Last week I wrote a rather alarming piece about the euro currency: Is the eurozone about to collapse?. Some significant commentators are doing likewise, notably, Will Hutton, Liam Halligan, Edmund Conway and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

These guys don’t mess about. If they are nervous, we should be too. My antennae have been twitching for some considerable time.

And yet, and yet … Where are the front-page stories in our national press warning us of the calamity to come? Today’s Sunday Times does have a mini article, “Greece urged to give up the euro” on page 11 of the main paper, squashed into a bottom corner next to a large advert for Hyundai cars, and cut into by a promotion for “Britain’s Best Picnic Walks”.

What comes next will not be a picnic, nor a drive in a spanking new motor.

We are informed, in around 250 words, that the British Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) “has warned Greek ministers they will be unable to escape their debt trap without devaluing their own currency to boost exports. The only way this can happen is if Greece returns to its own currency.”

As Greece’s debt is denominated in euros, it will increase as the local currency falls. Thus the debt must be “converted into the new currency unilaterally.” I’m sure that will go down a storm with holders of Greek euro bonds.

Doug McWilliams, chief exec of the CEBR, thinks the move is “virtually inevitable” and other members may follow. “The only question is the timing. The other issue is the extent of contagion. Spain would probably be forced to follow suit, and probably Portugal and Italy …”

He ends ominously, “Could this be the last weekend of the single currency? Quite possibly, yes.”

At least the ST lifted that out of the Business section. I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies.

David Laws is gone, having entered the annals of the Guinness Book of Records as the shortest occupier of a Cabinet seat in British history. I’m talking about time here, not stature. Someone should check that out too.

Eighteen days is not a long time in politics, whatever grumpy old Harold Wilson might have said. One thing made Laws stand out. His vanishingly small career is filled with superlatives.

Apart from the length of his stay on our political radar, he has been elevated to the status of “the star of the coalition government”, a Prime Minister-in-waiting, the best brain in Parliament, the ablest candidate for the job, and “a good and honourable man” (David Cameron).

If he can manage all that in 18 days, what might he have accomplished in 18 months?

Can we afford to lose such concentrated talent in these hard times?

If you have ever watched old British films, you will know what a charabanc is.

Charas (pronounced “sharabang”, suggesting a French connection) were old buses designed for long-distance outings to the seaside and, more often than not, pub crawls through the countryside. They were usually painted a drab green, or cream with brown highlights. Very public sector.

Charabancs were the quintessential working class form of transport right up to the 1960s. When in Malta a few years ago, I had the misfortune of travelling in one on a tourist trip to Medina in the centre of the island.

It was a very uncomfortable journey, especially when the engine caught fire, filling the bus with thick, black smoke. Alarmingly, the Maltese driver regarded this as perfectly normal.

I mention all this because while out walking in Exeter the other day, I came across a perfectly preserved example of a charabanc. By wonderful serendipity, it was parked alongside a luxuriously modern German coach with every facility and comfort known to man. Here’s my pic:

Doesn’t it just warm the cockles of your heart?

Annoyment of the Week

One of my pet aversions of the late, unlamented Labour government, was Yvette Cooper and Ed Ball’s constant use of the phrase, “It’s the right thing to do”.

Where do I start?

The word “right” is a value judgement, so should always be prefaced with “In my opinion …”. Instead it was used as a fait accompli, an argument stopper.

The gruesome/winsome couple (you decide who gets which adjective) were claiming infallibility of decision, something even the Pope would be wary of these days.

Imagine then my surprise when our shiny new leader, David Cameron, started using this verbal tic in putting his points across.

Dave, it’s not the right thing to do to say it’s the right thing to do.

Here in East Devon we’ve had a major sporting triumph, something we’re not used to, or geared up for.

Our local rugby club, the Exeter Chiefs, won a splendid two-leg final against formidable Bristol, 38-17 to win promotion to the rugby Premiership. That is a huge event for the club, for next season it will be hosting the like of Wasps, Leicester, Bath and Northampton, giants among the rugger crowd.

Yesterday the entire city centre was filled with an enormous crowd welcoming our heroes in their open-topped bus as they were greeted by the Lord Mayor of Exeter.

My photo is a bit blurred, but it was the best I could do in the circumstances.

Hail to the Chiefs

John Evans

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There they stood, in the Rose Garden at Number 10 Downing Street. Two smoothy 40-somethings in blue suits, arraigned behind identical lecterns, joshing away like a pair of ITV comedians — the Chuckle Brothers, perhaps.

The era of Dick Clameron has begun.

One can perhaps forgive them their moment of exuberance. It’s not often a chap becomes Prime Minister, even if he was expecting it. Nor a no-hoper, doomed to a life as a political Bedouin, unexpectedly to emerge as Deputy Prime Minister. It was more than a jaw-dropping occasion, it had all the ingredients of a new dawn, did it not?

For those who welcome a kindlier, softer form of Government, stationed firmly on the soggy marshland of the centre ground, it must have been a red letter day. From now on blue means red, or at least orange.

And, yes, there are lots of kindlier, softer things to look forward to, including higher taxes, chummier governance, smiles all round.

Crisis, what crisis? Do you mean our little, local difficulties? Don’t worry your pretty heads about it. The Clameroons are here.

Even Alex Salmond fell for the spell as the circus wafted into Edinburgh yesterday. Don’t be fooled, the phoney honeymoon is about to end.

Next week is a crunch period for the country. The question put will not concern who occupies Downing Street, but who governs Britain?

In Brussels, our secret masters are planning an audacious land-grab of power under the cover of the collapsing eurozone. Having presided over that chaos, they now want to drag us into the mess of their own manufacture.

On Tuesday, the Alternative Investment Directive comes up for final endorsement by senior politicians. It’s already got through committee stage, as participant Daniel Hannan has described in his blog.

It will do untold damage to the City of London, which has over 80% of Europe’s alternative investment businesses. Even the Americans, who are competitors in this trade, are protesting at this bulldozing measure.

Where is the opposing army to defend our shores? While I have every faith in George Osborne and William Hague to put up a fight, somehow Dick Clameron doesn’t instil much confidence.

There follows the EU Commission’s demand that all UK Budgets be submitted to them for approval before they are put to our “sovereign” Parliament. Where are the shouts of opposition? Apart from a few doughty journalists, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in particular, most people are still basking in the rosy glow of sweet togetherness.

Three governing bodies are being set up in Brussels to cement the final bars into our new economic prisonhouse. Welcome to the fascist Europe some of us have been warning of for years.

Make no mistake, these decisions will make Britain a minor protectorate of the illegitimate Brussels regime.

David Cameron must now tear himself away from the embrace of LibDem Euro infatuation and fight as if his life depends on it. Now is the time to take an arms-length position to the colossal burgeoning mess on the Continent and refuse to participate in anything they cook up.

If the Conservative Party can’t handle that, it doesn’t deserve to exist, let alone take office.

John Evans

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During this election campaign no party is telling the true horror story that awaits the British economy in the years and decades to come.

For a much clearer picture, I recommend you make use of an advanced warning system on the UK and world economies. Stationed at Camp Telegraph, it’s known as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

This week, the A E-P “Index” dropped several more notches — it really is getting scary now.

The Central Bankers’ bank, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), is forecasting British national debt to rise to 100 per cent of GDP (annual income) by the end of next year, and 300 per cent by 2040, if the Brown plan is adhered to.

As Mr Micawber might put it: Annual income £30,000, credit card debt £90,000, result, catastrophe.

If you are lucky enough to be on a 15 per cent rate, the interest alone — barring banks’ sleight of hand in calculating these figures — would be almost 70 per cent of your taxed income.

That is clearly unsustainable, especially as it doesn’t allow for paying off any of the outstanding debt.

Britain would probably inflate wildly to mitigate the situation, making markets even less friendly. At home, savings would be wiped out over time, and the housing market become unavailable to all but the most well off.

We would be back to the late 1940s/early 50s when poverty in the UK was more like the norm in Eastern Europe.

The Labour election message is that rapid growth from next year forward will crunch the deficit (overspend) before all that happens. They expect a growth rate of around 3.5 per cent over the next couple of years.

However, as the BIS makes clear, public debt at anything approaching 100 percent of GDP chokes off growth at the source. UK growth will be below the long-term rate of 2.25 – 2.5 per cent for decades to come.

Gordon Brown, in his Alicean wonderland, repeats daily his cod-Keynesian mantra that his ballooning overspend should not be touched until next year, or until the economy is robust enough to stand it. This dilemma too is of Brown’s own making.

This vital national choice is not easily conveyed to the public so he believes he can get away with it. But, we should not flinch, this is serious.

First to explode will be mortgage rates, as bond yields gallop north. Monetary policy will stop working, with near-zero Bank Rate, and QE unavailable to all but the Gordon Browns of this world. We could face a sudden explosive accumulation of bad news, falling markets, rising rates, and ever spiralling debt across all sectors of the economy, private and public.

We should start reducing the rise in public debt now by slashing the government’s overspend. The debt load itself will not come down until the deficit becomes a surplus. Frankly, there’s a very long way to go to that benign condition, particularly if growth in the economy stalls or is weak in the long run. The new government can at least limit the damage in the short to medium term, but it will take guts and thick skins.

Private indebtedness should also be reduced as fast as possible in every household in the land, for Britain could be into a Japanese-style Lost Decade or two on speed. Maddeningly, we do not have the home-grown savings pot that the thrifty Japanese have accumulated to absorb our government’s borrowing when the markets are reluctant to get involved.

Britain emerges in the BIS paper as an arch-sinner. The country may have entered the crisis with a low public debt but this shock absorber has already been used up, exposing the underlying rot in the UK’s public accounts. Tucked away in the BIS report are charts and tables showing that Britain faces the highest structural deficit in the OECD club of rich states, with a mounting risk that public debt will explode out of control.

Dr Death, Gordon Brown, should be forced by his more astute colleagues to take this crisis seriously. His lies are polluting essential public discourse.

Quote: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

John Evans

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We are hearing too much nowadays about predictions of the end of the world on December 21, 2012 — well, we’ll get through the London Olympics alright. Hang in there, Boris.

The Mayan Prophesies have been around a long time. They can be traced back at least to the 6th century BC. This particular prediction is drawn from a combination of various Mesoamerican calendars which only go as far as … you’ve guessed it.

Now call me obtuse, but every calendar I’ve ever owned usually comes to an end on December 31 of the year it relates to. Do we all run to the hills immediately after Christmas?

And then there are the Mayans themselves. Although they were pretty snappy at maths and appeared to know very tricky things about very long numbers, they hadn’t invented the wheel and were totally deficient in technology.

They were also the most bloodthirsty race ever to inhabit the earth. On one occasion 80,000 people were ritually sacrificed by cutting out their living hearts and holding them up to the gods still beating. The ground ran with rivers of blood for days.

So why do the usual ninnies imagine these people would know what’s going to happen on December 21, 2012? For the same reason, I suspect, that the scaredy-cats among us imagine the world is going to boil over some time soon.

Even Sony corp has got in on the act. Promoting its film, 2012 (what an original title!), it has a website terrifying the life out of many folk of a febrile disposition, not least thousands of children, who are also prey to the rantings of the climate bogies.

This madhouse we call Planet Earth should be subjected to a strict control order from the Galactic Council.

On a related subject, it seems the world is not going to run out of oil and gas for many a long while yet. In the Daily Telegraph Business pages on Monday Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported on the rise of new oil shale technologies to produce previously unattainable natural gas.

“The world Gas Conference in Buenos Aires last week was one of those events that shatter assumptions. Advances in technology for extracting gas from shale and methane beds have quickened dramatically, altering the global balance of energy faster than almost anybody expected,” he writes.

I remember a Canadian friend telling me years ago about the huge oil shale resources in that country. They are, he said, greater than the oil reserves in the Middle East. “Take that, Omar,” was his rather politically incorrect conclusion. I’ve not heard much about them, and other fields like them, since.

“This is almost unknown to the public,” writes A E-P, “despite the efforts of Nick Grealy at ‘No Hot Air’ who has been arguing for some time that Britain’s shale reserves could replace declining North Sea output.”

It’s no use depending on the present government, but shouldn’t the Conservatives make this a top priority before committing billions of our money to foreign technology and energy supplies?

I’ll bet the Mayans didn’t dream of that.

We should, I think, be in optimistic mood this autumn. Many things are going right for the world now, despite Sony’s Planet X waiting in the wings to destroy us all two years hence.

The one dark blob on the horizon is the Met Office. After its “barbecue summer” PR disaster, it remains unusually silent about the coming autumn and winter. I’m subscribed to its bulletins and warnings service, so would surely have heard by now if the boffins had put their heads above their Exeter parapet.

Other sources are less reserved. It seems that October has been unusually cold and snowy around the world. Eastern Europe and the Balkans are already snow spattered. It presages a similar winter to last year when North America suffered unbelievably cold weather throughout the season. Here in Britain it was not that bad, but chilly enough.

Whatever happened to global warming? And why are governments spending trillions of our money on ways of making us colder still?

Definitely another case for the Galactic Council.

Gordon Brown and his swivel-eyed team of policy wonkers and PR duffers, continue to talk about “fairness”.

Fair play is a typically British concept, one we have exported all over the world and which once imbued us with great moral authority.

Not any more. The present broken thunderbox of a government has let it die in half a generation. Brown’s use of anti-terrorist legislation to bully little Iceland when its banks failed was a monstrous abuse of power and hardly “fair”. The Icelanders will never forgive us for the humiliation.

Now the grumpy dinosaur of Downing Street is employing a kind of reverse psychology to win back some voters. Fairness is what Labour is about, he thundered at his party conference.

Let’s take him at his word. Mr Brown, do you think an electorate that was promised a vote on a foreign constitution should be given one as a matter of honour … and fairness?

I thought not.

Annoyment of the Week

A Gordon Brown-free zone

As a reader of history it pains me to say this. Historians are becoming very annoying.

Have you noticed whenever they pop up in the media — which is frequent — they talk about ancient times in the present tense?

Turn on Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4 on Thursday mornings and you will hear: “King Alfred is burning the cakes”, while “the Vikings have landed in the East.” It’s enough to frighten old ladies half to death.

Now metaphysically it is just possible to insist we all live in an “Eternal Now” where Alfred is indeed burning the cakes as we speak. Even those giant pygmies of our time, the particle physicists might agree, and some do.

It just gets a tad confusing though when a billion buses all come along at once.

Time may be a human construct but it wasn’t invented for nothing. More to the point, time and space go together, so unless we all want to be compressed into an infinitesimally small dot, we’d better hang onto it until we think of something better.

An example of how badly things can go wrong is called for: a small boy is preparing for school when he hears Melvyn on the radio: “Winston Churchill is Prime Minister. The war is raging across the Channel.”

In school a teacher asks, “Who knows who the Prime Minister is?”

A small boy puts up his hand: “Winston Churchill, Miss.”

I rest my case.

Some people have asked me why I’m publishing my own book: The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face?, instead of approaching a trade publisher.

The reason is that I’ve been in publishing for a long time and, just as I’ve always financed my own businesses rather than used banks or venture capital, I enjoy the freedom and lack of fuss of being in charge of the process. It’s not control freakery, just the opposite — the sense of space and freedom when I get up in the morning.

The book is now finished and being prepared for press. Imagine the long wait for the final result at a conventional publishing house. Think how ghastly the cover may turn out to be, and all those book promos at GMTV, Waterstones in every part of the country, and the sheer grind of having to explain what the hell it’s all about over and over again.

I rest my case for the last time this week.

John Evans

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Bank holiday mornings are usually dreary affairs, endured to the sounds of shrieking children and rain on the windowpanes.

This morning, as compensation, we have a few zingy articles in the press to cheer us up. Over at The Guardian, Jackie Ashley refers to David Cameron’s exceptional “chutzpah” — does she mean chutney?

When was the last time such positive thoughts for a Tory leader pinged from the bullet banks of the old Manchester teeth-grinder? I mean the paper, not Jackie Ashley.

So, let’s dig liberally into the chutney and hope that chutzpah is enough to win the next General Election.

I thought Dave looked a little chubby on Andrew Marr yesterday. Maybe he’s at the chutney too.

Boris Johnson was also heard moving in the undergrowth again at The Telegraph. Adding to the din of calls for a swift General Election he cites the dreadful state of legislation spewed out during the last 12 years. We need a House of Rebels, he writes, and, by implication, not shoppers and diners-out.

Why do many Tories sound so Cromwellian now? Aren’t they supposed to be Cavaliers, not Roundheads? Boris is a born Cavalier. A feather in his cap would utterly transform him.

But he’s right. We do need Parliamentarians for a complex technological age: MPs who will cut up badly drafted law and hurl it back at a slipshod Executive, forcing it to do better. Perhaps some Eton schoolmasters should be drafted in.

The floor of the House needs the capability to overcome government when it underperforms. That means a much higher quality of MP. Falling back on Esther Rantzen and Joanna Lumley would be total desperation. How good has Glenda Jackson been? Or Gyles Brandreth? Or that Leftie Shakespearean actor who went to Brussels?

Horses for courses. Ask any bookie.

But Derby winners, please.

Since we’re all in a rather bilious mood of rebellion against our leaders, here are two possible reforms to Government off the top of my head.

1. American Cabinets are not drawn from Congress as a rule. They are normally appointed from distinguished experts and public servants. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, for example, was at the New York Federal Reserve before the call came from Washington. Like us, there’s probably not the talent or expertise among career politicians on Capitol Hill.

Would they want to mop up 100 or so of the people who vote the money and pass laws for everyone? The “separation of powers” is bigger in the States than here, although I believe we invented the concept. Maybe that’s what’s gone wrong.

Gordon Brown tried a similar idea with his GOATS (government of all the talents). One by one the goatlings have fallen by the wayside, usually for lacking political savvy. Lord Myners slipped up over Fred the Shred’s pension. Others have left to take up motor racing, or got caught out for being human — a dreadful sin these days.

Digby Jones was probably the best, but he was stuck in some minor post as Prince Andrew’s bag-carrier. One suspects Brown’s heavy-handed incompetence destroyed the exercise.

Cabinet Ministers, especially Secretaries of State, must be selected from the best we have. They should also be vetted by Parliament before they are confirmed in office.

Prime Ministers must not have it all their own way. Often, as with Brown and Blair, they are the blockages that keep excellence out of government.

2. Why should leaders in the Commons choose the people who will revise their legislation in the Lords? Let’s remove the government’s power to stuff the second chamber with its placemen.

If you were up on a murder charge, you’d be astonished if you could choose anyone you wanted for the jury.

Improvements, such as these, need to be made now, when politicians are weak. The tragedy is, the old system ensures only they can make the necessary changes.

And turkeys don’t voluntarily jump into ovens at Christmas.

Gorbals Mick, otherwise known as the Speaker of the House of Commons, is almost history now.

But do you remember the Gorbals Die-hards? They were in a different class from the old black-robed sheet-metal worker.

You don’t recall them? Maybe Dickson McCunn will jog your memory. A retired Glasgow grocer, High Class, of course, Dickson — in his sixties — was the self-appointed leader of the Die-hards, who were a group of young boy tearaways, led by their Chieftan, Dougal. I wonder how that juxtaposition would play in today’s climate?

No, then how about Huntingtower? Or The House of the Four Winds?

Last chance: John Buchan.

Yes, I hear you shout — a bit late, if you ask me.

I left out the third book in the series, Castle Gay, because it’s taken on a wholly different meaning since Buchan’s day. More Graham Norton than Richard Hannay.

I mention the Die-hards because not everything narrow, puce-faced and boring came out of the Gorbals. The novels are wonderful confections of adventure, fights to the death, swashbuckling characters, and the kind of wild possibilities that appeal to teenage boys (and many older ones) almost everywhere.

It would be an interesting experiment to try out Huntingtower, written in 1922, on a modern comp-educated class of teens. Once they got over the very different morality and beliefs of the post-WW1 world, I’m sure the exhilaration of the story, far-fetched as it is, would grip them. After all how far does Harry Potter demand the suspension of disbelief?

You can download the Gutenburg version of the novel here.

I picked up my copies from a secondhand bookshop while still at school. They were very tattered but part of that great orange Penguin series that can still be found on sale all over the country.

I mention all this because every time I see Gorbals Mick presiding over the House, I think what a disapointment he would be to Wee Jaikie and the other Die-hards.

One of the great journalistic duels is taking place in the Business section of the Sunday Telegraph.

In the blue corner: Ambrose “Mr Deflation” Evans-Pritchard. In the red corner: Liam “Mr Inflation” Halligan.

Both are brilliant journalists and masters of their field. They differ in their assessment of the current economic circumstances, especially for the United Kingdom.

Ambrose admits to being “tortured by self-doubt” over his analysis. Liam is ruggedly certain of his.

Ambrose believes “two-thirds of the world will be in deflation by July”. Liam points to the climbing oil price which will wipe out all the stimulus effects of quantitative easing.

I suspect that both are right. Some parts of the world will fall into deflation — many countries already have. But inflation is the underlying wealth-destroying genie that has, once again, popped out of the bottle, thanks to Central Banks and politicians covering their backs against a 1930s-style Armageddon.

It may be a few years down the road, though, and deflation has to be fought now, as the Bank of England implies by its continuing policy of buying gilts. But it will let rip eventually.

As always, it’s a case of Up-To-A-Pointism. We are nowhere near out of the woods yet.

Once again the European Union is interfering in the running of the British state.

Not content with forcing us to adopt the useless mercury-filled light bulbs prescribed by them, we are now expected to switch from Watts — named after a fine Scottish gentleman — to “lumens”, a continental concoction that means nothing to the British.

Soon a size 9 shoe will become a 43, calories will be “joules”, after a long-forgotten Frenchman, and the English Channel will be called the German Waterway.

Why do these things happen? Because our politicians are not worth the spit they lick on their freebie postage stamps.

John Evans

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