Ross Clark

John McDonnell this morning invited Phones4U entrepreneur John Caudwell around for a cup of tea. If I were Caudwell I would treat it a bit like an invitation to afternoon tea in Miss Marple’s village – and keep a keen nose out for the smell of bitter almonds. No good will come of the invitation, that is for sure. Day by day, it is becoming clear McDonnell really is engaged in what he has described in his Who’s Who entry as ‘fermenting the overthrow of capitalism’. Today’s offering is to impose a maximum 20:1 ratio of the highest-earning employee to the lowest-earning in any company which bids for government contracts – and to threaten to delist any company which fails to reach decarbonisation targets.

'Elect me once more and we will finish off socialism for good,' declared Mrs Thatcher before the 1987 general election, or words to that effect. Not so fast. Thirty two years on and we are engaged in an unseemly contest as to which party can increase public spending, and with it the size of the state, the most. The latest wheeze on Corbyn's part is to promise us all free broadband. Yes, you, I, the Duke of Westminster, Barclays Bank: we will all qualify for internet on the house. It won't really be free of course. Labour's compulsory purchase of BT Openreach will cost up to £25 billion, on top of which will come the cost of maintaining the broadband service. The income from subscriptions, such as my £46 a month, will no longer be available.

When Boris Johnson edited this magazine, it proposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants — a controversial notion, but an idea he has stuck to. As London Mayor he suggested an ‘earned amnesty’: if bureaucracy had failed over many years to catch up with the 400,000 undocumented migrants in the capital, he reasoned, why not regularise their status so that they could start paying taxes and contributing to the country in other ways? When this magazine reprised the issue last week, the usual objections were recycled: why reward criminality? But the actual cases are more complicated. Trevor Rene is one such case. He was born in Dominica in 1969 when it was still a British colony, so as a child he had a British passport.

I’m sending someone down to the supermarket later to do a bit of shopping on my behalf. I have given them a rough idea of what I want but my main instruction is that they must spend the entire £150 that I am giving them.       If that was really how I did my shopping it isn’t hard to imagine the result. I would end up with bagfuls of stuff I didn’t really want and didn’t need. Some of the food might be good value but an awful lot of it wouldn’t be. Whoever did my shopping would simply pile up the trolley as quickly as they could, until they had spent my £150. It sounds stupid, so why, then, are the main parties promising to do a very similar exercise with the NHS?

One wonders what Tom Watson would have left in his vocabulary if the Conservatives announced a policy of kicking away the crutches of the elderly – given, that is, that this morning he described the ‘Tory’ policy of abolishing free TV licences for the over 75s as ‘utterly callous’. Ending universal free licences for the over 75s is not, of course, a Conservative policy – it was a decision made by the BBC itself in order to preserve the earnings of Gary Lineker, although to be fair to Watson the government did hand the BBC the power to make that decision.

For once, Jeremy Corbyn is right. The government’s announcement of a moratorium in fracking is an election stunt – and attempt to snatch a few leave-voting seats in the North at the expense of damaging Britain’s energy policy for the next couple of decades, as well as causing higher carbon emissions.  Announcing the block on fracking on Radio Four on Saturday morning, business secretary Andrea Leadsom said the government had reached its decision because the Oil and Gas Authority had concluded that it was impossible to predict when ‘earthquakes’ might be caused and what magnitude they might be. This followed a tremor measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale in August.

Yet again, listeners to the Today programme awoke this morning to hear a dire forecast for the economic consequences of leaving the EU – with no critical analysis nor even explanation of how the forecast was arrived at. This morning’s horror story came courtesy of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), a think tank which claims the economy will be 3.5 per cent – or £70bn – smaller in 10 years’ time than if we had never voted to leave the EU. The NIESR claims the economy is already 2.5 per cent smaller than it would have been had we voted to remain in 2016 and that this loss will last ‘in perpetuity’. Well, there it is.

We are, of course, on the cusp of an exodus of UK businesses as they leave to set up home in other EU countries. We know this because Remainers keep telling us so. Banking jobs are going to disappear to Frankfurt, manufacturing jobs to France or the Czech Republic. Or maybe not. It is not quite how the World Bank sees it. Its latest survey of the world’s best countries in which to do business – which takes into account such things as tax and regulatory barriers as well as access to energy and other services – ranks Britain as eighth out of 190 countries, one place higher than last year and higher than any other EU country except Denmark. Most EU countries do not score highly. Germany is at 22, France 32, Belgium 46 and Italy 58.

In an astonishing interview on the Today programme this morning, Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson tried to explain why she was tabling an amendment which would force a referendum on any deal the government presents to the House of Commons on the grounds that we should 'let the people decide'. She then asserted that the country had changed its mind since the 2016 referendum and now wanted to remain. It had to be pointed out to her that her party has, in fact, just adopted a policy of reversing Article 50 without a referendum – so much for letting the people decide. The truth is that like so many Remain campaigners, Swinson will banter on about letting the people have a say when it suits her while knowing it would be fatal to her cause to have another referendum at the moment.

Just when you thought that the Tories were getting into a position where they might be capable of winning the formerly Labour-leaning seats in the Midlands and the North – which they will need to snatch in order to survive after next election – along comes a minister to chuck a spanner in the electoral works.  Housing minister Robert Jenrick has suggested that the government might be minded to cut or even abolish inheritance tax, complaining about its ‘fundamental unfairness’ and claiming that it amounted to ‘paying tax twice’. Disturbingly, Sajid Javid also made a hint about cutting inheritance tax at Tory conference, suggesting that it might be emerging party policy.

Why do so many people try to compare Boris Johnson with Donald Trump? There is a US president whose manner and approach our Prime Minister resembles, but it isn’t Trump – it is Bill Clinton. It is hard to think of anyone else who has honed to a fine art the ability to survive narrow scrapes with native charm. Just look at the reaction to the allegation that Boris groped a young female journalist, Charlotte Edwardes, beneath The Spectator’s dining table two decades ago    Yes, Donald Trump survived groping allegations too, but not without stirring up a hornets’ nest of outrage, culminating in a mass protest following his inauguration. Trump survives by escalating outrage against him, thus uniting his enemies’ enemies behind him.