as Deben is blithely proposing – will cause all manner of financial, technical and practical difficulties. None of these difficulties, needless to say, are addressed in Deben’s plan.

Deben is the Deep State personified. On his recommendation, billions of taxpayer pounds are squandered, freedoms are curtailed, the economy damaged, crony-capitalists rewarded, avian fauna killed by bird-slicing bat-chomping eco-crucifixes…

Yet almost no one in the system – not the newspapers, not the politicians – is prepared to call him to account because they too are card-carrying members of the Green Blob.

But we members of the public aren’t – and we really deserve better from the people who claim to be acting as our “servants.”