I hope Theresa May squirmed when she saw her picture on the weekend front pages. I did - and so, I'm sure, did much of the world.

To listen to BBC news day after day last week, you'd have thought it was something to be proud of that the prime minister was the first foreign leader to visit the new US president. It wasn't. It was deeply shameful.

In allowing herself to be photographed hand-in-hand, smiling like a happy couple, May allowed herself - and by extension, us - to be associated with the most feared and despised regime in the world right now.

If you, or she, think a trade deal with the States is worth it - or any real alternative to being in the European market - consider this. British exports to the EU are around 15 times those to the US.

And the new president is a wheeler-dealer property tycoon. He will see May as someone who has quit one home without another to go to. In other words, a sucker to be taken advantage of.

Which could be extremely bad new for the NHS, ripe for exploitation by US companies. 

US food safety and welfare standards don't come up to ours either. Or to put it another way, ours don't come down to theirs. Yet.

Meanwhile May prepares to chuck foreign academics out of Britain, ensuring the UK - like the US - loses some of its best brains. A form of madness that recalls both Hitler's Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia.

All in all, it's a very strange time for Jeremy Corbyn to give the government a free pass on leaving the EU, rendering the debate on Article 50 all but pointless. A description which now sadly applies also to the Labour leadership. 

That George Soros is an interesting bloke. A former railway porter, waiter and travelling salesman, he is now one of the 30 richest people in the world.

Like many obscenely wealthy people, he likes to style himself – and no doubt think of himself – as a philanthropist. But you can’t rise from rags to riches without stepping on a few toes, and probably a few fingers too.

Soros is still known as “the man who broke the Bank of England” after making a billion out of the UK’s Black Wednesday crisis of 1992.

All in all, then, not the kind of fellow you might expect me to quote with approval.

But whatever the moral rights and wrongs of his business dealings, someone with his track record must know a thing or two about international trade. And some of the things he said at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland bear thinking about.

It may be that he is not entirely impartial on the subject of Donald Trump. It was reported that Trump’s election victory cost Soros $1bn in lost investments. So perhaps it’s no surprise that he calls the new US President “an imposter and con man” and speaks of him “awakening dark forces”.

But he’s put a small slice at least of his money where his mouth is. In the fortnight after the election, he put $10million into a fund to combat the rise in hate crime.

And he said in Davos: “I personally am convinced that Trump is going to fail. Not because of people like me who would like him to fail, but because the ideas that guide him are inherently self-contradictory.”

If Soros is right, this is not necessarily good news. Because the way he expects Trump to fail is by starting a global trade war in which everyone will be losers.

He isn’t always right, of course. As he told the Wall Street Journal in 2008: “I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong.”

But he’s been spectacularly right in the past about Britain. So it may be worth noting what he says about us now:
“In my opinion it is unlikely that Prime Minister May is actually going to remain in power. Already she has a very divided cabinet, a very small majority in Parliament. And I think she will not last.”

And of Brexit?

“At the moment the people in the UK are in denial. The current economic situation is not as bad as was predicted and they live in hope.”

Those hopes, says Soros, will sour before the divorce from Europe is complete – which will “take a very long time”. 

And the closer we get to the decree absolute, the worse shape the UK economy will be in, and the poorer we will all be. To the point where before we’ve actually left, we’ll be begging Europe to take us back.

He even suggests that three days after finally quitting the EU, we could be back in.

“It’s much harder to divorce than to get married… You could have a situation in 2019 or 2020 when Britain will leave the EU – because it does have to take place – but they could leave on a Friday but join over the weekend and have the new arrangement in place on Monday morning.”

Believe it or not (and I’m not sure I do), it’s an interesting scenario.
 
 
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Strange how TV seems to be invading real life, and vice-versa. Reality blurring hopelessly with fantasy.

Thirty-six years after America put a second-rate B-movie actor in the White House, it’s gone the whole surreal hog by installing a third-rate gameshow host there.

I’m still hoping I wake up and find the past year has been nothing but a dream foisted on us all by one dysfunctional character, like the ninth season of Dallas. It’d all be so much more entertaining if you knew there would be no dire consequences for the real world.

Meanwhile, back in the disunited kingdom, one of my friends announced last week that she was going to be on The Undateables. I don’t know how she, or Channel 4, think she qualifies, but I guess that’s up to them.

The next day another friend alerted me that his old house was featuring on Location, Location, Location. 

Do such things come in threes? Perhaps this should be my moment to apply for a spot on Mastermind or Only Connect. Or would that be Pointless?

On the shores of Lake Athabasca in Saskatchewan, around 500 miles north of Saskatoon, the capital of the Canadian province, stands the town of Uranium City. It’s a place with a certain bleak, remote romance about it and a fascinating, though short, history. 

Beginning in the 1950s as a settlement mostly of scattered tents, it began acquiring buildings and community services in 1960. Until 1982 it had around 5,000 residents. Now it has 201. The mines which gave it its purpose – and its name – are gone. But not forgotten. 

And not really completely gone either.

One, the Gunnar Mine, on the sweetly named Crackingstone Peninsula, 16 miles from the centre of the “city”, ceased production in 1963 and was abandoned the following year. It had been worked for just eight years, first as an open-cast site, then as a deep pit. The surface buildings, including the winding-gear, were finally demolished in 2011.

The work was part of Project Cleans (Cleanup of Abandoned Northern Sites), a multi-million-dollar project “to assess and reclaim Gunnar Uranium Mine and Mill site, Lorado Uranium Mill site and 35 satellite mine sites in northern Saskatchewan”. It’s a project that still has some way to go.

In November, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission approved part of a plan by the Saskatchewan Research Council to “remediate” the mine. Or, as reported last week by the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, “to clean up 4.4 million tonnes of radioactive tailings”. 

“Tailings” are mine dumps consisting of rock and effluent generated in the processing plant. This is essentially a huge radioactive slagheap. The old mine itself is flooded and also needs a deep clean.

The estimated cost of decontaminating the site has ballooned since the project was announced. In 2006, it was expected to cost $24.6 million. The current estimate is $268m.

It’s unclear who will foot the bill. It’s become the subject of dispute between the Canadian national government and the government of Saskatchewan. 

The company that ran the mine won’t be shelling out. It went out of business long ago. Not nearly as long as the problem it left is going to be around, though.

As  nuclear chemist Ann Coxworth of the Saskatchewan Environmental Society says: “Planning for centuries ahead is never easy”. 

The present plan is for the tailings to be buried beneath “more than a metre” of earth. This, Coxworth says,  is “as good as it can get at a practical level”. Whether it’s anywhere near good enough is a moot point.

Pointing out that the site’s remoteness is no excuse for not cleaning it up, she asks: “How do you balance the cost against the moral acceptability of it?” How indeed.

And this seemingly intractable problem is in Canada, one of the most economically sound and well governed countries in the world. Imagine how much worse this sort of problem is in India, Gabon, Congo, Niger or almost anywhere else uranium is mined.

And this is just the old mine. The radioactivity in the tailings is about three times the radioactivity of the uranium that went off to the reactors. 

And what about the radioactive waste from the reactors? After a few decades it’s still thousands of times as radioactive as the uranium that went in, and it’ll be highly dangerous for thousands of years to come.  

As my brother Clive – a qualified nuclear physicist – asks: “Who do you trust to dispose of it properly? Or even to have the faintest idea of how to dispose of it properly?”

This is not just a distant Canadian (or Indian, or Congolese, or Chinese) problem. It’s very much our problem too.

And worth pondering very seriously at a time when there are finally real hopes for tidal power (see Swansea Bay). When the technology of solar power is improving so rapidly (despite governmental stalling and obstruction). And when Dutch railways have just announced that they are running entirely on wind power.
 
 
 
Trumped
 
 
Just occasionally, fake news can be brilliant. And very occasionally the TV listings pages are really worth reading. The Scottish Sunday Herald ticked all those boxes at the weekend.

TV writer Damien Love’s summary of Friday’s President Trump: The Inauguration begins: “After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history.”

 He adds: “The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president. It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible.”

And he concludes: “It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we’re not careful.”

I really, really didn’t want to add again this week to the noise surrounding Trump. But journalistic genius deserves its due. Love’s full brilliant column can be found here.

Remember Michael Gove? If you’re a teacher you will, and not with much affection. Otherwise...

Of all the political casualties of 2016, only his erstwhile boss David Cameron fell further faster than Gove. Yet there was a moment when it seemed Gove might become Cameron’s successor. And the former (awful) education secretary and (unexpectedly decent) justice secretary will be remembered for the quote which summed up the last extraordinary year better than any other.

“I think,” he said, “people in this country have had enough of experts.”

So that’s it, then. As a nation we no longer listen to people who seem to know what they’re talking about. 

Never mind facts, reason, science, sensible argument and evidence-based conclusions. Let’s take our lead from whoever shouts their uninformed opinion the loudest.

It’s the zeitgeist. And not just in this country, either. How else can you possibly make sense of the man who in nine days’ time will be sworn in as president of what is still, for now, the most powerful country in the world?

You may have seen the New Yorker cartoon in which an airline passenger stands up and says: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” And in nearly every seat a hand is raised. 

On one level it’s a brilliant piece of satire. Though Donald Trump is neither depicted nor mentioned, you know it’s about him. Just as you’d have known, if it had appeared in a British paper, that it was about Brexit. But it’s too close to the mark to be very funny.

I don’t know whether Vladimir Putin really took to underhand methods to influence the outcome of the US election. But I’m sure he’s enjoying the chaos that has ensued. 

I don’t have a great deal of faith in the intelligence of the CIA, whichever meaning you give to that word. But I don’t put much faith, either, in Trump’s assertive denial that Russian involvement had nothing to do with his victory. He would say that, wouldn’t he?

Whatever else it’s done, the most surreal election result in American history has had one desirable effect.
Never again – surely – can Uncle Sam even pretend to lecture the rest of the world about democracy. 

I thought that after the “hanging chads” scandal of George W Bush’s win in 2001. This time there can be no moral, political or intellectual high ground left for America to claim.

And not just because of the bankruptcy of a system that hands victory to a candidate who got three million fewer votes than his opponent. With or without Russian help – and certainly with the huge assistance of FBI director James Comey, whose smearing of Hillary Clinton was timed for maximum effect. (Given the recent CIA claims, one has to wonder how much the whole mess of US politics today owes to the age-old rivalry between the bureau and the agency.)

Weirdly, given all we know about him, Trump talks a lot about morals and ethics. About “draining the swamp”. He was even given credit last week for getting the Republican Congress to backtrack on a plan to scrap the Office of Congressional Ethics, the office meant to keep an eye on them, to keep them at least vaguely honest.
One of my friends described his intervention as “some good news at last”. I’m not so sure it was as good as all that.

Yes, in this instance, a bad step was avoided. But it also revealed the power Trump can wield with one tweet over the one organisation that in theory ought to be able to keep him in check.

With Trump on the flight deck, we’re in for a bumpy ride indeed. Whether or not his attention is all on his smartphone. While he’s tapping in his 140 characters about The Apprentice or Saturday Night Live, the real danger will come from the gimcrack crew he’s appointed to actually fly the plane.

A bunch of blokes (all but two are blokes) whose chief qualification for anything is having loads of money. Who have a lot of experience of boardroom business but precious little in the departments they will now have to run.
And whose lack of real-world expertise is most dangerously encapsulated in the number of climate-change deniers and religious fundamentalists in their midst.

Whichever way you look at it, they are a frightening bunch of people.

Only one has run a federal agency before – Elaine Chao, labour secretary under GW Bush and now to be transport secretary under Trump. She is reckoned to be worth $24million (not counting the $22.8m fortune of her husband Mitch McConnell, the Republicans’ leader in the Senate), which makes her the seventh richest member of the team.

The third richest is former ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson, whose chief qualification for the role of Secretary of State is the Order of Friendship he got in 2013 from... Vladimir Putin.

Experts, eh? Who needs ’em?

The newspaper column that spawned this blog is no stranger to controversy and criticism. I’ve had abuse over my views on everything from global warming to social housing, nuclear weapons to grammar schools, Brexit to Donald Trump (inevitably). In years past, I’ve even had death threats for expressing my opinions about 4x4s and the invasion of Iraq. But if there’s one thing guaranteed to raise hackles in suburban streets and bring angry letters pouring into newsrooms, it's misuse of the English language. Or what a certain type of reader believes – always firmly – to be misuse.

So I’m reasonably confident that some of what follows will fulfil my regular function of provoking an irate reader response. As well as, I hope, a little of the rib-ticklery we all need at the start of what looks like being another grim year.

A former editor of mine once presented me with a framed copy of a letter he had received, scrawled heavily in an angry hand. Among other choice expressions, it said: “When there’s good men out of work, why employ such as that Semmens? Send him back to the gutter where he belongs.”

My crime on that occasion was to write about “naughty” words. Not even to use them, just to write about them.
But it’s not generally “bad language” that rubs up the man or woman on the Costessey omnibus the wrong way. It’s little things like apostrophes, hyphens and commas. (Or should that be “apostrophe’s, hyphens, and commas”?)

Reporters who like to boldly split infinitives. Others who don’t know the difference between desert and dessert (I’m not going for dinner with them). Headline-writers who put “striked” instead of “struck”.

I’m still shaking my head over that last one, which appeared just before Christmas on the Guardian website. Yes, I do know the Grauniad is famous as the paper that mis-spelled its own name, and yes I know the internet regularly sets new standards for illiteracy, but all the same.

Anyone literate enough to have read this far must share at least some of my pleasure and interest in words. And this is something I know about. (Sentences beginning with ‘And’ or ‘But’ are another thing that winds up a certain type of person, but they probably find me too annoying to read anyway. As they would Shakespeare, Yeats, Dickens. Oh, and the Bible.)

All newspapers and publishers have – or should have – something known in the trade as a style guide. It’s got nothing to do with what we wear to work, but everything to do with the words we use and how we use them.
I have written the style guide for one daily paper, co-written another, and contributed to the Daily Mirror’s version. I can spot a mis-spelled word or a grammatical howler in the middle of a printed page before I take in what the stories on it are about.

So I could hardly pass the poster outside the Palace Theatre in Manchester without grimacing. Advertising the current run of Billy Elliot, the Musical, it shows a man holding a laughing boy. Above the photo, the caption runs: “Funny touching and shamelessly enjoyable”.

And if that doesn’t show what a difference a comma – or its absence – can make, I don’t know what does. It makes the classic “Let’s eat Grandma” seem positively innocent. (OK, I haven't actually been to Manchester lately - but I don't think the photo was doctored. If it was, it still made the point nicely.)

Commas – like the spelling of such words as “defense” and “color” and the meaning of “pants” – are a little different in America. They tend to scatter them about more than we do. But I’d like to stick up for the American practice (though over there they'd call it a practise) of using what’s known as an Oxford comma before the “and” at the end of a list (as in the phrase “apostrophe’s, hyphens, and commas” above).

Consider the list “the president, a racist, and a misogynist”. Three things. Now imagine the same words without the second comma. On such slender differences legal cases are built.

Style guides tend to include things like whether acronyms should be written in capitals (FIFA or Fifa, ISIS or Isis). Which words should be hyphenated or run together (short list, short-list or shortlist). And how some words should be spelled (or spelt).

Personally, I like an “e” in “judgement”, but not in “aging”. You’d never put one in “raging”, “staging” or “engaging”, so why write “ageing”? But I recognise – as a lot of self-described pedants don’t – that this is a matter of preference, not of right and wrong.

I know people who get quite hot under the collar at what they consider the wrong use of “less” and “few”, or “imply” and “infer”. My own bugbear is the way “may” and “might” seem to have swapped meanings in the last few years. It might take me longer than I have here to explain that one fully.

Do these things matter? Probably not a lot. That’s one of the things I’ve learned (learnt?) in all my research and writing of style.

On the other hand, one can still be permitted a facepalm (one word, no hyphen) when an incontinent Twitter-user accuses China of “an unpresidented act”.