Ross Clark

Boris Johnson will be led into the Covid inquiry this morning like a condemned man. We have all seen enough of this inquiry to know the line of questioning he will receive: one that will try to portray him as a bumbling fool who rejected scientific advice to lock down, killing many thousands of people in the process. He will also be presented as a callous individual who allegedly said it didn’t matter if elderly people died because they had had their time. Johnson’s enemies will just regret that Brexit can’t be added to the list of charges against him. With expectations so low, it is only natural that he will over-deliver, reminding people of the great communicator he is and why he once enjoyed mass popularity.

The rebellion of 26 Conservative MPs against the government’s zero electric vehicle (ZEV) mandate couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Prime Minister. The ZEV will compel manufacturers to ensure that, from 1 January,  at least 22 per cent of their car sales are pure electric. Yet simultaneously comes news of a collapse in sales of electric cars.   There is little other interpretation to put on the figures for new car sales in November put out by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) today. Electric cars have had an appalling month, with sales down 17.1 per cent on November last year. This, in a month when overall cars sales were 9.5 per cent higher than a year earlier. Motorists seems to be abandoning pure electric cars, although they are buying hybrids.

There is a word that we are going to hear once COP28 gets underway in Dubai later this week: ‘reparations’. While US climate envoy John Kerry has tried to rule out any US agreement to pay reparations to countries affected by what he himself might claim were ‘climate-related disasters’, many developing countries are determined to put compensation top of the agenda, and push it far further than the agreement last year at COP27 to create a ‘loss and damage’ fund whereby developed nations hand out money to poor ones deemed to be affected by climate change.     The demands for reparations will be helped along the way by western academics and pressure groups.

There was little competition for the oddest and most obscure bill to be announced in the King’s Speech: the proposal to licence London’s pedicabs. On the list of the most pressing issues facing the nation, it doesn’t tend to feature very highly. There must be many people in Britain who have never seen a pedicab, let alone ridden in one or come into conflict with these vehicles, which tend to ply a tiny zone of tourist London around Piccadilly Circus. But could the move to regulate pedicabs evolve into something a little more substantial? During a debate on the pedicab bill in the Lords this week, Lord Hogan-Howe, formerly chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, made the suggestion that the legislation be expanded to cover cyclists in general.

‘We know it is painful, especially with inflation at what it is. But there really is no option other than to ask you low-paid workers to contribute a little more in tax so that Rishi Sunak and his wife, when the time comes, can pass on a bit more of their £730 million wealth to their daughters.’   That is, to put it bluntly what Jeremy Hunt will be telling the nation if he does what he is reported to be about to do in the Autumn Statement and cut inheritance tax (IHT). One of the suggestions is that he may halve the rate to 20 per cent.

A trade deal with the US has long been a holy grail for Brexiteers, not least because it is something that the EU has failed to achieve. Barack Obama told us we would have to go to the back of the queue, then Donald Trump told us we were at the front of the queue. Unfortunately, though, Trump wasn’t minded to serve anyone before being replaced by Joe Biden, who has shown a similar lack of interest in trade deals. Indeed, Biden has returned the US to an age of protectionism through his bizarrely-named Inflation Reduction Act, which offers grants and subsidies to green industries – so long as they are based in the US.

The green lobby has found another way of attacking the government for giving the go-ahead for new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. They are claiming that Britain doesn’t have enough refinery capacity to turn the crude oil into finished products.  The climate pressure group Global Witness claims that most of the new oil which will come out of the North Sea will be ‘heavy’ – while Britain’s refineries are geared up to handle lighter crude oils. Therefore, the group contends, it is pointless drilling for new oil in the North Sea because it can’t help provide for our own needs in terms of finished products such as petrol, diesel etc. The green lobby is looking ever more desperate in its campaign against new oil and gas licences It is a fallacious argument.

At times, the Covid public inquiry has had the appearance of a show trial – one that starts with the premise that lockdown was essential to saving lives and should have been imposed earlier in the spring of 2020, and that is seeking to find the guilty parties who prevented this happening. As Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, writes in The Spectator this week, the inquiry is failing to provide much illumination on the question that matters rather more: did lockdowns actually work, and did they do more good than they did harm?

So it seems that rail ticket offices will be reprieved. After a vociferous campaign – not least on behalf of elderly travellers who might find it difficult to use mobile phone technology, let alone the network of often-dysfunctional ticket machines – the government has undertaken a U-turn and told rail companies to withdraw their proposals to close most ticket offices on the network. Any other – genuinely private – industry would be deeply engaged in cost-cutting It may be the right decision. We certainly don’t need as many booking clerks as we did in the day before ticket machines or online ticket sales. It is good that passengers have the option of buying electronic tickets if they find that more convenient.