Ask a focus group the wrong question, and what you get is a nice answer

Ihave established a focus group in the Vatican. My sample, which extends from cardinals to altar-boys, has been asked a searching question: is the Pope a Catholic? First indications are that the answer appears to be Yes. This firm command of the obvious will then be made available to the Conservative party, as it comes home from Bournemouth resolved to be nice. Someone has introduced its policy-makers to a group of Kentish ratepayers who were asked if they would pay more tax for better services, and said they would. All focus groups say that, and all pollsters get the same answer. It makes the respondents feel nice, but it is not the way they vote, and it is, in any case, the wrong question. There is nothing to say that, when someone else spends your money, you will get what you want or what you pay for. You might simply be feeding the public sector's inflation rate, which (as George Trefgarne was saying last week) is twice or three times as high as the rate in the shops. To feed that maw, Gordon Brown has already raised taxes faster than any other finance minister in Europe, so Gabriel Stein calculates for the Adam Smith Institute, and he will tell us next month how he plans to speed up. Already the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says that Britain is more highly taxed than Germany. I suspect that the OECD has been subtracting apples from raspberries, but even so, high taxes do not now seem to have done Germany much good. My group will now move to the woods and study the habits of hears.

Leaking all over

JAMES THURBER's grandmother thought that electricity was leaking all over the house, and perhaps it is. That would explain why there is such a lot of it about. The glut in the market has been too much for British (nuclear, but please don't say so) Energy, whose balance sheet has turned deep red and glows in the dark. Now a company called TXU Energi is sputtering, too. It gets its supplies at a fixed price from a big power station and is losing money on every kilowatt it sells. Perhaps it should brand its electricity as a premium product, and charge more for it. or perhaps what we now have is an efficient market. Gone are the days when the tariffs were set by decree and the big industrial users were charged extra. (ICI used to complain to me that electricity was the most expensive ingredient in the production of chlorine.) Of the many benefits of cheaper power, one is aesthetic. On today's terms, there can be no excuse for coating the landscape and seascape with huge iron windmills.

Major's road ahead

UNLIKE John Major. I seem to have emerged in one piece from Max Hastings's memoirs (Editor, Macmillan, £20), possibly for not whingeing. That always set off his short fuse, and was a failing he detected in the Prince of Wales and in the Prime Minister of the day: 'Angry little bank manager.' When I first knew him he was a cheerful bank manager, as well he might be, having made it the hard way. He may privately have thought that some of his City contemporaries had made it the easy way. They had sidled out of the university or the Household Brigade into firms with which their uncles were connected. This was still a City of gentlemen and players, and a manager in Standard Chartered was a player. Said the chairman of a merchant bank of the chief general manager of a High Street bank: 'He's the sort of chap I might employ as a gardener.' John Major set out to make the transition from banking to politics and found that some of his contemporaries had come with him. Once again they seemed to have made it the easy way. They had touched down for a few years in a comfortable City seat before they found a seat in Parliament. Even when he got to the top, they and their friends (or so he may have felt) seemed to be rating him as a possible gardener. Max, no doubt, would not have employed him. No wonder this cheerful man became cross.

Chancellor Whosit

I RELISHED the conversation on the morning after Black Wednesday, when sterling had tumbled out of the ERM and Max Hastings was called round to the Treasury: Who's going to be Chancellor?

Jam.

But you can't be. Nobody's got any confidence in you any more.

The Prime Minister has expressed his full confidence in me.

But no one else will.

Nobody could have anticipated what happened yesterday.

Don't be ridiculous — scores of pundits have been predicting this for weeks, months. When you raised interest rates to 15 per cent, Christopher Fildes said it was time to send for the men in white coats.

Licence revoked

OLD Roy Thomson made a fortune out of Scottish Television, explaining that the franchise was a licence to print money. (He went on to spend it on the Times.) Half a century later, the printing press seems to be wearing out. Granada and Carlton, unhappy partners in ITV Digital, now think that the time has come for them to huddle together for warmth, but if this represents our last chance for a major British company able to compete in the world's markets, it looks hopeless. Why did we muff it? Partly because we began with a system of local fiefdoms, dependent on patronage, while the BBC retained its private income. Choice was narrow, because, we were told, of a shortage of frequencies. In the end, technology broke in on that cosy world, as it so often does. Rupert Murdoch bet on it and nearly lost his and his banks' shirts, but his gain was OUT missed chance, and will not recur.

Ideal Hole

FOR SALE freehold: long the home of distinguished neolithic families, visited in AD 189 by Clement of Alexandria. more recently the property of Madame Tussaud's, Wookey Hole is on the market. I am attracted by the portfolio of stalactites and stalagmites, which in these uncertain times make an ideal investment: long-term growth guaranteed. Try £3 million for the floodlit caves and another E3 million for the mill that stands beside them and contains, among other attractions, an amusement pier. Inquiries to Nigel TalbotPonsonby, chairman of Humberts Leisure, who has already sold Land's End three times.