Taking your lead bloggers ! Airbus it is – thank you for your speedy reaction

Boris’s thinking reaches stratospheric heights in his DT column today:

This is not a bus, or even a tram or a train or ship. It is an Airvillage. Already Richard Branson is planning to fill his 380s with casinos and gyms and coffee parlours

Read on …

European dream and American reality

Incroyable! Unglaublich! What a triumph for the European dream. What a stunning rebuke to all of us Euro-sceptics, with our acned teenage insistence on the dogma of the free market.

In less than two months, the first of our runways will rumble to the thunder of the new plane’s payload, 40 per cent heavier than that of a 747. In a couple of years, they will be circling in midge-like cones over Heathrow, except that they won’t be midges so much as aerial whales, Moby Dicks of the sky, each capable of taking 555 passengers, rising to 800 or even 1,000 as new models come on stream. In a decade, they say, the Earth will be cats-cradled with their vapour, as air travel passenger numbers triple in response to the inflated capacity of their bellies, holding 30 per cent more seats than a jumbo.

Continue reading Airbus 380 →

Those in the knowin’ expect a fresh view from Boris on Thursday mornings.

Well, today in The Daily Telegraph he recommends that we ‘hold our horses’ when it comes to all the alarmist news about a radiologist’s views on the effect of mobiles – just as we should have done with the MMR panic.

Dodgy mobiles? Don’t hit the panic button

It had to come. It couldn’t last. How could we have been so naive as to think that the gods – ever jealous of mankind’s technical prowess – would let us get away with an innovation as benign as the mobile phone? Like families across the country, the Johnson household has recently taken a momentous step. We gave a mobile to the 11-year-old, and it was not an easy decision to make. Look here, I said, representing the forces of inchoate conservatism, are you really sure? When I was a nipper, I said, a telephone was a semi-sacred instrument; you had to dial it by actually dialling a dial; the contraption was made of Bakelite and you never really got to have a go on it unless the grown-ups were out, and you could tip-toe softly and phone one of Rupert Murdoch’s red-hot chat-lines, which had only just been invented.

Continue reading Mobile Phones and MMR Vaccines →