John Oxley

Martin Lewis, the Money Saving Expert, has become the sage of the cost-of-living crisis. He is closing in on national treasure status, dispensing helpful advice on TV and online to help people avoid rip-off charges and ensure they are getting the benefits they are entitled to. This is all good work, but as the housing campaigner Anya Martin notes, Lewis, and resources like him, rarely focus on increasing earnings. Watching the similarly themed American show How to Get Rich on Netflix, the contrast is noticeable. The expert here, an American named Ramit Sethi, does all the Lewis-style tricks to save pennies here and there – but also encourages his subjects to leverage their skills to make more money.

The Prince of Wales has announced that homelessness will be his charitable focus while he awaits his eventual succession to the Crown. In an announcement this week, he pledged £3 million as the start of a lifelong commitment to tackling the issue, which will begin by funding ‘housing first’ schemes in six areas, taking the lead from Scandinavian approaches which aim to stop people falling between the cracks and sort them with accommodation before focusing on other issues in their life. There is a danger of being another wealthy man throwing money at a problem that others have already found impossible to solve It is a sensible choice for the Prince.

Sir Keir Starmer has broken cover on planning. In perhaps his most daring policy announcement so far, he has declared his intention to overhaul the planning system to free up more housing. When pressed on the morning media round he was clear – he would take the fight to NIMBYs and wouldn’t yield to backbenchers about developments in their patch. Labour, he said, would be on the side of the ‘builders not the blockers’. The discussion around planning has gradually broken away from interest groups and into the mainstream – and the Labour leader wants to make it a focus of the next election It is a bold move, but one which shows the shifting sands of the politics of housing.

Margaret Thatcher most likely never said that 'anyone on a bus over the age of 25 is a failure', but it’s handy for her supporters and detractors to pretend that she did. It encapsulates a certain view of the Iron Lady: that the individualism of cars was for the go-getters, a reliance on public transport for the life’s losers. Now, nearly three decades after she didn’t utter those words, it is becoming the de facto view of many Tories. The Conservatives find little they agree on and often little to shout about, but the party has increasingly found its voice as the party of motorists. At both parliamentary and local level, Conservative politicians have become ardently pro-car at the expense of almost every other form of transport.

Andrew Leak, the man named as the perpetrator of the petrol bomb attack on Dover migrant centre was, on the surface, an unlikely terrorist. Aged 66 and living in High Wycombe, reports paint him as a somewhat odd but largely harmless character. His internet history told a different story. Though he does not appear to have been led on to his attack by anyone else, there is a clear pattern of self-radicalisation. Analysis from Hope Not Hate, the anti-far-right campaign group, shows that his online presence was riddled with racism. He seemed to support Tommy Robinson and engaged with several other personalities who post inflammatory coverage of issues around migration.

A few short months ago, Liz Truss dismissed Rishi Sunak’s business-as-usual managerialism on the economy. The former chancellor responded by constantly reiterating that her homage to Thatcherism, led by cuts to personal and corporation taxes, would unleash chaos rather than growth. She peddled belief while he dealt in realism. The grassroots preferred the former. Seven weeks after the result and Sunak looks vindicated. Trussonomics collided with the reality of the markets. Interest rates surged and the Bank of England was forced into a massive gilt-buying operation. The pound slumped against the dollar and (even after a few rallies) sits down slightly on when Truss came to power – and is worth nearly twenty cents less than last autumn.

Dominic Cummings’s response to the plight of the Conservative party is typically bellicose. He calls for it to be driven into the earth, the furrows planted with salt, and banished for eternity like some latter day Carthage. He sees no sense in reviving or reforming it, only blood-eagling it. It is a strong take, and perhaps unexpected from someone who was at the heart of a Conservative government just a few years ago. Cummings is not, of course, a Conservative. He has never professed to be one, nor seemingly been a member of the party at any point. His relationship with it was always a temporary alliance driven by his own views of what to deliver for the country. Brexit was part, but not all of this, a necessary precondition to unleash the state in a new direction.

It is always interesting to read the Wikipedia pages of plane crashes. Thanks to the data recovered from black boxes, especially the cockpit voice recordings, the last moments of flights can be recreated with vivid accuracy. The most interesting are those caused largely by human error. In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out.