Richer? Stronger? Safer?

IN case you missed the latest Met Office forecast, looking at climate in Britain until 2040, let me summarise it. Summers will be hotter, except when they are colder while winters will be milder, except when they are less mild. Even the Met Office's greatest fan, the BBC, was reduced to summing it all up with a headline to treasure: "UK's future climate to be all sorts."

IN the finest tradition of apocalyptic shroud-waving, some of the media fixated on this week's claim that hot summers would produce more heat-related deaths. Or, if we choose to put it another way, fewer cold-related deaths. The assumption that climate change means disaster is utterly pathetic. England could do very nicely with being a few degrees warmer. Why must the climate-change zealots see disaster around every warm front?

ON A brisk country walk this week we found the crops sprouting, the hedgerows heavy with catkins, the ditches full of water. The green, green banks are plumped up with big, soft cushions of primroses and those most magical and beguiling creatures, the mad March hares, are boxing in the fields. I cannot remember a lusher, richer spring.

AND if you doubt my word, take it up with the blackbirds. According to the RSPB's Big Garden birdwatch, unveiled yesterday, blackbirds have become rarer at our birdtables because the mild winter provided a rich crop of worms and other food out in the countryside. This is good news for blackbirds but bad news for humans because it tells us that, given the choice, blackbirds would rather stay away from us.

A SOUND bite is precisely that, a quick, incisive and impressive snap of information, dropped into the conversation before the speaker moves quickly on. It is only later, when people analyse what was said, that the sound bite is sometimes revealed as nothing more than a weasel-wordy gumming. Take Nick Clegg's triple-whammy sound bite in his EU debate with Ukip leader Nigel Farage. The deputy prime minister rattled off that the EU made us "richer, stronger, safer." Richer? EU membership actually costs us £50,000 million a year. If we are wealthier than other parts of the EU it is entirely because Britain stayed out of every Euro-zealot's dream currency, the euro. Stronger? How can any EU nation be stronger when membership depends on giving up sovereignty? Safer? Has the EU's recent meddling in Ukraine made you feel particularly safe? The EU, founded as a free-trade area, is turning into one of the most imperialist and expansionist powers this world has seen, pushing its borders and its influence right into the nose of the Russia bear and leading Britain into all sorts of risks that are none of our business. The EU actually makes us poorer, weaker and worried.

I SUGGESTED recently that Spitting Image could never work today because the public simply don't recognise politicians as they did in the 1980s. But there is another factor. It is that today's more sensitive politicians would never tolerate the ragging dished out by Spitting Image. After the first show, producers, actors and puppet-makers would vanish under the weight of injunctions, super-injunctions and writs for defamation.

ALREADY, junior reporters are busy collecting snippets for those retrospective supplements over the Christmas and New Year period. When it comes to the "great quotes of 2014" section, watch out for Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin's definition of their separation, "as we consciously uncouple and co-parent." It is easy to ridicule such language but, even when you are multi-millionaires, separation hurts like hell and banal, bland words are balm to ease the pain.