Dear Reader

TRAVEL, at its most basic, is about getting from A to B. And right now in Britain, it’s impossible to go anywhere without the fear it will take double the time. There were no train strikes this week but the London Underground was closed on Thursday, bringing the capital to a standstill.

I came into town on a train from East Sussex. The taxi queue at Victoria Station snaked its way back and forth but even those at the front faced going nowhere in a hurry. Buses were ram-packed. Bikes all taken. The quickest form of transport was on foot.

I felt sorry for a group of Canadian tourists I passed near Hyde Park Corner, and hoped they didn’t assume this regularly happens — when it now does.

Naturally, there was no sign of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, yet again conspicuous by his absence when things go wrong on his watch.

Meanwhile, the M25 protesters continued to laugh in the face of section 137 of the Highways Act 1980, which says it is an offence ‘if a person, without lawful authority or excuse, in any way wilfully obstructs the free passage along a highway’.

The think tank, Policy Exchange, says Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, Animal Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are largely made up of the same people, who flirt with suicide as a response to ‘climate grief’.

Before scaling motorway gantries or glueing themselves to paintings, these miscreants must pledge to ‘take part in action which will lead to my arrest’. And, yet, the Home Secretary is taken to task for labelling these people ‘extremists’.

We’re not an authoritarian state but a little more authority when it comes to public transport would not go amiss.

I remember being in Tokyo and reading the front page of an English-language newspaper about an inquiry involving one of the bullet trains (pictured above). The issue? The train arrived into Tokyo’s Shinkansen terminal two minutes late.