Chelsea Tractor RIP

Our Chancellor will shortly announce a brilliant new way of making us a bit more environmentally friendly - take more money from people with big cars.

Here's the story, which explains how, in a dazzlingly unpredictable piece of carbon-reducing ingenuity, road tax will go up to - wait for it - a bankrupting £400 for 4x4 owners.

And if that doesn't get footballers and drug dealers into Smart cars, I don't know what will. Well done Gordon.

Elise S: £23,995. Freedom Of Speech: Priceless.

I was recently sent to Lotus's manufacturing plant in Hethel by a newspaper to drive the Elise S, this very one, in fact. It was a slightly strange assignment because the car was released about six months ago, making it prehistoric in review terms, but I'd never driven one and was keen to see the factory too, so I went. Not that I was in a position to refuse, and in any event I knew about a couple of things Lotus were doing that could prove interesting.

The most intriguing thing was their involvement in a car called the Tesla Roadster, a blindingly quick yet environmentally sound electric supercar, funded by the man who set up PayPal, apparently. So given that green is the new black, and that very little is known about the Tesla, I thought I could possibly have a scoop.

I spent the day in Hethel, which is near Norwich if you're interested, in the company of a handful of charming people, one of whom was Lotus's PR Director, who kindly agreed to sit down with me for nearly an hour answering questions. The thing was, I was only able to ask him a few things in that time because, as it turned out, he'd written the book on media management in interview situations. He even said "blue sky thinking" once, and he categorically would not give me anything useful on the Tesla, apart from to confirm they were working on it, which everybody knows.

Immediately after we'd finished I went out for a few laps on the Lotus circuit and, to my glee, on the way to the car I spotted a Tesla test mule parked up and wearing temporary plates. I promptly whipped out my camera and got the scoop, all the while under the nonchalant watch of the engineer who was taking me out to the track. He didn't seem bothered at all, and the thought even crossed my mind that they'd left it there deliberately for me.

When I returned to the newspaper the Features Editor seemed pleased with the photos, and the subsequent story would be focussed on Lotus's work in the environmental field rather than the drive in the Elise. The nice PR man delivered on his promise and hooked me up with an engine development engineer the next day, who called me and spoke at length about Lotus's environmental pioneering and such like. I didn't understand most of it, and my tape recorder only picked up the first two seconds, but it was genuinely fascinating and useful so I remembered enough avoid embarrassment. I wrote the piece, it was published, job done.

About a week later I got a voicemail from Mr PR. He wasn't happy. He was perfectly pleasant, but in an 'I'm just really disappointed with you' sort of way; the most disarming kind of criticism. If someone screams at you, you can scream back, but when they're just disappointed all you can do is apologise. I haven't, though. Yet.

The funny thing was, although my instinct was to instantly call back and ask for forgiveness, I actually began to feel quite proud of myself. See, Mr PR's disappointment had stemmed from the fact that I was invited to do one fairly journalistically redundant thing, drive an Elise, but I got there and found something much more interesting, and wrote about that instead. It seems to me that journalists are supposed to do that sort of thing, otherwise we're in a situation that liberals and punk rockers don't like - censorship. That's right.

So not only did I get my first little motoring scoop, I also won a small victory for global democracy and freedom of speech, and you really can't put a price on that.

Now, I wonder if PR people prefer flowers or chocolates?

Harder To Breathe

Someone told me that about 90% of a journalist's time is spent re-writing press releases, and judging by my recent stint at a certain respectable national tabloid, I can confirm that the other 10% is shared between bitching and worrying about getting sacked. If you keep that first statistic in mind when reading news stories you'll begin to realise it's probably true, perfectly exemplified by this story, a horrendous piece of recycled non-news telling us yet more ways, surprise surprise, to save our dying planet.

Is anyone else is sick to death of hearing about carbon emissions? And does anyone really believe that inflating their tyres and emptying crisp packets out of their glove box will prevent the imminent ice age?

I've got an idea. Maybe we could all hold our breath for six seconds in every minute. That would reduce our personal CO2 emissions by 10%, which means we could all drive whatever the heck we wanted, and in magnificent squalor too, if we so desired.

I'm a bit worried though, because it won't be too long before some government think-tank (like a fish tank, but with more emissions) realises that it's our selfish need to turn oxygen into carbon dioxide that's making it hot in summer, so the problem will be solved in the only way New Labour knows how: Breathing Tax

Those who choose to breathe air in town and city centres between 07:00 and 18:00 will be charged on a sliding scale dependent upon lung capacity. People living inside the breathing zone will get a small discount, as will those who spend five minutes in the hour breathing into a government-issue paper bag, called the 'carbhilator'.

"Breathing Tax is a way of ensuring the planet will still be here for our children and our children's children," says Gordon Brown, speaking from his newly acquired grace-and-favour yacht in Monaco. "This is not just another way of pilfering more money from people who can afford it, but a genuinely forward-thinking initiative aimed at curbing the selfish conspicuous consumption of our generation," he adds, before setting sail for Canada to do a bit of Lumberjacking.

Recycling: The possibilities are endless.