Rare interventions

This week: oh good, Tony Blair is back, huzzah! Also: how eccentrically located is your city hall; and what is “wet-bulb temperature” anyway?

Just out of curiosity, I did a quick search to find out when Tony Blair last made one of his “rare interventions” in British politics. It turns out it was March, when a parade of serving ministers had to gently suggest that jumping to join an attack on a Muslim country just because a demented US president woke up one day and fancied some bombing might, possibly, have some downsides. The fact that, two months later, we’re on the precipice of a global oil shock, and all the talk is of how the US can extricate itself while disguising the fact it just lost a war, does not seem to have dented Blair’s self-belief: today he’s back with a 5,700(!) word laundry list of advice for the serving government, and anyone who seeks to take it over.

I’m being unfair – both to the media, which long ago ceased to refer to these interventions as “rare”, and also to Blair himself. He is, first and foremost, a thinktanker these days, and half the point of think tanks is to release reports that get people talking. On that measure, at least, the Tony Blair Institute must be counted one of the most effective think tanks in the world today.

But that does not mean the advice itself is good. I haven’t read the full thing – again: 5,700 words – but the stuff that’s floated to the top of the coverage like scum on a pond seems, at best, mixed. Blair seems to me correct that Britain is currently negotiating with Europe from a position of diplomatic weakness, and that cuts to things like international aid were one source of that weakness. He makes a reasonable point that raising NI on businesses may have been a drag on growth. And he’s surely right that one of the biggest problems for this government is that it never defined what it was trying to achieve – and that, unless it works that out, there is a very real risk a change of leadership will solve nothing.¹

But the other stuff, my god. Blair seems to think it’s a mistake for Wes Streeting to even argue for rejoining the EU, as if actually making the argument isn’t a necessary first step to combating the forces that are the biggest current barrier. He attacked Ed Miliband’s net zero policy, and wants more licences for drilling in the North Sea, even though a drive for renewables will be far quicker to scale and thus more likely to affect energy bills on an electorally helpful timescale.²

Worst of all, he wants an end to all obstacles to AI-related businesses, more welfare cuts and no change to capital gains tax. Those may at first seem unrelated – they certainly do to Blair – but the economic chaos set to be unleashed by the first of is surely one of the main sources of the insecurity driving support for things like the others. Perhaps the 271st industrial revolution, or whatever ordinal we’re up to by now, will unleash previously unknown levels of wealth creation, although citation needed. But if you don’t arrange your political economy to make sure those rewards are shared, they’ll just accrue in the bank accounts of tech bros and their shareholders, most of whom aren’t even on this island. It is unclear how this will benefit Britain, or serve as an election-winning platform.

Blair clearly believes Labour wins from the centre. That was true in 1997; perhaps it’s still true now. But the world has changed a lot in nearly 30 years – this sort of intervention is roughly the equivalent of the late Harold Wilson running interference on Blair’s first term. As many years separated the elections of 1997 and 2024 as separated the former from 1970.

And of all the many changes to have happened since Blair was last at home in Downing Street, there seem to be two in particular he’s missed: that vastly more people are shut out of having any stake in the economy; and that it is no longer clear the US is an ally. Perhaps Blair does engage with these questions, deep into those many thousands of words. But from the answers he’s given to interviewers, generally prefaced with “Look-” I suspect not.

Julian Barnes once wrote that Margaret Thatcher’s view of the world was “relentlessly monocular”: she could see how feted she was in some quarters, but not how loathed in others.³ Blair seems similarly unable to clearly see himself and his position. He understands people are mad about Iraq – his answers there are polished and unwavering, and no interviewer will ever get him to crack. But that he’s ascended to the world of the super rich, where people build wealth through disruptive companies or buy-to-let portfolios, and that this is not the world most of us inhabit or enjoy, continues to elude him. He can’t see how his world differs from ours. The Labour party, he says, has an “almost infinite capacity for self-delusion”. Not just the party, I fear.

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity

It is, as I write this on Tuesday afternoon, extremely hot in London: 34C, which would be a lot to deal with at the height of summer, and is absolutely terrifying in late May. This is actually the second day running on which the city has seen record temperatures not just for this month, but higher than any ever recorded in June, too. This is, in what it says about a changing climate, really not good.

But it could be – may yet become – worse. The “wet-bulb temperature” – a measure which combines heat with humidity, and thus tells you more about the stress the temperature places on the human body – is a relatively comfortable 19.5C. That is a long way from the point at which the heat becomes truly dangerous. Put like that, it barely even sounds warm!⁴

Other heatwaves, in areas with hotter climates – this definitely was a heatwave, by the way; the UK has an official definition – have seen wet-bulb temperatures that are both significantly higher and more dangerous. The highest of all seems to have been in Ras Al Khaimah City, UAE in 2010: 36.3C, some way past the point at which it becomes a danger to human life. This, remember, is the combined wet-bulb measure: the actual air temperature was significantly higher.

All of which raises some questions: what is the wet-bulb temperature, why do they call it that, how does any of this work, and, let’s not beat around the bush here, what the hell?

Name first: the reason it’s called “wet-bulb” is extremely literal. Early attempts at “hygrometers” – devices for measuring humidity – involved pouring water into glass receptacles at various temperatures and measuring the rate at which condensation formed. This, though, was always a pretty rough and ready way of doing things – so in 1755, a pair of Scottish chemists, William Cullen and his student Joseph Black, came up with something more accurate, based on the nifty use of two adjacent thermometers. One would be wrapped in a damp muslin sleeve, so that the evaporation of water would reduce the temperature it showed; the other would be left alone. The difference between the readings on these “wet bulb” and “dry bulb” thermometers would offer a measure of the rate at which the air was absorbing water. Because that rate depends on how much water it already contains, it was a measure, in other words, of humidity.