Christopher Booker: Europe and wind: at last, the consensus is cracking

“Enough is enough”: blazoned over the front pages of two national newspapers, that was the verdict on wind farms from energy minister John Hayes last week. But it could just have well been spoken about Britain and the EU, by any of those 53 Tory MPs who inflicted a humiliation on David Cameron over his wish to accept a limited increase in the Brussels budget.

Both episodes caused a furore, but what was significant was that each marked the cracking apart of a suffocating all-party consensus which has imprisoned our politics for far too long. Even a year ago, it would have been unthinkable that so many Tory rebels would be willing to defeat the Government over the EU – or that a minister would question the plans to cover our countryside with wind farms. For years our politics has been frozen in a claustrophobic unanimity, whereby all parties agreed that we must not question our loyalty to the EU – or the need to “fight climate change” by suicidally distorting our energy policy in favour of those absurd windmills. But on each issue, those who spoke out last week were aware that their actions were viewed with sympathy even in the highest reaches of government.