Property

Back to the palace Donald Trump was invited for what will be his second state visit to the UK. Who else has been on more than one? – Olav V of Norway was entertained twice, in October 1962 and again in April 1988, although never at Buckingham Palace. On the first visit he was received at Holyrood Palace and the second Windsor Castle. – Margrethe II also undertook two state visits, in April 1974 and again in February 2000, both times to Windsor Castle. – Monarchs have an advantage as they tend to hang around for longer. Trump will be the first president to enjoy a second. Curiously, South Korea has had three state visits since 2004, but each with a different president. Low-flying planes How much low flying does the military undertake over the UK?

A few weeks ago, a couple of men with ladders started work on a former bridal boutique at the end of my road. I’ve no idea how old the building is. Its pitched roof and intricate gable and the sort of pattern brickwork no one seems to bother with these days suggest it’s Victorian, but it could be older. Beneath the first-floor windows was a decorative cornice. Under that, between a pair of attractive corbels, was a slim wooden fascia upon which the name of the shop was painted in stencilled letters. The chaps with the ladders got rid of all that. They ripped out the timber and chucked it in a skip. The building houses an estate agent now – a flat aluminium fascia, double the size of the old one, informs you of the fact.

Common ground Sir: Katy Balls asks ‘Lawyer or leader?’ (Politics, 25 January), but it became fairly clear which Keir Starmer is when he appointed as his Attorney General Lord Hermer, a human rights lawyer. As was mentioned, Lord Hermer has often represented those rejecting British values rather than standing up for them. Sir Keir and Lord Hermer show a clear preference for international law over Britain’s common law. They ignore the reality that common law has served the nation brilliantly over the centuries. It relies on the precise written word and precedent, being non-political, transparent, predictable and fair. British laws are enacted by our democratically elected parliament which can amend or repeal them.

Betting men Sir: The bet between Martin Rees and me that Matt Ridley recounts pits two kinds of scruples of disinterested rationality against each other (‘Wuhan wager’, 7 December). One is the scientific ethos that calls for factoring in all relevant information in updating one’s degree of credence in a hypothesis. The other is the logic of the epistemological tool of betting, which demands an agreed-upon fixed criterion and deadline for resolving the bet. My degree of credence has been influenced by Matt and Alina Chan for the lab leak hypothesis, but also by counter-arguments from Peter Miller for the zoonotic theory.

In they pour, one after another, cheerily thudding on to the doormat: ‘Thank you for insuring with us again! Now, pay us more than you earn in a year!’ Yes, it’s insurance premium renewal time – and they’re shooting up once more. Insurance premiums have swollen unstoppably, expanding upwards for all the world like a batch of evil mushrooms. In our household, home insurance alone now comes in at the same size as a monthly mortgage payment. Whack on to this car insurance (necessary), pet insurance (necessary?) and health insurance (in this day and age, yes), and you’d have to be earning the annual equivalent of Andorra’s GDP. What are we even doing? Shoving quantities of moolah (already diminished by the taxman) out to insurance companies, on the off-chance of an accident?

Britain’s farmers are in a bind. Despite sitting on land worth millions, they are unable to release that wealth without selling – and many struggle to make money from what they produce. According to Defra, almost one in five farms make a loss, while a quarter made less than £25,000 last year. Yet there are parts of the Labour movement that see farmers as money-grubbing, tweed-clad elites benefiting from special tax breaks and hefty subsidies. James Buckle, a farmer from Suffolk, understands those frustrations: ‘If our farm is worth £10 million, and we’ve got these new inheritance tax rules, we’ve got to pay something like £1.6 million to pass it on. And £10 million is a ridiculous value for an asset that one person owns.

Working people Government ministers may have had trouble defining what was meant by ‘working people’ in the Labour manifesto, but where did the idea of classifying people who earn their living as a distinct group come from? – According to the OED,the term ‘working class’ has been traced back to the 1757 edition of the Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce written by Malachy Postlethwayt, a former adviser to Horace Walpole. Postlethwayt was born the son of a wine merchant in Limehouse, east London, in 1707. He certainly fitted Starmer’s definition of a working person in that he appears to have died, in 1767, owning no assets.

My friend Tim Leunig is a cerebral thinker of the best kind. Though not party-political, he has worked for Tory chancellors and would give the same advice to governments of any stripe. Wikipedia calls him a prize-winning economist and that’s right, but he has a gadfly instinct and a remorselessly rational intellect that takes him into the deeps: into first principles, logical consequences and the reductiones ad absurdum of some of our trains of argument. He writes a substack (timleunig.substack.com) and it was his recent summary there of proposals he wrote as chief economist for the Onward thinktank that caught my eye. ‘I bought this house from savings that were taxed as I earned. Now you want to tax me because I have it. No!

While working as a callow speechwriter for the Labour party in the mid-1980s, I suggested to a member of the then shadow cabinet that perhaps we should do something in support of the teachers, who were clamouring for more money. ‘Sod them, they’re all Tories,’ came the response. Well, how times change – and also how little. This supposedly marginal land is in danger of disappearing, and with it the wildlife that abounds These days there are just nine teachers in the country who vote Conservative and they keep their heads down in case a colleague dobs them in for the hate crime of existing. However, the principle of helping only those who voted for you seems to have been continued by Labour down the years.

Disappearing England Sir: Rod Liddle’s reference to Labour’s intention to build 1.5 million new houses (‘The great bee-smuggling scandal’, 13 July), even though there is not a shortage, leads one to worry where they will be located. The green belt was introduced for London in 1938 and the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 extended powers with local authorities for self-designation. In 1937, John Betjeman wrote for one of his BBC talks: ‘England is disappearing and there is growing up, where the trees used to be and where the hills commanded blue vistas, another world that does not seem to be anything to do with England at all. This new world lives in ill-shaped brick horrors, for which it has had to pay through the nose.

Sitting ducks Sir: James Heale is right to highlight the important question about Rishi Sunak’s replacement (‘Who will lead the Tories?, 13 July). A weak leader will be a sitting duck for Nigel Farage to target, resulting in a worsening split on the right and an open goal for Labour to exploit at the next general election. They need a bold, principled and pragmatic leader who is prepared for fierce resistance by Reform UK. All the proposed candidates are great at preaching to their own respective choirs, but are any of them prepared to bravely fight for their beliefs like a Margaret Thatcher? They need to reinvent themselves, akin to in 1975, when Thatcher took the necessary steps to change the Conservative party, providing an alternative to the normalised managed decline.