Ross Clark

Matthew Parris is obsessed by an unsolicited app which landed on his smartphone and which, thanks to GPS tracking, is able to tell him how far he has walked in the past 24 hours. 'I can't stop checking, sometimes every 10 minutes, my average daily distances,' he wrote in the Times last week. He has discovered, to his pride, that he covers an average of 3 miles a day. I would beware that app, Matthew. There is a reason why it is free and why it sneaked itself onto your phone ­and it isn't with your health in mind. It has put itself there so that advertisers can follow you around.

The French liberal-left and George W Bush are not natural bedfellows, but today the former are sounding just a little bit like the latter. The ‘Je suis Charlie’ banners they are carrying in reaction to yesterday’s murders at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo are effectively saying, to borrow the former US president’s slogan: you are either with us or you are with the terrorists. The terror attack, of course, deserves universal condemnation. It is an act of cold-blooded murder. That it was carried out against a targeted group makes it neither better nor worse than 9/11 or the London tube bombings which were conducted against random victims.

We might not have much of a coherent energy policy, but we do at least have the honour of breaking the record for the most expensive object ever built. According to Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital, speaking at the Spectator Energy Forum, the cost of Hinkley C nuclear power station, Britain’s first nuclear power plant in 30 years, to be built in Somerset by French power giant EDF, is now up to £24 billion. ‘I’ve looked online to see if there was a more expensive object ever built but I couldn’t find one’ says Atherton. ‘The most expensive bridge was something like £6 billion and the most expensive building something like £5 billion.

Two headlines on successive days speak volumes about the scaremongering which is endemic in the way in which learned bodies disseminate information on climate science. Yesterday, the Royal Society published a report, Resilience to Extreme Weather, predicting that by 2090 four billion people around the world each year will be subjected to heatwave events, with dire consequences for the health of older people. This morning, the Office of National Statistics published its latest figures on ‘excess winter deaths’. They show that last winter there were 18,200 more deaths between December and February than would be expected during the three summer months. Dramatic though this sounds, it is the lowest recorded in 65 years.

Have a read of the following list and see if you can guess its significance: lubricants, iron ore, steel, oil, pharmaceuticals, ships, telecoms, food packaging, oil, property. With the exception of telecoms and property, and perhaps pharmaceuticals, are they just boring, old, dirty industries which are part of Britain’s industrial heritage but play a declining part in our dynamic, 21st-century service-based economy? In fact they are, in order, the principal business interests of the British residents who occupied the top ten places in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List. It is little surprise that there is only one representative from the aristrocacy: the Duke of Westminster, at number ten.

Want your sprog to be toughened up on the playing fields of Eton but can’t afford the fees? From September there is an intriguing alternative. You can send him instead to Holyport College, a free school which is opening in the shell of an old special school six miles away. Though the chairman of governors, Simon Dudley, insists his new school is not ‘Eton Lite’, the website offers more than a hint that here is an opportunity to obtain an Eton-standard education for a third of the price, if your child boards, or nothing at all if he doesn’t. ‘Eton College is our sole educational sponsor,’ reads the blurb, ‘and therefore brings its educational and pastoral expertise to Holyport College.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_31_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="Ross Clark and Lara Prendergast discuss the demise of individualism"] Listen [/audioplayer]Hell, as one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s characters said, is other people. Unless, that is, you happen to be British and born after about 1980, in which case hell is the opposite: being alone for more than about five minutes. As for the absolute pit, the eighth circle or however else you describe the geography of Beelzebub’s kingdom, that is being left alone without a 3G mobile phone signal. Of all changes in British life over the past generation, nothing has been quite so as stark as the strange death of individualism.

Will the military ever see any wrong in the execution of 306 soldiers for cowardice and desertion in World War One? I ask only because I have tried and failed to stage a new musical drama on the subject in a military museum. The Imperial War Museum said straight away that it had organised its own programme of events, but the events directors at the National Army Museum and the Royal Artillery Museum in Woolwich initially showed enthusiasm. They invited in the director and I to see what spaces were available. We discussed whether we would pay a hire charge or enter a revenue-sharing agreement where we paid the museum so much for every ticket.

I used to feel smug when plumbers, bricklayers and the like used to complain of Eastern European migrants coming over here and taking their work. They might be able to replace a ballcock and lay a line of bricks but the one thing these Poles won’t be able to do, unless they happen to be Joseph Conrad, is write good English. My job would be safe. But there was a great big hole in my thinking: I hadn’t reckoned on artificial intelligence. What happens – as it will do any day now – when the editor of the Spectator receives a salesman, or even a sales robot, peddling a device which cuts his contributors’ bill down to next to nothing?