What Do You Think Today?

[TheFallen]

I was equally really surprised to see Suella Braverman brought back as Home Secretary. Sure I was delighted to see the back of her predecessor Pritti Patel who had the same levels of compassion and tolerance as Pol Pot - but bizarrely, Braverman looks to be cut from very much the same zealot cloth. VERY much frying pan, fire if you ask me.

Side note - like Peter, I am also flabbergasted at the sight of politicians who are after all first generation British turning out to be so incredibly intolerant. I mean, Priti Patel's parents emigrated to the UK from Uganda in 1960, with Priti being born here 12 years later. Suella Braverman has a very similar back story, with her parents also emigrating to the UK in the 60s (from Kenya and Mauritius respectively), with Suella being born here in 1980. I simply do not get the justification for the sheer intolerance that infuses and yes, even galvanises the attitudes, policies and stances of both these slavering harpies? Truly baffling... anyhow.

Pete, Sunak's the only viable choice for the role of PM at the moment. I don't believe he's "a member of the city's hedge-fund elite", but he certainly understands the power that world financial markets wield and how they need to be inspired to have confidence. As we know and as Ludicrous Liz proved without doubt, it's literally crucial to have them onside. Sure, lament the power that global markets hold - but it's arrant folly to pretend that they don't hold such sway. And it's been thus for several decades now - just cast your mind back to Soros and similar currency traders handing the pound sterling, the then Chancellor Norman Lamont, the entire Tory government of the time and in fact the UK economy as a whole their collective asses on Black Wednesday back in 1992.

Sunak is without doubt the best man for the current job - but it's liable to be a real poison chalice. I'm confident he'll make the best fist possible of improving things over the next 26 months - but then will almost certainly lose the late 2024 general election as a result. Doing one's best to fill in a £30 to £40 billion black hole in the public finances is a 1,000% absolutely necessary and indeed crucial task - but it's never going to be populist or a vote winner.

IMO, Starmer is definitively not effectively an old-style Tory. He's a veneer man with no substance behind the public facade - he was picked as a face on the sole basis of being potentially acceptable to middle ground voters, very much along the lines of a New Labour Blair Lite, if you like... except one with no policies and no clue. He's a nothing man, a cardboard cut-out - but look behind the paper front man and you'll very quickly spot Corbyn-style big state socialism, as perfectly embodied by the loathsome and frankly scary Deputy Leader, the harridan that is Angela Rayner.

As to your earlier idea of a Nordic style consensus government? It'd be lovely if this were realistic - but I just can't see it happening. Such a thing suffers at root from the same problem engendered by Proportional Representation... 99% of the time you'll end up with a coalition government with no one party in power. That makes it incredibly difficult to get any agreed-upon decision made and even if decisions do eventually get agreed upon after months of near-endless debate and significant compromise, they'll inevitably be late as well as having been watered down to the point of ineffectiveness. However conceptually well-intentioned it may be, consensus government really doesn't lend itself at all to either timely, decisive or effective action.

Or to put it another blunter way, there's considerable truth in the trope:-

"A camel is a horse designed by committee."

[peter]

Can't argue with much of that TF. I'm a conservative (so far as I could be described as one) after the fashion of the two Peter's, Hitchens and Oborne, both of whom have valuable things to say on the sorry state that the Party has been reduced to.

On Stamer, you might well be correct. I was thinking more about how he would look to the old Tories of the Shires than of his actual political thinking (which Peter Hitchens agrees with you, takes a pretty radical Trotskyist shape when the veneer is pulled away).

As for my fantasy polity of cooperation and consensus replacing adversarial opposition - all true, but with one note to add. A camel can be a pretty damn useful beast if you find yourself in a dessert.



(On Braverman, in the submarine service of the Royal Navy, they operate a system known as 'The Perisher'. If you screw up, you are out. No if's, no but's, no returns. How could you ever be trusted again. The same system should apply to Ministers.)

[peter]

There is some kind of hoohaa going on about Rishi Sunak's decision not to attend the forthcoming Cop 27 talks in Sharm el Sheikh.

Environment Secretary Therese Coffey has made light of the decision saying that the conference is "just some people meeting up in Egypt", and Sunak himself has suggested that his nonattendance is due being busy with the "depressing matter of the economy" at home.

But some will unquestionably consider that his decision is intended to send a message that perhaps he is one that is not entirely convinced by the argument put forward by the environmentalists for manmade climate change - or does not consider it to be a high enough priority to justify his having to attend.

Which is perhaps not a good look as we happen to be, at this particular time, the outgoing presidency handing over the reins to our successor, and that other world leaders such as Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron are set to attend. And coupled with the decision to chuck the current chairman of the talks Alok Sharma out of the cabinet to the obscurity of the backbenches. And his deputy. And to uphold the ban on King Charles from attending the talks imposed by former PM Liz Truss, despite the monarch being very keen to attend.

Could it be that our new PM spends too much time listening to GB News and the Murdoch owned Talk TV, both of which channels seem to be of the opinion that the whole climate change issue is a globalist one world government conspiracy which has hoodwinked political leaders the world over into believing, and resulted in the disastrous 'net zero' agenda which will be the tool ultimately used to secure our enslavement. Could it be.....

I wonder....

Certainly the windfall tax that Sunak unhappily introduced while in his previous position as chancellor of the exchequer seems to have been so peppered with loopholes, leaky as a culinder, such that barely a penny has been paid since its introduction, despite the oil companies having made eyewateringly huge profits in the meantime.

Outgoing Cop 26 president Sharma thinks that the windfall loopholes should be closed, and is now in a position to say so (as he is doing on the front of today's Guardian). But time will tell if Sunak is perhaps not as committed to net zero and the climate control agenda as he should be. If this is so, he should not expect an easy ride. But from his first few days and the few decisions he has made thus far, it appears that like his predecessor, he also is prepared to be unpopular if this is what is required. Let's hope the policy serves him better than it did her.

[peter]

There was a report in the FT during the week that the cost of making a spaghetti and tomato sauce meal - a staple of the menu in many UK households - had risen by sixty percent in the last few months.

Similarly the cost of other basic foodstuffs had risen, not by the eleven percent quoted inflation figure, but by figures in excess of fifty percent.

Now this has a proportionately much greater effect the lower down the income scale you go. As the earnings of households decrease (in terms of looking down the scale of incomes), a greater and greater percentage of that income is spent on food and energy costs, with less and less disposable income left over for other items that have not increased in price,, but are included in (and therefore skew the final figure reached) the basket of goods upon which the calculated inflation rate is based.

So down at the level of the lowest income households, the inflation rate they experience is not the eleven percent cited in the official figures, but rates approaching sixty to a hundred percent (and rising as energy costs go yet higher and higher).

In my particular shop we experience these increases in price on a daily basis. Half of our time is spent altering the prices on the shelves and never a customer goes past the till without commenting upon the rate at which they are going up. The problem of increasing prices is being exacerbated by a steadily reducing supply chain efficiency. Our deliveries are getting smaller and smaller, gaps on the shelves getting harder and harder to fill, and appearing with increased rapidity and distribution around the store with each passing week. The amount and range of products available is being worn down by a sort of attritional effect week after week, month after month. Where will it end we ask? With queues and people outside, anxiously awaiting the next delivery to our store?

Now today in the papers it is reported that the agreement brokered with Russia to allow grain out of the southern Ukrainian ports has broken down and that Russia will attempt to "starve the West of grain" which will put yet further upwards price pressure on basic foodstuffs.

Which will yet again be felt most keenly by those least able to afford it.

Where does the government expect this downward cycle to end if not with hordes of angry and hungry people out on the streets? We have not experienced the effects of hunger - true hunger - on the population of this country for three quarters of a century (possibly much longer). If you want to see how people react to it, look no further than the French revolution.

And our government (most definitely including our current Prime Minister - though not, it has to be said, three quarters of his cabinet) thought it was a good idea to make it less inviting for our nearest neighbours to export their foodstuffs to our shores by virtue of our being outside the club instead of in it? This is a decision that in the near future the folly of which is going to become increasingly and more urgently apparent. This isn't the all of it, but the timing sure ain't helping. I hope our government are making plans for how to deal with the severe shortages when they start - when the effects of not having had a proper harvest and the like start kicking in. Plans like the postwar food rationing scheme, because we are going to need them.

Lay in a supply of food. Be prepared to batten down the hatches. There will be serious trouble before all of this is over. Hungry people get angry. And anger at the level of populations ain't a pretty thing.

---------------0---------------

Tragedy of epic scale as near 150 people die in the South Korean capital during Halloween partying last night. As per usual it was a mass stampede of hyperexcitable people that left hundreds dead and injured - a reason that I have never liked big closely packed crowds - and of as insignificant a thing as Halloween of all things. Such suffering in so many households this morning. Such a waste.

[peter]

It would be fair to say that new PM Rishi Sunak's start in the job has not been quite the glorious (or boring) affair that it was meant to be.

Like Liz Truss before him, his honeymoon period seems to have been denied him - and largely as a result of his own bad judgement. There is no sighn of the Suela Braverman affair dying down - in fact with refugee centres being firebombed, suffering from overcrowding and internal unrest between different migrant groupings and calls for emergency action which it appears that Ms Braverman has ignored, it seems to be getting worse.

And then there's the business of COP 27. With the UK still holding the Presidency of the international body supposed to be addressing climate change, it was not a good look for the PM to say that he wasn't going to attend the summit in Cairo, and the papers - and Sunak's opposition - were not slow in making capital out of it. To add insult to injury, Sunak's arch nemesis - Boris Johnson, not as it should be, Kier Stamer - announced that he was thinking of going instead.

Now anyone who imagines that this was anything other than mischievousness on Johnson's part understands nothing of our former PM at all. The idea that he would break off from shagging or drinking or lying on a beach in the Caribbean (or whatever it is he's up to today since dropping out of the race to become leader of the Party) for something as dull as a climate conference is for the birds. Johnson simply isn't going to stir himself for the good of humanity unless there is a bloody fine payoff for himself written in at the end of it, point blank. Though having said that - if it meant a freebie holiday to Egypt (as long as someone else was paying for it) in a swanky hotel with the additional benefit of causing Sunak embarrassment, then he might consider it. I mean, he wouldn't have to do any actual work or anything, would he? Attend any boring meetings or anything?

But whatever Johnson's real intentions were - and who can know - it seems to have worked. Suddenly, in today's press, it seems that the PM might not be too busy to attend the conference at all. Progress on the forthcoming economic statement seems to have been good, it is reported. Perhaps the PM will find time after all, to visit the summit.

Now come on. This is not a good look. There have already been questions posed about Sunak's judgement following the Braverman appointment and now this is beginning to fall into the same category. And to cap it all, it now looks as if he is going to be adding the fear that as well as having no judgement, he is weak as well. (His answers to questions always seem to have that sort of whiney quality that Stamer's have as well to me: as sort of 'pleading' sound that is not suggestive of the inner resolve or steeliness.) Make no mistake - I won't be the only one noticing this. He's going to have to tighten up his act or he might finish up next to Truss as the second shortest ever serving Prime Minister. (I mean in length of service, not height, though come to think of it........)

[Avatar]

Yes, the Braverman thing only seems to be gaining momentum now, with accusations she broke the law by not allowing them to find alternate accommodation for migrants, and her own admission that she violated that particular bit of the code that she resigned for no less than 6 times.

Dare I hope that the Westminster show may continue to throw up some amusing twists?

--A

[peter]

Beyond doubt Av. We're going to have to wait for Kier Stamer to be PM for things to get really boring. And then we'll know the true meaning of the word.



On the Braverman issue, I'd ask this.

What would be the consequence to the lowest person with clearance to handle these documents, had they done what Braverman has admitted to. Sacking - most certainly. Criminal charges - highly likely re the official secrets act. Apology accepted and job given back 6 days later? I don't think so. Very much I don't think so!

-----------0-------------

Socrates was not by any means convinced about the application of universal suffrage when it came to democracy. His argument was that if the people en masse were allowed to vote with equal weight given to every vote irrespective of the level of understanding of the individual who made that vote, then demagoguery would always win the day.

Put it like this. You have two candidates. One is a doctor who says, "this is going to hurt you, but it's necessary and for your own good." The other is a sweetshop owner who says, "Come on in. I'm going to give you all the sweets you can eat!" Which one do you think will win?

Or you might have two candidates for the Tory Party leadership. One might say, "We have to increase taxes and trim back public services to get the economy on track." The other might say, "I'm going to give you reduced races to pay right across the board - you will never have had it so good!"

Or you might have one group who has a lot of boring facts about trade regulatory arrangements versus another that has an exciting emotive slogan like 'Take back control!' and a lot of promises about reducing immigration and forging deals across the world.

Need I say more. Perhaps Socrates had a point.

[peter]

Is Eddie Izzard a man or a woman? Does it matter?

Well, to the women using the lavatories that the comedian has insisted that it is his/her right to use for many a year, it might.

Izzard is the (proud one hopes) possessor of a penis, a big Adams apple and size twelve hands. He is not (nor has any intention of doing so I believe) undergoing any gender reassignment therapy, but insists that he/she can be either man or woman, depending upon the particular feeling of the day. On the days that she is a woman, if I have this correct, she is a lesbian - so presumably on the days when he is a man, he is heterosexual.

He/she has intentions to stand as a Labour MP in the next general election (nothing wrong with that; everyone has that right), hoping to stand for the party in the seat of Sheffield Central. Identifying as a gender-fluid trans woman, she prefers to be referred to as 'she', but is not concerned about being called 'he' if it occurs. Being gender-fluid, she doesn't think it would be appropriate to appear on all women shortlists for seats, but confesses to not being entirely clear in her own mind on the subject.

Now I'm going to confess that I find all of this confusing, but hey - that's me.

From where I stand I think Izzard has the right to call himself whatever he/she chooses, and I have the right to think whatever I do about it. But in respect of her standing as an MP, I as long as it is done with the first and foremost desire to serve the people of the constituency she represents, and not with the priority desire to focus on gay/trans rights at the expense of her local responsibilities, then there is absolutely no problem.

But if I was a woman using a public toilet and Izzard walked in through the door - mmmm? Not so sure about that.

----------------------0----------------

Going out for a meal in a rather swish restaurant on one occasion, I needed a new pair of shoes and so went shopping in my local high street. I was pleased to find a very nice pair of blue lace-ups in my branch of TK Max, a retailer of pretty decent stuff at good discount prices. "These'll do nicely!" I thought, springing up the cash, and so it was that later that evening I found myself sitting in the reception lounge of said restaurant, blue shoes in tow.

As I was perusing the menu, a waiter approached bearing a tray with the drinks we had ordered priorly from the maitre d. I saw him glance down at my shoes (I was sitting in a sofa and my legs were out in front before me) and felt a glow of pride that he had clocked my new (and I thought expensive looking) footwear. If only he knew how little they had cost me, I thought as he walked away. Of course it was at that point that I saw he was wearing exactly the same pair of shoes himself, and so knew to the penny what I had paid.

Needles to say for the remainder of the evening we knew and understood each other fully. A pair of cheap bastards wearing cheap imitation blue shoes!

[peter]

Today is a day for trivia it seems. Is Matt Hancock a kangaroo penis, will King Charles get his wish and be reincarnated as a tampon (ugh! - nasty). These are the things which appear to be dominating the national conversation as I prepare to take myself up onto Dartmoor for a few days of r&r.

But there are serious things behind these silly stories (which are not quite as I have presented them). Like should our representatives in parliament simply be allowed to up sticks and off to the jungle on money making ventures and seemingly without a by your leave. This is not what we can expect from our elected politicians and has a demeaning effect upon the whole. And should what is essentially a fantasy series be presented as reality, knowing that it will effectively replace the gaps in our knowledge with what will come to be thought of as documented history? The future of the monarchy is, despite the seamless transition and outpouring of grief shown upon the death of the Queen, not by any means a given and programmes like this could influence it.

But in the spirit of it being (childish jiggling about and hand waving) 'holiday time', I'll continue with my sartorial story theme as introduced yesterday.

My grandfather was a distinguished looking gentleman in the mould of Harold Macmillan who was Professor of Engineering at a well known Scottish university. He was attending a conference in London at which peers from universities around the world were represented as well as government representatives from other nations and at the end of which there was held a gala dinner to round the thing off.

Being a pretty formal sort of guy he naturally assumed that it would be a black tie event and duly arrived togged out in his dinner jacket and bow tie.

Alas, he had not read his invitation card sufficiently well and to his embarrassment he was the only one thus attired with the exception of the Japanese delegation who had made the same mistake.

During the course of the evening as he circulated around the (morning suited) other attendees, he was (as he was later amused to relate) spoken to by people very slowly as though he might have difficulty in understanding the language.

"Hello. You come from far away to visit our shores and see engineering?", went the commentary.

But it seemed that his faux pas was to have unexpected benefits. He struck up a lively conversation with his fellow dinner suited visitors from Japan, from which a number of useful collaborations resulted between his university and the Japanese government.

Nice story with a happy ending. Just the ticket for a holiday day, I'd say.

(Don't worry; I'll be back to my usual pessimistic self in a couple of days time - Friday or Saturday depending on how things go- so the hundreds of you who drop in for a read each day (not) won't have long to wait. )

[Avatar]

And should what is essentially a fantasy series be presented as reality, knowing that it will effectively replace the gaps in our knowledge with what will come to be thought of as documented history?

This is a personal annoyance of mine...my answer is no, exactly because it will become assumed history.

It's like the people today who think Hercules rode Pegasus because of the damn Disney cartoon. But even worse simply because it has been presented as historical "realism."

Or the "true crime" series that take an actual event and then make up whatever they want around it.

Really grinds my gears.

--A

[peter]

Brexit and the pandemic have two things in common. Both have been devastating to the country and in both cases those who proposed the one, and the policies followed in dealing with the other, are so invested in them that they simply will never - can never - acknowledge the mistakes that they made.

Many times on these pages I said that the collateral damage caused by the covid policies would be factors of ten worse than the effects of the pandemic itself, and had myself a new arsehole ripped for my troubles.

Time and again I said that the ruin we faced as a result of effectively stopping our economy in its tracks would have knock-on effects way more significant than the effects of the virus, and time and again I was shouted down.

Over and over I expressed doubt at the wisdom of eschewing the recognised protocols for vaccine safety, and my concerns were roundly dismissed.

Now, as the damage that has resulted is becoming more and more apparent, in all of these areas, my concerns are being realised.

In the academic journals, questions are being raised about the number of unexplained deaths in adolescents - one series of data pertaining to Scotland shows a doubling of such cases above the expected - and other possible side-effects.

In our newspapers and on television, accounts are given of how the backlog of people on the NHS waiting lists is translating into excess deaths, with the figure already being approximately equal to that of the actual number of people who died of covid.

And the economy - well, what do I need to say about that? Every minister who opens his mouth on this subject uses the pandemic as his go-to excuse, never so much as mentioning that it was his government who followed the disastrous road that led us to this place.

And I expect in Sweden, where they took no action except to warn people to be extra careful with vulnerable people, they are still wheeling out the corpses to be burned in pyres in the streets. Except that they aren't. And that oddly enough, they seem to have suffered no side-effects for their laid back approach to the whole thing at all.

But none of this will ever be faced by the government or the media who were complicit in making it happen. Kier Stamer will not mention the whole sorry mess either, because he was balls-deep in it as well. He'd have gone even further! I've mentioned about the funeral attendant, husband of a coworker of my wife, who said that the crematoria are pushed to the hilt trying to deal with all of the increased cancer deaths that are passing through the doors, but again you won't hear anything about these.

Neither can you expect anything to come out of the forthcoming official enquiry into the handling of the pandemic on this score. I guarantee you that the question of whether it was all necessary will not be within a mile of their considerations. The reason being that if just once, for one iota of a second, there was the slightest suggestion from any of the state bodies or governmental departments that perhaps - just perhaps - the policies followed were excessive, that those more restrained ones as suggested by Professor Gupta et all, might have been more proportionate to the threat, then the dreaded C word would not follow far behind.

I'm talking of course of compensation. And how do you compensate a whole country?

[Iolanthe]

I've not been watching the tv news for a few days now and have been relying on reading your posts, Peter, to catch up. However your first sentence in the last post leaves me very confused. I did hear on the radio news about Matt Hancock but Prince Charles? What on earth is going on there. On second thoughts I don't think I really want to know

Enjoy your r&r. The last time I visited Dartmoor (I think you said Dartmoor but I can't quite remember and don't want to go back and look as if I do I'll have to type all this again) I was a teenager so over 50 years ago. I daresay it hasn't changed much.

I look forward with interest to your next instalment!

[Fist and Faith]

I've not been watching the tv news for a few days now and have been relying on reading your posts, Peter, to catch up. However your first sentence in the last post leaves me very confused. I did hear on the radio news about Matt Hancock but Prince Charles? What on earth is going on there. On second thoughts I don't think I really want to know

I hadn't read it until now. Halloween costume??

[Skyweir]

Its all happening in the UK atm lol and good luck to all the Brits here with all of that.

What do I think today? I think that

Pritti Patel who had the same levels of compassion and tolerance as Pol Pot

was as hilarious as it is pretty sad

But am glad that strange Truss woman stepped down - she was clearly out of her depth not to mention absolutely out of touch with the rank and file citizenry.

[I'm Murrin]

I've not been watching the tv news for a few days now and have been relying on reading your posts, Peter, to catch up. However your first sentence in the last post leaves me very confused. I did hear on the radio news about Matt Hancock but Prince Charles? What on earth is going on there. On second thoughts I don't think I really want to know

I hadn't read it until now. Halloween costume??

I don't know if or why it's in the news now, but IIRC it's an old story about something he said to Camilla that was leaked during their affair.

[peter]

It's been mentioned recently in respect of the new series of The Crown which is filming or due out or something. It's not my kind of thing really, so I didn't pay it a great deal of attention, but I think that the gist was that the rather childish conversation (and how was it ever found out about) has been, or was, toned down to save Charles embarrassment. Beyond this I can't say much......

But what I can say is that upwards of ten million households are going to be thinking today about the effects of the announcement by the Bank of England yesterday of the 0.75 increase in interest rates - and many are going to be deeply concerned that they will not be able to meet the costs of their mortgages which will rise to the tune of sixty pounds per week as a result thereof.

Unless it needed more laying out, Govenor Andrew Bailey said that he had been warned by advisors in the City that the economy had been within hours of complete meltdown following the market turmoil which came hard on the heels of Liz Truss's disastrous mimi-budget, forcing his hand to mke the twenty billion pound intervention for which we are now paying the cost.

Let's call this out for what it is.

People will loose their homes over this. People will be driven into complete penury in trying to survive it. Everyone with a credit card debt, a business loan, a mortgage on a variable or renewable contract will pay a premium on top of the cost of living rises - the inflation caused rises in fuel, food and energy costs - that we are all already subject to.

This is a state of affairs that should never have been and it sits directly - directly - with the government who are charged with protecting our best interests.

So unless you are one of those capable of complete denial of reality (think fool Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ilk) then this should horrify you, enrage you, make you want to write to your MP, and weep tears of blood for the lives that will be ruined on the back of their ineptitude.

And this cannot be put on the shoulders of Truss alone. She was voted into Downing Street on the back of her policies. She was put there by people who knew exactly what she intended to do. She told them. She was going to cut taxes hugely and borrow the money to pay for the shortfall in the national finances caused thereby. She merely did what she said she was going to do (a thing rare enough in itself these days). An inept individual raised above their capabilities cannot be blamed for the damage they cause. It is rather those who elevated them who bear the blame. This sits fairly on the shoulders of those who proposed her, those who supported her, those who voted for her, both inside parliament and out. And absolutely upon those who allowed her to enact a huge policy reversal under the false name of a mini-budget - which it was anything but; a policy reversal that should have been subject to approval by vote in the commons and accompanied by the findings of the appropriate OBR analysis before it was enacted. This is exactly what the OBR are for, and that the proper procedures were not followed here, but rather subverted and shimmied around is the true crime that was committed here.

This is what the government should be held to account for- the government and those who oversee parliamentary procedures and who are expected to ensure that the rules are followed.

Remember this when you see the homeless families on the news in the months and years ahead. People are responsible for this and to date they are walking away scott free.

[Iolanthe]

I agree with everything you've said above, Peter. I'm embarrassed to confess that we will benefit from the interest rise as we have no mortgage or any other loans but we do have a little bit in the bank that will now gain more interest. I suspect though that C will pay more tax on his work pension. I had to make an emergency payment to my son last week as he only had £3 in his bank!! At least I'm able to help my children.

I've never watched the Crown - I think it is on a channel that we don't have. We just have an ordinary telly with freeview and I can watch the iPlayer on my laptop. Neither do I watch anything with adverts in or any "reality" programmes. I don't find watching people making a fool of themselves entertaining.

[peter]

Alas Iolanthe, the interest on savings that any of us are lucky enough to possess will be more than swallowed up by the cost of living rises. And the rate of inflation will erode the value of said savings at a faster rate than you can imagine. That this can have been perpetrated upon the British public and there be no enquiry, no redress for the systematic failure that allowed it to happen, beggars belief.

If a government can simply state that black is white in order to evade the proper mechanisms of scrutiny and verification of what it intends to do - because make no mistake, that is what Truss and Kwarteng did in claiming that their policy volta face was only a mini-budget (and therefore not subject to either a vote of approval by the House or the need to be accompanied by an OBR forecast) - then let us be made aware of the fact by official inquiry.

If not however, if the mechanisms are in place to prevent such rogue behaviour and the Truss administration simply overrode them in a constitutionally or illegal manner, then let it be demonstrated and the effected households/businesses/people be compensated.

[peter]

For those who don't remember, the Lord Lucan affair was a scandal that hit the royal family back in 1974 when the family nanny, Sandra Rivett, was found bludgeoned to death in the family kitchen. A bandaged lead pipe - the murder weapon - was found at the scene (and another of similar type, in his abandoned car, when it was later discovered at Newhaven).

Lucan's wife, who was attacked on the same night but survived, identified the peer as the guilty party, but by this time he had as it were, simply vanished into thin air, never to be seen again.

At the time it was commonly believed that Lucan, who was I believe in some way related to the royal family (they used to call him the Queen's cousin, but this is remarkably difficult to verify one way or the other) could not have effected his disappearance without aid from his connections, and it used to be speculated that the said family had 'closed ranks' around him. Whatever the case it was a remarkably efficient disappearing act and while 'sightings' were reported on multiple occasions and in multiple places over the following years, no real trace of the disgraced Lord was ever found again. Lucan, who was a profligate gambler, was said to have been aided by friends from that circle, and to have fled the country by ferry across to the continent.

All so interesting, but pretty historical, stuff - but expect a new wave of speculation in the media following the newly revealed revelation that is on the front pages of today's papers.

For it seems, in a bizarre if gruesome twist, that Lucan may have actually planned what had been previously assumed to be an unpremeditated attack. For within his abandoned car were found nothing less than three cluedo cards that would seem to relate to the very murder itself. Colonel Mustard, in the hall, with a lead pipe, no less!

What is that all about? Some kind of macabre confession? A sick sort of joke? Why on earth - how on earth - did these cards, so intimately related to the heinous crime that had been committed, find themselves in such a place?

Whatever the case, I'm guessing it will do nothing to throw any light on the facts of the Lucan disappearance, but will no doubt revitalise speculation in the quarters where the infamous case is still poured over with all the same avidity as those of the Ripper murders of the Victorian era.

We do love a good murder mystery us Brits - that's why we gave rise to such authors as Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. And the Lucan mystery is one that has grabbed the public fascination for the most of my life and shows no sign of abating. One thing is absolutely certain however. Lucan has help. You don't simply vanish into thin air, even if you are a peer of the realm and someone, somewhere, knows the truth of it. And another thing that should never be lost sight of is that at the centre of the story with all its glamour and seediness, there lies the body of a dead lady - a lady of flesh and blood who had a family who loved her and a child who survived her. For her sake the truth deserves to be told.

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Just spent a couple of days in a really swanky hotel on Dartmoor - a sort of country hunting lodge with a first class restaurant - and have loved every minute of it.

I'm doubting that our rapidly diminishing finances will allow for us to return again, but we have enjoyed the place a few times over the last thirty years and so have no cause for complaint.

One thing that always strikes me on our journey up there from Cornwall is that, as we pass beyond Tavistock and up onto the moor proper, the first thing of note that hits you is the grim fortress of Dartmoor Prison brooding sullenly over the fields adjacent to its small service town of Princetown.

So at the one end of the moor you have this place redolent of the blasted hopes of humanity, our own little devil's island who's ghouls and miscreants exist in a savage hierarchy of fragile violent balance - and at the other end a haven of ersatz gentility (for that is the best any hotel can aspire to - the illusion of luxury, never the real thing, as spoken of by George Orwell in his Down and out in London and Paris) in which pains are taken to pretend that the brutal edges of 'life outside' never cross the threshold to marr the atmosphere of pampered gentility within.

And why is it that as you pass that place, created to house prisoners of the Napoleonic wars, but now occupied by twice the numbers it was originally built to hold (doubled up in cells designed to be small for one man), that your eyes are drawn in morbid fascination toward that haven of misery? What prurient bone of baseness supports our more rarified senses and pulls our eyes towards that from which we should shield our gaze with prayers to the tune of, "There but for the grace of God go I....". You can't help it. It's who we are, so as Yeats would have it, " Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by! "

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Rushing Sunak is on the front page of the Times telling us that the state can't fix all of our problems. No Rishi - but in the wrong hands it can certainly cause a good number of them.

[peter]

Patchy lot of stories in today's papers, and not a lot to amuse, inspire or even anger a would be (or would that be a wannabe) commentator on the days news.

Chief one of interest to me is the figure, buried in a report on ambulance delays more generally, that over 50,000 extra deaths above the expected, from heart attacks and strokes, have been recorded as since the onset of the pandemic.

The reasons for this are complex - handover times and driver shortages are key problems, as well as a backlog of problems due to people not seeking help for medical conditions when they needed to - and there is no quick fix. Suffice to say that it is yet another statistic that won't be covered by a sombre voiced BBC newscaster, or chalked up in a rising death toll chart of the cumulative effects of our misguided attempts to control the virus.

There has been a suggestion recently that there should be a 'covid amnesty' - an acceptance that what is done is done, and that we should all move on, look forward as it were rather than backwards at what has led us to this place. To this point Assistant Editor to the Telegraph, Camilla Tominey wrote an article entitled "Pro-lockdown Fanatics Don't Deserve an Amnesty," in which she said

It's not just in retrospect that we know the covid measures were a disaster - we were vilified for pointing it out at the time.

Now I take that with a pinch of salt; I saw Ms Tominey on the Andrew Marr show on numerous occasions during the pandemic (as well as reading her comments in the press) and I have no recollection of her being the champion of anti-lockdown sentiment that she would now claim to be, but it is salutary reading to at last hear the beginnings of public acknowledgement of what we have done to ourselves.

Like Ms Tominey (and with more justification I suspect) I too don't think that there should be any amnesty for what we have been subjected to. But my amnesty (or lack thereof) would not be directed toward "pro-lockdown fanatics" - these were in the main people who were simply following and taking on board the horrendous level of fear propaganda that the government was utilising (with the help of it's main organ of public manipulation or "nudging" as they prefer to call it, the BBC) to instill compliance within the population.

No. To me, the amnesty will be withheld from the scientists who drove this - the Imperial College London epidemiology bods, the SAGE advisors, Professor's Valance and Whittey and Ferguson. Nor will amnesty be given to the government that bought into their histrionic predictions, their manipulation of figures, of infection rates and r rates and death rates, all used to shepherd the population at first, and then subsequently to drive them, into their homes to watch while the country they loved was dismantled and destroyed before their eyes.

No. No amnesty for these people. None whatsoever. The reasons why this happened are complex and multifarious, but can essentially be boiled down to this. Science, raised to the level of religion, became a monster that ran amok. Failure to grasp this by our politicians led to a knee jerk reaction disproportionate to the threat, and a setting aside of the absolute understanding that life entails a degree of risk. Often it is said that the only thing to fear is fear itself, and never was this better illustrated by the carnage that we have wrought upon ourselves in the last few years. There's an old hospital joke that the treatment was a success but the patient died. Alas, we can't even go this far with the covid policies. Here, the treatment wasn't a success *and* the patient died.

So no. No amnesty for me. Not until a full accounting has been done. A tally of the death, the suffering, the ongoing damage that has been levied upon us for decades to come. Only then can we put this thing behind us, move on and get on with life.

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Does anyone else find it insulting to hear Rishi Sunak say that he "understands the pain that interest and mortgage rate rises cause"?

No he doesn't. He's a millionaire multiple times over. He earns millions a month on the return of the fortune he and his wife control. How could he begin to understand the pain being suffered by a person at risk of loosing their home, their business or on the verge of being driven into the courts for nonpayment of debt? It's like me saying that I understand the suffering of the people I saw crouched on the ground outside Lucknow railway station in India - people who weren't just there for the fun, but were there because they live there, on that spot, with no food, no shelter and nothing but the charity of passersby between them and death. How can I understand their suffering? How can I understand their pain? It would be ridiculous to suggest I could, and similarly it is ridiculous for Sunak to suggest that he understands what the people who lives have been tipped over the edge by Truss's failed budget are going through. He's just pretending so as to make whatever he decides to do (and remember - the state can't be expected to sort out all of your problems) sound better.

What he and his lapdog Hunt do in the next few weeks will spell the end for countless numbers of people who are at the shit end of the stick. Never forget this and never allow them to get away with their platitudes.