Ross Clark

While frustrated Remain campaigners continue to speak of economic Armageddon, a very significant move happened yesterday. Business secretary Sajid Javid flew off to Delhi to begin preliminary negotiations for a trade deal between Britain and India. It is significant because this is exactly the sort of deal that we have been forbidden from doing for the past 43 years. As members of the EU we are forbidden from signing our own trade deals with third countries. Instead, we must rely on deals collectively negotiated with the EU. Trouble is, the EU isn’t very good at negotiating them. It is painfully slow process because the competing demands of 28 different EU economies must be satisfied.

So now it is certain: the Conservatives will produce Britain’s second female Prime Minister, after Andrea Leadsom eliminated Michael Gove from the leadership contest and will now go head-to-head with Theresa May in a vote of Conservative members to be announced on 9 September. So why isn’t the Left cheering this social advance? Instead, the bitching has already begun.   Andrea Leadsom is being savaged for being less than 100 per cent enthusiastic about gay marriage (bizarrely, she voted for and against in the same vote); while Theresa May is eviscerated for her proposal – since dropped – to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights.

The Conservative party’s electoral system won an unlikely compliment this afternoon from Labour MP Ian Austin, who declared that it showed how a ‘serious party’ operated. It might look serious compared with the fiasco of Labour’s leadership crisis, but does the election of a new Prime Minister really have to be dragged out over two months, and at a time when the country is crying out for someone to take leadership over Brexit? It is bizarre that 100,000 Conservative party members are deemed to require twice as long to make up their minds as 46 million UK voters have to decide in a general election campaign. Until 2001 the Conservative party leadership was decided on fairly quickly via a ballot exclusively of MPs.

Just when you were beginning to wonder whether we have done the right thing, along comes Jean-Claude Juncker to remind you exactly why Britain voted for Brexit. It is ‘not going to be an amicable divorce’, he tells us. Why can’t it be amicable? We’ve decided that we’ve grown apart, not run off with the milkman. There’s no need to put the car keys down the drain and upload some naked photos onto the web. It isn’t so much Ukip who are exploiting the politics of hate; it is Juncker. In his desire for revenge he is demonstrating the contempt for democracy that has been the bane of European Commission ever since it was founded. The Remain camp just can’t seem to see why so many voters are fed up with the bullying attitude of the EU.

A vote to leave the EU would cause economic Armageddon. We know because David Cameron and George Osborne have told us so, claiming that there is a wide consensus among economists on the matter. But what if – as now seems increasingly likely – we vote to remain but then have a recession anyway? The Prime Minister and the Chancellor are very quick to quote economists when making the case for us to stay in the EU, saying we should listen to the experts. They would do well to listen to what the experts are saying about the chances of a recession.  A Wall Street Journal survey in May put the chances of a recession in the next 12 months at 20 per cent.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get through just a week of political debate on the EU, or indeed any other subject, without old Adolf being dragged into it. It won’t be this week, obviously, not now that Boris has likened the expansive fervour of the EU to the Third Reich.   Last week Hitler was on the other side, of course, with David Cameron claiming it was only the EU which stood between us and a repeat of the Second World War. Shame we can’t ask Adolf himself for his views on the EU referendum. Or maybe we can. Perhaps someone in the backwoods of Brazil could go and doorstep him and ask him how he’d be voting on 23 June.

Of all the things wrong with the BBC, it would be hard to argue that a shortage of gay people making and presenting programmes is one of them. As Andrew Marr observed a decade ago: 'The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.' Why, then, is the government intent on making the BBC even more gay? In one of the less-reported sections of this week’s white paper on the future of the corporation, John Whittingdale lays down a target that 10 per cent of senior leadership roles at the BBC be filled by LGBT staff by 2020.

As Isabel Hardman wrote yesterday, many interpret Labour’s failure to fail on a bigger scale in yesterday’s election results as the worst possible result for the party.  Sadiq Khan, who had nominated Corbyn for the leadership, won comfortably in London.  Predicted to lose 150 or more council seats, by midday Labour was down a net 26 seats.    This neither puts them in an encouraging position from which to build towards the 2020 election nor signifies a disaster which might provoke Jeremy’s Corbyn’s defenestration and replacement with a more electable leader. But the Conservatives would be very unwise to take comfort from the results.

Trailing in the polls with three days to go until the London mayoral elections, Zac Goldsmith continues to attack his rival Sadiq Khan by accusing him of having links with extremists.   It is a pretty desperate strategy, reduced to making the charge that Khan has ‘shared a platform’ with extremists.   It is also somewhat undermined by the revelation that Goldsmith himself has been photographed smiling alongside Suliman Gani, the Tooting Iman who is subject of many of the claims.  Gani also appears to have shared platforms with Conservative MP for Battersea, Jane Ellison, on a number of occasions. But one thing puzzles me.

Frumpy, out of date and not much fun – Gordon Brown and BHS go together in more ways than one.   A word needs to be put in about the role of the former Chancellor and Prime Minister in the collapse of the chain store this week. Dominic Chappell – who must win this year’s business brass-neck award by attempting to buy back BHS days after it collapsed into administration with him at the helm -- was perhaps not the kind of entrepreneur that Gordon Brown had in mind in 2001 when he published a white paper, Enterprise for All, which led to the 2002 Enterprise Act.  But intentionally or not, he was one who benefitted from Brown’s attempts to de-stigmatise bankruptcy.

If there was one piece of advice the Foreign Office was going to give to British citizens travelling to the USA you might think it would be to wary of lunatics armed to the hilt with semi-automatics.   But no, our civil servants do not regard the possibility of having your ass shot off as you innocently backpack around the backwoods of North Carolina to be worthy of a warning. There is one piece of advice the Foreign Office has put on its website, though.  It states:  'LGBT travellers may be affected by legislation passed recently in the states of North Carolina and Mississippi.