TIMING IS EVERYTHING.

And this Government is more John Sergeant than Fred Astaire.

It was just months ago hundreds of people in Southampton and the Isle of Wight lost their jobs when the Vestas wind turbine blade factory closed due to lack of local business.

You’ll remember the ugly scenes as some of the 427 furious workers barricaded themselves in the Newport plant to protest the decision.

Britain’s only meaningful wind turbine blade production facility was allowed to just wink out of existence.

It was painful, ruinous and now, it turns out, completely unnecessary.

With all that misery still fresh in our minds, it is now that the Government confirms plans for two massive wind farms either side of the Isle of Wight.

You could not make it up.

Talk about left hand not knowing what the right is doing.

So as ministers callously abandoned the local blade workers to the scrapheap, mandarins on the other side of Whitehall were busy cooking up a scheme that would have given them a glittering future.

This makes the Vestas pull-out an absolute catastrophe for both the island and its Hampshire supply route.

The scale and ambition of the Government’s wind energy vision has been widely compared to the mother lode that was the discovery of North Sea oil.

Only instead of being at the other end of the country from this, ahem, windfall, we would have been right at its epicentre. The beating heart of a multi-billion-pound new industry with a bright future. And now, well, we’re not.

Ok, the factory would have needed to be retooled to build blades for sea based turbines, but the vast reservoir of knowledge built up over decades of industry experience is priceless.

And for a final, tragi-comic twist, instead of travelling just a few miles from Newport, the blades for all these new wind farms will likely have to be shipped in from the continent or China or somewhere, generating skip-loads of carbon and cleverly undermining the very reason for the wind farms in the first place.

Such clumsy footwork in pursuit of a cut in our carbon footprint would shame even the twinkle-toed Sergeant.