John Redwood won a free place at Kent College, Canterbury, and graduated from Magdalen College Oxford. He is a Distinguished fellow of All Souls, Oxford. A businessman by background, he has set up an investment management business, was both executive and non executive chairman of a quoted industrial PLC, and chaired a manufacturing company with factories in Birmingham, Chicago, India and China. He is the MP for Wokingham, first elected in 1987.

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The Chancellor’s second package of support marshalled up to £330bn of guaranteed loans for a business sector facing shutdown of many enterprises.

It offered a welcome holiday for all businesses in the worst affected sectors from business rates for a year. It offered small grants to smaller businesses.

This is unlikely to be enough to prevent a wave of job losses from pubs and clubs, hotels and restaurants, from tourist attractions and events. As some of us pointed out in questions to the Chancellor yesterday evening, he needs to come up with a working burden sharing scheme soon that lets businesses with no revenue keep on their workforce waiting for the all clear on the virus.

Businesses cannot be expected to borrow indefinitely to pay the wages when there are no customers. They don’t need loans, they need revenues. Some restaurants will try take away meals. Some hotels will offer their services to the state as temporary hospitals. Many will contemplate closure to cut costs and reduce losses. The government should do what it takes to avoid this.

Some constituents asked me to take up the issue of accidents on smart motorways where a vehicle has come to a halt on the inside lane.

The Transport Secretary responded to general concern and held an inquiry. The investigation showed that smart motorways have lower risks of tailgating, rapid changes of speeds and vehicles drifting off the carriageway which can all create accidents on conventional motorways. However, as we thought there is more risk of collision with a stationary vehicle.

The government will speed up the introduction of stopped vehicle radar detection to give immediate warnings and lane closure signs. They will also put in more stopping places off highway, spaced at not more than 0.75 mile apart or every 45 seconds at 60mph on some new schemes with a maximum of 1 mile separation elsewhere. Additional pull offs will be added to the M25, with consideration of other changes also for the M1 and M6 where there have been incidents.

I try to accept interviews on topics I know something about and have well based or distinctive views on. Usually the media want to offer an interview on a topic where I am not an expert where they think I will have difficulty supporting the position of my party or government so they can create a split which does not yet exist. When I do get an offer that is worth accepting I spend my preparation time not on the topic itself, because I know the subject and know what I wish to say. I spend the time thinking about all the other things the interviewer might wish to deviate to in the hope of ensnaring me.

There are a series of regular ploys.

1. The creation of a caricature. The BBC often claims to know the  views  of the interviewee better than the interviewee knows them himself. When the person  explains their   view to them they counter argue by asserting they  must believe something else because they have invented a caricature of the person as a “right winger” or “left winger”, or “Eurosceptic” or whatever. It makes the interviews foolish, with the BBC setting out their version of the person’s  view and the interviewee  denying it. They then seek to suggest that their version of the view is the real view and so the   interviewee is in someway dishonest to say otherwise.
2. Undermining by false association. The BBC quickly diverts the interview of a politician who is doing well into an interview about the worst or stupidest thing some other member of that person’s party has said or done recently. The interviewee is forced to deny what the person has said or done to avoid contamination. An original interview about an important subject then becomes instead repeated pressure to get the interviewee to set themselves up as the moral arbiter and disciplinarian for their party with questions about whether the person who misspoke should be  sacked, prosecuted etc.
3. Subverting from past quotations. Someone setting out a cogent and appropriate case for current conditions is confronted with something they said or wrote many years before in different circumstances. It may be that the two views are fully compatible because circumstances are different, but precious interview time is lost trying to establish that. It may be that the interviewee has changed their mind owing to new facts and insights. This should not be a crime unless it is one of those cases where a party does do a major U turn in a dishonest or flagrantly political self serving way.
4. Setting the interviewee up against others in his or her party. Someone making a good recommendation or providing informative background to policy may suddenly be faced with a contradictory quote from another senior person in their party, as if this invalidates their position.
5. Quoting so called experts and insisting that because they are experts their opinion is correct and the politicians must be wrong. The politician is never allowed to debate with the experts and will not have advance warning to be able to explain why these particular experts may have flawed judgement or be coming  at the problem from a biased vantage point.
6.  Mistaking fashionable viewpoints in media circles like Remain and a particular version of Green for facts and attempting to shout down or crowd out a politician who has a considered but different opinion.
7. Trying to ascribe base motives to any politician expressing a different view from those deemed acceptable to the BBC. The interviewer alleges motives of personal career advancement or party interest when someone is putting forward their best judgement of what is in the public interest or the interests of their constituents.

Yesterday the Health Secretary explained the government’s approach to the virus, going a long way to cut contacts between people to slow or prevent contagion. The measures mean the effective closure of a huge part of our economy in sport, leisure, culture, hospitality and transport.

There was no complementary statement from the Chancellor explaining how they will help the many businesses that will struggle as a result. Cash flow dries up with no customers. Many employees will be made redundant, and many businesses will fold.

We need the government to help, to prevent large scale loss of good businesses which will result from this policy. Individuals losing their job or their self employed work will need Income support. I asked about the scheme in yesterday’s blog in the Commons and got various MPs to voice the need for some such relief.