Ross Clark

In China you can see replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid, St Peter’s Square and a large slice of Amsterdam. But more remarkable than any of them in its own way is a red-brick military-academy-style building in the Hongqiao district of Tianjin. It is a replica — or thereabouts — of Wellington College in Berkshire. And unlike a lot of other replicas, it wasn’t built by a Chinese property developer but by Wellington College itself. Wellington College International Tianjin, which was opened by Prince Andrew in 2010, is more or less a full-size working model of its mother school, albeit without the full complement of rugby pitches (there is one Astroturf pitch) or boarding houses (its first boarders arrive this month).

Which businessman is the most influential in the making of government policy? The answer came to me when I received a letter fining me £80 for forgetting to renew my car insurance by the correct date. But it could also have come to me had I forgotten to fill out of council tax enquiry form (fine £70), missed getting in my tax return by one day (£100), or got caught in a box junction in the King’s Road which has two sets of traffic lights in quick succession (£130). It is, I have come to believe, Michael O’Leary.

In June last year I predicted in these pages that the government would allow High Speed 2 to die a quiet death. Although the government has since reaffirmed its commitment to the proposed railway line, I am sticking to my prediction. Indeed, if the line is ever built I will book a ticket on the first train out of Euston and consume my hat in the dining car. How can I be so sure? Because the projected costs of the project are now so ridiculous that it cannot possibly go ahead. Even before George Osborne, in his spending review in June, added another £8 billion to the estimate cost of HS2, the project had a feeble and a deeply flawed benefit-to-cost ratio of 1.4:1.

It is good to see Boris furthering his policy of allowing illegal immigrants to stay if they manage to evade the attention of the authorities for 12 years. Older readers may just remember that they read it in the Spec first. The idea, as I remember, came up in conversations for a leader for the magazine back in 2001, when William Hague was jumping up and down about asylum and telling us that if we voted for him he would give us back our country. The Spectator, honourably, took a very different line. The problem was not with ‘economic migrants’, which was then a popular term of abuse on the right and the left, but with migrants who came to Britain with no intention of working.

When the Chancellor stands up to present his spending review next Wednesday it will be with the reputation of a crazed axeman. Much of the country, whether it thinks it a good thing or not, subscribes to the belief that George Osborne is shrinking the state year-on-year, slicing here, chopping there. In a recent poll 58 per cent of respondents agreed with the proposition that Osborne’s ‘austerity drive’ is ‘harming the economy’. Twenty per cent agreed that it was the ‘correct medicine’. Yet it was a trick question based on a faulty premise: that there has been an austerity drive. The truth is that public spending has risen under this government — and in real terms, too.

To listen to many disability pressure groups, adult social care for people with learning disabilities is being slashed by a heartless government. What few of them want to tell you, however, is that the government is spending far more than it needs to on looking after adults with learning difficulties, as well as exposing many to cruelty and exploitation, thanks to an ideological obsession with placing them in ordinary housing rather than the communities in which many have lived for decades. I have an interest to declare: I have a daughter with learning difficulties who in two years’ time will qualify for adult social care.

A former editor of this magazine, Nigel Lawson, once described the NHS as ‘the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practise in it regarding themselves as a priesthood’. He meant to imply that blind faith tends to take over from observation. But there are other likenesses: bickering cardinals, grandiose PFI cathedrals that suck money from the pockets of believers — and now, finally exposed after being covered up for years, a shocking scandal of abuse. Hospital managers like to commission paintings of the premises to hang in their corridors. In the case of Mid Staffordshire Hospitals Trust, William Hogarth would have been a suitable choice of artist.

Like the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 18th-century Anglo-Spanish relations, Heathrow is becoming something of a totem in the fight for the soul of the Conservative party. Whether you prefer your new runways to the east or west of London positions you on the other great issue of the day: who should be leader. If you’re an MP with a constituency anywhere near west London, you’ll probably be in the Cameron camp, shifting uncomfortably in your brogues, wondering how best to perform the Yeo flip and support a third runway at Heathrow. The alternative is of course the Boris camp, whose members think the PM’s plan pathetic. Brave, confident countries build big airports in anticipation of big planes.

The Chinese have excelled at London 2012, much to the annoyance of their Western rivals. In this week’s issue of the Spectator, Ross Clark argues that the claims against swimmer Ye Shiwen reflect irrational suspicion of her country. Here is an edited version of Ross’s article (you can read the full version here): The story of London 2012 has been that of a country which was once an underachiever in the Olympics but which, through sheer hard work on the part of its athletes, has hauled itself to the top of the medals tables, producing in the process one of the most dramatic world records in Olympic history. I refer, of course, to the People’s Republic of China. But this is not a story you will have picked up from the BBC or the press.

There is nothing as dangerous, they say, as the zeal of the newly converted. So it was when Labour under Tony Blair suddenly discovered capitalism. What had been a small-scale pragmatic policy under John Major’s government, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), was taken up with huge gusto in order to see the rebuilding of hundreds of schools and hospitals. Gordon Brown loved it too, because, although less wedded to private enterprise, he spotted a way of fiddling his borrowing figures: by shifting billions of pounds of new investment off the government’s books. We ended up with a deficit of £160 billion anyway. But on top of that, the real cost of PFI is becoming ever more apparent.

The fact that you cannot perform a U-turn in a train is one of the limitations of that form of transport. When the line ahead is blocked, locomotives form long queues, unable to go anywhere until the problem is solved. It is scarcely any easier performing a U-turn with a high-speed rail project, especially after you have spent several million pounds compensating people who live in blighted properties along its route, and several years promoting it as central to your vision for a modern Britain. But it is a U-turn which it is becoming increasingly clear that the government is now resigned to making. To the outside world, ministers are admitting nothing. But the signals are there, for those with an eye to see them.