Christopher Murray Paul Huhne (born 2 July 1954) is a British energy and climate change consultant, and former journalist, one of the most recent criminal convictions of an MP, business economist and politician who was the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Eastleigh from 2005 to 2013 and the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change from 2010 to 2012. He is currently chair of the UK green gas association – the Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Association – and senior adviser to the World Biogas Association. He also advises companies on his particular interest in renewable technologies that can provide back up for intermittent energy sources like wind and solar.
As Energy Secretary, Huhne was responsible for two innovations that have subsequently had a wide influence internationally: an Electricity Market Reform (EMR) that introduced market-friendly support mechanisms for renewables (“auctioned contracts for difference”) that has been copied widely in Europe and even in China, and the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) which was the first support for biomethane injection into the gas grid.
Huhne formerly wrote weekly columns for The Guardian, Independent on Sunday and Evening Standard. From 1994 to 1999, he built up a business advising on the creditworthiness of countries which is now the sovereign ratings division of one of the three large global ratings agencies, Fitch Ratings.
Huhne had twice stood unsuccessfully for election as Leader of the Liberal Democrats: in 2006 he came second to Sir Menzies Campbell and in 2007 he narrowly lost to Nick Clegg. His political career ended with resignation in February 2013, when he was (with his ex-wife) convicted of perverting the course of justice in relation to speeding offences. He ultimately pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to eight months in prison, serving nine weeks before being released in May 2013.
Huhne was reported in December 2023 to have settled with News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch's newspaper holding company that owned the main newspapers responsible for bringing him down, the Sun, News of the World and Sunday Times) over illegal information-gathering including phone-hacking. Huhne received six-figure damages and his legal costs. Huhne said that News targeted him because he had called for a reopening of the police investigation into phone-hacking (that led to the conviction of Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World) and a judicial inquiry (eventually the Leveson Inquiry).
Huhne was joined by other former Liberal Democrat ministers including Vince Cable and Norman Lamb, and claimed that News of the World had not hacked him just for tabloid titillation but as an attempt to remove him as a critic and to spy on the Government in its intentions on whether to refer Murdoch's Sky bid to the competition authorities.
Legacy as Energy Secretary
As Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Huhne was responsible for pushing through an Electricity Market Reform (in the White Paper in 2011)|url=https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/48129/2176-emr-white-paper.pdf that has been widely copied in Europe and even China. The central idea was to provide certainty to investors, and thereby to investors, by fixing a price for renewables that involve heavy up-front capital expenditure (such as offshore and onshore wind, and large-scale solar). The fixed price, backed by the government, reduces the cost of capital to the project, while developers are encouraged to bid the lowest possible price for the project in a dutch auction. This ensures that taxpayers get value for money. If the market price exceeds the strike price agreed, the developers pay back the government, but the government subsidises the developers if the price is under the market price.
These “auctioned and two-way contracts for difference” were a clear market-oriented break from civil servants determining a fixed price, and have been widely held responsible for the rapid reduction in costs of leading renewables as developers and manufacturers have attempted to win contracts by under-bidding rivals. For example, offshore wind project developers in the United Kingdom signed contracts to sell their energy at an average price of $143 USD per megawatt hour (MWh) in 2010, when only a little more than 500 megawatts (MWs) of offshore wind turbines were operational. By 2019, U.K. project developers were signing contracts on average worth $50/MWh, by which time installed capacity in the U.K. had reached nearly 10,000 MWs. Globally, the average levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of offshore wind fell from a 2012 high of $255/MWh to only $84/MWh in 2020, a reduction of 67.5%.|url=https://offshorewindfacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/03_SIOW_The-Economics-of-Offshore-Wind-FINAL.pdf
The success of Britain’s “auctioned and two-way contracts for difference” in both supporting rapid expansion of renewables and helping to drive down their cost was taken up by the European Union, which first recommended such competitive auctions in 2014 and then mandated them in 2024.|url=https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2024/05/21/electricity-market-reform-council-signs-off-on-updated-rules/#:~:text=The%20Commission%20presented%20the%20proposals,and%20security%20of%20supply%20(timeline) The scheme was even copied by the Chinese government in its renewables reforms introduced in February 2025, according to the International Energy Agency’s Renewables report 2025.|url=https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2025 The IEA report added: “Competitive auctions are now the main procurement mechanism of global utility-scale renewable deployment, accounting for almost 60% of gross capacity additions expected during 2025-2030 – up from less than 25% in the 2024 forecast. This marks a major shift from last year’s analysis, when feed-in tariffs and premiums were still the dominant mechanism (but now they represent just 10% of growth). Unlike feed-in tariffs and premiums, where the government sets offtake prices, competitive auctions let developers bid for the level of remuneration they receive, ultimately leading to lower costs.”
Another pioneering policy was the Renewable Heat Incentive, the first ever support for the injection of renewable gas (or biomethane) into the gas grid. However, Huhne’s energy saving policy (the “green deal”) which legislated to allow homeowners to insulate their homes and put the cost onto their energy bills (so long as the savings outstripped the on-going cost) was a failure with minimal uptake. Huhne was also the Energy secretary who had to handle the BP Macondo disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and the fall-out from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. Huhne did not bow to the pressure to phase-out nuclear power – unlike the German government at the time - but instead appointed an independent scientific review of the lessons of Fukushima which subsequently drew attention to the differences with the Japanese situation.
Early life
Education and upbringing Huhne was born in west London to businessman Peter Paul-Huhne and actress Ann Murray on 2 July 1954. He was educated at Westminster School.
He attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a Demy. While there, Huhne edited the student magazine Isis, served on the executive of the Oxford University Labour Club, and achieved a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). He was active in student politics, supporting the Labour Party. He also attended the Sorbonne, Paris.
Career before Parliament
Huhne started as an undercover freelance reporter in India during Indira Gandhi's emergency when western journalists had been expelled, before working for the Liverpool Echo and The Economist as its Brussels correspondent between 1977 and 1980. He was then economics editor, leader writer and columnist for The Guardian,Huhne, C. Real World Economics, Penguin (1990) and economics editor, assistant editor and columnist for The Independent on Sunday. He was the business editor of The Independent and The Independent on Sunday during its investigations into Robert Maxwell's fraud on the Mirror group pension fund. He won both the junior and senior Wincott awards for financial journalist of the year in 1980 and 1989 respectively. Along with his work in newspapers and magazines he co-wrote the book Debt & Danger: The World Financial Crisis (Penguin, 1985) with Harold Lever, and wrote Real World Economics (Penguin 1990).
Before embarking on his political career, he started a company in the City. He told The Independent in 2008: "I don't claim that I'm in other than a very happy position compared with most people, because, having spent a bit of time in the City before I was elected, being able to make a bit of money while I was there, I have a cushion." He started a company called IBCA Sovereign Ratings in 1994 that tried to "measure the risks of investing in different countries". In 1997 he became group managing director of Fitch IBCA, and from 1999 to 2003 was vice-chairman of Fitch Ratings.
Early political career and Parliamentary candidacies Huhne joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP) soon after it was formed in 1981. In the 1982 Islington London Borough Council election, he stood as one of two SDP candidates in Canonbury East, a double-member ward, but failed to be elected after coming third behind the victorious Labour candidates. His prospects were not helped by the fact that the two sitting councillors in the ward also stood as unofficial 'Social Democrats', having been expelled by the SDP a month earlier.
Huhne contested the 1983 general election as a Parliamentary candidate for the SDP–Liberal Alliance in Reading East coming second, and in the 1987 general election he was the SDP–Liberal Alliance candidate in Oxford West and Abingdon, a seat that would be won ten years later by Liberal Democrat candidate Evan Harris.
Member of European Parliament (1999–2005) In June 1999, Huhne was elected as a member of the European Parliament for South East England. The Liberal Democrats came third with a total of 228,136 votes behind the Conservatives and Labour. The proportion of votes received meant that the party was able to send the top two list candidates to the European Parliament, the top list candidate Emma Nicholson, and Chris Huhne who was second on the list. In the 2004 European Parliament elections, Huhne was re-elected, along with Emma Nicholson, with the party receiving 338,342 votes this time around, 15% of the total vote. In 2005, Huhne stood for election to the United Kingdom parliament representing the seat of Eastleigh in Hampshire. After he was elected as a Member of the House of Commons on 5 May 2005, Sharon Bowles, the candidate third on the Liberal Democrat list, replaced Huhne as representative for the South East of England.
During his time in the European Parliament, Huhne was the only Liberal Democrat MEP in a ranking by The Economist of the three highest-profile UK MEPs (the others being Glenys Kinnock and Caroline Lucas). He was a member of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, concerned with economic and financial policy including regulation of the financial sector. He was economic spokesman for the pan-European Liberal group in the European Parliament and was responsible for introducing "sunset clauses" – time limits on powers – into European Union law for the first time, for radically amending Commission proposals on financial services, and for opening up the European Central Bank to greater scrutiny.