I’m being driven mad by Microsoft Outlook

Call me a cynic, but I suspect this week’s headlines about a revival of Heathrow’s third runway plan amount to little more than a political game. Arguments for and against this project have been aired many times over, from a white paper in 2003 to the Davies Commission’s final report (in favour) in 2015. Much to the detriment of London’s status as a global city, the runway has stayed in the long grass – due to marginal-seat politics under the flight path as much as genuine environmental concern – while no satisfactory alternative at Gatwick or Stansted has ever advanced and the advent of the Elizabeth line is Heathrow’s only real improvement in living memory.

But as businesses from WHSmith to Lakeland join the frankly-why-bother party and put themselves up for sale, while entrepreneurs queue to explain why they won’t invest in the UK under the tax regime of Rachel Reeves, she and the Prime Minister desperately need a list of potential growth-boosters. We can almost hear Sir Humphrey saying: ‘Shall I have the third runway file brought up from the basement, Chancellor?’

And in his cunning way, he probably pointed out that even the fastest planning process (impeded, inevitably, by judicial review) won’t see diggers demolishing the adjacent village of Harmondsworth to clear the Heathrow site within Reeves’s chancellorship, which few believe will last Labour’s full term; so the heaviest flak will fall on her successors. Meanwhile Ed Miliband can righteously declare that the runway will be blocked again if it threatens to break the UK’s ‘carbon budget’ – giving him more clout to intervene in the energy sector and elsewhere while it appears to be going ahead.

But will you or I ever take off to conquer the economic world from Heathrow’s new mile of tarmac? I very much doubt it. I’m reminded of another ultimately pointless game on the theme of transport infrastructure, the one played in Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue: instead of ‘third runway’, Reeves might just as well have said ‘Mornington Crescent’.

City stronghold

How intriguing that four days after the Chancellor’s return from Beijing last month, the Metropolitan Police and Tower Hamlets council withdrew objections to the Chinese government’s plans for a new ‘super-embassy’ at Royal Mint Court, the compound opposite the Tower of London where the coinage used to be struck. Having bought the five-acre estate for £225 million in 2018, Chinese officials had been thwarted by police concerns about protest crowds causing safety risks and traffic chaos.

Now the scheme looks set to go ahead, ambassador Zheng Zeguang can measure for curtains in the C-suite offices (‘stately, not to say presidential’, I called them after visiting a previous tenant) of the mint’s Georgian central building. Beijing’s party bosses can congratulate themselves on having seized a commanding City site whose name connotes economic power – more imposing by far than the Americans’ Nine Elms blockhouse. Meanwhile we wait to hear of all the export opportunities the Chancellor nailed in return for facilitating what one China-watching lobby group has called the planning authorities’ ‘bizarre volte-face’.

Elder statesman

The Microsoft founder Bill Gates was notably not seen alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk at President Trump’s inauguration. Gates did recently declare himself ‘frankly impressed’ with Trump’s interest in healthcare issues after a private dinner at Mar-a-Lago, but perhaps he had low expectations. And as Big Tech’s elder statesman, now largely focused on philanthropy, he evidently didn’t feel a need to appear in that ‘tech bro’ Washington line-up.

The mature Gates persona will be reinforced this week with the publication of Source Code, his memoir of childhood in Seattle and the shared obsession with computers that drove him and his school pal Paul Allen to launch the software revolution that was Microsoft. The book is a self-critical and therapeutic exercise for Gates, who was a difficult kid – probably on the autism spectrum, as he acknowledges – but a lucky one, with hugely supportive parents and teachers. Presiding over a foundation that has spent more than $50 billion fighting disease and poverty, he has earned a niche in the pantheon that far outranks a seat at the Capitol.

I only wish he’d pop back into the office and sort out Microsoft’s Outlook email system, the latest version of which is so much clunkier and more accident-prone than its predecessor: anyone else being driven mad by it, or is it just me?

Times and customs

Last week, my late father’s big birthday. This week, my own relatively big one – and a dip in the archives to see what was happening in Britain during the time it took a nervous young doctor to bring me into the world in an East Riding maternity home. Some things, it seems, have barely changed. On that day in 1955, ‘farmers were angry’, one report began, at the low prices of imported food and the inadequacy of agricultural subsidies. The Spectator, noting that railwaymen had just won a 15 per cent wage rise, thundered: ‘All pretence that the railways are a commercial enterprise is now to be abandoned.’ But guess what: as ever, the railways’ ruling body, then called the Transport Commission, was about to publish a 15-year plan for modernisation.

Rather less like today, the Press Council, our voluntary regulator in that era, obsequiously welcomed a statement from the Queen’s press secretary that royal household staff were expected ‘not to make their experiences the subject of books and articles’. And here’s a charming suggestion from the Times letter column to help those who struggled to remember others’ names: ‘Could we not adopt in this country the excellent American custom of announcing our own names upon introduction?’ O tempora, o mores: in London’s clubland, we still don’t do that.