As I scribble this month’s column, West Texas Intermediate is trading a few cents short of $115 a barrel, Brent is only a couple of bucks below and the oil price has become a hot topic. Big Oil is in the headlines for something else, too: the largest oil discovery made in decades and, before that, at least two finds that may turn out to be super-giant fields.

Back in 2002, when I was UK energy minister, I attended a producer-consumer dialogue in Osaka hosted by the International Energy Agency.

Here’s a thought for all those now basking in the Houston heat. Having demonstrated their stupidity in lending on so-called “sub-prime” mortgages, how do we know that the financial institutions won’t make – or already have made – the same mistakes in the energy sector?