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With Bio-Waste Spreader: 'Environment secretary George Useless (aka Eustice) has at last announced outline details of the government's Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS), which, in England, will replace the £2.4bn a year paid to farmers in EU farm subsidies that are being phased out… The limited ambition of the schemes has caused alarm in wildlife conservation climate change activist and farming circles…'
With Dr B Ching: 'The government must still think northerners are gullible, judging by its claim that the newly finished rail capacity upgrade at Leeds is part of its Integrated Rail Plan (IRP) for the North and Midlands – published two months ago. The £161m investment 'is part of our Integrated Rail Plan which will see £96bn invested to deliver better journeys sooner', crowed the Department for Transport (DafT) this month – even though the job started years ago and was meant to have finished in 2018…'
With Remote Controller: 'As big money quiz shows have come to clog the schedules, viewers have developed two particular sources of cynicism: that the formats are calibrated to limit the number of really big jackpots, and that the main mechanism for doing so is a hierarchy of questions allowing the answers to get harder if a guest is doing well. The latest franchises seem designed to address these concerns. On Ant & Dec's Limitless Win, a new Saturday night peak-time addition to their ITV show portfolio, there is theoretically no maximum take-home money…'
With Old Sparky: 'The global energy crisis has pushed up prices and, equally significant, volatility, to unprecedented levels. Among the many now under enormous stress from this are energy companies – however well-managed and well-hedged – that must inevitably trade in wholesale markets. A line of credit doesn't stretch far if trade is conducted at prices four times or more what they were a year ago. Likewise, heightened volatility requires far more risk capital be put on the table to stay in the game…'
With Lunchtime O'Boulez: 'When Ofqual boss Ian Bauckham suggested that schools could deal with the staff shortages caused by the Omicron wave by suspending music lessons and redeploying teachers to other subjects, the music industry objected to what was seen as yet more contempt for their discipline and those dedicated to it. The Incorporated Society of Musicians charged Bauckham with showing disrespect… But not so the Musicians Union, which doesn't seem to grasp the threat to music in schools…'
With Slicker: 'Among those probably surprised and certainly unamused to see a grinning Peter Mandelson celebrating soon-to-be convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's birthday in Paris in 2007 in a photo published recently were Mandelson's co-directors of ambitious new banking start-up the Bank of London. As reported in the last Eye, the Labour peer has been appointed an independent non-executive director of the new clearing and payments banking venture, already valued at more than $1bn after raising $120m from mainly US investors…'
Letter from Colombo
From Our Own Correspondent: 'It's the economy, stupid. And in Sri Lanka it is indeed our parlous financial health – not our dismal politics – that currently dominates public discussion. The recent procession of dire economic developments has been incandescent in its intensity. First came mass protests, notably in the agricultural southern heartlands that mostly voted for President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2019…'