Now that the government has triggered a public-interest intervention (PIIN), who will end up owning the Telegraph group, and this paper, after deliberations finish in late January? If it dismisses objections to the sale to the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, that family’s vehicle, RedBird IMI, takes control. A leading national newspaper and our most venerable British magazine are thus nationalised by an authoritarian Arab state. If the government rejects the Redbird IMI bid, in law the titles stay with the Barclay family (as they do right now, since the Barclays’ debt to Lloyds bank has been discharged, though under a ‘hold separate’ order which deprives the Barclays of executive power for the course of the investigation) with the consequent right to sell them. The reality, however, will be that the Barclays, heavily in debt to RedBird, will be under its thumb. The Abu Dhabi interest will control the sale. In those circumstances, it would seem unlikely there would be a public auction. It is assumed that Redbird IMI will then sell privately to whoever will pay the most and can comply with newspaper ownership rules.

Why would Rishi Sunak’s government not want the second outcome? It would mean that the row about a free press would disappear and a less controversial bidder, of whom there would be no shortage, would own the titles. The only visible (though unstated) reason why Mr Sunak would decide otherwise is Emirati money power. He seems to look at the United Arab Emirates, in which the Abu Dhabi element is dominant, rather as David Cameron, when prime minister, looked at China. There is said to be £10 billion on offer for investment in Britain, including in Sizewell C. The Prime Minister may think that sum so valuable – though in truth £10 billion is less than a month’s spending on the NHS – that he will sacrifice two national media assets, both broadly conservative, to a foreign power. If so, he is not a wise man.

But I fear a further complication. If the PIIN process rejects the Abu Dhabi interest, the Barclays, as I say, become untrammelled owners in law, though not in financial fact. What would happen if RedBird IMI, rather than selling, decided to go on using the Barclays as their pawns? If they felt they did not need their money right now, could they control the papers via the Barclays, thus avoiding the formal ownership restrictions of which they would have fallen foul? We need to know the full nature of the deal struck between Abu Dhabi and the Barclays. The government has made a mistake by not applying a PIIN investigation to the first part of the transaction, the repayment of the Barclays’ debt to Lloyds. The argument was that a government should not impede a private debt repayment. The problem is that the repayment was made possible by what was, in effect, the takeover of national titles by a foreign power.

‘The science is settled’ is the extraordinary (and deeply unscientific) claim made about global warming. This week, I heard John Kerry, the US climate envoy, interviewed on Radio 4 from COP28 in Dubai. At the Paris COP of 2015, he said ‘we’ had not known that methane is ‘80-100 times more destructive than CO2’. If we were that ignorant that recently, isn’t Mr Kerry conceding rather a big point of principle? Our knowledge is always partial. The ‘science’ is not settled and so conclusions based on it must be tentative, not absolute.

In his newly published memoir, The Unlikely Duke, Harry Beaufort makes an important point about laughter. A boy called George Kershaw was his best friend at school and ‘a principal basis for this friendship was shared enjoyment of the physical act of laughter, the quality of the preceding joke being of secondary importance’. Young Harry and George had rooms one above the other. ‘When we were lying in bed [he doesn’t mean in one bed] in the summer, it was rather enjoyable to shout some remark out of the window and roar with laughter even if it wasn’t particularly funny.’ On hearing ‘the echo of recipient laughter, the trigger was pulled for an eruption of mutual hysterics’. On one occasion, the laughter was so loud that the housemaster came and punished the culprits. This is an observant account of how laughter can work. You often see children overcome with mirth when the joke is ineffably feeble and sometimes when they do not understand it at all. It is the connection with another that laughter creates which is infectiously pleasing. More than 40 years later, George Kershaw had a hunting accident and was paralysed from the neck down, as he remains to this day. At the time, I wrote about the delightful blog he wrote about his condition (Notes, 9 January 2016). From Harry’s book, we learn that: ‘One of the cruelties of Kershaw’s accident was that it physically limited his ability to laugh at full strength.’ A poignant thought, because that friendship-creating ability had been so great. The talent remains unimpaired but the faculty has been lost, a bit like Beethoven going deaf.

There is much concern about the safety of autonomous vehicles, but in a recent Lords debate, I heard a more far-seeing point made by the Paralympian medallist Lord Holmes of Richmond. ‘If it was evidentially proven,’ he asked, ‘that autonomous vehicles with no user in charge were significantly safer than human drivers, would the government move to ban human driving?’ Surely the answer will eventually be ‘Yes’. Human error must be the biggest single cause of accidents, although of course human drivers make more such errors if confused by bad signage, aggressive cyclists etc. Perhaps in 50 years’ time our grandchildren will be astonished to learn that people were allowed actually to drive these great lumps of metal called cars, and at lethal speeds.