During a lull in the pandemic I rented a little flat in Oxford for the academic year I was thrilled to have been offered; then Covid came back, my college all but closed and I made so little use of my lodgings that it would have been cheaper per night to stay in a suite at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. As bills mounted, I learned that modern renting is astonishingly expensive – while for the landlord, I thought, it looked like easy money. So in the next phase of life, I became a buy-to-letter myself – and as I do the maths at the end of the tax year, I’m discovering the meaning of what the Daily Telegraph recently called ‘Britain’s demented war on landlords’.

George Osborne, as chancellor, imposed a stamp duty surcharge and reduced tax relief for mortgage interest to discourage investors in flats and make more room for first-time buyers. Now, combined with stronger tenant rights, falling property values and rising mortgage rates, being a landlord is becoming more trouble than reward and hundreds of thousands are getting out – driving sale prices down and rents upwards for the fewer flats available. That in turn exacerbates labour shortages and suppresses productivity by reducing workforce flexibility, as well as hastening urban decline by leaving habitable space empty. A crippled rental market is an insidious plague on an already weak economy – and I hope I don’t sound bitter if I say I’ll be astonished if ministers do anything to rectify it.

Lynch justice

‘Be glad you’re not Dr Mike Lynch,’ I wrote in July 2021, when a UK court first ruled that the founder of the software venture Autonomy could be extradited to the US to face charges in relation to its $11 billion takeover in 2011 by Hewlett-Packard, which claimed to have been misled into overpaying by $5 billion. By now you should be even gladder.

Under the lopsided 2003 US-UK extradition treaty signed by Tony Blair as a supposed anti-terror measure, US justice is able to bag British suspects without having to offer prima facie evidence against them and regardless of whether their alleged crimes were committed on US soil. Some observers thought Priti Patel as home secretary might find reason to resist, but she green–lighted Lynch’s extradition and last week two High Court judges upheld the decision.

Lynch has already lost a related civil suit and his last resort to avert the ‘perp walk’ and plea-bargaining that awaits US white-collar defendants may be the European Court of Human Rights. His argument is that as a British citizen who was running a UK company, he should be allowed to answer any charges against him in a UK court; but that’s not how judges have read the treaty.

Previous exercises of US ‘extraterritoriality’ – notably the case of the ‘NatWest Three’ who were convicted of fraudulent long–distance dealings with Enron of Texas – attracted some UK media backlash. But for Lynch, already 12 years in legal limbo, I’m sensing an ominous lack of interest.

Taiwan targets

Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, says he expects China to launch an assault on his island state – over which Beijing claims sovereignty – in 2027. Some western China-watchers believe the conflict will kick off sooner, while others think Beijing is rattling its sabre without real intention to invade, given the challenge of doing so against high-tech defences – plus the risk of US intervention, the likely economic damage and the lesson of Putin’s botched war in Ukraine.

The gnomic wisdom of China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang – following recent simulation of Chinese forces encircling the island and showering it with missiles – is ‘those who play with fire on Taiwan will eventually get themselves burned’, words that might one day haunt him and his boss Xi Jinping.

Meanwhile, as a former regular visitor to Taiwan, I have repeatedly watched the video mock-up of China’s missile trajectories, wondering what mayhem they might cause by accident or design. If they land on Hsinchu, 50 miles south of the capital Taipei, they could take out half the world’s semi-conductor manufacturing capacity, bringing industry to a halt everywhere and starting a global recession in an afternoon. If they target as a potential landing ground the southern beaches of Kenting, where I once swam in murky waters, they could blow up the nearby Maanshan nuclear plant and contaminate half the island. Having war-gamed these and other catastrophes, you might think Xi’s posse would dial it down for the duration. But there’s no accounting for the mad vanity of tyrants.

Explosive success

Speaking of mad vanity, Elon Musk’s place in history is assured by his creation of Tesla as the auto industry’s first great electric disruptor. As for Twitter, I wonder who’ll give a blue tick in the long run: his follies will be forgotten as soon as the next digital novelty grabs the world’s attention.

And as for his rocketry, if in a century’s time there’s a human city on Mars, then Musk may be saluted by the AI chatbots that will be the chroniclers of the era. But the launch last week of his SpaceX Starship, ‘the most powerful rocket ever built’, set a landmark only in the art of circum-locution – when the SpaceX company described the unmanned craft’s disintegration, two and a half minutes after take-off, as a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’.

That’s a perfect description both for the current state of the CBI and for what we now know happened at Credit Suisse in the first quarter, when the bank saw $69 billion of net asset outflows prior to its takeover by UBS. Even more hyperbolic are the claims that Starship’s demise counts as success rather than failure because there was only a 50-50 chance it would leave the ground at all. ‘They have a long way to go,’ said Nasa official Bill Nelson, ‘But this is a good start.’ That’s a useful line for any corporate crisis-PR training manual.