Into the Vortex
What happens when you ask for a ‘Flat White’. (I’ve often wondered where that name comes from.)
Quote of the Day
When asked what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was about he replied that it was about to make him a lot of money. He used to reply, when asked where he got his ideas from: “Harrods.”
- Henry Oliver, writing about Tom Stoppard (RIP)
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mozart| Don Giovanni, K. 527 / Act 1 | Là ci darem la mano
Verily, the Devil always has the best tunes.
Long Read of the Day
Watching politicians failing yet and yet again: lessons from a life as an environment writer
Paul Brown was the Guardian’s environment correspondent from 1989 until 2005 and has written many times for the paper since. He submitted his final column last week after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. In it, he reflects on 45 years writing for the paper.
I first got to know him in 2011 when I invited him to Cambridge for a Term as a Press Fellow on a programme I run in my College, Wolfson. He spent his time with us writing an excoriating paper on what he called the “voodoo economics” of Britain’s nuclear industry, and what’s interesting about this piece is its suggestion that not much has changed.
There has been another – in my view, very sinister – development, which has put back the cause of action on climate change into very dangerous territory: the latest “nuclear renaissance”. I started covering the nuclear industry in the early 1980s, and like all well trained journalists was neutral then. Nuclear power was a success story because it was part of the National Coal Board and its true costs were hidden, not just from consumers but from the government.
The first nuclear renaissance took place in the late 1980s when the Sizewell B nuclear power station was being built. Several more were on the drawing board, but Thatcher demanded to know the cost and the resultant price of electricity to consumers, and was so enraged that she and the government had been lied to about the real cost that she cancelled the rest of the programme. It was one of my more memorable stories.
At least two more “renaissance” moments have come and gone, mostly also on cost grounds, but now Keir Starmer’s government has gone completely gung-ho on nuclear – to the utter dismay of many environmental campaigners.
The government subsidies are simply huge: a nuclear tax is being levied on hard pressed consumers. What is the government thinking of? The fossil fuel industry, which has thrown its weight behind nuclear power, is of course delighted; all these decades of new construction without any electricity to show for it gives at least another decade or two of unabated burning gas. It is no accident that Centrica invested in Sizewell C – after all, it is primarily a gas company. With Sizewell C likely to take 10 to 15 years to build, that is a lot of extra gas being burned and profits for shareholders.
It’s a sobering story by a fine journalist and well worth reading. I have an eerie sense that governments’ historical infatuation with nuclear power (which, remember, was going to be “too cheap to meter”) is now being reenacted with ‘AI’.
Books, etc.
This is a truly beautiful book. It tells the remarkable story of a remote Irish island nearly untouched by time in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the adventurous men and women who visited and were inspired by it. I was reminded of the book when we were in Dingle last weekend. What’s remarkable about it is the way the author, an American writer and academic, developed such a sympathetic and intuitive understanding of the community that lived on the island until the hardships implicit in their way of life eventually led to their evacuation to the mainland in the 1950s.
Feedback
Many thanks to everyone who wrote in after I got Monday’s date wrong. All the suggested interpretations, including smoking too much dope and an excess of Irish whisky were wide of the mark (except perhaps for “ageing”). I’ve always admired Sam Johnson’s celebrated response to the indignant lady who asked him how he could possibly have defined ‘pastern’ as ‘the knee of a horse’: “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance”. In my case, for ‘ignorance’ read ‘incompetence’.
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