We will all be losers if this winter is blighted by widespread strikes

‘You don’t win a strike,’ Paddy Cardiff used to say. ‘When it’s over, you try to recover from it’, writes, Fergus Finlay.

ISN’T winning-and-losing strange? Sometimes, you have to see it in action to be sure about what happened. For example, I stayed up to watch Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, last week, in the US presidential debate. Bleary as I was at the end of it, I wasn’t sure who had won.

But I was certain who had lost. Again and again, throughout the debate, Trump ‘shot himself in the foot’. By the end, he could barely stand, because he had shot most of his two feet away. He was rude and blustering; he walked (actually charged) into every rhetorical trap she laid for him; he gave her endless opportunities to score direct hits.