Ross Clark

This is the way that Brexit ends: not with a bang but with a whimpering submission to EU standards on everything, billions in contributions to the EU purse – but with the pretence that we are not really rejoining the single market or customs union, honest. That was the position laid out by the Chancellor in her Mais lecture on Tuesday. She said the government would pursue a bespoke deal with the EU where divergence would be the ‘exception, not the rule’. What does that mean in practice? The EU has made it perfectly clear that it is not going to accept an à la carte menu on the single market; if you want to be in the club you are going to have to accept all its rules and pay all its dues.

I am sorry to hear of the death of Stanford University Professor of Biology Paul R. Ehrlich at the age of 93, but to read his writings you wonder whether it is an event he might actually want us to celebrate. It does, after all, mean one less mouth to feed. Just another 6.5 billion people to go and we will be down to what in 2018 he stated was the world’s optimum population of between 1.5 to 2 billion. Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb – written with his wife Anne whose name his publisher famously kept off the front cover – established Ehrlich as the world’s latter-day Malthusian-in-chief.

Well, who would have guessed? Emboldened by Mauritius’s success in persuading Keir Starmer to surrender the Chagos Islands – which were never even part of Mauritius in the first place – the African Union is reported to be planning to take Britain to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to demand reparations for slavery and colonisation. Their case is pretty feeble, and for reasons which ought to be obvious. You can’t compensate slaves who lived 200 years ago by making cash transfers to nations from which they were taken, especially when the tribal kingdoms which existed when the slaves were taken were themselves involved in the slave trade.

In the end it wasn’t even close. The Greens won the Manchester Gorton and Denton by-election with some to spare, winning 40.7 per cent of the vote. Reform UK, who looked the main challengers at the beginning of the campaign came second on 28.7 per cent, and Labour, as had looked likely, were pushed into third on 25.4 per cent. The defeat reflects very badly on Starmer Even taking into account the long history of by-elections producing a protest vote which does not get repeated at a general election, Keir Starmer is pretty well finished as Prime Minister. The defeat reflects very badly on him personally because he intervened to stop a candidate who might well have won the seat: Andy Burnham.

Given the relative sizes of their economies, one might conclude that Russia would quake before the military might of Europe’s Nato members. Russia, the ninth-largest economy in the world, is up against the third, sixth, seventh and eighth in the shape of Germany, Britain, France and Italy. Yet the reality is that, militarily, it is the other way around. Russia has the world’s second-strongest military, while France comes sixth, UK eighth, Italy tenth and Germany 12th. To put a few figures on it, Russia has 1.32 million active service personnel, 560 fighter aircraft and 3,941 tanks ready for deployment. For Britain, the corresponding figures are 141,000, 67 and 187; for France 264,000, 178 and 342; and Italy 165,000, 62 and 142.

No wonder government ministers in recent weeks have started nodding along with fears that AI will take our jobs, with investment minister Lord Stockwood even suggesting that the government has discussed the idea of a universal basic income to provide for people thrown out of work by the technology. God forbid that voters should start to appreciate the real reasons why an expanding jobs market has been thrown into reverse under the Labour government. Labour has destroyed one of the big advantages that the UK had over many of its immediate European neighbours: a flexible jobs market No, it isn’t AI that is to blame for the loss of 171,000 payrolled jobs in the year to November.

It looks as if £300 will end up being to Ed Miliband what 45 minutes was to Tony Blair: the number which will forever hang around his neck, dragging him down whatever else he tries to do in politics. Of late, Miliband seems to have stopped repeating his promise to cut £300 from our electricity bills by 2030 as he decarbonizes the electricity grid. And no wonder when Centrica boss Chris O’Shea revealed yesterday his own company’s projections for electricity prices in 2030. They show that far from falling, we will be paying more for power then than we were in the wake of the Ukraine invasion in 2022.

Nothing excuses the manner of Peter Mandelson’s communications with Jeffrey Epstein both before and after the latter’s conviction for sex offences. Nor are the lies which Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor told about breaking off relations with Epstein defensible. Nevertheless, there is something disturbing about what looks like being the inevitable fallout of the Epstein scandal: that no one in public life will ever again risk remaining friends with anyone who has been jailed or disgraced in any other way. It may well extend to people outside public life, too. The principle seems to have been established: that if one of your friends commits a serious offence and you do not instantly cut off all relations with them, then you are guilty of moral turpitude yourself.