Wheeler Dealer

Mere experts have accused Her Majesty's Government of using all sorts of rather sophisticated dodges to understate the environmental impact of its road-building plans by a factor of up to a hundred; and this despite the fact that the Department for Motoring is run by the blithering wideboy Grant Shapps and his colleagues Michael Green and Sebastian Fox. Vexatious do-gooders are seeking a judicial review of the Government's "largest ever investment in English strategic roads" rah rah, which includes the strategic assault against the treacherously pre-English archaeological heritage at Stonehenge. The lefty lawyers claim that the Government has omitted forty-five out of fifty schemes from its calculations, failed to take account of emissions from the construction process, and limited its forecasts to a point when some schemes will still be incomplete; all of which sounds a bit over-elaborate for Shapps and Company, who most likely preferred the straightforward no-nonsensism of having all the numbers totted up and then deleting a couple of digits off the end. There is also no cumulative figure for the damage, probably because Shapps thinks a cumulative is a sort of cloud. The Department for Motoring argues that it has a forthcoming plan thingy which will resolve absolutely everything; which is certainly at least as believable as anything else Shapps and Company have ever said.