Ross Clark

In 2007 Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of EDF’s UK arm, made the now-infamous promise that by Christmas 2017 we would be cooking our turkeys using energy generated at Hinkley C nuclear power station. That has already been put back to well into the 2020s. But if you are making plans for Christmas 2025 it might be an idea to base them around eating cold turkey sandwiches by candlelight around a wind-up gramophone. The French newspaper Les Echos reports today that an EDF board meeting about Hinkley has been postponed, amid fears that EDF is having more problems funding the project. EDF has already looked to China’s Nuclear Power Corporation, which last October agreed to take a one third stake in the project.

The whole purpose of parliamentary select committees was supposed to be to help inform policy-making. Instead, they have sunk to becoming rather vulgar kangaroo courts used by wannabe barristers of the backbenchers to boost their egos. It took about five minutes at today’s session of the Commons Home Affairs Committee to establish that neither G4S nor Jomast (the landlord which provides properties in Middlesbrough for the housing of asylum-seekers) have a policy of deliberately painting front doors red in order to help identify the occupants as asylum-seekers. Only 59 per cent of properties in the town occupied by asylum-seekers are red, it turns out. Moreover, the doors have been painted red for 20 years – long before they were used to house asylum-seekers.

Retail empires, like the political and military kind, are tragedies. They grow from modest beginnings, pushing all others aside until they reach their apogee when all competitors seem to have been vanquished. Then they collapse from within.  The only difference is that instead of leaving us magnificent cathedrals and palaces they leave us enormous tin sheds. For the past 20 years Ikea has carried all before it. Positioning itself as a mass-market Habitat, at MFI prices, it has all but extinguished the market for traditional furnishings and antiques, which now are sold for peanuts by increasingly desperate auctioneers. In 2005, 4000 people turned up when the Swedish chain opened its new store in Edmonton.

The Today programme often has one choking on one's porridge, but this morning's edition had an item even more infuriating than usual. A barrister who had represented one of the men accused in last April's Hatton Garden raid -­ in this case acquitted -­ was invited onto the show to speak of his 'grudging admiration' for the men who have just been convicted. 'They were clever, they were brave, they were elderly,' he began, suggesting that the raid had 'captured the imagination' of all of us. He was then followed by a crime writer who likened the gang's takings to a 'lottery win', and suggesting that it had cheered us all up at a time when many are struggling with their own finances.

The tragedy of Sir Philip Dilley’s short reign as chairman of the Environment Agency, which ended when he resigned today, is that until he chose to stay in Barbados rather than travel back to Britain to take control of the response to the floods, he was unusually well-qualified for the job. With his appointment in September 2014 we finally had an engineer in charge of the nation’s flood defences. Prior to that the quango had been led by a long line of chairmen and chief executives who seemed to have little grounding in water management or any kind of construction. Baroness Young of Old Scone, chief executive between 2000 and 2008, had come to the job from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

To adapt Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous dictum on the failure of the Germans to tackle Hitler, 'First they came for the smokers and I did not speak out because I was not a smoker…’ How right the smoking lobby was when it warned that once the health Nazis had banned smoking in enclosed public spaces they would target the rest of us. Red meat, cured meat, sugar – all are the subject of increasingly belligerent health campaigns. Today the Chief Medical Officer has upped the ante on alcohol.  No amount of alcohol intake is safe, she says. We risk cancer with every sip we take.   The recommended maximum for men has been reduced from 28 to 14 units a week and for women from 21 to 14 units.

Have 425,000 children really been abused during the past two years? That is the extraordinary claim suggested in a report put out earlier this week by the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, which was swallowed whole by the Today programme and many newspapers. Not even the normally-inquisitive John Humphrys raised the slightest doubt about the figure when he interviewed a woman who said she had been abused back in the 1960s. The more you dig into the data, though, the more that the estimate of 425,000 child abuse victims comes across as a pure fantasy figure.

In a TV stunt, a Brazilian actress recently lay on a beach asking male passers-by to rub suncream into her back. Many were eager to oblige only to recoil, when she turned over and they saw a bulge – a prosthetic penis – in her bikini. It is a good job she didn’t try it here, else she might be facing the best part of a decade behind bars. There have been many times since the accusations against Jimmy Savile came to light three years ago that I have wondered whether Britain’s traditional prudishness over sex is developing into a national psychosis.

There has been predictable frothing at the suggestion by Professor Averil Macdonald, Chairwoman of UK Onshore Oil and Gas, that more women than men oppose fracking because women are more prone to follow their gut instinct than the science behind fracking. I am going to keep out of that debate, not because I fear for my chances of landing an honorary fellowship – if Tim Hunt’s experience is anything to go by, the world of academia will fall in on Professor Macdonald -- but because I am more interested in what fracking tells us of the attitude of the left towards science. Over the past few years the left has tried to establish itself as the defender of scientific reason.

How easy it would be to scorn the environmentalists who are up in arms about George Osborne’s new pet project, the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. You can understand their anxiety: subsidies for green energy are being slashed, yet the Chancellor will do anything — and pay anything — to get this project up and running. He is happy to force households to pay artificially high prices for a form of energy which brings all kinds of risks — of which the world was reminded this week when Japan found the first cancer case liked to the Fukushima disaster of 2011. ‘Has the Chancellor lost his mind?’ they ask.

That the Conservatives came up with the idea of extending the right-to-buy to housing association tenants was a symptom of their failure to believe they could win this year’s general election. Such an ill thought-out policy can only have made it into the manifesto in the expectation that it could be used as a bargaining chip in the coalition negotiations which were expected to follow. Today, communities secretary Greg Clark announced a significant weakening of the manifesto promise. He said he would consider an alternative scheme put forward by the housing associations themselves, which would exempt many properties, such as those funded by charitable donation.