Ross Clark

Never let a good crisis go to waste, as they say. And Rachel Reeves has made it quite clear that she is going to milk the Iran war for all it is worth. It was Iran wot pushed inflation up to 3.3 per cent, she has hinted (ignoring that the Consumer Prices Index was already above 3 per cent, and has been well above the Bank of England's target for most of her time in office). It will be Iran (or rather Donald Trump) which destroys British jobs (ignoring that her hike in employers' National Insurance had already cost tens of thousands of jobs), and it won't be anything to do with her when the economic growth figures turn sour. 'Just look at that thundering growth of 0.5 per cent I created in February,' she will say (ignoring that growth in the year to February was just 0.8 per cent).

Donald Trump's second presidency began with a blaze of executive orders which horrified and impressed in equal measure. It also begged the question: if it really were so easy for a president to circumvent the legal obstacles and assert his will, how come none had behaved in this way before? A year on, we are learning the truth: no, a president can't just do what he likes, and there is a horrible price to pay if he tries. In the case of Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs the notional bill is $166 billion. That is the sum that US Customs believes it will have to refund to importers who paid tariffs which were ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court in February. A computer portal to handle the refunds was set up this week, the administration of which adds more cost.

What have North Sea oil and gas production and grammar school education got in common? Both are subject to a fiddle by which they can be expanded while the government pretends they are not expanding. After David Cameron changed his mind on grammar schools and said he wouldn’t allow new ones to be created, a deal was done whereby existing schools could open a ‘satellite’ on another site in another town. Hence Tunbridge Wells Grammar School opened a new site in Sevenoaks – a separate school in all but name, and yet the government could claim that it had stuck to its promise of no new grammars. The cabinet battle over the energy crisis is still far from resolved Rachel Reeves has suggested that the present government may take the same approach to North Sea oil.

First the good news. Some commercial users may be enjoying free electricity at some point this summer – or better still, they may even be paid to consume it. Now the not so good news: at other times it will mean us all having to pay even more for our electricity than we already do. The National Energy System Operator (NESO) – the nationalised body which manages the grid in Britain – is reported to be drawing up emergency plans in case it becomes too sunny. Thanks to Ed Miliband, there is now so much installed wind and solar capacity that in sunny and windy conditions it threatens to overload the grid. Here is the problem. Currently, the UK has 32 gigawatts of installed wind capacity and 22 gigawatts of installed solar capacity.

At first sight it might seem like the triumph of reason over ideology. The Times is reporting that Ed Miliband has given way and is poised to announce that he will, after all, grant a licence for extraction from the Jackdaw gas field 250 miles east of Aberdeen. It has been a long time coming. For weeks, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero has been holding out, insisting that more oil and gas drilling in the North Sea won’t make any difference to Britain’s energy security or energy prices. Meanwhile, even RenewableUK, the trade body for wind and solar, has been backing more drilling. On Wednesday, Rachel Reeves made it quite clear that she was in favour of approving new licences for the North Sea.

Reform UK has just made what could turn out to be an enormous error. Its Treasury spokesman, Robert Jenrick, has committed the party to retaining the ‘triple lock’ on pensions, whereby the state pension rises each year by either inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is greater. This follows a period in which Nigel Farage had suggested that the policy was ‘up for discussion’. It is easy to see the attraction of committing yourself to the triple lock. A recent poll by Lord Ashcroft suggested that six in 10 voters support the policy. What’s more, pensioners tend to be enthusiastic voters.

Sooner or later it is going to dawn on Ed Miliband and the rest of the government that anger over Britain’s sky-high energy prices is not going to go away. They are no longer going to be able to conceal the obvious evidence that UK consumers and businesses are paying significantly more for their energy than their counterparts in comparable countries. They are also not going to get away with blaming the war in Iran, nor with maintaining the pretence that the government’s green policies are helping to bring down bills. Yesterday it was the turn of Marks & Spencer chief executive Stuart Machin to highlight the issue. Green levies and other policy costs, he revealed, now make up more than half of his company’s energy bills.

Have markets and governments horribly underestimated the fallout from the Iran war, or is it the doomsters who have got it horribly wrong? President Trump’s announcement has rather caught the world off guard. This morning, he posted on Truth social saying that he is seeking a negotiated settlement with Iran and has postponed his planned attacks on energy infrastructure. Many expected a huge escalation in hostilities this week. Could this be yet another example of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), or was his threat to bomb energy infrastructure another crafted bluff – and that order to the global economy will be swiftly restored?

Like Harold Wilson and his 'white heat of technology', Rachel Reeves is presumably hoping that blathering on about AI and quantum computing in her Mais lecture today is going to make her sound modern and positive. Yes, of course artificial intelligence is the 'defining technology of our era' – we don't need the Chancellor of the Exchequer to tell us that. I am sure that £2.5 billion of public money will be useful, but then there isn't exactly a shortage of private capital being hosed on AI at the moment, so the need for public money isn't clear; lower taxes and less onerous employment legislation might be more favourable.

Could there be any greater vindication for the government’s policy of pushing us to buy electric vehicles than the crisis in Iran, which has sent prices of petrol and diesel soaring? That is what the government itself would like us to think, but it is not how the UK car industry sees it. Never mind the pain being suffered at the pumps. The Chief Executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), Mike Hawes, chose yesterday to warn that the industry is in ‘deep jeopardy' thanks to the government’s proposal for banning new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 and all remaining hybrids from 2035. At an event in London set up to call for a rethink, he said he didn’t know of a single person in the industry who thinks that the targets on EV sales can be met.