Here's the full unedited version of an interview with the Europe minister, David Lidington, at a moment of extreme pressure for him. Months of simmering tension between euroscetpic Tory backbenchers and the government are finally coming to a head as a looming vote on an EU referendum bill looms. This issue is not going to go away, but Downing Street has been doing its best by suggesting a Tory MP could take on the cause via a private member's bill. I was shown across tHE foreign Office's huge courtyard, up one of this very grand department's grand staircases and into the minister's office to ask David Lidington: 'what on earth is going on?'

Podcast55: Europe minister David Lidington

This special edition of the Politics.co.uk podcast is brought to you in association with Statoil.

It's decision time for Britain's energy debate. Not in the next week or so, or even the next few months. But in the next ten years or so, when our politicians will be making a series of crunch decisions that will determine the nature of the UK's energy mix for much of the next century.

The problem is politicians are, by nature, indecisive. They struggle to make the big calls which the energy sector, which operates on a much longer timescale, is desperate for. Investor certainty is weak at the moment - and whether on renewable energy, or oil and gas, or nuclear, there are many question-marks yet to be resolved.

Over the last few weeks we've been looking at these issues carefully and speaking to some of the key players across the energy sectors:

Michael Fallon, the Conservative energy minister at the Department for Energy and Climate Change
David Harrison, consultant at Ernst and Young and a veteran of the oil and gas sector
Adrian Bull of the National Nuclear Laboratory, with a career's experience of nuclear issues behind him
Nick Molho, head of energy policy at WWF-UK
David Green, the man behind the Isle of Wight's EcoIsland project

This podcast also features interviews with Dan Byles MP, the Conservative bachbench champion of shale gas, and Tim Yeo, the former chair of the Commons' energy and climate change committee.

Alex Stevenson 12