I hope the fact that I think of David Cameron as a friend doesn’t disqualify me from a word in his defence. You may find his kind of lobbying inappropriate. I do. But make no mistake: this kind of thing is absolutely routine, has been for decades and involves Labour as well as Conservative former cabinet ministers.
Equally routine is the standard response of most serving ministers, which will be courteous, helpful-sounding and non-committal, often undertaking to get officials to have a look and see if anything can be done. Usually, it can’t. Frequently, both sides suspected this from the start. But the lobbyist has done his job and his employers can’t complain. Most often, the real suckers are the employers.
The current fuss is best understood as an opportunity Boris Johnson has not missed to kick an old rival in the shins, and in which the present Labour leader has, equally opportunistically and perhaps incautiously, joined. It would be unjust for this inquiry to limit itself to Cameron.
125 reasons to grieve
The last InterCity 125 trains are to be withdrawn from service on the East Midlands Railway next month. After almost half a century these are still the best way in Britain to travel by train. The carriages feel spacious and airy. The seats are soft. The windows are big. The corridor feels wider. And because the locomotives are at each end, something close to silence reigns for passengers, the noise of the engines being (as used to be the case with steam trains) lost in the wind outside. Travelling to London I’ve taken the 07.05 from Derby to St Pancras purely because it’s often a 125 — and quite often pulled by the very locomotives that established the world record for a diesel train (148mph) 34 years ago. They’ve recently been repainted in their old British Rail livery, as a mark of respect. Give me a moment to grieve.
All work and no perks
Not so long after sunrise last Friday I opened the kitchen door to see a delivery van driver photographing the latest parcel. He looked about 20, slight of build, with a kind of fragility about him. We talked. He has to be up shortly after 4am. He’s paid £90 a day for a 12 or 13-hour day and must be self-employed, so few rights and no sick pay, no holiday pay, no pension. He looked so tired. As a classical liberal I should believe in freedom of contract but what real meaning does this have for him, or for the careworn east European lady who cleans the stairs of our London apartment block? Can’t we do better than this?
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Risky business
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is a statistician whose explanatory gifts I admire, so I was surprised last week to hear him hit a dud note on the radio. He described the post-vaccination risk from blood clots as being so tiny that from an entire capacity crowd at Wembley Stadium, only one person would succumb. Hmm. Told there was a sniper on the roof, but he would shoot only one person, I might give Wembley a miss. For some weird, irrational reason I’d be better persuaded to risk Wembley by the blood-clot analogy than the other way round.
Black mark on Covid
Expert opinion is now clear that it’s very rare to contract Covid-19 from surfaces. But still the trilogy “hands, face, space” is intoned: sacrosanct, a medical mantra. Government communications should understand that if changed assessments of risk are passed on only when the risk is being upped, and never when lowered, we do notice. A ratchet operates. This irritates, undermining faith in all official warnings.
So on the London Tube I’ve resumed holding the handrails when climbing or descending stairs and escalators. And guess what? You now get a thick black line across your palm, when you never used to. I have a theory. Falling on to handrails is an invisible rain of iron filings from carriage brakes, wheels and rails. Normally, so many passengers’ hands continuously wipe these handrails that no hand shows the mark. But when it’s only you, you collect the lot. Then you touch your trousers, and all is lost. Someone should examine the lungs of the mice that live between the rails.