At 7pm last night the phones started ringing in Energydesk towers.
Word had got out that the government was unexpectedly announcing details of the biggest shakeup in UK energy policy in generations - just hours before print deadlines.
The announcement was largely as expected, but there was something strange about the phone-calls. They weren't from the usual suspects who have been following this story.
In fact, some of the journalists closest to the issues have told Energydesk that just hours earlier their inquiries had been stone walled or denied by the Department of Energy and Climate Change.
It's not so much about who was told - good reporters all of them - usually covering the business beat. It's about who wasn't.
Almost all the main environmental reporters covering energy and climate change that we contacted had been left out of the loop including environmental reporters at mainstream media organisations who have covered the bill at every stage.
Political reporters covering the story to see who would win in the coalition battle over decarbonisation (not the Lib Dems it turned out) were also firmly out of the loop.
Instead political advisors to the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate change chose to brief a select few journalists, interested in business and with an understanding of energy but with relatively little prior knowledge of (or interest in?) the political fight their man had just spectacularly lost.
Decarbwha?
At their party conference the Liberal Democrats had voted to endorse a call by the government's climate advisors to set a target for cleaning up the power sector by 2030.
The measure had been supported by a wide range of consumer groups, charities and businesses - but didn't go down well in Number 11, which is suspicious of any new target binding government policy. Some energy companies also opposed the idea.
Yet the DECC press release went into significant detail on something almost nobody had previously heard of: the Levy Control Framework.
This is the mechanism which limits the amount of money taken from consumer bills to fund clean energy. The big victory, DECC claimed, was increasing this sum to £7.6bn.
This is neither particularly new (the government had previously said it would need £110bn in new investment), nor actually in the bill. It was to have been set seperately by the Chancellor.
It also claimed the UK would now get more than 30% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 - a legally binding EU obligation signed up to by the previous administration.
But the content isn't really the problem, I doubt Energydesk's owner's, Greenpeace, would be above such tactics.
Deliberate bills suicide?
The issue again, is the impact on the intended recipients.
From the audience they briefed DECC could, at best, have hoped for a series of stories about generating jobs and growth - though this would be diluted by the lack of certainty provided by a clear target.
Far more likely was a flood of stories about the impact on bills. That was the headline figure, after all: £7.6bn taken from bills to fund (largely) renewables. And everyone knows how popular wind turbines are with some sections of the media.
Yes, that story had already been reported. In fact, the Committee on Climate Change had produced not one, but two, reports on it detailing how bills would rise with clean energy and how they would rise even further without.
And yes, to a different audience, the money may have played second fiddle to fact the bill contained no target to clean up the power sector beyond 2020, with the possible implications of that for the coalition, for investment and for bills in the long term.
But to a business audience, in the middle of winter, the big number and bills were always the only story.
One of them even managed to calculate the measures would cost the average household £200,000. It's fair to say nobody covering the story over time would have got the number of digits wrong. (That figure has now been corrected.)
It may have made the government unpopular, but it makes the Liberal Democrats look like they are fighting for the environment - a key cause for some of their Guardian and BBC reading voters.
When contacted by one journalist who'd been omitted DECC told them it was purely an accident.
Perhaps. But it might have been quite a conveniant one.
