Owen Paterson proves a gale of fresh air in Westminster

Christopher Booker of The Sunday Telegraph
" Another issue due to make headlines will be a major Bill on Britain’s water policy, soon to come before Parliament. “It is vital that we find ways to reverse the tendency in recent years to charge customers ever more for water while supplying them with less. "We desperately need to build more reservoirs to store all that water which keeps falling out of the sky — contrary to the long-fashionable belief that, thanks to global warming, we can expect nothing in the future but endless droughts.” Mr Paterson smiles as he says this. In private he laughs a lot and is much more genially relaxed than he sometimes appears to be in public. And, of course, his pragmatic scepticism about climate change, like his enthusiasms for shale gas and GM crops, is yet another reason why he has become such a hate figure for the green pressure groups. He enjoys the irony of the fact that, as a practical environmentalist, he is demonised by fanatical ideologues who know rather less about nature and the environment than he does — just as he does in being the pragmatic Eurosceptic who knows considerably more about how the EU system of government works than those ideological Europhiles like his Labour opposite number, for whom “Europe” is little more than “a cosy abstract idea”.