Ross Clark

If there is one thing that could yet save HS2 it is the 'letting down the North' argument. Didn’t Boris make a speech in the early hours of 13 December promising the party’s new-found voters in the north that he would never take their votes for granted and never forget them? How, then, would he escape the onslaught that would be launched against him if he decided to dump a high-speed rail line to the north? We’ve had endless open letters from council leaders, business people and so on in recent months begging the government to go ahead with the scheme.

Hands up if you have ever heard of Brian Moles? No? Then what about Anne Sacoolas? Yep, I bet that is registering a bit more. Sacoolas, as pretty well the whole country now knows, was spirited out of the country by US authorities after allegedly causing the death of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn by driving on the wrong side of the road near an airbase in Northamptonshire last August. Yesterday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that he was rejecting a British demand for the extradition of Mrs Sacoolas, arguing that she had diplomatic immunity. And Mr Moles? Last year, Moles pleaded guilty to causing death by dangerous driving at Southampton Crown Court after killing a motorcyclist while making an illegal turn.

It was pretty inevitable that once rain finally started to fall in South Eastern Australia, extinguishing some of the bushfires which have been raging for weeks, the wet weather, too, would be blamed on climate change. 'Climate apocalypse starts in Australia,' a human rights lawyer tweeted in response to golf ball sized hailstones falling in Canberra. 'You'd be hard-pressed to look at what is going on in Australia right now and not connect it to climate change.' said the website News & Guts, tweeting similar pictures of hailstones falling on the Australian capital. For the Weather Channel it was a case of 'record rains' – citing by way of example the 60mm of rain which fell in an hour in Newcastle, New South Wales. https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/1219180999097057281?

It wasn’t so long ago that Sir David Attenborough came across as a calm voice of reason. His much-admired documentaries touched on environmental issues but were not driven by them; they were not morality plays. But something seems to have got into Sir David. He has become a Greta of the third age. The rot set in last April when he narrated a programme on climate change which used the same, tired old trick Al Gore has used: running a commentary on climate change against pictures of hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and floods, as if to plant in the viewer the idea that all these events were caused by, and therefore wouldn’t have happened without, climate change.

Gavin Barwell is a decent enough chap, but the more you read of his time as Theresa May’s chief of staff, the more you realise why her government was doomed. He paints a picture of a low-energy government in the midst of high-energy national crisis. Nothing demonstrates this better than the corresponding reading lists of Barwell and his successor at 10 Downing Street, Dominic Cummings. This is the reading list Cummings set for data scientists interested in applying to his ‘weirdos and misfits’ job advert at the beginning of the year: This Nature paper, Early warning signals for critical transitions in a thermoacoustic system, looking at early warning systems in physics that could be applied to other areas from finance to epidemics.

The biggest news of the week, obviously, is the conclusion of the drama which has rocked Britain for the past 12 months: the moment the EU Withdrawal Bill finally made it through the Commons. Blanket coverage of Thursday night’s vote may have led to some readers being unaware of some of the other news stories of the week, such as the shooting down of a Ukrainian airliner in Iran and the announcement by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex that they no longer wish to work as full-time royals. Or maybe not. How astonishing, given all those days of destiny that we had throughout 2019, that hardly anyone seems to have noticed the final act. That it was reduced to the ‘news in brief’ column is mostly down, of course, to the power of a comfortable Commons majority.

It is easy to construct a scenario in which tit for tat actions by the Americans and Iranians lead to all-out war, close off the Gulf, send oil prices soaring, crash the global economy – and, if you are really going to go for it, end in nuclear conflagration. But what about the alternative outcome: that conflict between Iran and the West precipitates a counter-revolution against the mullahs and leads to and end to the 40 year Iranian theocracy? The overthrow of the Iranian regime is the black swan event – or maybe it ought to be called a white swan event – which no-one is talking about, which is odd given that there have been plenty of indications over the past couple of years that ordinary Iranians are finally growing fed up with their regime.

As we know, carbon emissions are going to have to be eliminated in the coming decades to prevent us suffering from fire, flood, tempest and plagues of locusts. But in one important respect is the cure actually worse than the disease? That's the surprising implication of a statement on deaths from last year’s heatwave by Bob Ward, the Director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics. In response to figures suggesting that there were 892 excess deaths between last June and August, a period which saw the highest temperature ever recorded in Britain, he said: 'Tragically, many of these deaths are likely to have been preventable.

No, it isn’t a great triumph that train fares are going up by an average of ‘only’ 2.7 per cent today which, as the Rail Delivery Group notes, is a whole 0.1 per cent lower than the Retail Prices Index (RPI). For one thing, RPI is no longer used as an official government statistic because the statisticians believe it to be faulty. When it comes to the government paying us, for such things as the interest on our inflation-linked savings statistics, it is almost always the – usually lower – Consumer Prices Index (CPI) which is used. But that is all a bit beside the point. In what other industry do prices go up automatically in line with a government inflation figure every 2 January, as regulated rail fares do?

We have a likely candidate who allegedly told one of her colleagues 'I’m glad my constituents aren’t as stupid as yours', and who has threatened to sue the MP who told the story as she says it's untrue. We have a frontrunner who can see nothing wrong in the manifesto with which Labour just crashed to its biggest defeat since the 1930s; another who went down to a limp defeat when she last stood for the leadership against Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour leadership contest is hardly going to worry Tories too much. That might be good news for Boris Johnson, in that he is unlikely to have much of a challenger in 2024. But is it really good to have such a weak opposition?

I have long since learned, not least from my interview with Al Gore published here in 2017 that the surest way to get called a climate change denier is to quote genuine science that runs counter to the hyperbolic ‘science’ spun by the likes of Gore, Extinction Rebellion and the global Greta community. But no matter, here goes. No, the devastating bushfires in Australia are not a symptom of a world that is being consumed in conflagration caused by man-made climate change.

Andrew Bailey, announced this morning as the next Governor of the Bank of England, is not, to use a term quoted this morning, a ‘rock star’ banker. He has been sold to the nation as a boring, dependable sort who will steady the horses, the safety-first candidate. It no doubt helps in this impression that he is, in fact, a banker – unlike the labour lawyer now running the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde. But that rather misses out a bigger question about Andrew Bailey: what is his attitude towards the regulation of banks and the wider financial sector in general? This matters somewhat as, under his watch, Britain will have to decide how to use its new-found freedom over financial regulation – whether to deregulate, increase regulation or follow the EU.

Just how could the Conservatives win so many seats in working class areas in the Midlands and North, areas which the party stands accused of hollowing out through its cruel monetarist policies in the 1980s?       There is a fairly simple answer to this: it is no longer the 1980s, and areas which were once hollowed out through mass unemployment are no longer afflicted in this way.     Today’s employment figures show just what Labour is up against when trying to convince the working classes that they have had a raw deal out of the government. The unexpected jobs miracle of the past decade continues. The employment rate is no longer falling as sharply as it has done over most of the past 10 years, yet at 76.