To create his own monster, Dr Frankenstein required an abundance of cheap, reliable and available electricity, which he sourced by harnessing the power of lightning during a violent thunderstorm. Such a shock brought to life the dismembered body parts the good doctor had carefully assembled, and hey presto his monster came to life.

Mary Shelley would no doubt look upon the creation of another such implausible monstrosity, the International Panel on Climate Change’s President of Negotiations for the Conference of Parties 31 (huh?), and the vast amounts of electricity required to bring this creature to life, as some sort of tribute to her own efforts two centuries ago.

Indeed, speaking in Bonn this week, less than a hundred miles to the northwest of Frankenstein’s hilltop castle overlooking Darmstadt, the subject of electricity and how to generate sufficient quantities of it was very much on the mind, so to speak, of this newly formed creature himself.

‘The world is having an electrification moment, an electrifying moment, perhaps, and that’s a very good thing,’ said Mr Chris Bowen excitedly from his Bonn lair. With his fancy aformentioned title and expenses to boot this terrifying Australian politician calmly plots and schemes with fellow climate cultists to ‘electrify’ the planet in order to ‘save’ it.

Those familiar with Mr Bowen’s CV over the last two decades might be tempted to view his career, too, as being assembled out of the dead bits and pieces of various failed socialist experiments. It was Mr Bowen, of course, who first attempted, and failed, to breathe life into the concept of a centrally controlled Australian economy, whereby all a disgruntled peasant, sorry consumer, had to do was to log onto FuelWatch (or was it GroceryWatch?) and the problem of greedy, grasping, profit-hungry, exploitative, capitalist, small business people would simply disappear in a puff of smoke. The hopeless schemes, needless to say, were swiftly scrapped.

Next policy onto the laboratory slab was Mr Bowen’s Malaysian Solution, whereby body parts, or at least bodies, would quite literally be swapped between our near neighbour to the north in a slightly sinister ritual of four healthy bodies for every illegal asylum-seeker. Or something like that.

A brief stint as Kevin Rudd’s very own Igor, left in charge of the Treasury, was also a dismal failure, after which Mr Bowen retreated into brief obscurity. That was until one day in 2019 when, still fiddling about with economic tools, he made an amazing discovery: he could terrify Australians into voting for Labor by announcing his plan to tax the Frankenstein credits (surely ‘franking credits’? – ed) of all the elderly retirement villagers.

Excited by this life-altering discovery, Mr Bowen then eagerly formulated the perfect recipe for resurrecting the Morrison government: ‘If you don’t like our policies, don’t vote for us,’ he proudly declared. And the villagers did exactly that.

But Mr Bowen was just warming up. Having found the elixir of political life when Labor won power in 2022, Mr Bowen set his sights on a much higher goal, and in a flurry of Gothic horror revivalism declared that the world was facing a cataclysmic Armageddon that he, and he alone, could halt. Only he had the ability to stop the seas from rising, stop the icecaps from melting, bring rainfall to the drought zones, temper the winds and save the entire planet from catastrophic climate change – all through the magical power of his beloved renewable electricity.

And so, despite the horrific costs of billions if not trillions of taxpayer dollars, Mr Bowen embarked upon his grandest folly yet, to push water uphill in the Snowy mountains, to flatten the rainforests of Queensland and replace them with towering wind turbines, and to terrorise local farmers by staking gigantic, monstrous transmission lines into their farmlands.

In a strange coincidence, just as Mr Bowen was reaching the pinnacle of his renewable powers with his new job as President of Negotiations, the monster’s creator, the IPCC itself, quietly released a report that declares that the worst case scenarios it has been peddling for decades are ‘implausible’. In other words, the melting icecaps and rising sea levels and horrendous extremities of weather are all fiction, a made-up story designed to terrify the children and scare the peasants, sorry taxpayers, witless. Just like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, really.