I want an old-fashioned shop with an old-fashioned sign — and a ban on newfangled billionaires (Oct. 20)
I wonder. Has anything ever been improved by having way too much money thrown at it? HS2, for example. Will it be dramatically better than what we have now? I suspect it probably won't. Then there's football. In the olden days, when Blackburn's Billy Harbuckle pulled on a stout pair of boots, sparked up a Woodbine and ran about in a quagmire, before adjourning to the pub with his fans, the game was played for fun. But along came Captain Cash, and now the only fun to be had is watching teams with too much of it fail.
In Formula One motor racing Mercedes has just won its sixth successive constructor's championship and the reason you don't know that is simple: money has made the sport unwatchable. And horsists can shut up, because what you do on a wet Tuesday at Lingfield isn't any better.
In the world of commerce, though, things are especially bad because, so far as I can see, absolutely everyone who starts a business these days is only thinking of one thing: when can I sell it? No one wants to provide a decent living for themselves and their family. They don't want to make 50 quid. They want to make £50bn and then move to Monaco with some bikinied-up boat meat.
When my mum started making tea cosies and draught excluders in the spare room, she didn't think: "Right. I shall sell four and then I shall sell the enterprise to a furniture conglomerate for millions." She just wanted enough money to buy my sister and me some new shoes.
It was the same story with me. In the mid-1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was extolling us all to go it alone, a friend and I started a business, selling road tests to local newspapers. The idea was that we'd have enough at the end of the week to buy some beer. Not a whole brewery.
Today it works very differently. You have an idea for a vegan drinks additive or an app that provides directions to that day's nearest eco-protest, and you then borrow a huge amount of money from someone whose job is to lend huge amounts of money to people like you.
One in a million of these businesses will succeed, and in order to turn the large fortune that results into an even larger fortune, the man who created it will pay people to lend his money to people who have a new idea for a clockwork dog.
This is what's become of capitalism, and if you do the maths, you will very quickly work out that one day, one man — or one woman — will own every single business in the world. And then it isn't capitalism any more. I don't even know what it is, because not even the Catholic Church managed to pull off such a feat.
Shows such as
The Apprentice give us a graphic demonstration of all this.
Gelled-up wide boys and pouting
Love Island cast-offs giving 10% more than is mathematically possible so that they, one day, can be like that Thomas Cook boss who trousered a couple of million as the business failed. He's their pin-up and it makes me feel sick.
There's talk that, after Brexit, Britain will become a low-tax haven for commerce — like Singapore — and we all nod as if we know what that means. But I reckon that we should have a reboot and go the other way, back to the days when you started a small business because you wanted enough to live on and fancied being your own boss.
I'm reminded at this point of a conversation AA Gill had with a bouncily keen young Thatcherite MP who was squeaking away about how everyone needed to invest the money they'd made from gas shares into an entrepreneur's wet dream.
Adrian piped up to say that he started a business shortly after leaving school. The MP beamed and bounced some more. "Good man," he said. Adrian went on to explain that he worked long hours, late into the night, until eventually the Tory boy asked excitedly: "And what was it you did?" "I was a drug dealer," he replied.
I read today about these so-called county line gangs that deliver spliff and charlie and horse around the shires. These are often run by young kids who, having been excluded from school, face a life on the dole, but instead they've helped create a £500m-a-year industry supplying drugs to middle-aged people who have no theatres and no cinemas to take their minds off the fact that, once again, there's nothing on television that night apart from a documentary on transgenderism.
I'm not advocating the use of drugs or the use of slavery to sell them. I am merely pointing out that large numbers of people in the provinces like to get high and someone has worked up a business plan to sate that demand.
I'm about to do pretty much the same sort of thing. Not drugs, obviously. Or slavery. Well, not much. I'm going to start a small shop. I do not need to borrow a penny to get it going, but, according to the business plan, it should generate about £20,000 in the first year and maybe treble that in the second. I have no intention of selling it, ever, because I want to pass it on to my children.
That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, knowing that one day, when I'm JR Hartley, I'll go outside with some Humbrol and paint some words on the sign outside my business premises that you rarely see any more: "and son". (Or "and daughter". I'm not bothered either way.)
If more of us did this — started a business for the long term — then the spectre of Jeremy Corbyn with his anticommerce and anti-inheritance policies would be far less scary.
But as things stand, practically the only people who will not be voting for him next time round are the hooded entrepreneurs who turn up on your doorstep with a bag of ecstasy on a Friday night.
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Note: This small article ran in the same issue of the paper.
And on that bombshell: Clarkson sets up shop
By Nick Rufford
To Britain's legion of small shopkeepers, a familiar name will soon be added: Clarkson and Son.
The motoring presenter is to open a shop on his 1,000-acre farm in Oxfordshire, selling vegetables from his kitchen garden, honey from his hives and beer from his barley — licence permitting.
It will stock "anything I grow on the farm", said Clarkson, who may take turns behind the counter. "Bread from my wheat; vegetable oil.
"There are partridge and pheasant, and we could sell them. But that would require hosting a shoot day and hitting something, which I'm not very good at."
Clarkson never thought of himself as a shopkeeper, but says he has little choice. He bought seed he could not plant because of wet weather and diesel for machinery that has sat idle. Delays in planting 100 acres of winter barley have cost £18,000, while Brexit has put at risk his EU subsidies, erasing his profits.
"I'm so much in debt now you cannot believe. If you went on
Dragons' Den and said, 'I've got this idea for a business. I'm going to spank a load of money upfront and I don't know if I'm going to be able to sell my products. I don't even know if I'll get any products. And I don't know what the price will be', they'd just say: 'Don't be stupid.'" The shop could throw his farm a lifeline...
He says his "tiny" shop is no threat to a nearby store, "which is the life and soul of the village", and promises not to sell similar goods.
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Galloping good fun — when it's working: The Clarkson Review: Porsche 718 Cayman (Oct. 20)
How did we cope in the olden days when cars broke down all the time? Did we really walk to a phone box and stand up to our knees in a tramp's urine, desperately trying to push a 2p coin into the vandalised slot so we could summon help from someone on a work-to-rule?
And did we then call the person we were going to visit, to explain that we wouldn't be there because we were on the A38 and we were going to be sitting in the rain for the next two hours and then making merry with the driver of the tow lorry, who would take us to his workshop and explain that he'd need a new £200 part to get the car going again, but that it wouldn't be available for a month as the workers at the factory where it was made were on strike? I guess we did all those things, and we accepted it. We knew when we set off in our dismal Austin 1100 that, even though there were only six moving parts, one would definitely go wrong every two or three months. And that we'd be walking through the rain again.And spending some time later in the breakdown lorry with a man who might or might not be a murderer.
I guess we still have unreliability in our lives. Phones. Trains.
Holiday companies. And my laptop is capable of spectacular strops from time to time, but cars have become phenomenally bulletproof.
I drove a Toyota pick-up to the North Pole once, and long after the savage cold had laid waste to my camera, my phone and everything with an electrical circuit in it, the pick-up, and all its 15,000 parts, worked so perfectly that I began to suspect witchcraft.
Even brands with a poor reputation for reliability are now fine. My old Range Rover has a few aches and pains these days — the steering is getting very heavy — but that's because the old girl's getting on a bit. The new one, though: it bounces through fields all day long with a back seat full of drunk men in tweed shorts. It takes noisy kids on day-long thrashes through France. It does stop-start traffic in London and it never goes wrong at all. It hasn't even been stolen yet.
There was a time when the hard shoulder on a motorway was a place to park cars that had been hurriedly thrown together by communists. But now people don't even really get punctures any more.
Last week, however, the car I was testing came over all 1971 and did actually break down. It was a proper, old-fashioned, steam-and-noises breakdown, too, which surprised me enormously.And what surprised me even more was that the car in question was a Porsche — a 718 Cayman GT4.
Porsches do not break down.
Ever. A Porsche makes a Swiss watch look sloppy and haphazard. If you explained to a Porsche engineer that Japanese train drivers are punished if they arrive in the station more than seven seconds late, he would be staggered by the leniency.
And yet there I was, coming home from a short Sunday morning test drive, when I was told via a message on the dashboard that the coolant was so low, I needed to stop driving immediately. It didn't say "Achtung", and there was no imagery of a soldier in a greatcoat with a Schmeisser submachinegun, but the tone was similar. So even though it wasn't my car, I did as I was told.
There was a lot of gurgling and plenty of steam as well — so much, in fact, that a chap staying on a caravan site across the road came over to see if he could be of assistance. Though when I say "to see if he could be of assistance", what I mean is: he came over "for a bloody good laugh".
Having bitten off the inside of his cheeks trying not to openly cackle at the man from the telly with his steaming yellow Porsche, he went off to fetch some water while I attempted to find the engine. It wasn't in the front and it wasn't in the back. There are boots at either end. Big ones, too. But that was it.
Happily, because it is the 21st century, I didn't have to walk to a phone box, and because I live close to a former prime minister, the 4G signal is excellent, so I googled the issue and discovered that the car's engine is locked away in an impregnable metal box. When MG did the same thing on the MGF it was idiotic, but I guess Porsche didn't see a problem, as it knew it would never need attention.
However, it turned out that what appeared to be suspension turrets are the filler nozzles for topping up the water and oil. So when my new best friend came back from the caravan site's lavatory block with a watering can, we were able to effect a repair.
Except we didn't. The water was now cascading from the bottom of the car. But as I was only a couple of miles from home, I thought I'd make it before it all came out again. Wrong. Because a hundred yards later, the electronic sentry flashed up a new message. "Achtung!" it said. "For you, Tommy, ze drive is over."
This time, there was an alternator fault, and the advice was to park in a safe place as soon as possible. I had a quick think and reckoned that the nearest really safe place was outside my house, so I got there as soon as possible and later that afternoon the car was hoisted onto a tow vehicle and taken away to be punished for its insubordination.
The next day, Porsche called to say the water pump had gone wonky and dumped coolant all over the alternator. Plainly, Porsche finds the modern, and possibly left-wing, system of using water, as opposed to air, to cool an engine a bit complicated.
Pity, because just before it came over all British Leyland, I'd decided the 718 Cayman GT4 was a very good car. I've always thought that the Boxster and the Cayman were bought exclusively by people who could not afford a 911, and that view didn't change when the 718 came along. Buy one, and all you're doing is saying that you haven't achieved your life goals.
In recent years, though, the 911 has got a bit ahead of itself. It's still fabulous,if you like that sort of thing, but it no longer feels like the sports car it's supposed to be. It feels a bit unnecessary.
And that's where the 718 comes in, especially if you go for the GT4, because that doesn't feel unnecessary at all. This is a real, genuine, 100%, undiluted sporting thoroughbred. It's what the 911 is supposed to be.
It's not fast enough to be scary. It's got bundles of grip from its noisy tyres. The seats are spectacular. The driving position is perfect. It's practical and small, and before I get to a conclusion that Porsche would like, I've decided to break down. Steam. Hiss. Gurgle, gurgle.
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And here's
The Sun column: "
Just leave Greta Thunberg’s Extinction Rebellion groupies glued to the railings to cause a real stink"