In my Twitter feed yesterday came something entirely without precedent: a tweet from Lord Deben. This was something of a shock, as the noble lord has hitherto made it a matter of policy never to address me directly, leaving his followers in the slightly strange position of trying to work out who it is that he is insulting.
I assume that this was an error on his part.
He was responding to a tweet from someone who asked rather alarmingly:
Has @lorddeben blood on hands? #SundayTimes claims he ignored #diesel warnings in favour of #climatechange
And as one might expect, he denied everything:
It claims no such thing. Try reading the quote again!
So is this a case of a good man wronged? I have been sent a scan of the Sunday Times article in question and I reproduce here the second paragraph:
About 50,000 people die annually because of air pollution, yet many deaths might have been prevented had ministers heeded a 1993 report handed to the then environment secretary, John Gummer - now Lord Deben - warning that any increase in diesel could have just such a consequence.
I'm struggling to see anything in the article that might be the basis for Lord Deben's suggestion that it wasn't alleging that he bore the blame for the (alleged*) death toll. What can he have meant?
*I am highly suspicious of these figures.