CHRISTOPHER BOOKER THE LAST WORD T

The consistent refusal of the Government to listen rather puts one in mind of Cassandra

hirty years ago, when the thenyoung cartoonist Matt joined The Daily Telegraph, one of his first jobs was to produce little cartoons to illustrate the paper’s satirical Way of the World column, to which I was then contributing. One cartoon I asked him to draw showed the prophetess Cassandra standing amid the smoking ruins of Troy, holding a placard reading “Remember folks, you read it here first”.

The point about Cassandra, of course, was that she could foresee the future, but only on condition that no one believed her. Over the past two years, ever since Theresa May announced her decision to leave the EU’S tightly integrated internal market, one or two of us have sympathised with Cassandra.

We immediately began explaining the more obvious problems that this fateful decision would result in, since it would severely endanger much of that “frictionless” export trade to the EU that earns one pound in eight of our national income.

Our manufacturing of cars, medicines and chemicals would all be seriously at risk, as would our Dover/channel Tunnel link with the Continent, much of our agricultural export trade and even the participation of Irish horses in Cheltenham and the Grand National. We also warned, meanwhile, that on no rock was May’s plan more likely to founder than the inevitability of a “hard Irish border”.

But much more significant than the failure of anyone to heed our predictions was Britain’s inability to listen to what we were being repeatedly told by the EU itself. Recalling that joke Thirties headline “Fog In Channel: Continent Cut Off ”, our politicians seemed incapable of understanding the EU’S endless explanations of the legal position in which our choosing to become a “third country” outside its market would leave us.

No matter that the EU set all this out in sober technical detail in its 168 “Notices to Stakeholders”. The seeming failure of our politicians even to read these made it ever more likely that we would end up with the ultimate catastrophe whereby we crashed out of the EU without a deal.

The real Cassandras in this story have been those technocrats in Brussels. They tried to warn us of the realities we were facing. But that fog in the Channel rendered us incapable of listening.

It has always seemed rather odd that two of London’s most prestigious universities, Imperial College and the LSE, should include a “Grantham Institute”, lavishly funded by an asset management billionaire to promote research supporting the belief in global warming.

An employee of the LSE branch is Bob Ward, much of whose job seems to consist of lodging long and tortuous complaints against any journalist daring to point out factual errors in claims made by warming propagandists. I have lost count of how many such complaints Ward has made against me over the years, most recently under the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). But not one has ever been upheld.

So enraged was Ward by IPSO’S rejection of his latest complaint against me that he last week published a long rant on the LSE website, accusing me of “endangering lives” by producing scientific data to show why last summer’s heatwave was not proof of global warming, and attacking IPSO for allowing the press to “promote climate change denial”. He seemed to be calling for a restriction on the freedom of the press. But isn’t it odd that the LSE should be lending its prestige to such intemperate stuff?

Last week, BBC Radio 4 regaled us with a documentary comparing Elon Musk, the US billionaire behind Tesla electric cars, to the great 19th-century engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Three years ago, after the BBC had broadcast seven laudatory items puffing Musk’s latest Model 3, I noted that Tesla ranked 15th on the list of the top 20 firms invested in by the BBC Pension Fund.

Since then, with debts estimated at up to $10 billion (£7.6 million), not least due to the slumping sales of its Model 3, Tesla has not fared well. But I see it has now risen to seventh on the BBC list, which has increased its investment in Tesla to £27.3 million. I hope all those BBC employees who rely on it for their pensions know what is happening to their money.

Our politicians seemed incapable of understanding the EU