of central casting, the diehard apparatchik David Viner - a type who in the dying days of the Soviet Union would still have been spouting Marxist theory as gospel. He, famously, in the year 2000 told The Independent that within a few years snowfall would become "a very rare and exciting event" in Britain.

Then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, he now heads the British Council's climate change programme, with the Orwellian task of indoctrinating "younger generations" in 60 countries with the mantras of the warmist creed, spending an annual budget of £10 million.

With his very existence dependent on his faith, he stands by his prediction. "We've had three weeks of relatively cold weather and that doesn't change anything," he says. "This wintera wise decision. For, by 6.30, there was a queue of over 100 cars – Porsches, BMWs, Mercs and such like, interspersed with beacon-flashing official ones – stretching for well over a kilometre, waiting to enter the venue.

This was to honour the man who, six weeks ago, was telling us that the Western lifestyle was "unsustainable". Today, "we have reached the point where consumption and people's desire to consume has grown out of proportion," he declared.

Perhaps the Berlin Wall analogy is the wrong one. The closer parallel, perhaps, is the storming of the Bastille, with the formation of a Committee of Public Safety to supervise the safe transit of those tumbrels.