It’s partly, no doubt, a by-product of our shallow celebrity culture. It’s partly the fault, I’m sure, of the most shameful parts of our national press. Social media probably has a lot to answer for in the way it both trivialises and intensifies the public conversation. And no doubt some of our politicians must take a share of the blame themselves. But whatever the mix of reasons, it’s a sad fact that the level of political debate has fallen to that of name-calling.

Politics has always been more about personalities and less about policies than it should be. But I don’t remember it being quite this juvenile, quite this spitefully unpleasant before.

Labour leaders – with the curious exception, for a few years, of Tony Blair – have always been a target for the vitriol spat by some of our national press. Jeremy Corbyn no doubt knew it would be his turn the moment he was elected party leader. The moment, in fact, his candidacy for the job was announced.

But I don’t suppose even he imagined just how unfairly, how unremittingly, how childishly he would be dragged through the mud. How much he would face of the kind of undignified inanities normally reserved for unsuccessful England football managers. And along with that, almost worse, the sneering and trivialising attitude of the BBC.

One effect of all this nastiness has been to weld a pretty solid support for him out of those of us who always saw a decent, honest man trying genuinely to do his best. So it’s with deep sadness and regret that I now have to say I’ve had it with Corbyn.

I’m still sure he’s a remarkably nice bloke for a politician. But as a leader he is a disaster. The momentum is gone, wasted. And that’s not entirely the fault of the press.

Corbyn’s incomprehensible decisions over this past fortnight to bow down before the government have torn another great rip through the fabric of his already tattered and threadbare party.

And by agreeing before the Brexit debates began to back the triggering of Article 50 regardless, he gave up any possibility of salvaging anything from the wreckage. The debates became almost pointless. EU citizens here, and UK citizens abroad, abandoned to their fate and to a government that breaks its promises left, right and centre.

Corbyn now says he’ll fight for two years to get an exit on the best terms. But he’s too late. The fight’s happened, and he threw in the towel before the first bell.

Seeing the performance of Owen Smith on Question Time last week, I wondered for the first time if the wrong man won the Labour leadership contest. It’s a bit late for that too.

Smith and the Norwich South MP Clive Lewis are among very few people to come out of this whole affair with credit. Others are Nick Clegg – too late to redeem him from his colossal error of judgement in 2010 – and the best Tory PM we never had, Ken Clarke. Too late all round.

I could fill this page most weeks with my thoughts on Brexit. I don’t suppose I could change your mind, though, whichever way it’s made up. And I couldn’t change the sorry fact of where we are as a country.

But I’m sick and tired of being called a “remoaner”.

Apart from the fact that it’s a pathetic, school-playground sort of insult, it doesn’t come near expressing how angry I am. Or the urgency of the argument.

It’s as if I was in the back seat of a car heading faster and faster towards a cliff-edge, yelling at the driver to watch where she’s going. While she takes her hands off the wheel to turn round in her seat and tell me to stop moaning.

It’s enough to make me start calling certain people bad names.


--------------


Ronald Coyne must be a right charmer. Only truly delightful young people video themselves burning £20 notes in front the homeless.

Give him a few years and this official (ex-official now) of the Cambridge University Conservative Association will probably be in the Cabinet. Chancellor perhaps, given his respect for both money and the disadvantaged. He seems the type.

The attempt by some of the press to smear Nicola Sturgeon by describing him as “a member of her family” is pretty rich, though.

His dad is the brother of the ex-husband of Sturgeon’s husband’s sister. That’s a pretty extended family. I must be related at least that closely to thousands of people I’ve never even heard of. By my calculation, it puts Coyne and Sturgeon only one degree of separation short of the six that are supposed to link you to everybody in the world.

Paul Dacre, the editor of the paper Wikipedia no longer trusts enough to be a source of accurate information, is probably related at least that closely to all sort of undesirables – socialists, people on benefit, refugees, people who fancy Diane Abbott…

I have a confession to make. I love flying. I’m not what you’d call a frequent flier. Not like my cousin Geoff, who has clocked up well over a million miles in the air commuting between business meetings all over the world. But I have flown to the US three times, to India, to north Africa and countless times to the Med and elsewhere in Europe. Which I suppose makes me normal for the nation and times I live in.

I’m not a fan of airports – particularly those big, busy ones of the shopping-mall variety. But once in the air I’m in my element. As long as I get a window seat – that’s the crucial part.

I do like to travel to unfamiliar places by train. But there’s still a special kick to be had from looking down on the land from high above. And if it’s cloudy – well, clouds are pretty cool too.

Cataloguing my photograph collection has made me realise just how drawn I am to clouds. Among which you have to count the contrails left by high-flying aircraft, which can often be extremely beautiful.

It’s strange to think how baffling and bizarre those straight, or sometimes not so straight, lines across the blue would have seemed to a skywatcher only a century ago. They seem so natural to us. Especially in this part of the world where the drone of flying engines is so much part of the background noise we scarcely really notice it.

And in a way they are natural. The atmosphere’s natural reaction to engines flying through it. Gavin Pretor-Pinney, in The Cloudspotter’s Guide, calls them “the new bastard son of the cloud family”.

I’ve seen them referred to a few times lately as “chemtrails” – which isn’t entirely wrong, since water is a chemical. And that’s what they are, like any other cloud. Condensed water vapour or ice crystals.

As Pretor-Pinney is at pains to point, though: “Aircraft exhaust contains a lot more than just water vapour. The other ingredients include carbon dioxide, oxides of sulphur and nitrogen, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, unburned fuel and tiny particles of soot and metal. The particles have an important role in the formation of the contrail, by acting as nuclei on to which the water vapour can begin forming into droplets and crystals.”

What he doesn’t say – but which you can sometimes observe if you have a window seat near or behind a wing – is that the air pressure change which gives a plane lift can also cause condensation of the water vapour already in the atmosphere. Contrails sometimes stream from wings themselves, not just the engines on them.

But however they are formed, depending on atmospheric conditions they can puff away in a moment or hang around for hours, gradually widening and spreading into “real” clouds.

It’s not that one aero-engine produces that much vapour. Rather, it can start a chain reaction, causing the vapour in the surrounding air to condense.

These clouds look gorgeous, especially in the low sun of early morning or late evening. But they’re not quite as benign as they look.

Cloud cover has two contradictory effects on global warming. By day, it reflects the sun’s light away, keeping the earth relatively cool. By night, it acts like a blanket, keeping the earth warmer. You know this already. Cloudy nights are warmer than clear ones.

What you may not know – I didn’t until I read Pretor-Pinney’s excellent book – is the way these two effects balance out.

Thick, low clouds tend overall to have a cooling effect. While the thin, high cirrostratus such as that created – or rather triggered – by passing aircraft have a nett warming effect.

So much so that climate scientists suspect clouds that start as contrails may contribute even more to global warming than the greenhouse gases emitted directly in aeroplane exhaust.

All of which seems to have been ignored in the heated toing-and-froing over the now-approved expansion of Heathrow airport. But probably shouldn’t have been.

What do you think of the show so far? As bad as you expected – or worse?

Perhaps the best we can say is that if you’re reading this, then presumably he hasn’t yet pressed the start button on nuclear armageddon.

Every time I turn on the news it seems to be running another mad episode of the same hysterical satire. At least it would be hysterical if it weren’t so far-fetched.

It’s hard to believe this stuff is really happening. Almost as hard as it is to believe a word uttered by the host of the biggest, craziest gameshow on Earth.

He says torture can work. But nothing seems capable of getting the truth out of him.

OK, he’s a delusional narcissist. Perhaps he actually believes what he says – about the turn-out at his inauguration, for example, or all those supposed fraudulent votes in the presidential election.

That excuse won’t wash for all the bootlickers surrounding him. They know his “alternative facts” are lies. Yet they pass them on like tablets from Above.

It’s a close call, perhaps, but to me the scariest thing about the new administration in Washington is the brazen way it goes about suppressing the truth.

About, for example, climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency is not allowed to say anything. Anything at all.

NASA, whose photos and scientific data tell a scary story the chief bully doesn’t want to hear, is gagged.

Reporters are arrested for reporting the facts about legitimate protests. Legitimate, that is, until all protest is criminalised.

This truth-crushing is one of the first tell-tale signs of fascism.

Yes, I used the F-word. Think I’m exaggerating? Think it’s not really as bad as that? The diaries of those who suffered in the 1930s reveal that they constantly believed things had gone as far as they could. And then they went further. The next step is always unbelievable.

It’s the sense of disbelief that keeps people going from day to day. A sense of disbelief like the one we’re experiencing right now.

No, I don’t know how it’ll all end up. No one does. Perhaps history will repeat the old tragedies as farce this time.

There’s certainly a farcical feel to a lot of it. Laughter is a natural reaction to such disbelief. As it is to the bizarre spectacle of a monstrous ego floundering so far out of its intellectual depth.

But there’s this. The last time the world faced fascism it took a six-year war, 60million deaths and an international effort to stop it. Who now is going to stop the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military machine the world has ever seen?

There’s not a lot you or I can do. The opposition has to come from within the US itself. In fact, it really needs to come from within the Republican Party in Congress.

So who among them is going to be brave enough to say: “OK, Donny, you’ve had your fun, now it’s time for beddy-byes”?
 
 
 

Careful with that stake...
 
 
Money isn’t my specialism. The words “finance”, “economics” or “business” usually get me flipping channels or turning the page. I do occasionally catch moments of money talk on Radio 5, and it nearly always sounds as if they’re speaking a foreign language. But I’ve noticed one word cropping up a lot lately. Stakeholders.

The same word keeps appearing on a website I work for. It was in a planning report I read the other day (I have such interesting reading). And I’ve even heard it slipping into conversation with teachers about education.

But what does it mean? Who are these stakeholders, and why have so many of them started appearing lately?

It gives me visions of a kind of inverted zombie apocalypse. A world full of people armed with stakes, ready to plunge them in should any members of the living dead come stomping round the corner.

Are you a stakeholder? Do stakeholders litter your conversation? Or are you (can I say this?) normal?

Of course, it’s jargon. Which is closely related to “zhargon”, the Yiddish word for Yiddish, or “language that other people can’t understand”. Which may be very useful if you’re a persecuted minority.

But jargon has a sneaky way of slipping into wider use – perhaps because people think it makes them sound smart, or expert in some way. And, hopefully, anything but persecuted.

I’m sure those stakeholders will eventually slip away back into the dust they came from, to be replaced by some other badly contrived metaphor. But for now they seem to be the buzzword du jour.

“Buzzword” itself, of course, being a buzzword that’s now slightly stale, a tad old hat, retro-styled, past its sell-by date. Like blue sky thinking outside the box – an odd notion that probably wouldn’t help any junior stakeholder up the rungs of the management ladder today, as it undoubtedly did around the turn of the millennium.

Your old hat is sky blue? Oh, be off with you. And careful how you hold your stake while climbing that ladder.