Owen Paterson: The 'unknown Cabinet minister’ has a fight on his hands

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" The brief Mr Paterson has been given, according to Downing Street, is to revive Britain’s hard-pressed rural economy. What he is determined to do is push for a wholesale return to policies that make practical common sense, in light of the facts rather than misguided ideology. If he tries to do that in all the directions his pragmatic instincts lead him to, he will inevitably find himself up against opposition and constraints on all sides – not just from the EU and its house-trained acolytes in his own department but also from other ministers, notably those in the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Nowhere is this battle likely to be fiercer than over those useless wind farms and the vast reserves of cheap shale gas, which could offer Britain an even brighter energy future than that promised in the 1970s by the North Sea, as Paterson has been well-briefed to grasp, not least by his brother-in-law Matt Ridley. Thanks to the fact that the regulation of shale gas was given to the Environment Agency, answering to Defra, he can now call the shots on this issue in a way that those who hoped it could thus be parked on the back burner never imagined.
Mr Paterson has indeed got a fight on his hands. If he fails in his drive to bring about the most radical shake-up in Defra’s orientation for decades, he will at least have demonstrated where those problems lie, which are in so many ways constraining the lives of all those affected by its vast range of activities. He – and the rest of us – are in for what promises to be an exhilarating, if unnerving, ride."