Number 10 policy board adviser Peter Lilley regularly bigs up big oil in speeches to parliament, bemoaning climate change laws that “require us to replace cheap fossil fuels with energy sources that are at least twice as expensive and less reliable” last September and then going after vested interests in November:

“Politicians and environmental campaigners have a vested interest in fanning that suspicion to divert attention from the increases in the cost of energy that the political elite are planning in the move to increasingly costly renewables, with the added costs that they impose on the transmission network.”

What Lilley didn’t mention on either occasion was his own vested interest as the £47,000-a-year non-executive director of Tethys Petroleum Limited, an oil and gas exploration company based in Central Asia. He is also a director of Facor Energy Limited, a new shell company which is yet to begin trading. Considering he’s been an MP for nearly 31 years, he should probably know better than to breach the members’ code of conduct by failing to declare an interest…