The private jet jamboree

Rafa De Miguel has a vaguely unsettling El País piece on the rapid rise of the private aviation market. Particularly interesting now that private jet jamboree COP28 has opened for business. 

The unstoppable rise of private aviation

More than 23,000 private jets transport 0.0008% of the world’s population faster than commercial flights. Every year about 600 new aircraft are added to an already booming business. The industry’s contribution to climate change and the risk of investment bubbles are the shadowy side of a sector that turns over more than $38 billion a year.

If luxury is mostly to do with exclusivity and enjoying what is forbidden to others, the ultimate privilege would be a time machine. “We sell something that is not for sale to ordinary mortals: time. It’s a commodity that is difficult to trade. We are a time machine. I can get the manager of an investment fund, from their villa on the coast to their home six hours faster than it would take to take a commercial flight. And if that option cost you $15,000 more than it would cost to take your entire family on a scheduled flight, you’d choose it without blinking.”


The whole piece is well worth reading as another insight into global elites and aspiring elites. As for climate change, if they haven't already, these are the people likely to claim they are saving the planet by adopting sustainable fuels.


In Farnborough, where it has its tactical control center, Flexjet has also set up the Red Label Academy. It is a culinary laboratory, a kind of finishing school for the cabin crew to learn good manners and the rules of etiquette. Leading the project is Francesco Vanerio, vice president for customer experience. Throughout his professional career he held positions of responsibility in top-flight hotels and restaurants around the world. The culmination of that career trajectory came when he attained the position of Bar Manager at Villa D’Este, the palace on the shores of Lake Como, in northern Italy. The resort symbolizes all the luxury and refinement to which the rich and powerful can aspire. “That’s where I met Flexjet president Kenn Ricci. The rest is history,” explains Vanerio...

Flexjet operates under the shared ownership economic model (fractional ownership, as it is known in the United States). The owner — the company never calls them customers — purchases a fraction of the aircraft (typically 1/16) and earns a minimum of 50 flight hours per year, with no option to terminate the contract for the first three years. The advance payment, with no refunds, is just over $2 million.

The Political Crown

Britain's King Charles in UAE to urge action on climate at COP28

The king, who arrived in the Gulf state overnight, is due to give an address on Friday at the U.N. climate negotiations that are scheduled to run in Dubai until Dec. 12.

It will be his first major speech on climate change since he became monarch in September 2022. Other world leaders including India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are also expected to attend the talks. U.S. President Joe Biden and China's President Xi Jinping are not.


These, though they have not the least degree of knowledge, profess yet that they have mastered all.

Desiderius Erasmus - In Praise of Folly (1511)

Time to stonewall the UN

Andrew Tettenborn has an interesting CAPX piece on Stonewall’s spat with the EHRC and an attempt by Stonewall to undermine the EHRC via the UN.


Time to stonewall the UN?

The Equality and Human Rights Commission represents an unsung success of this government. Set up in 2006 by Tony Blair as an umbrella super-agency to promote and enforce human rights and non-discrimination, by 2020 it had become, in effect, a progressive pressure-group led by a self-perpetuating leftism drawn from the genteel quangocracy. In that year, however, Liz Truss, then Women and Equalities Minister, riled the establishment by shaking it up, appointing four new Commissioners who did not come from that class, and later a new Chair, Baroness Falkner, a woman of impeccably balanced liberal views and independent mind, who does not suffer fools or grifters gladly.

The new moderate EHRC is, however, now under regular attack from progressives determined to regain control of it. The latest assault comes from Stonewall, once a respectable gay rights organisation, but now a tiresomely shrill trans activist pressure group. This is an attack that can be fought off, but the government needs to keep a cool head.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of the Eric Hoffer quote -

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Stonewall’s spat with the EHRC arose in April this year, over women-only spaces and the issue of whether a person who self-declared as female had a right to be admitted to them. Having weighed submissions from all sides, including women’s organisations that wished to keep such spaces free from biological males, the EHRC recommended amending the sex discrimination legislation to make it clear that sex meant biological sex rather than chosen gender. In other words, the mere fact that you said you were a woman (or a man) should not guarantee you a legal right to be treated by all and sundry as if you were. This recommendation was accepted by the government. Stonewall, an organisation that brooks no dissent from its own different and very dirigiste views, was livid. Finding no joy at home, six months ago it attempted to internationalise the dispute through the UN.

Bogs that swallow you whole

48 hours in Derbyshire

Derbyshire weaves a funny spell on anyone from south of Watford: cragged peaks, peat bogs that swallow you whole, ancient limestone, fell wind and rain swim into view. What it also heralds, at least to us weedy Southerners, is immense distance: literally everyone I speak to thinks that Derbyshire is years away, like fusion power, or the North Pole, or Luton.


That's right, don't come to Derbyshire, it's years away and those peat bogs that swallow you whole are everywhere. It's best avoided.

Yet it’s very close. Barely a brisk three-hour drive away on the M1. Since my mum grew up in the Lathkill Dale way back when it was still fleeced by Ash trees, since I used to spend every summer in Buxton with my grandparents and since I am also, at least in theory, capable of reading a map, you’d think I wouldn’t need reminding.

Well okay, Lathkill Dale is worth visiting but in an EV you just won't make it. 

A light sprinkling

There has been a very light sprinkling of climate collapse here in Derbyshire this morning. Rather picturesque it is, with parked cars on the street all white.

It's a good job we have COP28 to tell us about these things and show us what to do about it. If we had a private jet in the garage I'd pop over there to lend my support.

Oh well, fifteen minutes from now I'll be thinking about these crucial matters as I remove the ice from the car windscreen just before we set off on the school run. I don't know why we have a 4x4 though, there must be some reason.

Just pay Gary less

BBC's Newsnight to be cut back as part of savings plan

BBC Two's Newsnight is to be cut back and have its format overhauled as part of a plan to save money in the corporation's news department.

The long-running show will lose its dedicated reporters, be shortened by 10 minutes and drop its investigative films to focus on studio-based debates.

The word "less" in the post title can be taken to mean much less...

or to be more honest it means nothing at all. 

Christmas is coming - again

It is always rather a problem how to spend Christmas. Forced festivities can often be as tedious as forced isolation, and over-eating has definite drawbacks.

A.G. MacDonell – England, Their England (1933)


Not that they do, but anniversaries seem to come round more frequently than they did. Christmas has certainly arrived and it is still November so that sense it has become more frequent. The garish Christmas decorations at our local garden centre began to appear in late October.

Christmas may be an oddity of an anniversary, but birthdays and other anniversaries do seem to descend on us more frequently than in the past, even though they obviously don’t. We have two significant milestones popping up in 2024. Mrs H and I will have been married for 50 years and it will be 30 years since our daughter died.

When our daughter died we were told it would it would mark us for life. We weren’t told that in a dismal sense, but to prepare us for the annual occurrence of anniversaries. Off they go and back they come. Many people must be in a similar situation to ours, but we are all ticking off birthdays and significant decades as the years roll by.

A 10th birthday doesn’t seem especially significant, but three years later at 13 we have the teens, then various age milestones such as 16 and 18. Then 20 comes along, then 30 and the decades become more ominous as we become more aware that life just rolls on at the same rate towards the same distant outcome. An outcome which isn’t ever as distant as it was the last time we thought about it.

To my mind, that’s the problem with Christmas, it is no longer the snowy, cheery, apple-cheeked festival Dickens portrayed. It begins far too early, goes on far too long, intrudes into aspects of daily life to an absurd degree. Almost as if modern Christmas is designed to be slightly depressing, a reminder of mortality, of our insignificance. A reminder of futility even.

As oldies know and youngsters don’t, age does affect outlook, so over the years it is possible to become bored with Christmas and perhaps other overplayed anniversaries. But there is an indeterminate point where excess blends into futile, where the point of it all has faded and no amount of excess brings it back to life.