The cost of oil

The Count has it on good authority that the end of the world is nigh. The Amazon Queens who drive their little princesses to school in their Chelsea tractors are aghast at the cost of oil and are convinced that the entire universe will collapse if they have to give up their Chelsea tractors in favour of more humble modes of transport, like walking the little darlings to school. Walking may be healthier, but it means that mum can not look down from her chariot on low life pedestrians and can not play one unpwomanship with all the other school mums in their 4x4 chariots. It would, indeed, be the end of the world for them.

This is a sore point in the Count's household. The Countess is determined that a 4x4 is not safe enough and is still hankering after the T-72 main battle tank as a safer mode of transport for going along to Whole Foods, where she can save the planet by buying organic food (which costs more than the whole bloody T-72) while killing anyone who disagrees with her with a blast of exhaust from the tank.

Things went really wrong when I tried to explain how expensive petrol was. She got out her intellectual shot gun, loaded both barrels and blasted away. It was not a pretty sight. First, she pointed out that at $120 a barrel it still only costs about 30 pence per litre. That is before the government has got hold of it and added another 80 pence of tax to help pay for MPs televisions, sofas, second houses, first class travel and all the other basic necessities of maintaining democracy. For reasons which remain entirely obscure, they do not tax airline fuel which is why flights are so cheap, provided you do not want to check in, have hand baggage, require a seat or have any of the other items which Ryanair clearly deem to be a luxury. But I digress.

Pumping oil out of the bottom of the sea, or from some godforsaken part of the world (anyone who has had the misfortune to work in Riyadh can guess where such places might be), then refining it, transporting it and finally selling it for 30 pence (plus 80 pence of tax) is a bargain.

Water costs about £1.80 per litre from my local newsagent, which may explain why he can afford big holidays and the Kostovs have to hang out on their decrepit Siberian estates for a break. Don't tell me that bottling water is six times more expensive than producing oil. A StartFucks organic semi-skinned raspberry ripple frapuccino to go costs £6 a litre. A decent bottle of Krug comes in at £100 a litre (for heavens sake, its grapes - how much do grapes cost??) and printer ink for my lousy printer comes in at £3,000 a litre. Its probably not even organic. But it is a rip off.

The problem is not the cost of oil. The problem is that all the peasants want to whirl around the world: without sea, sun, sand, sex and sangria in Spain the peasants of Britain would be revolting at home rather than disgracing themselves abroad. Over a million people a year jet between New York and London - why? The peasants on the Kostov estates are happy enough drinking illicitly distilled vodka and shagging anything on two feet (or four feet at a push). These are simple communal and family pleasures which require the ability to do no more than stagger from one hut to the next.

And as for the school run - why cant we make the little beggars run? Solve the obesity pandemic, NHS tax burden and global warming all in one fell swoop.

Flying in the face of reality

Business In The Community (BiTC) has kicked off the smug awards season by giving Tesco an award for environmental responsibility. Tesco's qualifications for this are:

• its buying practices lead to factory farming and eco-disasters
• its out of town stores destroy the green belt and encourage massive car pollution
• it is a member of BiTC and a big donor to it.

This is like giving a serial mugger an award for crime prevention and reduction on the basis that he has mugged fewer people this year than last year.

British Airways is not waiting for BiTC to help out: it is awarding itself awards and slapping its own back. The Count will happily slap any part of BA for its scumbag dishonesty which serves to show that business people are as bent as a seven pound note.

BA is spending a few million on advertising the great success of Terminal 5. Its latest claims are that "90% of flights take off within 15 minutes of the scheduled time" and that on average it only takes six minutes to check in. If this is the best they can do, they need to give BiTC a big donation and wait to be given an environmental prize in return. Let's take a chainsaw to this nonsense.

90% of flights do not take off within fifteen minutes of schedule. They push back from the gate and then spend several hours wandering around the Heathrow tarmac finding a runway and a runway slot. And if BA manage to have 10% not even pushing back within fifteen minutes of schedule, then they really can not even run a BAth, let alone BA.

Only six minutes to check in sounds great, except that most people check in by the internet or by machine, so that is no big deal. They quietly ignore the problems of getting through security: if they were so efficient, why do they say that everyone must complete check in sixty minutes before scheduled departure (which will not happen for 90 minutes anyway) - or they will not be allowed to continue.

And the six minutes ignores the evening peak (they only measure results to 2pm). And it ignores the hell of getting to check in at T5 which appears to have been designed by a demented leprachaun after a night on the town. Getting from the tube to departures by escalator is a labyrinthine exploration of shops, offices, arrivals halls, up and down escalators, hidden signs and utter chaos. And T5 is only served by half a tube line: the other half serves the other terminals.

So BA's great success is this: it has constructed an inaccessible, badly designed terminal where passengers need over an hour to get through security to catch flights which will not leave on time. But check in only takes six minutes of the four hours of hell you are likely to endure from leaving home to sitting on the aircraft.

Meanwhile BA want us to know that their submissions for the third runway at Heathrow are completely honest and objective.

At this point the only sensible thing to do is to hire a few shoulder launched SAMs and see if Al-Qaeda would like to do some target training near Heathrow: if not on BA aircraft, then at least on BA management.

$50 billion for a knighthood?

An iron rule of government is that prestige project + government = huge waste of money. Think Millennium Dome. Fear the Olympics. Actually "Prestige" is a redundant term in the above equation. Government = huge waste of money.

Naturally, the private sector is far superior to government, even when it comes to blowing money away and no one being accountable. As the Count's first exhibit, step forward the senior management of Britain's banks.

Today, RBS announced that it was writing off £5.9 billion. Woops. That would pay for the Olympics with change left over for a couple of Millennium Domes, if the government's cost estimates are to be believed.

RBS, HBOS, HSBC and the whole alphabet soup of Britain's banks, plus the quaintly named Barclays (what, a real name) have written off $52 billion. That's only £27 billion in real money.

Next time my impertinent bank manager tries charging me for my very modest overdraft, I will ask him where all the money goes. Down the drain. The banks have become expert at fleecing good customers and throwing the money away on vast salaries and dodgy lending. The basic idea of lending money is that you get it back at the end of the loan. This very simple principle seems to have eluded the geniuses that run Britain's banks. They are highly skilled and giving money away, but have no idea how to get it back. This myopia has been a windfall for the Kostov estates which are kept afloat with dodgy loans from dodgy banks. Banks have been very obliging about investing in the Russian economic renaissance (more hunting estates for the Kostov clan): they have all realised far too late that in the absence of the rule of law they have as much chance of getting their money back as mad Uncle Vanya has of winning the Nobel prize for temperance.

In Russia, we know what to do with people who lose our money. It is a mistake they can only make once.

What happens when you lose $52 billion in the UK? Arise Sir Fred Godwin: CEO of RBS. Arise Sir James Crosby, the CEO who bled HBOS. Feel that ermine, Lord Stevenson, Chairman of HBOS. Arise Sir John Bond, the Chairman who led the losses at HSBC.

How many senior executives and city grandees have lost their jobs as a result of losing $52 billion? Precisely none. How many people will lose their homes because of the bankers' greed and incompetence? 40,000 home repossessions for 2008 alone. To add insult to injury, the government has asked Sir James Crosby, who screwed up so badly with his dodgy mortgages at HBOS, to lead a government inquiry into how to make mortgages and housing work better. You can not make this stuff up.

Its enough to turn any self-respecting aristocrat into a communist. But then when the revolution comes, I will have to be the first person to line myself up against a wall and shoot myself.

£20 billion for a jog in the smog

Beijing says that the Olympics will cost $40 billion. Go kiss my communist pants (they are the unwashed ones which have been festering in the servants quarters since the fall of communism nearly 20 years ago. They are now a WMD if they fall into the wrong hands).

Beijing was saying that the games would cost $40 billion 5 years ago: this either proves how perfectly planned the Chinese Communist regime is, or it proves that they have 100% control over the media and can peddle any bollocks they want. Most of the horse shit they produce lands up in the atmosphere. This is fine as long as it poisons the Chinese: not so smart when they start melting all the ice caps.

So now we come to London. The London branch of the Chinese Communist party, aka nuLabour, claimed that the games would only cost £2.3 billion. Look, the price of a cappucino is London is roughly the annual income of fourteen labourers in China. And yet somehow nuLabour convinced itself that Beijing would cost six times more than London. That is as fanciful as thinking that Gordon Brown is a competent Prime Minister.

Within months Tessa Jowell, Minister of the Glorious People's Culture and Diversity Division, was announcing that the cost of the Olympics would go up by another £900 million. Only £900 million? A mere rounding error to a Labour minister with her snout in the trough of privilege and entitlement.

Except that was never going to be enough. Now the Cabinet is admitting that the cost will be nearer £9 billion. Oh well, that's only four times the original estimate. Imagine buying a pint of beer for £2.50 and suddenly being charged £10. I would personally horsewhip any publican who tried that on the Count. But publicans have a good deal more honesty than politicians: unfortunately the politicians live in a security bubble to prevent them getting horsewhipped by aristocrats. The concrete toblerone around their offices may prevent bombs, but they can not prevent the tidal wave of ridicule which sweeps over them.

Of course, we are promised "regeneration" for our £9 billion. For "regeneration" refer to the fiasco of the Millennium dome which lay empty for years as they tried to foist it onto someone, anyone, to get rid of the embarrassment. The Greenwich penninsula is still like the end of the world. So much for the regeneration programme: in ten years we will have vandalised swimming pools and decaying housing as the Olympic regeneration legacy.

And does anyone actually believe £9 billion? Do I hear £10 billion, £12 billion, any more?

Baron de Courbertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, claimed that it was "the taking part, not the winning that counts." That is patently untrue of nuclear war and it is also untrue of the commercial, jingoistic dope fest which the Olympics has become. If a real aristocrat ran the Olympics, the amateur ideal would be rediscovered and both the drug users and commercial villains of the Olympics would find them standing in line with Tessa Jowell and the other pathetic politicians waiting for their horsewhipping.

Its time for the politicians, venal commercial interests and self-aggrandising Olympic bureaucrats to stand aside. Let the Count save the Olympics for posterity.

Kangaroos, cars and the tube that costs more than it earns

The Australians have calculated that traffic delays costs the colonials $30 billion a year. My faithful retainer, Digdog, assures me that this is roughly £15 billion in real money. In Zimbabwean dollars it would not be enough to buy a tin of the amber nectar. Quite how traffic delays can cost them so much is a mystery: are there really traffic jams of jackeroos riding their kangaroos down to the local billabong?

By contrast, TfL (transport for London) estimates that traffic delays in London cost a mere 837 million minutes a year. Perhaps that is because we don't have so many kangaroos jamming up the roads. Although Thames water is doing its best to create as many billabongs as possible in London: potholes are not good enough for Thames water. They dig up entire roads and convert them into little lakes. Their latest ruse is to dig up the main road into London (the Cromwell Road) and reduce it to one lane. Inevitably, no one has actually seen anyone working on the Cromwell Road billabong. That alone must account for 850 million minutes of delay a year.

Digdog is good at numbers. He assures me that this converts into about 14 million hours or about 8,000 working years. Even giving each car commuter a value of £40,000 a year, that still only comes to £320 million a year. Peanuts compared to what the Aussies are able to claim.

The real cost of delays are not above ground: they are below ground on the tube. TfL goes very quiet about this, since they are responsible for the tube. Digging around finds that they admit the average delay, on TfL's own metrics are 6.6 minutes per tube journey. This excludes time spent queuing while the person in front of you attempts to pay with Lithuanian luncheon vouchers. That is just actual travel time. 6.6 minutes delay is nothing. Until you multiply it by the 1 billion passenger journeys on the tube this year. That suddenly becomes 110 million hours of delay a year. That comes to about 60,000 average working years or £2.4 billion of lost productivity a year.

Tube delays cost nearly eight times as much as road delays: they cost more than the entire revenues of the tube network. The tube costs twice as much as it earns. Of course this "cost of" calculation shows why all such "cost of" calculations are pure meadow mayonnaise. An accountant would promptly conclude that we would be better off closing down the tube. And everyone else would rightly conclude that we would be better off closing down accountants.

The real cost of tube delays are not financial. They are the cost of the Count's sanity while waiting for yet another mythical tube train to go in a faintly useful direction.

The only real solution is to dump the tube and hire a kangaroo instead.