Boris Johnson's Blog, page 7

There are times when we have to dig deep to finance the future

I need to invest in something new, efficient, reliable, green, clean – something modern. The question is how much is it going to cost, and the answer is …What?! You cannot be serious. And that is exactly the dilemma we face in Britain today, as we consider the needs of the fastest-growing economy in Europe.

Take London, now responsible for almost 25 per cent of UK GDP. The population is about to reach an all-time high of 8.6 million, and is projected to hit 10 million by 2030. You may ask: is that a good thing? Is growth in itself a good thing? What if it just means more frenzy and more traffic, more people being fed abjectly into the maw of an overcrowded public transport system?

Surely we should care not just about national GDP – though obviously that is a matter of growing pride – but about quality of life: how much time we have at the end of the day, how much time to play with the kids, to read, to think, to relax, to be proper human beings.

In the weeks before Christmas we had more people on the Tube than ever before – more than 5.7 million a day; indeed we have more people using virtually every mode of transport. And as the crowding increases across the country, people are finding their journeys are getting longer and longer; their mornings earlier, their evenings later; and they have less and less time for themselves.

Of course, we could just muddle on: we could rely on the upgrades of the old Victorian Tube, and the introduction of Crossrail – itself a scheme that is now 40 years old. Or else we could see the sense of what my friend the plumber says: that sometimes you need to go for the next big investment.

Look at the pressure on the suburban rail network – especially the lines coming into Waterloo from the south-west of London. Look at the pressure on the Tube. Consider that Crossrail is going to be full as soon as it opens in 2018. It is time for Crossrail 2 – what they used to call the Hackney-Chelsea line.

With the support of the Treasury, we are launching plans for a new 13-mile tunnel under the middle of London – south-west to north-east – as the heart of a new railway. Crossrail 2 would deliver more than £2 in benefit to the UK for every £1 it cost; it would enable us to build about 200,000 homes on largely derelict land in the north-east.

It would create vast economic activity and tax revenues that would be exported from London to the rest of the country. It would shorten journeys and improve the lives of millions.

Of course it will be expensive – £27 billion in today’s prices – and we must acknowledge the strong feeling in the rest of the country that London has had it pretty good lately. That is why it is crucial to stress that we in the capital fully accept that the city should shoulder the majority of the burden of funding the scheme.

How? By developing the payment models we are already using to fund Crossrail (which will be a third supported by London business) and the Northern Line Extension, which is being fully paid for by the future tax yields from the developments the two new stations will make possible in the Battersea area.

We need the same approach to Crossrail 2 – and that means giving London a share of the increase in stamp duty generated by the city, and allowing that money to be allocated to Crossrail 2.

Think of the stamp duty on the 200,000 homes the scheme would unlock: that sum alone would be a significant contribution towards the total bill. This does not mean less money for the rest of the UK: the new railway brings higher growth and therefore additional potential for investment all round. And what is right for London is right for all the other core cities of the UK, the motors of our economy.

It is time for British cities to grow up, to be given more responsibilities for the taxes they yield – and to plan and build the infrastructure they need. We can patch up our roads and our rail; we can make do and mend – but unless we unlock local financing of long-term infrastructure, the system will one day seize up like a poor old put-upon boiler.

Boris Johnson: Christmas revellers with minor injuries should get a taxi to hospital

Some ambulances were held up waiting to offload sick patients at busy Accident & Emergency units in hospitals.

At the same time, members of the public were increasingly dialling 999 for help rather than waiting to see their family doctor or travelling to A&E under their own steam.

Mr Johnson said: “The London Ambulance Service is doing an incredible job responding to Londoners at an increasingly busy time of year.

“That demand puts huge pressure on the men and women in the front line, emergency service operators, paramedics, ambulance technicians, police officers, firefighters and staff on our public transport network.

“Over the festive period and across the winter I know the public will heed the emergency services calls for restraint when it comes to calling an ambulance.”

Mr Johnson's comments come after a memo drawn up by the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives proposed limited increases for waiting times for some serious ambulance call outs.

The proposals to deal with growing pressure on services were then leaked to a newspaper, leading to accusations that the time taken by ambulances to reach critically ill patients would double.

According to the new proposals, NHS England had agreed in principle to relax target times with a proportion of "serious but not life threatening" Red 2 incidents, which include strokes and seizures, increase from eightminutes to 19 minutes.

The only higher category is Red 1 - "immediately life-threatening" incidents such as cardiac arrest, choking and major bleeding and target for these remain unchanged.

Some doctors have warned it is that it can be very hard to tell if a situation is immediately life threatening or not over the phone when people call the emergency services.

The Interview and North Korea: what happened to America’s true grit?

The BBC is about to use a short story about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher – one of the most venerated leaders of post-war British history – as its Book at Bedtime. Since the first cheeps of human creativity, the idea of killing the king has been an indispensable staple of drama – and in this case the thing is obviously not intended seriously.

It’s a spoof; it’s a joke; it’s a piece of hyperbolical satire. But never mind – true to form, the North Koreans have a total sense of humour failure. The next thing is they decide to launch a frenzied cyber attack on Sony Pictures – and I have to tell you, the results are side-splittingly funny. They expose the salaries of the top stars, and the sexist pay gap between the men and even the most talented female performers.

They publish loads of embarrassing emails, including the intervention by the Japanese head of Sony, who wonders whether the final shot of Kim’s exploding head contains a shade too much brain-splatter. They cause such mayhem with their hack attacks that in the end Sony Pictures decides pathetically and cravenly that they are actually going to pull the movie! Can you believe it?

The whole shebang is scrapped; Sony is refusing to release The Interview to the cinemas. It is meant to be the Christmas blockbuster – and now the pantywaist Hollywood moneymen have kowtowed to the North Koreans.

In the bit I have just been watching, the President of the United States has been forced to give a press conference, in which he says: “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the US.” I must say that there has been a certain amount of giggling in my section of the audience – because that is exactly what is happening, isn’t it? The North Koreans have only one objective in this enterprise: to protect the “dignity of the supreme leader” by suppressing this insulting American movie; and as far as we can see, they are succeeding.

As the head of Sony Pictures has plaintively observed, there is still not a single American chain that is willing to screen The Interview. No one wants to take the risk; no one wants to suffer the unspecified wrath of Pyongyang. They are frightened, frit.

Now the house lights are up, and we are all scratching our heads and feeling like Jaws has ended with the shark eating Quint. It’s like an unavenged Pearl Harbor. It’s Team North Korea 1, Team America 0.

My friends, there is only one way to take this narrative forward, and that is as follows. We meet the underpaid and idealistic Jennifer Lawrence, who has a lowly job reading scripts for Sony pictures, and whose father was an MIA fighter ace tortured by the North Koreans. She smuggles a print of The Interview in her handbag to a scuzzy old arthouse cinema, run by an eccentric Englishman (Michael Caine? Benedict Cumberbatch?).

She begs him to screen it. With tears in his eyes, he declines; he can’t afford the insurance; the authorities will close him down. She pawns her mother’s rings. They screen it together – and it is an unbelievable hit. There are queues around the block, whole families retching with laughter as they watch the bathetic North Koreans get their comeuppance.

Soon the shame-faced bureaucrats of Hollywood can see where they have gone wrong. They put the film on general release — and the US government decides to do the only honourable thing. It recognises that it is the duty of the state to fight cyber-terror, not to surrender to it, so it agrees to underwrite the insurance costs of every cinema that screens the film.

As our story comes to its triumphant climax, we go to a montage sequence with a swelling orchestral score. We see Barack and Michelle watching it in the White House screening room, with tears of joy running down their cheeks. We see audiences roiling with pleasure in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing – and yes, in the final shot we go to a darkened room in Pyongyang where Kim Jong-un is watching it himself.

His lip twitches. He can’t help it. He smiles, he chortles, he belly laughs – and cut! Roll the credits. Isn’t that fantabulous?

Come on Sony; come on America. It’s time for everyone to come to their senses, get a grip, have some guts, rediscover the spirit of John Wayne, and give us the Hollywood ending that free speech demands.

Happy Christmas!

Boris Johnson: do those concerned about immigration want ‘forced sterilisation or one-baby policy?’

He said that it was inevitable that immigrants were attracted to London at a time when the economy was growing.

Saying that Russia had a stable population, he went on: "And Russia is a chaotic and nasty place to be."

The Mayor said he did not support uncontrolled immigration, adding: “A state should be able to control its frontiers, I am perfectly prepared to accept that we need proper controls at our borders, and we haven’t had those controls."

But, he asked: "How would people feel if the population pressure was caused entirely by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant babies?"

Asking if those who favoured population controls would want "forced sterilisation or a one baby policy" - a reference to the practice China used to limit its population - he went on: “I just think there’s a lack of clarity.”

Mr Johnson’s words are in stark contrast to those of the leaders of the main political parties, who have escalated their rhetoric in recent months in response to the electoral threat of the anti-immigration UK Independence Party.

In a major speech on the issue two weeks ago, David Cameron set out plans to reduce access to benefits to immigrants in a bid to reduce the level of migration to the UK.

He promised to negotiate a new settlement with the EU to stop a flood of migrants arriving to take advantage of Britain’s economic success, saying: “Here is an issue which matters to the British people, and to our future in the European Union.

The Mayor also appeared to contradict an article he wrote in The Telegraph just two months ago, in which he suggested that levels of European immigration might need to be capped and urged those concerned about migration to vote Conservative rather than Ukip.

In another sign of division between Mr Johnson, who is hoping to return to Parliament at the forthcoming General Election, and his party leader, the Mayor added that he hoped the Government would ultimately make the “right choice” and back his plan for an airport in the Thames Estuary dubbed “Boris Island.”

He said the expansion of Heathrow had been ruled out, and Gatwick would also prove unsatisfactory, adding: “In the end, having exhausted the alternatives, I do think we will do the right thing and have that airport.”

Don’t murder the Cereal Killers – we need people just like them

So let’s imagine that you have the privilege of being their editor. You are the boss of Pliny the Younger and Tacitus, the two thrusting hounds of the newsroom. And then let’s imagine it’s a slow news day, and the pair of them are prowling around – looking hungrily through the plate glass of your corner office, wondering whether you will send them on a story. Then something comes in. It’s about some new café in Shoreditch, in East London, called Cereal Killer – a place where they seem to be selling any kind of cereal you want, 120 varieties and 13 types of milk. Hmm, you say to yourself, as both Tacitus and Pliny leer through the glass, trying to catch your eye. Which shall you send on this one?

Now, Pliny the Younger (you think to yourself): he is definitely a glass-half-full kind of guy. He is gossipy, lively, and he has done some terrific eyewitness stuff, most notably his sensational scoop about the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii. He can definitely do the human interest piece, and he can do it with compassion and humour – and above all he will do it pretty straight. This is a man who has already composed an almost emetically enthusiastic panegyric in honour of the Emperor Trajan. When the sun comes up in the morning, Pliny the Younger basically believes that Jove is in his heaven and all is right with the Roman world. Yup – whatever is going on with this Shoreditch café, Pliny can be counted on to be fairly positive.

Then you see his rival scowling at you sardonically, daring you to give him the job. Tacitus is a completely different kettle of fish. Cornelius Tacitus prides himself on being able to see through everything. He thinks that almost everyone in government is weak, hopeless and vacillating – or else they are debauched, murderous and corrupt. Sometimes they are all of these things at once. He makes fun of the poor deluded British subjects for deciding to imitate Roman dinner parties – without realising that it is really part of their slavery. Where Pliny the Younger takes an upbeat view of the empire, Tacitus puts some famously withering words into the mouth of the rebel Calgacus – they make a desert, and call it peace! Tacitus is cynical, mordant. He is definitely a glass-half-empty sort of reporter.

You look at the story again, and you see it is going to be all in the telling. Pliny would probably make it into a light but heart-warming tailpiece for the news. Tacitus would almost certainly go for the jugular, and find some way of attacking not just the café but the entire dietary habits of the people of Tower Hamlets, perhaps for failing to eat enough vegetables. (“They make a dessert and call it peas!”)

Who gets the story? The equable Pliny or the vicious Tacitus? I think the answer depends on whether you are in Britain or America. A distinguished Roman historian told me the other day that she had taught both Pliny and Tacitus in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. She was fascinated to discover that the students had exactly the opposite preferences. The British students loved Tacitus, and thought Pliny was on the whole less exciting. The American students were very keen on Pliny, and rather appalled by Tacitus.

At the risk of vast generalisation, that tells us something about continuing differences in attitude and temperament between the two countries. The Americans like stuff that is broadly positive; the British love to be cynical. Of course, there is scope for both. It would be a sad day if we British stopped being cynical, but you sometimes wonder whether we overdo it.

As it happened, Channel Four indeed sent a reporter to cover the story of the Cereal Killer Café in Shoreditch – and he generally monstered the poor entrepreneurs. He was scathing about charging £2.50 minimum for a bowl of cereal; he mocked the proprietors – a gentle pair of bearded hipsters – for their pretensions to gentrify the area, and suggested that local people would not be able to eat there. He put the boot in, and I am not at all sure he was right to do so.

We should be hailing anyone who starts a business in this country; we should acclaim them for overcoming all the obstacles that government puts in their path – the rates, the employment law, the health and safety. It is a great thing to want to open a place of work in one of the poorest boroughs in Britain. We don’t need taxpayer-funded journalists endlessly bashing the wealth-creators of this country, and sometimes we need to be a little less cynical and a bit more encouraging.

Tacitean scorn is all very well; but there are times when we should be boosting our enterprise culture. When someone has come up with a wacky business proposition that will create jobs and bring in tax revenue and boost the neighbourhood – send Pliny to cover it.

Boris Johnson: Nigel Farage’s decision to blame M4 traffic on immigration is like ‘effluent’ and ‘sewage’

"Yeah, I heard this. Xenophobia is like sewage, it’s a natural concomitant of the human condition," Mr Johnson said.

"We’ve got to manage it, we’ve got to dispose of it. It’s like effluent, it’s something that human beings naturally produce."

Pushed on the comments by the show's host Nick Ferrari, Mr Johnson said that immigration had been "massively" beneficial for London and the country but xenophobia reflected a wider fear of Otherness.

"It’s part of the way human beings are. I think there’s a natural sort of tendency to be alarmed about the Other, the alien," he said.

"My view about the whole immigration is very, very clear. London has benefited massively from immigration; the country benefits massively from immigration, but people need to be British.

"They need to speak English, they need to be loyal to this culture, to this country, to our institutions, to our society, to the Queen, to the rule of law – all the things that make us British – a sense of humour, and not freaking out about traffic jams on the motorway."

Mr Farage said over the weekend he was unable to attend a reception for 100 party supporters to meet the leader at Ukip’s first conference in Wales because of traffic on the M4.

Speaking to the BBC's Sunday Politics Wales, Mr Farage said: "It took me six hours and 15 minutes to get here – it should have taken three-and-a-half to four.

"That is nothing to do with professionalism, what it does have to do with is a population that is going through the roof chiefly because of open-door immigration and the fact that the M4 is not as navigable as it used to be."

Sending Putin the Elgin Marbles is barmy, but it’s what makes Britain great

Well, perhaps we are; and we must all hope that there is a sensible solution in the Ukraine. But how exactly does it constitute “putting pressure” on Putin to send him a masterpiece of Phidian sculpture? The British Museum is one of the very greatest in the world (if not the greatest, as I am sure its director, Neil MacGregor, would attest). The Duveen Galleries are the holy of holies, the innermost shrine of that cultural temple; and the river god Ilissus is one of the most fluid and extraordinary pieces of 5th-century Athenian sculpture.

Why send it abroad now? Why to Russia? Why Putin? The French have just decided not to send the Russians the warships they have built for them; and here we are, despatching a portion of the Elgin Marbles. It is hard, on the face of it, to see why there should be one rule for oil and gas companies, which are private businesses, and one for a museum that receives – rightly – substantial support from the taxpayer. If you were Putin, you might feel that this was a decidedly friendly gesture from the British Government – a calculated thawing in relations, an olive branch.

And there, I think, Putin would be completely wrong. I don’t believe for a minute that the Government plotted to send Ilissus to Russia. This is not an act of state; this is not some serpentine piece of British diplomacy, a surreptitious little bit of détente. This is what it looks like – a moderate shambles, in which the trustees of a national museum have taken a decision, at the urging of their flamboyant and enterprising director, which simply does not cohere with British foreign policy. And the decision, therefore, is all the more glorious – and all the more correct.

The idea of sending a piece of the Elgin Marbles to the Hermitage did not need to be cleared by government. The British Museum did not obtain prior government approval – and in that simple fact you have the difference between Britain and so many other countries on earth, and especially Russia. This is not a tyranny. We do not have power located in one place. We have and we protect an idea of cultural, artistic and intellectual freedom – and that is of immense economic value to this country.

We have more live-music venues in London than any other city on earth; we have twice as many theatres as Paris, and we will soon produce more TV and feature films than New York or even Los Angeles. One of the reasons for that global success is that politicians, by and large, do not interfere – except to encourage.

Can you imagine any other country where a national museum could take such a politically charged decision, without government knowledge and acquiescence? Greece? France? Russia? Don’t make me laugh. That is why good old George Clooney is so wrong in his plan to restore the marbles to the “Pantheon”, as he puts it (I think even M Vipsanius Agrippa would have had some trouble with that project, since the Pantheon is the wrong temple, in the wrong city, with the wrong architectural order).

That is why it is entirely fitting that the owl of Pallas should still haunt the squares of Bloomsbury. It is the British Museum’s freedom to loan Ilissus to Russia – even in this wretched period – that shows exactly why the Elgin Marbles belong and shall remain in London.

Indonesia adores the Brits, so why aren’t we trading there?

We saw dozens of kids wearing Premier League football sweaters: Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and so on. As I left the presidential palace a young chap came up to me and said: “I love your Royal family. God save the Queen!” They love the Beatles, sure; but they also love Coldplay and Adele, and modern British pop music is heard endlessly in their vast new shopping malls.

According to a recent survey of Indonesians, 69 per cent have positive feelings about the UK – interesting, when it is not at all obvious that 69 per cent of British people have positive feelings about Britain. Why do they like us? Search me, frankly. It may be that we are seen as a) not American and b) not Australian and c) the possessors of a pretty cool and groovy creative national brand.

At any rate, it is something good to build on. After all, Indonesia is a colossal market, and it’s going to be bigger. It is the powerhouse of the Asean countries, accounting for 40 per cent of the bloc’s economic might. The archipelago is vast – it stretches the same distance as London to Tehran. Indonesia has 242 million inhabitants, and will reach 280 million in the next 15 years, and economic growth has been ticking along at 6 per cent a year. According to the IMF, Indonesia will be the world’s fifth biggest economy by the year 2030. These are the consumers of the future – and they love British brands.

So you would expect British companies to be piling into the place, wouldn’t you? Which is why it is so disappointing to find that Indonesia is only the 46th biggest export market for British companies, and to find that Indonesian investment in Britain is minimal.

Yes, there are some heroic British firms that are out here – and going great guns. The malls are full of British retailers such as Marks & Spencer and Debenhams, and British oil companies, banks and insurers are also doing well.

But the country has a colossal need for new infrastructure, so you would have thought there was more of a market for British engineers and construction firms, for designers and consultants. One would have thought Indonesians would want more and more British luxury goods – from Range Rovers to Jermyn Street suitings.

What is holding us back? People have offered various suggestions. There is the perennial issue of bureaucracy and corruption. I talked to one British dynamo who imported hundreds of tons of potatoes all the way from Scotland – they have an increasing taste for chips – and he explained how the Indonesian phytosanitary inspectors had insisted on being flown all the way to Britain for two weeks, and hadn’t gone anywhere near the potato farm.

Well, if there is a problem with venal officials, then that is exactly the kind of problem that the Jokowi government is pledged to sort out. There is the complaint about lack of direct flights from London – and that will only be really resolved when we do what all the capitals in this region are doing, and build an airport that can cope with the needs of British business. There are complaints about the difficulty Indonesians have in getting visas to visit and study in Britain – and that certainly needs to be addressed.

But the final explanation I have been offered for these modest trade flows is the most disheartening – and one that I frankly refuse to accept. There are some who say that UK business just doesn’t have the same persistence as our rivals in Germany or America; that we have lost the buccaneering Stamford Raffles world view of our Victorian ancestors; that we are not prepared to take the long-term approach.

Can that be so? It is time to recognise that the world is mysteriously full of people who love all things British. We should help them buy British, too.

Give Ed Miliband a Darwin Award for his Emily Thornberry decision

A furious twitstorm blew up, as it does so often these days – like some summer squall in the Mediterranean: quick to rise, quick to die. Some people denounced her, some defended her. And yet still Emily might have survived; she might today be luxuriating in her position as shadow attorney general; she might never have been chased down her street by photographers; the name Emily Thornberry would still be relatively unknown, and not – as it is today - on the lips of every newspaper columnist, every broadcaster and everyone in the entire country who drives a white van or flies the England flag.

But then Ed Miliband stepped in. He ingeniously doused himself with petrol; he lit the match – and ka-boom: there he is, with staring panda eyes and frazzled hair, and the entire Labour Party looking on in amazement at the destruction. He fired Emily; indeed he is said to have lost his cool altogether and actually shouted at the woman.

This tells us several important things about his leadership, and about the Labour Party under Miliband. The first is that he is prone to panic under pressure – and that is in itself a reason why he should not be prime minister. The second is that he clearly can’t think straight. By sacking Emily Thornberry so violently, he has emphatically and publicly endorsed the real meaning of her tweet.

Rachel Reeves and other ministers have been lining up to support this interpretation – that Thornberry was being snooty about that home in Rochester, and of course they are right. She was indeed being snobbish and condescending. She was showing her Twitter followers that house in order to belittle it and make fun of it.

When Emily Thornberry looks at a white van, she ought to see the people who make this economy go, the grafters and the entrepreneurs who comprise a huge proportion of the GDP of the South East. These are the people any government should want to help and support – by cutting their taxes, for instance, or helping them with a diesel scrappage scheme so that they can buy less polluting vehicles.

If you own a white van, you have worked to buy a vital asset; you are more likely to be helping others into employment; and yet Thornberry looks at a white van and sees only an enemy – a cultural enemy.

She doesn’t care much about small businesses and their problems, and in her experience too many white van men have unacceptably Right-wing views. And what does she see in those England flags? She should see an innocent symbol of patriotism, and love of our country – its language and history and institutions, its Royal family and its countryside, pubs, Shakespeare, football, fish and chips, you name it.

But that is not what Emily sees. She sees the dreaded flag of pot-bellied, immigrant-bashing lager louts. She sees the kind of flag that Labour councils have tried in the past to ban from public buildings; she sees a symbol of deplorable nationalism and jingo.

As for the house itself – what does Emily see? She should see a tribute to the efforts of the homeowner, someone who has worked not just to own the place but also to ensure that its architectural features somehow reflect his or her personality. Of course she sees no such thing – only a reminder of the achievement of her bête noire, Mrs Thatcher, who mobilised people to buy their own home.

Mrs Thornberry’s tweet was superbly eloquent of everything that is wrong with the modern Labour Party – a party that is all too obviously full of middle-class lawyers like her, who secretly disdain hard‑working, George Cross-waving white van men. But she might have got away with it; she might have been able to fudge it and keep her head down until the twitstorm passed, and then claim that it had all been grievously misunderstood.

Well done Ed, for so brutally confirming the truth about what Labour really thinks. Give that man a Darwin Award.

Dr Matt Taylor’s shirt made me cry, too – with rage at his abusers

It may be that we can learn some more about the role of comets in transporting ice, and therefore water, through the heavens – and there are some who have speculated that we have comets to thank for the existence of the oceans on our planet.

At this very moment the scientists will be beginning to process the data – to understand more about the elements, the minerals, the isotopes, the molecules. There may be clues about our past and pointers to our future.

This mission is a colossal achievement. Millions of us have been watching Philae’s heart-stopping journey. Everyone in this country should be proud of Dr Taylor and his colleagues, and he has every right to let his feelings show.

Except, of course, that he wasn’t crying with relief. He wasn’t weeping with sheer excitement at this interstellar rendezvous. I am afraid he was crying because he felt he had sinned. He was overcome with guilt and shame for wearing what some people decided was an “inappropriate” shirt on television. “I have made a big mistake,” he said brokenly. “I have offended people and I am sorry about this.”

I watched that clip of Dr Taylor’s apology – at the moment of his supreme professional triumph – and I felt the red mist come down. It was like something from the show trials of Stalin, or from the sobbing testimony of the enemies of Kim Il-sung, before they were taken away and shot. It was like a scene from Mao’s cultural revolution when weeping intellectuals were forced to confess their crimes against the people.

Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.

And so I want, naturally, to defend this blameless man. And as for all those who have monstered him and convicted him in the kangaroo court of the web – they should all be ashamed of themselves.

Yes, I suppose some might say that his Hawaii shirt was a bit garish, a bit of an eyeful. But the man is not a priest, for heaven’s sake. He is a space scientist with a fine collection of tattoos, and if you are an extrovert space scientist, that is the kind of shirt that you are allowed to wear.

As for the design of the garment, I have studied it as closely as the photos will allow, and I can’t see what all the fuss is about. I suppose there are women with long flowing hair and a certain amount of décolletage. But let’s not mince our words: there are no nipples; there are no buttocks; there is not even an exposed midriff, as far as I can see.

It’s the hypocrisy of it all that irritates me. Here is Kim Kardashian – a heroine and idol to some members of my family – deciding to bust out all over the place, and good for her. No one seeks to engulf her in a tweetstorm of rage. But why is she held to be noble and pure, while Dr Taylor is attacked for being vulgar and tasteless?

I think his critics should go to the National Gallery and look at the Rokeby Venus by Velázquez. Or look at the stuff by Rubens. Are we saying that these glorious images should be torn from the walls?

What are we all – a bunch of Islamist maniacs who think any representation of the human form is an offence against God? This is the 21st century, for goodness’ sake. And if you ask yourself why so few have come to the defence of the scientist, the answer is that no one dares.

No one wants to take on the rage of the web – by which people use social media to externalise their own resentments and anxieties, often anonymously and with far more vehemence than they really intend. No one wants to dissent – and no wonder our politics sometimes feels so sterilised and homogenised.

There must be room in our world for eccentricity, even if it offends the prudes, and room for the vague other-worldliness that often goes with genius. Dr Taylor deserves the applause of our country, and those who bash him should hang their own heads and apologise.