Ross Clark

You can tell a lot about the Left simply by reading the list of subjects which are trending on Twitter. Top spot this afternoon goes to the hashtag #BoycottHeck. If you are wondering what that means, Heck is a family firm based in North Yorkshire which until the weekend ran a blameless business making gluten-free sausages. Besides its traditional pork sausages, it has also established a reputation for its vegetarian sausages – winning plaudits from a great number of warm-hearted, peace-loving people of the Left. That was, however, until Boris Johnson passed by on the campaign trail for the Tory leadership contest, and posed for a photo opportunity in a Heck-branded apron with the company’s products.

I often see National Trust vehicles around my way – transporting animals, digging, cutting wood and constructing bridges and the like. They do not appear to me to be electric-powered. I shouldn’t be surprised if, like my car, they are still powered by filthy old diesel. I am sure, like me, the Trust would rather use clean vehicles – it has already announced its ambition to source 50 per cent of its energy needs from renewable sources by next year. But for the moment the Trust, like the rest of us, would struggle to live on renewable energy alone. That hasn’t, however, stopped the Trust this morning announcing that it will divest the £45 million it has invested in oil and gas companies.

As Jeremy Hunt has repeatedly claimed during the Conservative leadership campaign, to set a deadline of 31 October for leaving the EU is foolish. Why tie yourself to that date if a deal with EU negotiators seemed close to being sealed? But if you have fallen for that argument, it seems no less puzzling why you would want to set a deadline of 30 September instead – as Hunt has done this morning. That is the date, he has announced, that he will decide whether a deal is achievable or not. If it is, he is prepared to carry on negotiating with the EU indefinitely. If it isn’t, then he will commit to a no-deal Brexit a month and a day later. His announcement will, of course, be listened to eagerly in Brussels, where 30 September will have been underlined in red.

Jeremy Hunt’s case to be Conservative leader is that he is the sensible, low-risk option. While Boris is now committed – thanks to his interview on Talkradio yesterday to leave the EU on 31st October, come what may, ‘do or die’, Hunt is holding out the prospect of some flexibility. The last day of October, he said this morning, is a ‘fake deadline’. Trying to force Brexit on that date, he said, could lead to a general election, a Corbyn government, followed by no Brexit at all. If the government were close to cutting a deal, he has said, then we should extend the deadline. If there were no deal in sight, on the other hand, Hunt says he would take Britain out of the EU without a deal.

Whatever you think of Boris Johnson’s ability to be Prime Minister you have to admire the PR skills of Carrie Symonds. Last Thursday evening an event occurred which could seriously damage Boris’ chances of winning the Tory party leadership contest – a domestic row between the couple in which the police were called to her flat. Unsurprisingly, it dominated the news agenda over the weekend. In a sense it still is way up the news agenda. But over the past 36 hours the focus has subtly changed. The ‘scandal’ is no longer what was said, and thrown, in an upstairs flat in Camberwell last Thursday, but the provenance of a soft-focus photo of the couple – apparently all smiles again – sitting in a Sussex garden.

A neighbour records a domestic row through the wall of their flat, takes the recording to a newspaper which then publishes details of the conversation. I wonder what The Guardian would have made of that in 2011 when it was on its crusade against press intrusion which led to the Leveson Inquiry – especially had the newspaper been a red-top. Eight years ago, it was hacking into the messages on mobile phones which caused the controversy – a practice which led to criminal trials and a comprehensive, judge-led inquiry into the ethics of the press.

Why are MPs so pathetically in thrall to Extinction Rebellion? This morning, while the world was focused on the Conservative leadership campaign six Commons select committees (Treasury, BEIS, Environmental Audit, Housing, Communities and Local Government, Science and Technology, and Transport) jointly launched a 'Citizens' Assembly' on climate change. If you think you have heard that term before, it was one of the central demands of the climate change activists who occupied Oxford Circus for two weeks in April. One by one, they seem to be having their demands met as if they were a conquering army as opposed to a ragbag of anti-capitalist protesters. They demanded that Parliament declare a ‘climate emergency’ – which it duly did on 1 May.

Heathrow Airport commences the consultation on its third runway plans today with a very big problem on its hands: a man who has threatened to lie down in front of the bulldozers to stop the runway seems very likely to be Prime Minister by the time the consultation has concluded. In theory, the project ought to be dead in the water – although, as Lord Adonis pointed out on the Today programme this morning, that would be to underestimate Boris’ capacity for u-turns. According to some reports, Boris has already assured fans of Heathrow expansion that he will respect the decision of Parliament to go ahead with the project. But to take that at face value, too, underestimates Boris’ ability to make simultaneous, mutually-exclusive promises to different audiences.

Theresa May is said to be desperately searching for a legacy in her last few weeks at Number 10. It is staring her in the face. Today, the Office for National Statistics published its latest employment figures which confirm, against all odds, that we are in the midst of a jobs miracle of which any previous prime minister would have been proud. The employment rate climbed again to 76.1 per cent, the equal highest on record. The unemployment rate fell to 3.8 per cent, the lowest rate since the autumn of 1974. The rate for economic inactivity – which takes into account people who are not working but not looking for work either – is also at its lowest rate ever, at 25.2 per cent of the working age population.

The problem for Michael Gove is not that thousands of Conservative party members will open their copy of the Daily Mail this morning and think to themselves: ‘Gove has taken illegal drugs, therefore he is unfit to be Prime Minister’. It is that Gove or his supporters will fall into the trap of trying to turn his admission into a virtue. How tempting it will be for them to try to say: ‘look, all Govey’s done is what millions of other students have done. That makes him a normal human being – unlike all these swivel-eyed moralists who would condemn him for it’. But that is what would be fatal to Gove’s chances of winning the Tory leadership.

Politics may seem to be deeply confusing at present, but in fact there is one very stark conclusion to come out of the Peterborough by-election – that while Labour and the Conservatives are both deeply unpopular, the Labour vote remains more tribal than that of the Conservatives and will hold up better in a general election. Hard though it might be to see the bright side when your party’s share of the vote has plunged from 48 per cent to 31 per cent, Peterborough is something of a quiet triumph for Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour result is truly miserable until you realise that the Conservatives’ share fell from 46 per cent to 21 per cent.