Ross Clark

The idea that the government had somehow managed to draw a line under the rail strikes by offering drivers and other staff a fat pay rise with no conditions attached even managed to fool the former Tory rail minister Huw Merriman, who declared in August: ‘I can understand why the new government have decided to cut a deal to end the uncertainty and move on with goodwill.’ There are more than 60 metro systems around the world that run without drivers Goodwill? That didn’t even last a day as Aslef celebrated the award of a pay rise for drivers by announcing a further round of strikes on LNER, this time over rostering. Those were cancelled after the government expressed outrage, but that hasn’t stopped Mick Lynch’s Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union coming back for more.

What an ordeal. If there is one thing more trying than watching a leader’s speech at a party conference, it is watching four of them in a row – four doses of platitudes, jokes that miss the mark, personal anecdotes about their childhood and parents which are supposed to build up a sense of character but instead make you groan because you have heard them a dozen times before. She speaks with words, not phrases Tom Tugendhat came across as a middle manager on a public speaking course. Never mind where he wanted to take the country – he didn’t seem sure how and in which direction he was supposed to leave the stage after his low-energy presentation.

For the past five years, I have been in something of a conflict: was Boris Johnson an unconventional but essentially wise prime minister whose ability to see the big picture was more important than his weakness on detail, and whose gift for spreading optimism outweighed his disorganisation? Or was he, as his many detractors have argued, simply not up to the job of leading the country? Fortunately, Johnson has now answered the question himself. Yes, he was stark-ravingly unsuited to being prime minister.

There will be little surprise that Baroness Warsi has resigned the Conservative whip; the greater wonder is that she didn’t do so years ago. In her leaving, she complains 'how far right my party has moved', but then she has been making complaints about the Tories for years. Warsi has never been slow to accuse the Conservatives of Islamophobia. In June 2020, for example, following the murder of three men in Reading by an Islamist extremist – an asylum-seeker from Libya – it was the then Conservative government which caught her ire. Describing the murders as a ‘lone wolf’ attack, she said: 'How can the government seek the support of a community that it needs to deal with these challenges when it simply refuses to work with that community?'.

Is it really true that obesity rates in England have stabilised or fallen, as has been reported today – and that, according to the Obesity Health Alliance, this may be down to things like junk food being removed from supermarket checkouts and calories being provided on menus?  While obesity rates have ballooned, smoking rates have collapsed On the face of it there is one remarkable statistic in the latest figures provided by NHS England for 2022: 13 per cent of 2-15 year old boys were recorded as obese, down from a fifth in 2019 and the lowest figure since 1998. There were no figures produced for 2020 and 2021 owing to the pandemic.

I am sure that the business secretary Jonathan Reynolds picked up many useful skills in his previous job in local government, but does he really know more about how to run a business than the people who run one of the world’s most successful companies?    Apparently, yes. Asked on LBC where his comments about encouraging remote working fitted in with Amazon’s decision to order its staff back to work five days a week in the office he said:  If I was talking to a business like that I would say that every piece of evidence that has ever been collated suggests that flexibility, when agreed between employer and employee, is good for productivity and is good for staff resilience. You get to retain your staff for longer, you get more out of them.

First, the good news. The Irish government is about to receive a €13 billion windfall in the form of back taxes from tech giant Apple, after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled against the company. That should pay for a good few social homes in a country that has an even bigger housing crisis than Britain’s. It could even go some way to providing universal free public healthcare (at the moment most adults have to pay something, even at public hospitals). Why should countries which have been successful at managing their finances be forced to jack up tax rates? Now the bad news. Ireland doesn’t actually want to receive the money any more than Apple wants to pay it. It has spent millions of euros fighting the European Commission (EC), which initiated the case.

Keir Starmer won the Labour leadership election in 2020 on the back of a promise to nationalise public utilities. In one of his most blatant flip flops, he later went back on that, committing instead only to nationalise the rail industry – and even then by degrees as current franchises reached the end of their lives. But could the Prime Minister find himself driven towards a much broader nationalisation after all, and at high political cost? The question arises because of Thames Water, which has warned it could go bust next year if it is blocked from jacking up customers’ bills to help fill its own £15 billion financial black hole. The company wants to raise bills by 60 per cent over five years, but the regulator Ofwat only wants to allow an increase of 23 percent.

Ed Miliband told the EnergyUK conference this morning that he wants to take on the 'blockers, delayers and obstructionists' who stand in the way of Britain’s energy security. Oh good, does that mean that finally he appreciates that the North Sea needs some encouragement? And that a UK fracking industry will finally be allowed to commence, after years of being blocked in the courts by environmentalists spinning false stories about how it will cause your water taps to burst into flames and cause devastating earthquakes (including those actually felt at the Earth’s surface)? Er, sadly not. Miliband, of course, rather likes blockers and delayers when they are on his side.

If Starmer were to rejoin the EU tomorrow, arch-Remainer Gavin Esler tweeted the other day, what benefits of Brexit would you miss most? I've got one for him: affordable cars.  Britain, even under a more EU-friendly Labour government, has declined to copy the EU – as well as the US – in imposing punitive tariffs on imports of Chinese-made electric cars.  For some manufacturers the new EU tariffs will reach 37.6 per cent, which together with the existing 10 per cent tariff will bring it close to 50 per cent. Britain, critics will say, will now become a target for ‘dumping’. That is another way of saying that UK motorists are about to enjoy a cornucopia of affordable electric cars – something which European manufacturers have failed completely to engineer.