Unsustainable energy
Sir: Sir Richard Dearlove (‘Net cost’, 22 November) succinctly sums up the views of many of us who cannot understand the whole lemming-like net-zero policy. This leap into the abyss was precipitated by Boris Johnson and the torch is now carried by Ed Miliband, who seems to have carte blanche to make matters worse. The destruction of our automobile and energy industries in terms of GDP and Treasury receipts is mindless – more so in a country producing less than 1 per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions.
Interestingly, Matt Ridley’s article in the same issue (‘Star power’) gives longer-term hope regarding fusion energy generation, but it will be years before this becomes reality. Are we to wish that the construction of the UK’s first small modular reactor is a wake-up call to the reality that one way or another, the only assured source of reliable non-carbon energy is these nuclear plants with lower transmission losses and build costs? Let us hope we can get them through the planning process before the lights go out.
Christopher D. Forrest
Plymouth, Devon
Lest we forget
Sir: I was saddened and surprised to read Sir Anthony Seldon’s suggestion that, as he described it, Remembrance Week may have been too ‘backward-looking’ (Diary, 22 November). Is ‘remembrance’ not retrospective by implication? I may well have misunderstood the meaning of the term. But, as a sometime master of Wellington College, itself a monument to the Great Duke and a charitable foundation in its own right, might Sir Anthony not applaud the exemplary nature of its status, vested in the appreciation of what is enduring remembrance, rather than using the matter to take a tilt at contemporary political shortcomings?
Anthony Beattie (Col retired and OW)
Warminster, Wiltshire
Late developers
Sir: Rory Sutherland is spot on about Luddite inertia in the house-building industry (Wiki Man, 15 November). The guys who built the pyramids could walk on to any site and recognise everything going on, except the electricals. Laing O’Rourke are pioneering modular construction in the UK but I don’t see a significant impact.
Having spent most of my working life in heavy civil engineering in the UK, Europe and Asia, 25 years ago I developed and patented a method of constructing dry, naturally lit basements for new-build houses, thereby increasing sellable living space per plot by 50 per cent. We built them successfully as one-offs for private and self-build developers all over England. But despite submitting numerous economically and technically viable schemes to suit the standard house types for all the national volume builders, none would commit.
David M. Owen
West Kirby, Wirral
Mad dash
Sir: I enjoyed Philip Womack’s article on hyphens, and found it particularly relevant to my work as a corporate ghost-writer and editor (Notes on…, 22 November). Some of my days are filled with not much more than inserting hyphens into reams of management waffle to help the reader make some sense of it. The way such language is going means there is a constant stream of compound adjectives that need hyphenating. A glaring example was ‘we maintain high risk management standards’, and yet the client still objected to my placing a hyphen between risk and management, because ‘we don’t hyphenate it’. This prompted me to create a one-page PDF of amusing examples similar to the article’s canned baby food, to send to clients. The most popular by far with recipients is where I ask them how they might punctuate their ‘first hand job experience’.
Richard Owsley
Bristol
First-class Mail
Sir: Charles Moore recalls the time in 1983 when the then Spectator literary editor A.N. Wilson edited one of my book reviews to mean the exact opposite of what I had written (Notes, 15 November). He turned my compliment to Clive James into an expression of his own loathing of the great man. Wilson then added insult to injury by chucking away my polite correction – and was eventually sacked by Alexander Chancellor. In fact, this was all down to Julian Barnes, who assailed me at a party asking, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘What’s Clive James done to you?’ I hadn’t actually seen the published article yet.
A year later I wrote a profile of lovely Linda McCartney for the Telegraph Magazine, only to find on publication that the first two columns had been rewritten to spew the usual bitchy tropes about the photographer whose chief sin was being married to a Beatle. Outrageous.
It’s interesting that in the 32 years I have been contributing to the often-maligned Daily Mail I have never once been ‘spliced’ (as the BBC describes malicious editing) to express a view not my own. Another frequent contributor to the Mail is the always brilliant A.N. Wilson, and I’ve no doubt he receives the same respect.
Bel Mooney
Bitton, South Gloucestershire
Unabridged admiration
Sir: I am the editor of the Oban Bridge Club newsletter. A couple of years ago I contacted Susanna Gross and Janet de Botton to ask if they would mind me reproducing a couple of their columns, as they were by far the most entertaining bridge writers I had come across. They readily agreed to my request and I even got a mention in one of their columns. The bridge column is one of the first items I turn to in The Spectator. How sad it is that almost in an instant they have gone: Susanna dying far too young and Janet understandably feeling that without Susanna, their ‘double act’ couldn’t go on. They will both be terribly missed.
Tony Graham
Loch Awe, Argyll
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