Monday If I were to stumble on a £3m windfall, I wouldn’t be making a donation to the Tory party. I’d get each of the kids somewhere to live, buy a couple of Jennifer Lee pots along with first editions of Brighton Rock and The Great Gatsby, treat myself to a couple of opera away weekends somewhere in mainland Europe, and put the rest aside for a rainy day. But for the mega-rich, donating to the Conservative party – or philanthropy, as George Eustice, the environment secretary, put it – seems quite a cheap way of sharp-elbowing your way into positions of power. The Sunday Times reported that a £3m donation and a token stint as party treasurer was enough to guarantee a seat in the House of Lords. Which actually seems extraordinarily good value at the price. If you’ve got more than £100m in the bank – and the Conservatives know plenty who have – then you’d barely notice £3m sliding out of your account. And for that you get to call yourself Lord and pick up all sorts of other perks that come with the title. It’s time the Tories showed the upper house some proper respect and moved the entry bar into the tens of millions. Tuesday Most of us like to think we have a fairly functional inbuilt bullshit detector. That we can tell when people are talking rubbish. But a new study by Canadian and Israeli academics, published on the PsyArXiv website, suggests we may be more gullible than we thought. Much of our willingness to attribute meaning to something that sounds as if it is nonsense depends on who we think said it. Bill Gates and Michelle Obama we take seriously. Kim Kardashian and Richard Nixon not so much. Take the idea that “we live not, in reality, on the summit of a solid earth but at the bottom of an ocean of air”. If you were told that this came from a Hallmark inspirational greetings card, you’d probably have been inclined to dismiss it immediately. But if you were told it was actually said by the philosopher and mathematician Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, you’d have given it the benefit of the doubt. You might even have found it meaningful, despite it not making much sense. It turns out that “pseudo-profound bullshit” studies – the willingness to attribute truthfulness to nonsense – are a fast-growing area in psychology: PsyArXiv has at least six other papers devoted to the subject published this year. What no one seems to have yet been able to determine is whether those who are regular bullshitters are better able to detect it in others. Nor does it seem clear whether bullshitters are always aware they are talking bullshit: it is genuinely possible that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson believe most of what they say. It also seems likely that your receptivity to bullshit rather depends on how desperate you are to believe it. When I was in the mental hospital this summer, some of the therapists used new age language that my normal cynical self would have rejected. But when I was on my knees I didn’t question it. Maybe I’m just shallow.
Wednesday Our youngest is 26 today. Happy birthday, Robbie. I couldn’t be more proud of the person he has become, as he’s far more caring and sorted than I was at his age and is the type of young man I would have liked to have been. But his birthday does make me feel ancient. It’s not just that the years seem to be slipping by faster and faster – though I can still vividly remember bringing him home from hospital after he was born, wondering if I was going to be a good enough dad to him and his sister: it’s also that me having adult children feels absurd. A category error. I don’t feel ready to be this old. Then, maybe I should take lessons in the ageing process from my 97-year-old mother. When I visited her in the care home last weekend she informed me that she didn’t think she was going to make old bones. This from a woman who survived being machine-gunned by a Messerschmitt – she tells me she can still hear the sound of the bullets hitting the road beside her – as she was running for shelter during an air raid on Portsmouth where she was serving as a Wren in the war. And who only last year managed to contract the mildest form of Covid, when many others of her age were not so lucky. She was more upset at being placed in self-isolation, with the carers bringing her food in full PPE, than she was by her symptoms of a slight fever and cough. Even so, she didn’t look as if she entirely believed me when I told her she already had made old bones. I just have to hope I have her genes rather than my father’s. He died of heart failure when he was 77. Thursday Parliament is on a two-day recess and no one I’ve asked has any idea why. After all, it was only about a month ago that the Commons was on recess for a week, so it can’t be because MPs need some more time off. The only logical explanation is that some MPs have fallen behind on their second jobs and need a few days to catch up. Much of the investigation into MPs’ outside earnings has focused on the jaw-dropping £1m that Geoffrey Cox has raked in over the course of the last year, but two other Tories have also caught my eye. The first is Chris “Failing” Grayling, who makes an extra £100k a year as a strategic adviser to Hutchison Ports. This has to be a joke. What sea-faring operation would hire a former transport minister who awarded a £13m contract to a ferry company that was planning to operate out of a port that was not designed to take any ferries? Even if it had any, which it didn’t. The other MP to come to my attention is Ben Bradley, who the register of interests says works 30 hours a week as leader of Nottinghamshire county council and 30 hours a week as a member of the executive board of East Midlands Councils. That’s five 12-hour days working outside parliament. Presumably he saves weekends for his constituency work. The register also says he earns £600 a year from East Midlands Councils, so it’s safe to assume he’s not in it for the money. And that he’s never heard of the national living wage. The cabinet had been due to spend one of their two days off on a special management away day at Chequers – I’ve always wanted to go on one of these – but had second thoughts after no one wanted to be shot in the back by Boris during the afternoon paintballing session. Instead, they were holding a cabinet meeting in London where they were to discuss levelling up. Perhaps they could get some input from Cox via Zoom from Mauritius.
Friday Cop26 is due to end today but Boris Johnson’s press conference earlier in the week, when he returned to Glasgow for a couple of hours, was remarkable for his declaration that the UK was “not remotely a corrupt country”. Hardly the most reassuring of statements as he urged world leaders to make one last effort to reach a meaningful climate agreement, since it had all the conviction of someone trying to persuade his wife he wasn’t having an affair. Practice doesn’t make perfect in Boris’s case, because since then the media’s focus has been on all the ways Britain is a corrupt country. Paid lobbying, trying to undermine the standards commissioner, cash for honours, signing the Northern Ireland protocol in bad faith and the prime minister’s financing of the redecoration of his Downing Street flat and accepting a free holiday from someone he had put in the Lords naturally all took centre stage, but the UK’s refusal to pay back £400m to Iran – Richard Ratcliffe is now on the 20th day of his hunger strike as part of his heroic struggle to get his wife, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, released from Iran (don’t forget it was Boris Johnson’s failure to read his brief that was partially responsible for her remaining in prison) – could be added to the charge sheet. The debt dates back to the 1970s when the UK refused to deliver the remaining tanks it had promised and for which it had already been paid when Iran became a theocracy. Clearly the ethical thing to have done would have been just to return the unspent money. After all, that’s what would have been expected of any legitimate commercial business. Instead the UK has been fighting and losing court cases not to pay the £400m. When Ratcliffe brought up the subject in a recent meeting with the Foreign Office, he said the junior minister James Cleverly just clammed up. The Iranians report that our excuse is sanctions prevent us repaying the dosh, even though the central bank of Iran is not a sanctioned body. If the problem is that we just don’t have the cash, then maybe the government could just flog off another 150 peerages. That should cover it. Digested week, digested: Where’s Geoffrey? A Farewell to Calm by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.