Ross Clark

Is Bill Gates shorting Tesla? He certainly didn’t deny it in an interview with the Today programme. The suggestion is that he has upset Elon Musk, who has complained that he couldn’t take Gates’s philanthropy on climate change issues seriously if he was betting against the share price of the world’s biggest electric car-maker. But Musk’s outburst rather evades the issue: is Tesla’s share price destined to fall? You could be the most ardent climate change campaigner, the biggest enthusiast for electric cars in the world – and still think that Tesla is overpriced.

In their post-royal careers, Harry and Meghan have learned two lessons in quick succession: firstly, that membership of the royal family opens the door to media deals less well-connected celebrities could only dream about. Secondly, they have learned that even royal fame will not, ultimately, help one of the biggest media organisations in the world sell a product that the public finds unappealing. No doubt Meghan thinks mightily of the concept of Pearl, her proposed animated Netflix series in which a 12-year-old girl is inspired by great women in history. But it seems potential viewers are rather less enamoured. Netflix has cancelled the series before it was even made.

Thierry Breton, the European Commission for the internal market, lost no time in rattling his sabre at Twitter as soon as it was announced that the company had accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy it. Even though Musk had made no announcement on how he intends to run the company, beyond stating his belief in free speech, Breton felt it necessary to warn Twitter that if it ‘does not comply with our law, there are sanctions – 6 per cent of the revenue and, if they continue, banned from operating in Europe.

Why does Elon Musk really want to buy Twitter? Is it vanity, political activism, or a shrewd financial move? Musk’s reputation lies in building companies from scratch, yet Twitter is a mature business. It is hard to see why that should excite him anything like transforming the car industry or creating a market for space tourism. Twitter is currently a business without any obvious prospects for substantial growth. The company, which was formed in 2006 and floated in 2013, has never set the world alight like other businesses in the tech sector. Even after Musk’s $44 billion (£34 billion) offer, the share price is only modestly higher than it was at the company’s flotation nearly nine years ago.

Any Conservative who doubts that Labour’s promise to abolish non-dom status could seriously damage the government needs to look at the fate of Rishi Sunak. So recently the heir apparent to the Tory leadership, Sunak has this week plunged to bottom in a poll of the most popular cabinet members. It comes, of course, just a couple of weeks after the revelation that Sunak’s wife was living in Britain as a non-dom – a status which according to one estimate could have saved her up to £20 million in tax over the years. And this was a poll of Conservative party members, so goodness knows how much the revelation has done to damage the Chancellor in the eyes of the floating voters whose support the Conservatives will need to stay in government.

If Boris Johnson is forced from office by his own MPs, partygate will only be part of the story. Another huge part of it will be his failure to appreciate the full scale of the cost of living crisis now washing over millions of households – especially his reluctance to address the issue of energy bills. Asked on his Indian trip whether he would consider removing the levies which make up around 25 per cent of electricity bills and around 4 per cent of gas bills he replied:  I want to do everything we can to alleviate the cost of living, but there is a lot of prejudice against the green agenda.

Remember how David Cameron’s government was going to end Nimbyism by having local communities vote for new housing developments on their doorsteps? That didn’t end so well. Last October, following a shock defeat in the Amersham by-election, the Prime Minister gave up on building more new homes in the shires in favour of reverting to the line of least political resistance: the old favourite of trying to solve the housing shortage by building more new homes on brownfield land in the North. Why, then, does the government think it will be any more successful trying to persuade us to accept wind farms on our doorsteps?

How tempting it must be for Rishi Sunak to chuck in his job as Chancellor. ‘My chances of ever becoming PM have plummeted to next to nothing,’ he must be thinking, ‘so why not go off and earn some serious money instead, away from the spotlight?’  I have no insight into the state of the Sunak marriage but I wouldn't be surprised if he was also tempted to resign for his wife's sake. ‘Let's get out of the public eye,’ he might well be tempted to say, ‘and enjoy being rich again.’ But if Rishi had hired me for some advice on reputation management I would give him a better idea. You have obviously wanted to be PM for a long time, so why give up now? Your political reputation is not beyond repair.

The political story for the moment is the cost of living crisis. But by the end of the year could we be talking about a recession instead? We shouldn’t read too much into one year’s economic growth figures, especially given how often they are revised upwards or downwards. But February’s figures, published this morning, have caught many people unawares. They show that the economy just about ratcheted upwards in February, growing by 0.1 per cent. That’s compared with healthy growth of 0.8 per cent in January, as the country emerged from the Omicron scare. Notably, in two areas the economy contracted: construction fell by 0.1 per cent and production by 0.6 per cent. It was only the services sector, where growth was 0.

It is been a familiar story in recent years: a Budget that sounded reasonably good when delivered, but that unravels in subsequent days. Rishi Sunak’s spring statement was no exception. When he delivered it a fortnight ago, he said he was going to compensate low-earners by raising the primary threshold for National Insurance, bringing it into line with income tax and relieving people who earn less than £12,500 from having to pay NI at all. But as the 1.25 percentage point rise in National Insurance kicks in today, it turns out that the rise in the threshold for NI will not take effect for another three months, on 6 July. In the meantime, any employee who earns more than £9,880 a year will be paying 13.25 per cent of their earnings on NI.

When allied military operations go well or badly, we very quickly hear about them. But what about sanctions? It is about time that we started to ask: are they hitting their target, or are some of them slewing off, out of control, straight into civilian targets? Notionally, sanctions have been a success – or at least they seemed to be initially. The rouble and Russian stock market collapsed. But then the rouble recovered strongly, and the stock market, too, has staged some sort of recovery since it reopened. What seemed like a pretty comprehensive boycott by western companies turns out to be rather less complete than many might imagine.

Brexit, as Boris reminded us many times during the referendum campaign, would give Britain the power to make its own laws, unencumbered by constant directives from the European Commission. But it will take a long while to disentangle UK laws from the influence of the EU, as the government may be about to discover in its attempt to punish P&O ferries for sacking 800 workers and replacing them with agency staff. It will take a long while to disentangle UK laws from the influence of the EU At last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Johnson declared that P&O had contravened section 194 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1992, which required employers to give the government 45 days’ notice of any intention to make more than 100 workers redundant.