Ross Clark

It looks as if £300 will end up being to Ed Miliband what 45 minutes was to Tony Blair: the number which will forever hang around his neck, dragging him down whatever else he tries to do in politics. Of late, Miliband seems to have stopped repeating his promise to cut £300 from our electricity bills by 2030 as he decarbonizes the electricity grid. And no wonder when Centrica boss Chris O’Shea revealed yesterday his own company’s projections for electricity prices in 2030. They show that far from falling, we will be paying more for power then than we were in the wake of the Ukraine invasion in 2022.

Nothing excuses the manner of Peter Mandelson’s communications with Jeffrey Epstein both before and after the latter’s conviction for sex offences. Nor are the lies which Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor told about breaking off relations with Epstein defensible. Nevertheless, there is something disturbing about what looks like being the inevitable fallout of the Epstein scandal: that no one in public life will ever again risk remaining friends with anyone who has been jailed or disgraced in any other way. It may well extend to people outside public life, too. The principle seems to have been established: that if one of your friends commits a serious offence and you do not instantly cut off all relations with them, then you are guilty of moral turpitude yourself.

Like Harold Wilson and his ill-defined ‘white heat of technology’, Keir Starmer has latched on to artificial intelligence as the saviour which is finally going to jolt Britain’s sluggish economy into growth. He once even suggested it would help fill potholes. A year ago he launched his AI Opportunities Action Plan, which is supposed to give the industry a huge boost through the designation of ‘AI Growth Zones’. But there is a big hole in Starmer’s plans. How are we going to power an industry that has become as voracious in its energy needs as the steel, shipbuilding and other heavy industries which it might one day replace? The high energy consumption of AI might not seem obvious to anyone playing around with ChatGPT. It all seems so clean and modern.

‘It’s Scotland’s oil,’ cried the slogan of the SNP in the 1970s when the party first began a serious drive for Scottish independence. Not according to the current Labour government at Westminster, it isn’t. The oil doesn’t belong to Britain, either, but to the Earth – and that is where it will stay if Ed Miliband has his way.

How grim things are suddenly looking for Nigel Farage and Reform UK. It isn’t that their poll ratings are crashing – in spite of a minor decline in the polls in recent weeks, the party still holds a commanding lead. For the moment, the outcome of the next election continues to look like being either a Reform UK government of a Reform UK-led coalition with the Tories. At the current rate there is a serious chance that by 2029 the Conservatives could end up looking fresher than Reform UK Conservative MPs are certainly convinced that their party is dying, which is why so many are defecting.

Remember the summer of 2022 when politicians from Ed Miliband to Boris Johnson went around telling us that wind energy was 'four times cheaper' than electricity generated by gas. It wasn’t true then – even at the top of the spike in gas prices which followed the Ukraine invasion. But it looks like an absurd claim now. Miliband, in his latest auction for offshore wind farms, has just committed energy consumers to paying a wholesale price of £90.91 for their electricity, rising with inflation for the next 20 years. Where does that fit with the Energy Secretary's promise to save us £300 a year on our energy bills? No one knows the future course of energy prices, but the average wholesale price of electricity over the past 12 months was £79 per megawatt-hour.

Shock horror. A Cambridge college has realised that to recruit the brightest students sometimes you have to encourage students from private schools as well as state comprehensives in poor neighbourhoods. You can almost feel the foundations of higher education quivering at Trinity Hall's decision to write to private schools to encourage pupils to apply for certain subjects, such as languages and classics where there is presumably a dearth of applications. Trinity Hall's 'targeted recruitment strategy' has sparked fury Predictably, Trinity Hall's 'targeted recruitment strategy' has sparked fury. One college staff member said it was a 'slap in the face' for state-educated undergraduates.

One remarkable thing about Donald Trump’s adventure in Venezuela is just how old-fashioned it is. It is a world away from George W. Bush’s neoconservative efforts at nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is little attempt to justify the arrest of Nicolás Maduro in terms of the human rights of Venezuelan citizens. Little attention appears to have been paid as to how the country will now be governed. Nor have we heard much more about the drugs crimes of Maduro, other than the admission that he perhaps isn’t, after all, quite the lynchpin of an international criminal racket (for all his other offenses against his own people).

Thank God for HS2. The scandal of the ever-more expensive and ever-delayed rail line from London to Birmingham (and now no further) has taken the heat off another of Britain’s tortured rail projects: East West Rail, linking Oxford and Cambridge. East-West rail has the distinction of being even older than HS2, having first been proposed in 2006. It shouldn’t have been that big a project, given that Oxford and Cambridge did once have a rail connection, which was closed in 1967. Much of the trackbed remained in place and parts of it have remained in use throughout. Yet still it is proving a little too much for Britain’s miserable infrastructure industry. Where is the Oxford to Cambridge railway line on the 20th anniversary of its proposed reopening?

How tempting it is to rush to the aid of Clare Melford, one of the five people told by the Trump regime that they cannot have a US visa on the grounds that their presence in the country is not conducive to America’s commitment to free speech. It is hypocritical, one might say to Team Trump, to make a show of defending free speech by banning people you don’t like from entering your country. Indeed, that was the reaction of Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons committee on Science, Innovation and Technology. She said last week: ‘Banning people because you disagree with what they say undermines the free speech the administration claims to seek.’ Before accusing the Trump administration of hypocrisy, however, we should know who Melford is.