Included in this figure is £22 billion by Microsoft. Its CEO announced that these investments should boost the UK economy by 10 per cent within five years – now that’s a boost any Chancellor wants.

Interestingly, the day before the announcement was made, I sat in a room of energy people to hear the news that data centres (at the heart of this tech deal) were knocking on the door of gas networks asking for connections. They need power, loads of it; they need energy security, not intermittency; they need it to be affordable because of the sheer quantity of energy they use and they need to connect in a timely manner. So, guess what, they want a gas connection to run their own power generators rather than connect to the power networks.

The UK’s gas networks, for their part, are looking to find ways of making connections cheaper and more straightforward. That’s the responsible approach and they have a reliability record the power networks can only dream of. And if I can put this bluntly, we will not get a 10 per cent boost to the economy in the next five years from these data centres and AI if it takes eight years to get a power connection!

So, we face a situation where the tensions within our economy become pronounced. We can use more gas, emitting more carbon as we do so, but grow our economy; become more prosperous; improve our public services or we decline the opportunity and instead worship at the altar of the anti-fossil fuel brigade. Over time, this “tech prosperity deal” could help us reduce carbon by speeding up technology change. Is DESNZ prepared to accept this trade-off? What about the CCC? And if they are and in my opinion they will do (you watch them twist and squirm doing so). But what about other tensions? As I mentioned last week, North Sea gas extraction to reduce imports and have lower emissions or keep a blanket ban on new fields? Watch this space.