Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
It’s never easy to know what the Mayor of London really thinks — as many of us at The Spectator can attest from weekly experience during his benignly idiosyncratic editorship. His opposition to a third runway at Heathrow, and his espousal of an apparently fantastical alternative scheme to move the entire airport to a pair of man-made islands in the Thames estuary, 60 miles from central London, might just be seat-of-the-pants Boris, blustering his way out of an awkward corner. You can see why he came out against the third runway: it’s Labour policy, and it could lose him votes under the flight path in 2012. But then his aides must have reminded him that his business supporters insist more airport capacity is needed to maintain London’s position as a global city. ‘Oh cripes! Well, ah… let’s say we’ll bung it right out in the estuary, aircraft landing and taking off over water, all very green and hydro-powered, high-speed links in all directions… But it’ll cost at least £40 billion, so there’s no chance it’ll go ahead while I’m still mayor and lose me any votes. And if they do build it one day, they’ll still name it after me. Brill!’
Or perhaps he and his team have actually hit on a bold but feasible solution to the central problem in this debate, which is that after six decades of piecemeal development, Heathrow is one of the world’s worst travel nightmares and surely cannot be improved by having a sixth terminal and a third runway squeezed on to its constricted suburban site. Removing it (or perhaps keeping Terminal 5 and downsizing to a provincial-scale airport to service the M4 corridor) would not leave a wasteland behind, as Johnson’s opponents claim: it would release a vast development site, plus hundreds of acres of green space. Many other capitals from Paris to Kuala Lumpur have moved their main airports to meet modern demands. Why can’t we?
And if demolishing Heathrow is a real, if radical, option — particularly after a High Court judge kicked the runway project into the long grass last week — the estuary alternative has many attractions and a respectable history: a version of it would have been built 35 years ago, at Maplin Sands, if the 1974 economic crisis hadn’t intervened. The author of the feasibility study for Johnson’s preferred multi-runway scheme is veteran engineer (and Crossrail chairman) Douglas Oakervee, who says it would be ‘simpler to build’ than Chep Lap Kok, the superb new Hong Kong airport he created in the 1990s by flattening some rocky islands and driving a runway out into far deeper waters than those of the outer Thames estuary.
Too far from London? Not if the links are fast enough — and it could hardly be worse than rattling out to Heathrow on the Piccadilly Line. Airlines wouldn’t like it? If it allows 24-hour operation, and as many landing slots as they need, what’s not to like? Bad news for wading birds? Well, maybe — but perhaps they could have a big new pond where Heathrow Terminal 3 used to be. It’s time for a trip to Boris Island.
Neuro-logical
Former Barclays chief executive Martin Taylor says that the euro’s ‘marriage with 16 partners’ has become so fractious that the best way to save it from unravelling altogether might be to split the currency into a hard northern euro, or ‘neuro’, and a soft southern one, the ‘sudo’. Taylor, being a serious fellow, points out in the FT that his proposal is not intended as ‘a spoof in poor taste’ — though it does contain a brilliantly comic encapsulation of the incompatibility of the two halves of the eurozone: ‘She has run up all these debts without telling him; he always lectured her and has begun to shout at her. For her, the sunbed; for him, the gym.’
The logical extension of Taylor’s non-spoof is that if the Greeks, Italians, Portuguese and other euro-delinquents were forced to become partners, without the bracing presence of the Germans, French and Dutch, these volatile southerners would immediately clamour to get away from one another. The end result would be a fortress-like ‘neurozone’ on one side, and a set of reinstated but chronically weak national currencies on the other. But that might not be altogether a bad thing — and one of the lessons of the past two decades in Europe has been that it is relatively easy to invent new currencies or reinvent old ones. Take Slovakia, for example: after the ‘Velvet Divorce’ from the Czech Republic in 1993, the revived Slovak koruna was separated at par from its Czech equivalent; it moved to a permanent discount, which was good both for Slovak competitiveness and for Czech self-esteem, and last year the Slovaks swapped their koruna for euro membership at an exchange rate of 30 to one, while the proud Czechs hung on to theirs, trading at around 25 to the euro. The moral of the story — worth taking to heart at a moment when EU leaders have started talking about ‘gouvernement économique’ from Brussels — is that currencies can and should adapt to national interests, and not the other way round. Bring on the neuro.
No Byers market
What shocked me about the latest episode of parliamentary sleaze was not that former ministers had been caught prostituting themselves, but the outrageous prices they were quoting. A new sideline in charity auctioneering has given me a glimpse of the embarrassing gulf between what people think their time and talents might be worth, and what, if anything, other people are prepared to pay for them. How much would you part with, for example, to have Toby Young ‘write a speech for you for any occasion’ — especially if you had read his notorious best man’s speech at an American wedding in The Sound of No Hands Clapping? Bidding was not what you’d call brisk, but I think we just tottered into three figures. Likewise, imagine a perspiring amateur like me, gavel in hand at the local primary-school fundraiser, having to read out: ‘Lot One: Mrs P. Hewitt will come to your house and cook dinner for eight, est. £3,000; Lot Two: Hoon the Sad Clown will entertain at your child’s birthday party, balloons included, est. £3,000. And our very special Lot Three: let life-coach Stephen Byers reshape your personal goals in a day and introduce you to the Secretary of State for Transport, est. £3,000-£5,000.’ Ladies and gentlemen, do I hear the sound of no hands bidding?
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