The law we are talking about is the Climate Change Act. Although this sets specific, mandatory targets aimed at reducing emissions, these have now become aspirational, with no realistic prospect of the government achieving them.
What Booker has found though is that the government it is intending to commit this very serious breach of the law – it is doing so in such opaque fashion that it hopes no one will notice.
The detail is buried in last week's statement by Ed Davey, secretary of state for energy and climate change, which reveals just what a catastrophic shambles he is making of Britain’s energy policy.
As always though, the legacy media missed the point. The headlines that greeted this document focused on the "victory" of Mr Davey over George Osborne, in managing to preserve the subsidy given to onshore wind turbines at 90 percent, rather than the 75 percent the Treasury supposedly wanted.
The reports dutifully echoed DECC's claim that this would bring "£25 billion of investment into the UK economy", while Davey was allowed by the Today programme to get away with the risible claim that this would "create hundreds of thousands of green jobs".
Everything about this statement, Booker writes, betrayed the fact that Davey and his officials have begun to realise that they are impaled on two wholly irreconcilable hooks.
