To stop people shivering in their homes in a reasonable timescale, we need a programme that will start by insulating 4 million homes by 2020, including grant funding for 2 million of the UK's poorest households.
But Osborne made clear he aims to rob Balls of his ability to focus the next election on the coalition's struggle to achieve growth – and thereby its failure to tackle the deficit on a faster timescale – by amending the government's fiscal rules to achieve a budget surplus by the end of the next parliament.
But the whistleblower claims a special team was set up – partly based at a Leicester call centre – to fast forward this process so that investigations to locate people would be launched, and the money then taken into company accounts over a much shorter timescale.
On that timescale, Labour should brace itself for at least another decade in the cold.
Tyrie's intervention will put further pressure on the bank to reveal the scope and timescale of its investigation into the impact of an EU referendum.
The changes will have two elements: The fiscal mandate – the targeting of the structural budget deficit – will have to be assessed on a shorter timescale of two or three years.
A Treasury source said that shortening the timescale from five years to two or three would make it a "much more binding target".
For a carbon price to work on a very short timescale it would have to be very high, which may or may not be economically problematic but would surely be politically inoperative.
Yet Mr Hatoyama has made clear that he does not understand the word "expeditiously" to bind him to a specific timescale.
One option would be to lower the unemployment rule to 6.5%; another to set out, as the Federal Reserve does, a likely timescale for a rate rise.
The sweeping timescale of its story, from ancient glory to medieval decline, from Ottoman empire to British occupation, from socialist revolution to modern money-grabbers, is held together by a loose, connecting thread: the contrast and conflict between cosmopolitan, multi-faceted Cairo and its traditional, native heart.
