The EU’s top court has backed a British window salesman in a bombshell ruling over unpaid holiday during 13 years of employment. The judgment has been described as a “game-changer” for gig-economy workers and a reminder of the “impending disaster” that Brexit will be for employment rights.

Conley King worked was a self-employed worker for a sash window firm from 1999 until he retired in 2012 and had never been paid for annual leave during that time.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled on Wednesday that he was entitled to payment for the time off as well as any leave that he had not taken. Judges added that the right to paid holiday was a “particularly important principle of EU social law”.

European law overrides national provisions on the issue of how long a worker can carry over or accumulate annual leave when an employer has refused to pay, the court ruled.

The Court of Appeal had asked the CJEU whether there was a time limit for Mr King to claim the payment. The EU court decided there wasn’t – a decision which lawyers say could lead to other similar cases being brought.

“An employer that does not allow a worker to exercise his right to paid annual leave must bear the consequences,” the court ruled.

“Furthermore, it is for the employer to seek all information regarding his obligations in regard to paid annual leave.

Dr. Jason Moyer-Lee, general secretary of the IWGB union said: “Today’s bombshell judgement from the The Court of Justice of the European Union is a game changer for the so-called ‘gig economy’. 

“The law is now recognising the massive unpaid debt of ‘gig economy’ companies to their workers and IWGB members will be coming to collect.”

Today’s judgment is also a striking reminder of the impending disaster that is Brexit for worker rights.”

The CJEU also found that a worker must be aware their leave will be paid if they are to “fully benefit” from that leave.

In addition, the uncertainty over their rights could dissuade a worker from taking holiday in the first place, it said.

The case will return to the Court of Appeal.

Recall how Brexiteers said this was all going to be easy. The EU would be falling over itself to give Britain everything it wanted. They would prove to the nation that you can have your cake and eat it. There would be no multi billion pound divorce bill. 

With a deal offing that could see Britain paying as much as €50bn (££44bn), a truly staggering sum of money, it all looks rather different now.  

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: As I wrote last week, paying up is a sensible step on the part of the Government if it leads to a trading arrangements that limit the damage Brexit will inflict, is already inflicting, on the nation’s battered economy. 

The more sensible ministers in the Government know this. It is why Britain blinked first. It is we are the party giving ground and the reason that a sum of a similar quantum to what it took to bail out Royal Bank of Scotland will be handed over. 

Compared to chaotically crashing out without any deal it will be worth every last euro cent. 

The markets are in accord. Our bombed out currency has jumped against almost every other one that you’d care to mention. 

We’re all a teeny bit richer this morning, our purchasing power is a teeny bit higher, the world’s view on our economic prospects is a smidgeon less gloomy, the chance of protecting some of the £70bn plus a year Britain’s financial services industry contributes in tax is a little bit higher. Huzzah. 

This optimism, even if it is only very muted optimism, is understandable. It hints that the increasingly loud cries from businesses, and others, that we’ve heard in recent weeks, the calls to sort the mess out, might have had an impact, might just have found a way through the wax clogging up ministers’ ears.

The jihaadis demanding we sail into the Atlantic with a course charted for the economic arctic have lost this one. 

But thorny, and perhaps intractable issues remain. The UK’s arctic cruise has been temporarily averted, but the tickets are still valid. The ship is ready to leave port.  

If sense has prevailed it’s only the sort of sense that sees a driver opting to take their foot off the accelerator with a wall looming in front of them in preference to using the brakes. 

It doesn’t appear that Britain has any brakes, despite the increasingly obvious falsehoods peddled by Leave. The NHS getting £350m a week is the most famous of them (it’s actually getting £350m for the entire winter) but no less egregious was the falsehood that future trade deals would be a breeze to sign, or the claim that Britain would become an economic superstar in the blink of an eye. And there were many more like that. 

In response to that people occasionally pop up to suggest a second referendum, arguing that when what Brexit actually means becomes clear; when there is less chance of its true meaning being obscured by lies, democracy demands that people be allowed to make a true choice. The divorce bill agreement, assuming it’s formally signed, only adds weight to that case. Paying makes sense, but staying makes more. 

The chances of it happening, however, remain slim. Something may now be salvaged from the wreck of Brexit, but no one in the City, or anywhere else where jobs are at risk of relocation, should be suspending their overseas house hunting. 

The Conservative commentator who shared Islamophobic tweets by the deputy leader of Britain First with Donald Trump has claimed it is “irrelevant” the inflammatory posts he subsequently circulated to millions of people were misleading.

Ann Coulter, one of only 45 people who the US President follows on Twitter, retweeted a video posted by Jayda Fransen purporting to show “Muslim migrants beating up a Dutch boy on crutches” shortly before Mr Trump shared the clip.

The American leader then thought to have browsed Ms Fransen’s feed before he retweeted two other videos posted by the far-right leader, sparking condemnation for spreading Britain First’s extremist ideology to a global audience.

Dutch authorities later confirmed the supposed “Muslim migrant” shown attacking a victim on crutches had in fact been born and raised in the Netherlands, while the other two videos the President retweeted were also shorn of important context.

But Ms Coulter said it was “supremely irrelevant” if the clips did not show what they were claimed to.

“It’s a difference without a distinction,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today. “This business about, ‘Oh they were born here.’ Yeah, from migrant parents who came in the 80s. Anybody can look at the video and see this is a Middle Easterner. 

“I think it could not be more supremely irrelevant [whether the attacker was born in the Netherlands.] The issue is all of these Middle Easterners and Muslims being brought in. To pretend like there’s no difference between a tenth generation Dutch person and a migrant or the child of a migrant is preposterous.”

Asked if she knew she was sharing post by a far-right extremist, Ms Coulter added: “No… I don’t think it really matters. It’s a video. A video is a video.”

Liu Yifei has been picked by Disney to play Mulan in its upcoming live action remake of its 1998 hit animated film focused on a young girl who excels in a masculine military world that is dismissive women who want to join its ranks.

Liu, who is also known by the name of Crystal Liu, was chosen after a massive search by the movie house to find an actress who could portray the young woman, and for an actress who possesses the necessary skills to shine in a film with plenty of action.

The Chinese actress is no stranger to the martial arts that will be needed for her in her new role for Disney, as she has been in films with some of the entertainment industry’s greatest martial artists in the past.

That includes having played a part in the film The Forbidden Kingdom, alongside stars like Jackie Chan and Jet Li.

The actress, in addition to obviously having those martial arts chops, is known in China for her acting abilities as well, and has won awards there for films beloved in the country.

The new Mulan movie won’t be out for over a year, however, and has a rough premier date set for sometime in 2019. News of the film, while cherished by die-hard fans of the animated classic, generated at least some controversy after it was announced that the live-action film would not include singing as had the cartoon version.

The film will be directed by Niki Caro, who is so-far known for his work on the movie Whale Rider.

The new Mulan will be the latest live-action remake that Disney has undertaken, after its reboot of Beauty and The Beast, which cast Emma Watson in the lead role.

This week, Morgan Stanley claimed that “Corbyn would be more of a danger to markets than hard Brexit”, something which I saw as supremely ironic.

Because the actions of Morgan Stanley, and others like it, laid the foundations for Leave because of their role in the financial crisis: a crisis of capitalism, which ushered in seven years of austerity, falling wages and insecure work. Precisely the conditions that would encourage the majority of British people to vote against the status quo and opt for Leave.

Morgan Stanley’s role in the financial crisis cannot be understated; and, given describing things as a “danger to markets” appears to be in fashion right now, let’s remind ourselves what they got up to just over a decade ago.

Essentially, they packaged up sub-prime mortgages as something called Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs), got credit ratings agencies – who were entirely conflicted as their clients were the investment banks – to rate these absolute garbage CDOs triple-A investments. Morgan Stanley then misled investors who bought them.

Because they knew what those investments were actually worth, Morgan Stanley’s traders bought what are known as “credit default swaps” on those CDOs – effectively amounting to a bet on it defaulting. You can buy or sell a credit default swap even if you don’t own the investment.

They did this thousands of times.

Howie Hubler was a Morgan Stanley bond trader, responsible for the biggest loss on a single trade in history – totalling $9 billion. His story came to embody the financial misdeeds that led to the crisis of 2008. Howie devised a complex trade where he sold $16 billion worth of credit default swaps on triple-A rated CDOs, which he calculated would offset the $2 billion he also bought in risky mortgages. Because of the opaque nature of the CDOs, Hubler was unaware of the extent to which the investments they were insuring contained similarly risky subprime mortgages to the bonds they were betting would default.

When the financial crisis hit as the house of cards came tumbling down, Morgan Stanley lost $58 billion overall. For his role in it, Hubler was given the option to resign instead of being sacked, and was awarded tens of millions of dollars in backdated pay. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley were effectively insolvent, needing a bail-out of $107 billion from the Federal Reserve. Virtually interest free, by the way.

They were fined just $3.2 billion for misleading investors, despite their role in bringing the global economy to its knees.

But the right-wing press, which gleefully reported on this Corbyn/Brexit warning, clearly has a short memory about what really happened. After all, the lie that Labour caused the financial crisis, and not investment banks like Morgan Stanley, was a convenient pretext for maintaining the economic status quo while cutting to public spending.

This forced ordinary working people to pay for a financial crisis they did not cause. It’s little wonder that people voted Leave having been totally shafted by the system. But the opportunity to do so only arose because the narrative that “Labour crashed the economy” helped secure David Cameron a majority in 2015 on a manifesto that promised a referendum.

Earlier this week Morgan Stanley warned that a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn would see spending priorities “shift in favour of low-income households and the public sector, and away from outsourcers and defence companies.”

That sounds like a good idea to me. So does providing the major boost to investment that business groups like the CBI and the FSB have called for. Much better ideas than, for example, getting so carried away with greed that you cause a global recession. But if Labour need any advice on how to do that, they’ll know who to ask.

In the style of Keith Moon offering interior design tips to would-be hoteliers, the Government has published its plan for the post-Brexit economy, and it has not disappointed.

Theresa May has again lifted the lid on her fabled “industrial strategy”, once received as a wise idea by a credible and popular Prime Minister – 17 months and several lifetimes ago. Harsh judges may have pointed out at the time that other comparable countries to the UK had already had one for years, and had not required, say, exiting the European Union to produce it, but that’s by the by.

An industrial strategy might seem a confusing notion, but careful planning of a country’s business strategy, instead of leaving everything up to free markets, should in the 21st century yield distinct advantages.

For example, if a government has a big announcement to make about its industrial strategy that it wishes people to notice, it is able to plan in advance so as not to make that announcement in perfect synchronicity with news of a royal engagement.

It can also plan to send out the Business Secretary Greg Clark on the morning TV shows to talk about it. Though what it evidently cannot do is prevent him getting bogged down in refusing to tell Piers Morgan whether or not his own name is Greg Clark.

It falls to me then, to deliver the key messages, and they are thus. Britain’s industrial strategy will focus on “five core areas” and these are: “ideas, people, infrastructure, business environment and places.”

To the uninitiated, this might seem a little like launching a Big Mac Meal strategy that focuses on the “three core areas” of Big Mac, fries and a soft drink.

Indeed you may be racking your brains to conceive not merely of any kind of business, but absolutely anything at all, real or imagined, dead or alive, that does not fall within the realm of ideas, people, infrastructure, business environment and places. You may be wondering whether what Greg Clark has launched is not an industrial strategy but in fact an Animal, Vegetable or Mineral reboot for the corporate-speak era.

But that, I’m afraid, would make you a cynic. Because the industrial strategy white paper comes at you simultaneously with news of not one, but two large pharmaceutical direct investments in the Global Britain™. A large German company, Merck, and an even larger American one, MSD, have both announced plans for big centres in the UK, more than £1bn of investment. Yes, this has all happened, as they say, #despiteBrexit, and that is to be welcomed.

No one of course, absolutely no one, is seriously suggesting it has happened because of Brexit, but these non-defeats are what passes for victory in the Take Back Control-era.

It is becoming clearer that this long window between the referendum and its consequences will come to be seen as the high banter era of Brexit. When we almost laughed at the mind-bending complexity of it all, of how it could never be done, and yet we pushed on trying to do it anyway, rather than do at least the less stressful thing and just wait for it all to go wrong.

Not many people come to share stories of the final moments on stricken aircraft, but I suspect that while some passengers stampede screaming up and down the aisles, others simply sit there, in calm resignation of their fate.

All weekend and again on Monday, arguments raged about the Irish border. If only there were a metaphor for seeking to resolve a hard border problem by driving at high speed into a brick wall.

Yet again, the EU does not believe “sufficient progress” has been made on the border issue. There are so many times, in such a limited timeframe, that “sufficient progress” cannot be made.

Only so many times, when one side of the table is determined to play rummy and the other whist, that one or the other can throw the cards in the air and storm off. 

Why concern oneself with the intractability of the problem – of Dublin determined not to see a hard border return to Ireland, but the UK seeking a path of regulatory divergence that all but demands it (and that’s before it came to be propped up by a small, weird Northern Irish party that is even more into hard Brexit than it is)? Just wait for it all to go wrong.

The American statistician Nate Silver, who was widely ridiculed last year for insisting Donald Trump still carried a chance of electoral victory, became famous for his methodological innovation of deciding on the probability of various outcomes then running simulations of them thousands of times.

Now I am no statistician, but chuck all the currently available information from the last 19 months on the likelihood of Brexit not going utterly, hideously wrong, the scale of the challenge, the amount of goodwill around, the calibre of the people involved, that sort of thing. Run the program 10,000 times, and see how many catastrophes you end up with.

A very large, round number, somewhere above 9,999, cannot be ruled out.

What the country needs, at this impossibly challenging time, is not so much an industrial strategy but a coping one.

One bitcoin is now worth more than $11,000 (£8,180) after the digital currency’s value soared more than tenfold this year. In the last three days, alone bitcoin has gained more than a quarter in value.

That’s far more than most investments return in a year, causing many to ask how they can get in on the action and others to suggest it’s a dangerous bubble waiting to burst.

So what exactly is bitcoin and why is it attracting so much attention?

What is bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009 by a mysterious figure using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. It can be used to buy or sell items from people and companies that accept bitcoin as payment, but it differs in several key ways from traditional currencies.

Most obviously, bitcoin doesn’t exist as a physical currency. There are no actual coins or notes. It exists only online. 

“Real-world” currencies, like the dollar, are managed by a central bank such as the US Federal Reserve or the Bank of England, which manage the money supply to keep prices steady. They can print more money or withdraw some from circulation if they think it’s needed, as well as using other monetary policy controls such as adjusting interest rates. 

Bitcoin has no central bank and isn’t linked to or regulated by any state. The supply of the cryptocurrency is decentralised – it can only be increased by a process known as “mining”. For each bitcoin transaction, a computer owned by a bitcoin “miner” must solve a difficult mathematical problem. The miner then receives a fraction of a bitcoin as a reward. The use of problem-solving in this way is the reason bitcoin is known as a cryptocurrency.

A record of each transaction, using anonymised strings of numbers to identify it, is stored on a huge public ledger known as a blockchain. This acts to ensure the integrity of the currency.

“The system can act as a payment network that has no down time, it’s operating 24/7, it doesn’t care where and to whom you send money,” says Michael Rauchs, a cryptocurrency and blockchain expert at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. 

Why is bitcoin’s value soaring?

Like all assets or currencies, bitcoin’s price is determined by the amount that people are willing to pay for it. Whether that is the “right” valuation, and whether bitcoin is truly worth that amount or not, is largely down to opinion.

JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon recently labelled bitcoin a fraud, and said its astronomic rise in value is a text-book financial bubble comparable to the Dutch “tulip mania” of the 17th century, which saw speculators push up the price of one bulb to ten times the annual salary of a skilled worker – before quickly losing almost all of that value.

Speculation has fuelled bitcoin’s rapid ascent in recent weeks, Rauchs says, but there have been signs that the cryptocurrency is moving from the fringes of the internet to the mainstream. He points to more than 100 hedge funds specialising in cryptocurrencies that have started recently, triggering the current price surge. 

CME Group, which owns the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where trillions of dollars of derivatives contracts for global commodities are traded each year, has said it wants to offer bitcoin futures by the end of the year. Some analysts say this is a sign that bigger financial players could be ready to enter the market.

The number of people using the cryptocurrency has also risen from around three to six million in April, to between 10 and 20 million people now, although exact figures are very difficult to establish, Rauchs says.

 

Can I still make money out of bitcoin?

It’s impossible to say with any certainty, but anyone investing in bitcoin should be aware that it’s a risky thing to trade. 

Bitcoin slumped from $1,150 to below $500 in late 2013, after widespread media coverage prompted many people to buy it for the first time, fuelling a bubble that then burst. Bitcoin didn’t pass its previous high for almost four years. 

However, if the cryptocurrency was to move into the mainstream and become a recognised medium of exchange around the world, its value would likely increase dramatically. But that scenario is far from being a certainty.

Regulators are not particularly concerned by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like ethereum at present. Bank of England Deputy Governor John Cunliffe has said bitcoin is not big enough to pose a threat to the global economy. But if they saw bitcoin as unsafe and began to crack down on it, this could hurt its value. 

Where can you spend Bitcoin?

The number of companies accepting bitcoin payments is growing rapidly. Microsoft and travel website Expedia both take bitcoin, and Icelandic singer Bjork is also accepting bitcoin payments for her latest album. Retailers in Japan can now accept bitcoin payments thanks to a new law passed this year, and small businesses can accept bitcoin payments through simple plugins that add to WordPress websites.

The currency has also found favour in countries experiencing political turmoil like Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

What is Bitcoin’s connection to the dark web?

Bitcoin has a reputation for being used by criminals, particularly people selling drugs on the dark web. On marketplaces such as the now-defunct Silk Road and its more modern imitators, cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have been the only method of payment, largely because they are theoretically untraceable.

Transactions can be tracked, giving a higher level of security than handing over money to the average street dealer, but identities (generally) can’t. Bitcoin is still used to buy drugs online, but its use has spread far beyond that.

Could bitcoin’s rapid rise be a bubble?

Hundreds of articles speculating on how high bitcoin could go now seem to be published each week. Hedge fund manager Mike Novogratz told CNBC it could quadruple to $40,000 by the end of 2018. A piece on the investing website Motley Fool in May questioned whether it could go to $1m.

But according to Rauchs, the current frenzy is bitcoin’s fifth bubble. “After all of the previous four it crashed and remained low for some time before bouncing back,” he says.

“It has been going crazy over the last 10 to 12 days, and that is not backed by any fundamentals. It’s really a self-fulfilling prophecy, driven by fear of missing out.”

This is partly down to the economic environment, Rauchs says. “We’ve had low or even negative interest rates for some time and stock and bond markets are already at all-time highs, while bitcoin is giving these incredible returns.”

Despite this, Rauchs still believes the outlook for bitcoin and blockchain technology is strong. “I would put it in the same category of revolutionary new technologies like the internet,” he says. 

“These world-changing systems tend to be accompanied by bubbles in their early stages. What’s happening now is completely normal.”

Consumer confidence has dipped again this month, hitting its lowest level since the aftermath of the June 2016 Brexit vote and underlining the fragility of the household sector as a driver of GDP growth.

The GfK Index came in at -12 in November, down from -10 in October.

There was a big drop in the index in the immediate wake of the referendum but it bounced back rapidly as the political scene stabilised.

However, the index has been on a broadly declining trend since September 2016, as inflation, stemming from the record slump in sterling on the night of the vote, has bitten into real wages.

“The confidence trajectory is unquestionably negative and sadly no amount of tinsel or baubles will change it. We need some big, positive economic good tidings to reverse this downwards trend,” said Joe Staton, the head of market dynamics at GfK.

Weakest since Brexit vote

All five of the measures that make up the headline index fell in the month, with the largest decline coming in the “major purchase index”.

Earlier this month a separate consumer confidence index produced by YouGov and the Centre for Economics and Business Research sank to 106.6 in November, down sharply from 109.3 in October, also the lowest since the Brexit vote.

Household spending has largely driven UK economic growth since the Brexit vote, but analysts expect consumers to slow spending as inflation continues to bite into their real incomes.

The latest data from the Bank of England, which raised interest rates for the first time in a decade this month, shows a slowdown in the relatively high rate of consumer-borrowing growth in recent months.

However, some retails sales indicators have held up. 

Accountancy firm BDO reported last month that its High Street Sales Tracker found overall like-for-like store sales rose by an annual 2.9 per cent in September, adding to a smaller rise in August.

And the CBI’s Distributive Trades Survey in November showed 39 per cent of respondents reported sales volumes up on the same time last year.

Families of Native American war veterans and politicians from both major US parties have criticised Donald Trump for using a White House event honouring Navajo Code Talkers to take a political jab at a Democratic senator he has nicknamed “Pocahontas”.

The US leader turned to the name he often deployed for Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren during the 2016 presidential campaign to mock her claims about being part Native American.

He told the three Navajo Code Talkers on stage that he had affection for them that he doesn’t have for her.

“It was uncalled for,” said Marty Thompson, whose great-uncle was a Navajo Code Talker. “He can say what he wants when he’s out doing his presidential business among his people, but when it comes to honouring veterans or any kind of people, he needs to grow up and quit saying things like that.”

Pocahontas is well-known as a Disney princess, but less so for the sacrifices she made to save her people from British forces in the 1600s in present-day Virginia, descendants of her tribal community say.

Whether Mr Trump’s remark constitutes a racial slur depends on who you ask, but most critics agree it was inappropriate.

Ms Warren said Mr Trump’s repeated references to her as “Pocahontas” will not keep her from speaking out.

“Now he seems to think that that’s somehow going to shut me up.” she said.

She added: “He’s wrong. It’s not going to make any difference.” 

All he “had to do was make it through the ceremony,” she said. “But that wasn’t possible for Donald Trump. He had to throw in a racial slur.”

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that she didn’t believe the remark was a racial slur and that “was certainly not the president’s intent.”

Mr Trump made the comment as he stood near a portrait of President Andrew Jackson, which he hung in the Oval Office in January. He is known to admire Jackson’s populism, although he is an unpopular figure in Indian Country because he oversaw the forced removal of American Indians from their southern homelands.

The Navajo Nation suggested Mr Trump’s remark was an example of “cultural insensitivity,” and they resolved to stay out of the “ongoing feud between the senator and President Trump.”

Its president Russell Begaye said in a statement that “all tribal nations still battle insensitive references to our people.”

He added: “The prejudice that Native American people face is an unfortunate historical legacy.”

Still, Mr Begaye and relatives of Navajo Code Talkers said they’re honoured the story of the men recruited from the vast Southwest reservation to become Marines could be told on a national stage. Peter MacDonald, a former Navajo chairman and trained Code Talker, who stood beside Mr Trump, also took the opportunity to ask for support for a Navajo Code Talker museum. Mr Trump obliged.

Michael Smith, a Marine whose father was a Code Talker, said most of the Code Talkers would be sceptical about going to the White House because it could be construed to mean they support a political cause.

“So, why did they go? Why were they there? He’s putting them in the Oval Office to say ‘You did a good job, and say hi to Pocahontas?”’ Smith said. “They should be taken care of as heroes, not as pawns.”

Michael Nez, whose father helped develop the code based on the Navajo language, said his father would have been upset to hear Mr Trump’s “Pocahontas” comment. But, as other Code Talker relatives said, his father was taught to respect the president as the commander in chief.

“It’s too bad he does put his foot in his mouth,” Mr Nez said. “Why he does it? I don’t know.”

The president has long feuded with Warren, an outspoken Wall Street critic who levelled blistering attacks on Trump during the campaign. Trump seized on questions about Warren’s heritage, which surfaced during her 2012 Senate race challenging incumbent Republican Senator Scott Brown.

Ms Warren says her parents told her of the Native American connection and she listed herself with that heritage in law school directories to meet others with similar backgrounds.

“Our nation owes a debt of gratitude to the Navajo Code Talkers, whose bravery, skill & tenacity helped secure our decisive victory over tyranny & oppression during WWII,” Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, tweeted. “Politicizing these genuine American heroes is an insult to their sacrifice.”

It is a puzzle that the Prime Minister is making a second visit to Saudi Arabia. Of course Theresa May will have received a friendly welcome as the leader of the sixth largest economy in the world, which in addition is a permanent member of the UN Security Council. It also presumably still counts that the UK is a member of the European Union, though Brexit will soon cancel out that advantage.

There is a strong public relations flavour to this journey to the Middle East. It is described as part of the Prime Minister’s efforts to strengthen links with other trading partners as Brexit approaches. Or, as I would put it, to help create the myth that a series of bilateral deals with economies outside the European Union will make good what we shall lose by leaving the single market.   

This must be why Theresa May is also visiting Jordan on the same trip. But it is a fool’s errand, for Jordan doesn’t import a lot. We carry on more trade with Belgium and Luxembourg. So the Jordan leg of the Prime Minister’s journey is more or less irrelevant to Britain’s trade prospects post-Brexit.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, however, we have our arms sales, worth more than £3.3bn since the bombing of Yemen began in March 2015. Yet in spite of British complicity in this action, May was expected to raise with her hosts the humanitarian crisis in Yemen that has been the inevitable result.

It beats me how she can do this with a straight face. What could she have said in her meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman today? “Oh, I forgot to tell you on my last visit that you mustn’t actually use the arms we have sold to you”?

Or, more likely, “Look, while I fully understand that you cannot tolerate Iranian-backed Houthi rebels operating on the other side of your 1,100-mile border with Yemen, I am afraid that the traditional British sympathy for the underdog means that my people strongly disapprove of your actions. So I would appreciate it if you could let it be known that you will at least consider my representations. You will? Oh, I am very grateful.”

There is, however, a much bigger source of embarrassment for a visiting British prime minister. As Jeremy Corbyn put it, the conversation about Islamic extremism should begin with “Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states that have funded and fuelled extremist ideology.” 

While the Saudi government rejects what it calls these false allegations and dismisses them as malicious falsehoods, the circumstantial evidence is pretty convincing.

Here we have to rely on Wikileaks. In 2009, it published diplomatic cables from the US State Department stating: “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources.”

Pointing in the same direction were emails leaked from the office of Hillary Clinton. Her campaign chairman, John Podesta, said: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”  

Then in 2014, the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, accused both Saudi Arabia and Qatar of supporting and funding terrorists: “I accuse them of inciting and encouraging the terrorist movements.” He added: “I accuse them of supporting them politically and in the media, of supporting them with money and by buying weapons for them.”

So I go back to my question: what on earth is Theresa May doing cosying up to the Saudis with two visits so far this year? I hope she doesn’t have ambitions to be some sort of honest broker in the Middle East. For many have tried – and none have succeeded.   

My guess is that she is seeking a large financial investment in the UK. She would think that worth the many embarrassments she must have experienced on her journey.