I can't yet work out whether he'll be pleased – though he's quite a combative politician, he's also new to the job and in unfamiliar territory – but those following the climate change debate have told me their new minister, Ed Miliband, has already entered the history books.
"Business leaders are telling us they can't remember the last time a secretary of state pissed off their lot so quickly," reports a delighted green campaigner. Miliband's crime? Supposedly his new hard line on pre-payment meters – that he'd bang heads together if the companies didn't act independently to rectify matters – was briefed to people like me before anyone in the energy industry was told... about a week after becoming the climate change and energy secretary. Now titans of energy corporations are making like Lord Humungus in Mad Max, prowling the world's last oil refinery.
My greenies are over the moon. "When John Hutton was i/c he would see the leader of an energy company, tete a tete, possibly monthly," a green campaigner says, while her NGO would get a group meeting along with all the other NGOs "roughly once every nine months". What now? "Now we're in whenever we want."
Last week I wrote about Miliband's relationship with business leaders - it seemed fairly tough. The euphoric reports of these green campaigners, famously an equally hard group to please, seems to support this.
