Ross Clark

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.

I am going to stick my neck out and say it’s going to be Boris by 58 seats. How do I reach that conclusion? Because the pollsters have a problem with estimating the Labour vote. And this time it is their turn to over-estimate it. In 2010 the final polls put Labour on between 27 and 29 per cent – against the 29.7 per cent which Gordon Brown actually achieved. In 2015 the last polls put Ed Miliband between 33 and 35 per cent – compared with the 31.2 per cent he actually achieved. All polls converged on predicting either a dead heat or a Tory lead of 1 per cent – except, that is, for a Survation poll the day before the election which predicted a Tory lead of 6 per cent, remarkably close to the 6.6 per cent lead which gave David Cameron his majority of 15.

The last YouGov constituency-level poll showed a significant closing of the gap between Labour and the Conservatives, with the projected Tory majority falling from 68 seats two weeks ago to 28 seats now – and with a margin of error which could take us well into hung parliament territory. The interpretation being put on this is that while the Conservatives have hit a ceiling, Labour continues to draw tactical voters away from the Lib Dems. But it is worse than that for the Tories. In spite of appeals to Brexit voters to vote tactically, in some places votes are beginning to drain away in the other direction, from the Conservatives to the Brexit party. Nationally, there is no Brexit Party surge – Nigel Farage’s party is stuck at around three per cent.

Has Boris decided this election is in the bag? I ask because this afternoon he's made just about the first bold policy announcement of the campaign. After a safety-first manifesto and little other announcements so as not to frighten the horses, he has stuck his neck out and suggested that the TV licence might be on borrowed time. Having said he was under pressure not to make up policy 'on the hoof' he went on, well, almost to make a policy on the hoof: 'You have to ask yourself whether that kind of approach to funding a media organisation still make sense in the long term, given the way other organisations manage to fund themselves'. How odd that it has taken a Prime Minister, or even a party leader, this long even to contemplate ending the TV licence.

Why can’t the great and good of the climate establishment mention higher temperatures, disappearing sea ice and rising sea levels without also throwing in floods, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires? Al Gore does it, David Attenborough does it and UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres did it at the opening of his annual climate beanfeast in Spain yesterday. You know the sort of thing: we’re heading for more extreme weather, “weather weirding” or whatever. There is hardly a single adverse weather condition which does not now attract some comment blaming it on man-made climate change. It matters because while there is good evidence of rising temperatures, evidence for wilder weather is tenuous at best.