William Cash

There’s nothing the ruling Labour political class likes more than propagating the Oxbridge class myth that the Conservative party is a cosy PPE graduate club, its cabinet full of over-privileged Bullingdon members, whilst Labour is the party of merit, ‘social equality’ and equal opportunity.  Burnham arrived in No. 10 promising radical change. But a glance at his government appointments makes a joke of any idea that Labour is the real party of merit. The new PM likes to wear dark Don Johnson-like T-shirts and peddle the idea that he is different – that he comes from a working-class northern family and that reading English at Cambridge didn’t really change him.

The moment I heard that Nigel Farage was going to make a 2 p.m. statement yesterday regarding his "political future," I can't have been alone in having a sense of deja vu. On 23 June 2016, the morning of the historic EU referendum vote, I texted my boss Nigel Farage to say he ‘had fought a hard battle and deserved to win’. He texted back: ‘One dares to hope’. Only two weeks later, on 4 July 2016, Nigel resigned as leader of Ukip saying he wanted to “get his life back”. This was the third time he had resigned from the post, after leading Ukip from 2006 to 2009 and again from 2010 to 2015.

‘English Tourism Week’, which runs until 23 March, kicked off with a jaunty reception in Downing Street. Various ‘celebratory’ and industry events are planned for this week. But those who work in England's tourist industry are not in the mood for celebrating. For all the fanfare, our tourist and hospitality sectors are in trouble – and the government is to blame. The tax will further cripple the marginalised UK tourism sector To celebrate ‘Tourism Week’ while at the same time administering a punishment beating that hits B&B, hotel and pub owners, as well as self-catering and Airbnb owners, is the equivalent of chartering a luxury bus to parade the English cricket team – ‘Cricket Awareness Week’ – down Whitehall after their last 5-0 Ashes whitewash.

It is ‘insane’, Reform’s Doge chief Richard Tice said this week, that children are wearing ear-defenders in classrooms, supposedly as a ‘calming activity’ to reduce anxiety and stress. Such practices, he said, show UK’s ‘special educational needs and disabilities’ system – known as Send – is not fit for purpose. The number of children receiving support for Send has increased from 1.3 million in 2019 to 1.7 million today, and by 2029, Send-related debts in UK councils are expected to reach £17.8 billion. These costs may bankrupt some local authorities.

With an inconclusive first and second day at the Conclave – to date – speculation in Rome is mounting that there may be deep divisions inside the Sistine Chapel. We may be in for an intense session of vote trading and complex geopolitical chess-board negotiations. The next pope, especially if it is one of the younger members of the Conclave – by which I mean under 70 – will shape the faith of some 1.4 billion Catholics for possibly as long as 20 years, maybe more.  Age may turn out to be a critical factor. The Conclave may want a younger pope from an entirely new generation not besmirched by the sins of the church.

Has the merry-go-round of the global elite summit – epitomised by the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, which concluded this weekend – had its day? As I saw at Davos when I was editor of the finance magazine Spear’s, the WEF has been out of touch for years. Its costs of attending are now so expensive that it is increasingly difficult to justify attending what is essentially a global-class corporate ego massage circus. The first problem with Davos as a platform to ‘improve the state of the world’ is that there are now plenty of other, smaller, and more exclusive global insider CEO ‘thought leadership’ conferences. There is the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho, the Milken Conference in LA, the Google Summer Camp in Sicily, and Brilliant Minds in Stockholm.

Last year, I wrote here about the dark side of LA, after the Friends actor Matthew Perry was found dead in the hot tub of his $6 million Pacific Palisades house. I grimly predicted that his luxury ocean-facing bungalow – sold on to a developer for over $8 million just a few months after his fatal drug overdose – would become a new stop off on the ‘Movie Star’s Homes’ tours.  Was I wrong? The Perry multi-million glass bungalow narrowly avoided the flames. The LA wildfires have torn through the Palisades area, and have reached the very part of the Hollywood Hills where I used to live in the 1990s. Los Angeles Sheriff Robert Luna said that it looked as though ‘an atomic bomb dropped in these areas’.