By David Osland

I suspect I would be hopeless at running the National Grid. But if I were in charge of the show, I would build in substantial reserve capacity for unforeseen circumstances. Like, I dunno, Britain getting cold in winter, or something like that.

All you MBA smartarses out there will probably point out that this would cost money, and could even knock a couple of points off shareholder dividends.

But the way I see it, UK domestic and industrial users are paying the highest electricity bills in the world, and are therefore entitled to security of supply all year round.

Alas, such prudence seems lost on National Grid chief executive John Pettigrew, who took home a £1m salary and £5.1m in bonuses last year.

That strikes me as shedloads for the less-than-rocket-science task of maintaining a network of pylons, built up over decades by state investment, and constituting what economists call a ‘natural monopoly’ of the kind that functions best under social ownership.

It certainly puts the debate on whether nurses genuinely deserve to live off the fat of the land in perspective. If train driver wages are the new benchmark of bloated affluence, £6.1m would pay 130 of them.

So is Mr Pettigrew at least worth the wedge he’s pulling down? Surely, for that amount of dosh, he must be delivering a second-to-none all singing all dancing power supply, right?

Well, not exactly. The National Grid has now announced plans for rolling power cuts across the country from 5pm to 7pm, hitting different areas on different days.

This is not Mr Pettigrew’s fault, you understand. According to the Daily Mail, blame rests with lazy Met Office employees, who have been working from home, and therefore failed to warn that temperatures might fall below freezing in December. And to be fair, who could possibly have seen that coming?

The National Grid was until 1990 an unsexy wing of the Central Electricity Generating Board, a publicly-owned body that by and large did an exemplary job of generating electricity and making sure it reached your plug sockets.

Then the Tories privatised it, and the interests of shareholders – not to mention the interests of chief executives – suddenly became more important than the interests of consumers.

Things got so bad that by 2019, Labour offered a manifesto commitment to renationalise the company.

Mr Pettigrew wasn’t having that, describing the move as “highly detrimental”. He soon put a stop to such unhinged Corbynista nonsense by changing the National Grid’s legal domicile.

Britain is now in the incredible position of delegating its energy security into the hands of brass plate entities in Hong Kong and Luxembourg.

Luckily, the panic is now over. Keir Starmer, who won the Labour leadership on a platform that included a pledge that “public services should be in public hands”, has quietly kyboshed the idea.

That was the wrong call. From the failings of the National Grid to the water companies that dump sewage in our rivers and sea and the train operators that charge the most expensive fares in Europe while failing to run dependable services between nearby cities, the Tory privatisation experiment can now demonstrably be seen as an expensive mistake.

If you see Sid, tell him. And if you see Sir Keir, tell him that too.

David Osland is a member of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP and a long-time left wing journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland

Image: Electricity pylons. Source: IMG_0233. Author: Matthew Black, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.