Ross Clark

Were I to wake up one morning experiencing sudden doubts over my sexuality I don’t think I would turn to Mike Davidson, still less the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, which has been accused of offering a 'cure' for homosexuality, or anyone else offering gay cure therapy, gay conversion therapy or whatever else people call it. The very names hint to me of quackery, of people wasting their money on pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. But then I am inclined to put much psychotherapy into the same category, along with all the self-help books imploring us to create a better self. But does that mean I want to ban any of them above? Not at all. If people want to pay someone to try to change aspects of their personality that is their own free choice.

It is not a great advert for university when the universities minister says he is not especially bothered whether his own children go or not. ‘The days of degree or bust are long gone,’ Jo Johnson told the Sunday Times recently. ‘There are alternative ways into the workforce these days. Absolutely I would say to my own kids to consider them.’ But hasn’t he got it the wrong way round? Is it not the case that a degree is more essential now than ever? That the chances of getting a good job without one have greatly diminished since a generation ago, when East End barrow boys went straight into the City and industry was full of leaders who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps?

The subtitle of Al Gore’s new film is ‘Truth to Power’, which is supposed to give the impression of brave old Al fighting for right against the mighty fossil fuel establishment. But it is somewhat ironic, given his response when the power being challenged is Gore himself. The former vice president was in London last week to promote his new film and I, along with the world’s press, was invited to a private screening before being allotted an entire eight minutes talking with the great man. An Inconvenient Sequel is an odd film. Billed as a film about global warming, it is really about Gore himself.

Is there anything more predictable than a Mark Carney press conference? The poor sod in Groundhog Day got to enjoy more variety and suspense. Explaining why, yet again, the Bank of England had decided not to raise interest rates, Governor Carney told us that rates could rise ‘faster than markets expect’. That wouldn’t be all that hard, given that markets have pretty well given up on Carney ever shifting rates. Maybe they believed him the first time, in June 2014, when he said that a rate rise could come ‘sooner than markets expect’. Maybe they were still inclined to take a little bit of notice in July 2015 when he told us that he expected rates to rise over the next three years to reach around 2 per cent. But now Carney has become a bit of a yawn.

Remember George Osborne in his hi-viz jacket as he toured the nation’s metal-bashers and gromit-manufacturers in furtherance of his elusive ‘rebalancing of the economy’ away from services and consumers and towards manufacturing and exports? What a shame he is not still in office to witness his ‘march of the makers’ finally becoming a reality. This month’s Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for manufacturing has come in at a healthy 55.1, comfortably exceeding expectations. Any figure above 50 suggests expansion. The index was boosted especially by a sharp rise in new export orders, which rose at their second fastest level in the 17 year history of the index.

There is a group of women who have every reason to feel aggrieved to learn that the BBC is paying Gary Lineker £1.8 million a year and John Humphreys between £600,000 and £650,000. But it doesn’t include Jane Garvey and Emily Maitlis, both of whom appear to be grubbing by on a little below £150,000. It is the 101,000 women found guilty last year of evading the TV licence. If you want a genuinely worrying gender disparity, forget the BBC’s highest-earners and look at the balance of people at the bottom of society who are being dragged through the courts for the non-payment of the tax. The Perry Review into the TV licence, which reported two years ago, found that 70 per cent of those prosecuted for non-payment in 2012 were women.

Byng was the name of the unfortunate admiral executed in 1757, in the words of Voltaire, “pour encourager les autres” after the fall of Minorca. I fear that poor old Michael Byng might be about to go the same way. Having put out a report estimating that the first phase of HS2 could cost £48 billion and the full scheme £104 billion, twice official estimates – will have woken up this morning to hear transport secretary Chris Grayling rubbishing his work, saying that he couldn’t possibly know about HS2 because he hasn’t been working on it. He did, however, devise the system which Network Rail use for estimating costs, which one might think was a pretty useful qualification. I am not a quantity surveyor.

'Workers,' says Matthew Taylor, whose report into modern practices is published this week, 'should be treated as human beings, not cogs in a machine'. How very grand – and how fatuous. His entire report, commissioned by Theresa May in one of her first acts after becoming Prime Minister last July, is pointless, based on the false premise that there are millions of Brits beavering away in Victorian conditions for little money in insecure self-employment. Actually, we’re quite happy, Matthew. The vast majority of us are self-employed because we like it that way. We are not looking for a job, nor extra hours.

A cherished British institution is facing its Waterloo because young people have come to see it as an irrelevance – not the Conservative party but the BBC.  Figures from Ofcom released yesterday show a dramatic fall in the amount of viewing of live television among 16 to 24 year olds who, collectively, are only watching two-thirds as much as they did in 2010.     Instead, they are getting increasing amounts of entertainment online, through Netflix, Amazon and other services. Why, with all that available on your phone, your iPad, your laptop, would you see the need to buy a television – especially when you are probably living a semi-nomadic lifestyle between insecure tenancies?