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The preposterous figure of Two Jags has apparently been reincarnated as something called the Council of Europe’s ‘rapporteur’ on climate change. That’s a new one on me. Wasn’t the dwarf in Time Bandits called Rapporteur?

I’ve no idea what a rapporteur does, but I would imagine it involves a lot of first-class air travel, five-star hotels and lobster suppers.

There’s probably a bird thrown in, too. Two Jags is flying to China this week to deliver a lecture on global warming. That’s right, he’s jetting halfway round the world and back to talk about the need to cut carbon emissions.

Don’t these people have any idea how ridiculous they are? What astonishes me is that anyone, especially in my trade, takes him seriously. Two Jags is a circus act. Come to think of it, the dwarf in Time Bandits had considerably more gravitas than Prescott.
Yet, in some quarters, he’s treated as a proper person. Yesterday’s Independent carried an interview with Two Jags, in which he announced that Europe’s target of cutting emissions by 80 per cent was nowhere near tough enough. The paper even ran an editorial praising Prescott’s authenticity.

The only thing authentic about this old fraud is his ocean-going, ozone-puncturing hypocrisy and self-importance.

I didn’t christen him Two Jags without reason. This was the man who insisted on having not one, but two ‘gas guzzling’ limousines.

He had his wife chauffeured 200 yards along the seafront at the Labour conference so her hairdo wouldn’t get windswept. Pauline’s creosote-thick hairspray has probably done more damage to the atmosphere than a fleet of SUVs.

Two Jags took a helicopter back to central London from the rugby league final at Wembley and commandeered an RAF flight to turn on the Blackpool illuminations.

After giving a speech on the importance of public transport to the railwaymen’s union in Scarborough, he made an ostentatious display of boarding a train home.

He then got off at the next station, where his driver was waiting with the Jag to convey him back to London in air-conditioned, eight-cylinder, 15-miles-to-the-gallon luxury.

Once he returns from China, he will embark on a tour of Britain, lecturing schoolchildren about global warming. We can assume he won’t be travelling by bike.

When he was ‘in charge’ of the environment, he was so concerned about the delicate eco-balance that he ordered tens of thousands of houses to be built on flood plains.

Yet now we are asked to believe that he is a born-again Al Gore. According to the Indy, he is the brilliant global player who brokered the Kyoto deal in 1997 and ‘is now returning to a major role in climatechange politics’.

All you need to know about the Kyoto ‘deal’ is that the rest of the world ignored it, while here in Britain it has been used as a catch-all excuse for everything from the extortionate tax on petrol to fining people £500 for putting out their dustbins on the wrong day.

In one sense, I suppose you could argue that Kyoto was a success, since the world has actually been getting colder over the past decade, despite China opening a new coal-fired power station every five minutes.

That inconvenient truth has not deterred the climate-change industry-from cranking up the rhetoric, inventing ever-tougher targets and dreaming up an exciting range of new rules, fines and punishments.

Britain’s ridiculous obsession with ‘man-made global warming’ has prevented our building a new generation of power stations.

As a result, we are facing the looming prospect of rolling power cuts in the not-too-distant future.

But you won’t find a forest of windmills in the back garden of Two Jags’ turreted mansion.

Just as Al Gore consumes enough electricity to power a small town and flies by private jet to deliver his lavishly rewarded pieties on polar bears, so Two Jags, too, thinks that cutting your carbon footprint is for the little people.

This week, The Guardian - which is The Independent with adverts - carried a spread about everyday people who were doing their bit for the planet.

They boasted about how they were going to eat more root vegetables, wear thicker undies and travel by train not car.

A more self-righteous, self-flagellating bunch you’d be hard-pressed to find outside of, er, the pages of The Guardian.

But even though I think they’re all barking mad, at least they are prepared to make some kind of self- sacrifice in pursuit of their quasi-religious crusade.

Two Jags was conspicuous by his absence. While those poor, deluded saps are turning down the thermostat, shivering in their thermals and eating their own toenail clippings, you won’t catch him chowing down on turnips or taking a slow boat to China.

Our esteemed ‘rapporteur’ will relax in the rear seat of his limo or at the front of the plane, tucking into the finest food flown in from around the world. And to hell with the ice caps.

He will continue to leave a trail of yeti-sized carbon footprints as he tours the globe lecturing the rest of us on how we’re all responsible for razing the rainforests.

In the great debate about nonexistent global warming, this freeloading, flatulent, frequent-flying fool is about as relevant as the polar bear on Fox’s glacier mints.