Phil has to be canny like Gordon

TORY MP Chris Heaton-Harris tweets: Just had Beef_Stew rejected as my computer’s password. It’s not stroganoff.” Brown was on the money in crisis

IF you’re shopping around for cheaper fuel, Rotterdam is a bit of a hike and there’s none there anyway.

The Dutch port’s petrol stations use self-teaching algorithms to set pump prices by learning what their competitors are charging and how customers behave.

The programmes tell garage owners when motorists are most rushed and least likely to drive around looking for the best deal.

As garages all bought the same Danish-made software, prices tend to be the same wherever you go.

Had the owners agreed to do this together that would be a breach of competition law because they would have created a price-fixing cartel.

And whenever companies mean to do just that it is very difficult to find out they’re doing it. But it goes to show that artificial intelligence is not so, well, intelligent.

If this spreads it will destroy the backbone of capitalism, which is to allow the free market to work to keep prices in check.

I’m sure Jeremy Corbyn will be delighted. But to lose confidence in the whole economic system before there’s anything in its place would spell financial disaster.

We came within a whisker of that in the great crash of 2008, and it’s not fully appreciated what would have happened had Gordon Brown not bailed out the banks to keep them afloat. Within hours, banks and their holes in the walls would have shut and cash would stop.

And all your credit cards would be useless.

After a week without money you would be hungry, in two weeks, starving.

Looting would be rife and with police losing control, t roops would appear on the streets.

I promise you it would have been as bad as that.

So when Gordon gave banks a massive bung it wasn’t inspired leadership but the only course open to him.

The f orecourts of Rotterdam are a long way from the Commons, where Philip Hammond will deliver his spring statement on Tuesday. This is not a Budget, not even nearly.

The Chancellor will rabbit for 20 minutes max, and there’ll be zilch tax changes or public spending announcements.

So Hamfisted could spend his time more profitably looking into the future. And telling us what he intends to do to stop artificial intelligence wrecking it. IF I wanted to drive from, say, Lydd in Kent to Cambridge I’d just punch the destination into my satnav and GPS would get me there.

So I was astonished to learn from Alan Sugar that Lydd and Cambridge are the only airports in the country using the global positioning system that motorists have taken for granted for years.

It’s standard in America and could do much to answer aviation safety issues after Brexit as we wrestle with how to keep our planes flying over other sovereign countries. The Government admits the roll-out is “long overdue”.

Theresa May should be like Lord Sugar and tell failing ministers who can’t get this right: “You’re fired.”