It was difficult not to feel sorry for Transport Secretary Justine Greening this morning as she twisted and turned to avoid questions fired at her by Jim Naughtie on a third runway. Each time Greening thought she had escaped having to tell Radio 4 listeners whether she could remain in the Cabinet should the Prime Minister decide he is indeed a man rather than a mouse and U-turn on expanding Heathrow, Naughtie kept returning to the question:
Naughtie: Let’s be clear about the third runway: is your government open to argument about it, or not?Greening: No, the Coalition Agreement is very clear that we don’t support a third runway and in fact there is now cross-party consensus against a third runway, but what we do need to do is to start the process of saying, well, if we’re not going to have a third runway, how do we make sure we’ve got the hub capacity that our country needs going forward, and that’s the process I’m about to kick off when Parliament comes back.
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If we were really an island of strangers, as Sir Keir Starmer attested this week, then it might be OK. The real problem is that we have to interact with the bastards, so they cease being strangers and start being people who have a function in our lives. The old cliché had it that in
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