A serious contender for villain of the year has to be Tim Yeo. The conflicted chairman of the Energy and Climate Change select committee has time and time again flown the green flag this year, insisting that it is mere coincidence he makes over £100,000-a-year from his own renewable energy investments. Just because a conflict of interest is declared, it is still a conflict of interest…

Guido took particular interest in Tim Yeo’s taxi trouble over the summer. There was a distinctly whiffy smell lingering around Eco City Vehicles, an environmentally-friendly taxi company chaired by Yeo, and their wheeler deal to conveniently introduce an age limit for London’s taxis. The job earned Yeo some £440-an-hour, but when Number 10 started sniffing around he quickly resigned on the quiet. Guilty conscience?

And it didn’t end there. Perhaps Yeo’s most shameless moment of the year was when he used his position to lobby the government for more flights to China, the very same day that his company TMO Renewables signed a multi-million pound deal in – you guessed it – China. He still rakes tens of thousands from his positions at three renewable energy companies, despite remaining as chairman of the select committee that helps govern them. Don’t Yeo forget it…

If Tim Yeo is doing the rounds in television studios professing his support for an idea, it’s usually not unfair to assume there must be a vested interest in there somewhere. This morning the conflicted chairman of the Energy and Climate Change select committee decided he was backing fracking, so Guido crowd-sourced his possible financial interests. The results were hardly shocking.

ITI Energy supplies equipment for a variety of methods of producing energy from gases. Add that to his other interests in energy investment, energy efficient vehicles and fuel cell technology, and you get the picture. Whiffy once again…

Believe it or not, David Willetts gave an interview that caught Guido’s eye in the Times this weekend. Speaking about what the government was doing to boost Britain’s scientific standing in the world, Two Brains let the cat out of the bag regarding a certain conflicted MP:

“A new scientific field known as “synthetic biology”, which finds ways of using specifically-designed bacteria to solve medical and industrial problems, will be handed £50 million of the new money. Mr Willetts said that he had been particularly taken by one company, TMO Renewables, that had designed a micro-organism capable of turning human waste into biofuels.”

Tim Yeo, the man in charge of the Energy and Climate Change select committee, is paid £5,400 per month as chairman of TMO. His company lobbies the government for funding and Willetts signs off a tranche of taxpayers’ cash for them to turn poo into fuel. Whiffy…