UR TV CAST

even with this cancer thing she is still being positive.” We are told that just as Kylie remodelled herself musically and revamped her image to kick start her career, so the Tories have to reinvent themselves in order to achieve success next time around. The icing on the cake was when the revolting Lynton Crosby, so-called mastermind behind the Tory election flop, gave an interview in The Spectator in which he claimed that the party could learn from his fellow Australian’s misfortune. Life for her from now on is going to be a series of comparisons by pundits she’s never met, as new post-operative Kylie is relentlessly chronicled and picked over.
Kylie’s cancer filled up pages and pages in newspapers around the world last week, with harpies offering support and medical writers producing plenty of graphs and charts of the disease’s incidence by age, location, social class, whatever. From now on, press photographers will be working out how to capture her in hospital; they will be stalking her every move down the road to convalescence, charting every minuscule moment on the way to recovery. Cancer makes the sufferer angry, but most women can at least retreat into the protective environment of family and friends, cry when they want to and know that they won’t be the focus of attention when they go shopping wearing a wig or looking bloated from radiotherapy or drugs.

Kylie, for all the tidal wave of tabloid emotion engendered by the news, doesn’t have that option. Unlike Katie Price with her ludicrous self-promotion, Kylie is a particularly private person when it comes to blathering to the press about her health, and she must have realised that the big C word would mean that she’d have to carry the beacon of Diana, Princess of Wales, suffering for ever more. Now she has had her operation, she faces a new kind of problem. Kylie Minogue had no choice but to tell the truth about her breast cancer because a concert tour had to be cancelled and she could no longer top the bill at Glastonbury. I’m not going as far as saying urban owners of 4×4s should automatically be served with an Asbo – but it’s a nice thought
More from Joan Smith. Green issues barely featured in the general election but since then the Government has put anti-social behaviour at the heart of its third term: what could be more anti-social than the behaviour of drivers who do not show a trace of responsibility, acquiring SUVs and other high-performance cars as status symbols and ignoring their effects on the environment? I would like to see a form of fuel rationing by price, with the cost of petrol rising exponentially for drivers who use more than a set quantity per year.

(I sometimes think union leaders are so blinkered that they would argue in favour of hanging, if abolition threatened members of the National Union of Rope Operatives.) But it is perfectly possible to take the jobs issue seriously while also arguing that trade unions, along with other components of civil society, have a duty to think beyond the narrow interests of their members.What I am suggesting is that transport is a moral issue, causing thousands of avoidable deaths each year from pollution and accidents. Ford was cross and so was the Transport and General Workers’ Union, which chided Greenpeace for hitting production “at a difficult time for the industry and the people of the West Midlands”. Predictably, car use and emissions went up.Greenpeace last week stepped in where ministers fear to tread, highlighting Ford’s aggressive marketing of environmentally disastrous 4×4 vehicles for use in cities by staging an invasion of the production line at the company’s Range Rover factory in Solihull. The Government has a track record of taking fright at the least suggestion that it has upset drivers, abandoning even that modest environmental measure, the fuel escalator, in the autumn of 2000 after protesters blockaded oil depots around the UK.

With this kind of dog’s breakfast passing for transport policy, it’s not surprising that the Government is unlikely to reach its promised 20 per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2010; the reduction will probably be in the region of 13 per cent, which is just above the UK’s Kyoto commitment on greenhouse gases, although some experts argue even that figure is optimistic. “Increased car use is consistent with a growing economy and we have to accept that people will want to use their cars,” said the same spokeswoman, contradicting John Prescott’s 1997 speech to the Royal Geographical Society, in which he announced: “I will have failed if in five years’ time there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car.”Those were the days. When it was revealed that an extra 5 billion car miles had been driven in 2000-2001, the Department of Transport lamely argued that reducing traffic was not a government target. “Reducing congestion is the target,” a spokeswoman said, although ministers preferred to let someone else – the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone – bear the risk of introducing the country’s first congestion charge. So what did ministers do? They included a measure in the Queen’s Speech, the very next day, to reduce penalties for speeding – rightly infuriating the Lib Dems, who accused the Government of sending out the message to drivers that modest speeding is acceptable.
It’s hard to think of another area in which ministers have failed so comprehensively. During Labour’s first five years in power, measures aimed at reducing congestion were so ineffectual that car traffic levels actually rose each year.

Yet this shy creature, who these days is more likely to be a Premiership footballer in a gas-guzzling SUV, seems to have ministers in a headlock. On Monday, the Royal Society declared that the Government’s climate change policy is failing and that urgent action is needed in this session of Parliament if the UK’s targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are to be met. Brown has no interest in sharing responsibility for defeat, but he has a more specific reason for wanting Britain to vote Yes. Blair has to make it clear before a British referendum that he would stay as Prime Minister whatever the outcome – otherwise it would simply be a referendum on him. Once again, Blair and Brown are, in what the constitution lays down as the motto of the European Union, “united in diversity”
More from John Rentoul. So Brown, like Blair, is hoping for a French No next weekend. The horrors of renegotiating the constitution – a negotiation that Brown might have to take over as prime minister – pale into insignificance against the horrors of fighting such a difficult referendum.