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With Bio-Waste Spreader: "Theresa Villiers says she hopes to introduce financial incentives for UK farmers to move away from production techniques like chicken broiler houses (where tens of thousands of chickens cram into a single house with little more floor space per bird than a single piece of A4). But it is highly likely the WTO will deem such payments an illegal subsidy...”
With M.D.: "Hancock is convinced the solution to health inequality is for everyone to sport a wearable device that captures and feeds back data that enables them to make better choices to improve their health, with prompts like: "Do you really need those Haribos?” Johnson, meanwhile, has promised to roll back sugar taxes to make diabetes even cheaper...”
With Remote Controller: "For the TV industry, poverty has always been profitable. Viewers enjoy the sense of balancing virtue that comes from watching the poor while sluicing down a Deliveroo with a glass of something from the wine club. At commercial networks, even advertisers, paradoxically, get a glow from fogging their products during shows about people who couldn’t possibly afford to buy them…”
[reviews of I am... Kirsty (C4), Broke (BBC2) and Eat, Shop, Save (ITV)]
With Old Sparky: "The ink was hardly dry on the ruinously expensive Hinkley contract when EDF announced its next new nuke, Sizewell C in Suffolk, would need an even better deal! As ever, May meekly complied and, two days before she left office, launched a consultation on her obliging response – a financial package known as “regulated asset base” that would relieve the French of virtually all risk in building Sizewell…”
With Lunchtime O’Boulez: "One of his birthday events is the premiere of a new symphony at the Edinburgh Festival. But celebrations soured when David Grieg, who runs Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, complained that MacMillan shouldn’t accept Scottish government money to support his music when he has been so fiercely critical of the SNP for its separatist politics, and has called artists who receive its patronage “government stooges”…”
With Slicker: "The unfortunately named Conn’s reign at Centrica since 2015 provides a masterclass in how, far from being aligned by remuneration policies, CEO pay and shareholder rewards have increasingly diverged. This was overseen by the Centrica remuneration committee, which – as at so many other FTSE companies – could always find reasons to reward...”
With Hedgehog: "Johnson ordered the “New Bus for London” (NBfL) when he was mayor – and the clue was in the name: it was a bus for London only. Heedless of the capital and operating costs, he demanded a third doorway on each bus to indulge his nostalgia for the open rear platform of the classic Routemaster. Thus the “Borismaster” was longer than necessary and required a conductor to fend off personal injury solicitors...”
Letter from Beijing
From Our Own Correspondent: "Fan Bingbing is our most popular film star and has 62m social media followers. But that counted for nothing when she was “disappeared” by tax authorities and secretly detained for months, before being handed a tax bill of more than £100m last year. Her perhaps more serious misdemeanour was to symbolize the dizzying decade of economic growth and greed under president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao – which our current Emperor Xi Jinping has spent considerable resources trying to reign in since 2012…”