Are you fed up with your smart energy meter? Mike O’Brien is. He used to use one of the devices, 53 million of which are due to be rolled out across the country by the end of 2020. “I had an early version,” Mr O’Brien told The Telegraph this week. “After a while I barely looked at it, didn’t use it.”

The difference between you and Mike O’Brien, however, is that in 2008 Mike O’Brien was Minister of State for Energy at the newly-created, Ed Miliband-led Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), which launched Britain’s smart meter revolution - the biggest and most expensive in the world.

It is an IT project which will not meet either its 2020 deadline or its £11bn budget. That seems certain. What seems much less sure, however, is whether the whopping £16.73bn savings the plan’s backers claim for it will ever materialise.

After all, according to the Government’s own analysis, a full third of those savings are due to come from reduced energy usage, driven in no small part by consumers staring at the screens of their smart meters then frantically turning off electrical appliances at home.

That’s what Ed Miliband told a select committee in 2009. “As a user of a real-time display,” he said, “I know that it makes a difference and it makes you careful when you boil the kettle and all that sort of thing.” Yet his Minister of State for Energy had a different view. “We got rid of it,” he recalls of his own smart meter.