At last the good news. Throw out the running shoes, cancel that gym membership and get into a hot bath or sauna! Crucial new research shows that a long hot soak or steaming brings similar benefits to aerobic exercise, without the aches, blisters and expensive running shoes.

The research was by Charles James Steward at Coventry University. He has a hot tub in his lab and invites volunteers to try it, wired up to ultrasound and heart monitors and technological gizmos beyond my understanding. An hour’s soak at 40 degrees produces the equivalent of a moderate jog, without the rain and the rabid dogs chasing you.

Charlie also takes each volunteer’s temperature. The discouragement is that he uses a rectal thermometer.

Apparently, a long-term study of Finland’s sauna goers – there’s almost one sauna per person there, three million in a population of five million, like Scotland but with birch twigs – discovered that four to seven sessions a week produced a 50 per cent reduction in the risk of fatal heart attacks. The same study showed that it also significantly decreased dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

In other studies it was found that four weeks of regular sauna use improved blood pressure, exercise tolerance, fitness levels, and reduced hospital admissions. Daily hot tub therapy for three weeks was also shown to lower blood glucose levels in patients with type 2 diabetes. Phew.

It gets even better. While sitting up to your shoulders in the hot tub (or in sauna) at the constant temperature for 60 minutes is the ideal. A hot bath three times a week where the blood temperature is raised by just 0.6 degrees grows new blood vessels, increases insulin sensitivity (more effective use of blood glucose), and results in improvements in fitness.

Obviously you won’t build up muscle lying in the bath or lounging in the sauna but while you can’t run a marathon from your hot tub the benefits of heat therapy seem indisputable.

Crivvens! Free hot tubs for all on the NHS. It would be cheaper in the long run.

End of peer show

My parliamentary petition to remove former BBC director-general Tony Hall’s peerage has hit the buffers. Hall, Baron Hall of Birkenhead, is the one who absolved Martin Bashir over his Diana interview and later, as director-general, waved through his rehire as religious editor.

The rejection by the petitions team at Westminster points out that “there are limited circumstances in which a member of the House of Lords can be expelled”.

Exactly. An act was passed in 2015 which allowed, for the first time in history, expulsion from the unelected chamber.

Prior to that members could only be suspended for non-attendance, or serving more than a one-year prison sentence, which was the only way to deal with the duffers then.

No peer has been expelled. The nearest to it was in July 2015 when Lord John Sewel, a former Labour councillor in Aberdeen, resigned after he was filmed by The Sun on Sunday allegedly snorting cocaine in his London flat while entertaining prostitutes. At least they weren’t flagellating him like the late Max Mosely.

Hall has resigned as chair of the National Gallery but he’s still able to turn up and collect his £305 a day and vote on legislation. On Thursday, the North Antrim DUP Ian Paisley asked Commons Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg whether there was a mechanism that could be used to remove Lord Hall’s title and privileges following the scandal.

In his response, Rees-Mogg said such mechanisms could be used but “they are at the highest end of our constitutional activity for the most serious misdemeanours”.

So that’s it. Lord Hall can keep his ermine. His reputation has long gone of course.

Friends no more

The one where I click the off switch. I didn’t watch Friends Reunited. I would only watch Friends in chains with my eyes glued open. A bunch of actors squeezing another buck out of a franchise is unseemly, if common. The original was hackneyed, the characters were caricatures, the fake laughter was toe-curling, the bleached New York portrayed was like something out of a white eugenicist’s dream. But most of all it wasn’t funny.

MacNamara ban

In a range of towering peaks of revelation and vituperation in Dominic Cummings’s parliamentary testimony, the Everest was surely recounting senior civil servant Helen MacNamara’s reaction when she discovered that there was neither a “Plan B” on dealing with the pandemic nor a “Plan A”, nor indeed any cunning plan at all.

As Cummings described it: “Helen MacNamara said I have come here to the Prime Minister’s office to tell you all I think we are absolutely f*****. I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people. As soon as I have been told this I have come through to see you.”

MacNamara and Cummings were not close. As Deputy Cabinet Secretary, as well as the propriety and ethics enforcer, she had butted heads with Cummings over his treatment of civil servants. She also headed the inquiry into the allegations of bullying against Home Secretary Priti Patel and swerved Patel’s demand for a formal inquiry into who leaked the story to the media.

Patel was “convicted” of breaking the ministerial code but Boris Johnson rejected the verdict. As a result, his standards adviser Sir Alex Allan resigned last November.

In January of this year, after leaks that she was to be moved sideways, she resigned. She is now number two at the Premier League, where she has stepped into another nest of hornets. She has neither confirmed nor denied Cummings’s account. You can make of that what you want.

Grand tour

The Giro D’Italia finishes today. Arguably it’s an even harder race than the Tour de France but certainly the two are among the toughest sporting events in the world. The live Giro TV coverage doesn’t just show the interaction between teams and individual riders, the spills, the hair-raising descents after almost perpendicular ascents, but also the magnificent and breathtaking Italian scenery. It’s like a prolonged tourism promo, although it’s unfortunate that the take-up will be low because of the pandemic restrictions.

Why can’t we do it here, a Tour de Scotland, showing off our own scenery and attracting thousands of tourists and spectators? Imagine the break or the peloton going up the Bealach-Na-Ba – 9.1kms, 20% at its steepest – one of the most beautiful routes in the world, before swooping down into Applecross? Or taking on Skye and the Cuillins? It’s not as if it’s a weather-dependent event. On two or three stages of the Giro some of the weather was so bad the cameras conked out and they also had to reschedule routes.

Mairi Gougeon was appointed Tourism minister this month, and Maree Todd put in charge of sport. If they want me to plot the route I’m here.