Larry’s Diary, Week Two Hundred and Fifty-Four

Monday

Good morning from your favourite cat reporter and chief mouser. Well, it rained again yesterday, just as forecast, but it was a ‘Gray’ day for another reason here at No. 10. Don’t believe what you read that Sue Gray ‘resigned.’ Technically she did, but not before she got a huge shove by Legohead. The word I hear is that Legohead got so many complaints from MPs and ministers about her that she just had to go. I see she has been moved into a non-job on less money. I wonder how long it will take for her to find a job in ‘industry’ and finally resign properly?

The big news this morning is that Reform have written to the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper Balls, demanding a statement from the CPS on the Manchester Airport attack by two Muslims on four police officers and breaking a woman police officer’s nose. If they don’t get a response quickly they say they will crowd-fund a private criminal prosecution. I suspect a lot of my readers will support them. The CPS has obviously been hanging on hoping the police complaints system will find against one or two of the officers involved, in the hope that they can quietly drop the case. The two men, who were in the process of being arrested when they kicked off, initially put out an edited video showing one being kicked by an officer and later held a press conference where they claimed to have done nothing wrong and had been targeted because of their religion. Then a second video emerged where the run-up to the first video showed what had really happened. But the CPS/police seem to be more interested in finding out who leaked the second video than charging anyone.

I hear that 847 Naval Air Squadron is currently out in the desert of California at Naval Air Facility El Centro, California which is about 100 miles from San Diego. Their AH1 Wildcat helicopters normally support the Royal Marines so I suppose 847 Squadron must practice in operating in lots of different conditions, but they would normally be lifting the troops from ship to shore. So is operating in the desert with snakes and scorpions really necessary? This is a follow-up to a recent exercise in the Arctic to show them the extremes they might have to operate under. I hope that all had the proper clothing issued to them.

I also hear that Robber Reeves is doing exactly what I jokingly suggested she was doing last week; she is redrafting parts of her budget. It seems that the Treasury has warned her that some of her plans to raise money with do the exact opposite and lower the tax take. The main culprits are VAT on school fees, tax on non-doms and increasing tax on the higher earners. These were three of the main planks of Liebore’s ‘fully costed’ manifesto and their spending plans were very much dependent on them. This government is proving to be a nightmare.

Speaking of Robber Reeves, I see she must have been reading my diary where I said her hairstyle made her look like Richard III. Have you noticed she has had a red tint added to her hair to try to make it look different? Why is it that so many left-wing girls and women go for brightly coloured unnatural hair colours like blue, red and green? I could have understood if she had gone blonde or brunette or even ginger, but red!

The Royal New Zealand Navy has just lost its first ship since World War 2. RNZN Manawanui, a specialist dive and hydrographic vessel hit a reef off the coast of Samoa, caught fire and sank with 75 crew and civilian scientists on board. Fortunately, everyone on board was saved, but there is a considerable fuel oil spill. I will refrain from commenting on the fact that the ship’s captain was a woman. However, I will say that the events are being investigated and that the loss of a naval ship nearly always results in a court martial of the ship’s captain.

Following the Ukrainian drone and rocket attacks on several ammunition and missile stores deep in Russia, this morning Ukraine has hit the largest oil terminal off the coast of the occupied Crimean peninsula. The Feodosia terminal is on fire and according to a statement from Crimean officials no one has been hurt but 300 people have been evacuated. Officials have not yet admitted that the fire was caused by Ukrainian action but Ukraine announced the attack before the Russians mentioned the fire. Last week Ukraine announced that a new long-range Ukrainian-developed ballistic missile has passed flight tests. But this attack is well within the range of StormShadow or ATACMS missiles, and as their rules for use were obeyed, I doubt the new missile was used.

Tuesday

Hi folks, damp overnight, but the sun’s out now with rain forecast later. So, I popped out into the street to watch the shower arriving for this morning’s cabinet meeting. I hear I was on TV again. I wonder if the meeting will discuss the latest opinion poll that is out this morning which says that the Liebore lead is down to 1% over the Tories. That’s well within the bounds of polling error.

The October cruise ship building report is out and it reveals that there is currently a 66-ship, 171,234-berth order book for deliveries as far ahead as 2036 at a total cost of $56.5 billion. There are still two ships still to be delivered this calendar year, the Disney Treasure and Viking Vela, and there are 15 ships due for delivery next year. Of course, many of those new ships won’t be used to expand fleets, many will replace existing old ships that will filter down to lessor operators replacing very old ships. The major thing is that the new ships tend to be either very big or smallish luxury ‘expedition’ ships that can get into the small less-visited ports. The medium size ships seem to be disappearing from the trade.

I read an online blurb from Aer Lingus saying they were now offering flights from Southampton to Nashville, Tennessee. My first thought was I can’t see many people in the Southampton catchment area wanting to fly to Nashville. But reading on a bit, what they are really pushing is a new service from Dublin to Nashville and a service from Southampton to Dublin which they say will connect to the Nashville service. I rather doubt they will be selling very many return tickets from Southampton to Nashville.

The U.K. currently has more illegals at over 750,000 than any other country in Europe. This includes boat people, overstayers and failed asylum seekers and amounts to 1 in 100 people in the country. Last Saturday another 973 people were added to the list as they came over the Channel in 17 boats, a record number on a single day. Why do they come here? Could it just be they see us as a soft touch where they will be given accommodation, three meals a day and an allowance for fags etc. which is far better than living in a tent in France? All this costs very nearly the same amount a year as the savings made by stopping the Winter Fuel Allowance. I would set up tented camps for them on a remote Scottishland island. OK feed them three times a day with simple cheap food like a bowl of porridge for breakfast and stew for dinner. If they don’t like it we will fly them home. That will act as a deterrent and I bet the numbers crossing the Channel will soon dry up.

I read that Saudi Arabian airline Flyadeal is looking to add a considerable number of widebody aircraft to its fleet by placing an order by the end of this year. Their choice is apparently between the Airbus A330 and the Boeing 787. Their parent company Saudia operates the Boeing 787 so the order could go that way, but they already operate one A330, and 35 A320 family planes. Because of the compatibility between the A320 and A330 cockpits it only takes a week or so to retrain a pilot. Flyadeal has already said it expects to expand its fleet to 88 planes in four years, so I reckon the order will go to Airbus as Boeing won’t be able to meet that timetable.

Word reaches me that Sad Dick is pushing Legohead to fund the replacement of the Tube trains operating on the Bakerloo Line. These trains are over 50 years old and really do need replacing, but poor old Sad Dick can’t afford it. The idea is that the trains would be a follow-on order to Siemens who are building most of the new Piccadilly line trains from its train factory in Goole, Yorkshire. It would all lead to people having great employment prospects at the factory in an area that needs high-quality jobs. There are already 700 employed there and they are about to hire another 300. On top of that the factory is said to support over 2,000 jobs in the supply chain. Legohead doesn’t seem to have any trouble finding pots money when he wants to.

I have had my ear to a few doors, and I think that Robber Reeve has found the £1 billion needed to bore the tunnels from Old Oak Common to Euston Station. The Liebore government has decided that it would be pointless building HS2 so that it only transported people from Birmingham to the outskirts of London and have them change onto the Elizabeth Line to get to Central London. But that creates another problem, the development of the HS2 station at Euston. The original plan when there were to be trains to Manchester as well as Birmingham and the branch to Yorkshire was for 11 platforms, which was reduced first to 10 to save money and then to six when the project was cut back to Birmingham only. But the problem here is that if it was ever decided to push HS2 to Manchester or the East Midlands there would not be enough platforms, and it would cost a fortune to add them later. But the problem once again is cost, the last budgeted price for the station was £2.6 billion but the quotes came in at £4.8 billion. Another problem is that the line should really have gone to Kings Cross/St Pancras that is far better connected to the Underground, Thameslink and HS1.

Wednesday

Good morning happy readers and it’s not raining in London this morning although it has been overnight. So, the Israelis have taken out the latest leader of Hezbollah only a short time after the last one. I must say I admire the Israeli security services; they don’t mess around and seem to have fully infiltrated Hezbollah. I wouldn’t want to be appointed as Hezbollah’s next leader, it appears to be a death sentence, unless of course, the next leader is a Mossad agent!

First Bus who run numerous bus companies around the country have just signed a deal with WrightBus in Northern Ireland for 1,200 zero-emission buses. The buses are to be made at the WrightBus factory in Ballymena where a special dedicated production line is being created for the £500 million order. The buses are to be delivered at a rate of 400 a year for three years, which should be good news for the 500 people employed in the Ballymena factory. Forty-three of the vehicles will be hydrogen fuel cell-electric examples for Metrobus services in London, but the remainder will be battery electric and are going all over the country to the likes of East Yorkshire, the Isle of Wight and Gloucestershire, but the majority will be going to London.

Over in the Baltic I hear that Russian minesweeper Alexander Obukhov is out of commission, having suffered from sabotage. It seems a big hole somehow appeared in a gas duct. This allowed seawater in, which flowed back down the duct and into the engine. The ship is said to have suffered serious damage. The ship was based in the Russian coastal town of Baltiysk in Kaliningrad which is 250 miles north of the nearest part of Ukraine, so was it them, or a disgruntled Russian? This is the second Russian ship that has been sabotaged in Kaliningrad.

This morning, I read of an Albanian criminal who was deported back to Albania after serving only part of his sentence. It has now emerged that he came back to the U.K. illegally and has married his Lithuanian girlfriend and they now have a child. The police eventually caught him up with him and the court has now given him leave to stay because of his family. I would send him directly back to prison to complete his sentence. When it has been fully served, with no remission, he can have a choice of going to Albania or Lithuania with his family.

On Monday I talked of Robber Reeves rewriting her budget because of Liebore’s incompetence and their ‘fully-costed’ manifesto being nothing of the sort. The whisper I hear coming out of today’s Cabinet meeting is that some members of the Cabinet want her to drop free prescriptions for the over 60s only making them free at 65. The claim is that this would raise around £6 billion and make up for the money not coming from the non-dom tax, tax on higher earners and VAT on school fees. The big problem with this is it will be highly unpopular with voters, and Scottishland and Wales already give all their residents completely free prescriptions.

An application to run a shop as a takeaway fish and chip shop in Morfa Bychan, Gwynedd, has been opposed by the NHS local health board on the grounds that it will encourage local residents to get fat. Betsi Calwaladr health board want less sugar, fat and salt on the menu and would like to see the shop selling fruit and vegetables. Porthmadog Town Council also has some objections, but rather more sensibly they are on the grounds of over-development and parking for customers

According to a Somerset county councillor EdF are breaching the number of workers employed on the Hinckley Point C nuclear power station site. EdF agreed with Somerset County Council that a maximum of 8,600 workers would be needed during the peak of the construction programme. However, the councillor says that they are currently employing some 3,000 over that maximum. When the build started the Government put a maximum of 5,600 on the number of workers on site. But EdF negotiated an increase to 8,600 because they were falling behind the timetable. The original 5,600 limit was put in place because of the limited infrastructure in local towns. No extra infrastructure has been put in place and the rumours are that many of the workers are not terribly happy

Thursday

Hello friends, a bit damp this morning, which is no surprise. But I am a little worried by the forecast on this morning’s BBC weather app. Down here in London it is saying we are going to have hurricane-force winds today. But in other parts of the country, it was even worse, for example Nottingham was going to be 404°C overnight and in parts of Scottishland the wind is forecast to reach 15,178 mph. I hope my scribe is OK as it said there would be 11,518 mph wind in Worthing. The BBC say there is a ‘glitch’, I hope so.

Please tell me if I am wrong but is the newly switched on Lakeside Park Battery Storage System next to Drax Power Station next to useless? The BBC report tells me it stores 100 megawatts and that can run 30,000 homes. So, my next questions were for how long, how much did it cost, and much are we paying for it to stand there doing nothing for 99.9% of the time? Well, the BBC isn’t much help but I read elsewhere that it is rated at 200MwHrs so I guess that means it will be drained in 30 minutes and those 30,000 homes will be back in the dark. As to costs, it’s not clear, but it looks like it cost around £70 million to build, but I can’t find how much we are paying for its power or for it to be on standby. One other little thing, the batteries were supplied by Tesla and are Megapack 2XL lithium-ion batteries. Aren’t lithium-ion batteries those things that are almost impossible to put out if they catch fire?

Last November, Turkey announced that it was in talks to buy Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets. Eurofighter is a consortium of Britain, Spain and Germany and to sell the Typhoon to anyone outside the consortium the governments of those three nations must agree. Germany objected so the sale fell through. But I understand that Turkey are still interested and the Germans are under huge pressure from Britain, Spain and their trade unions to adjust their position. I hope this results in an order as it will be excellent news for BAe and Rolls-Royce.

I told you earlier in the week that Liebore are going to give the go-ahead for HS2 to run from Old Oak Common to Euston. However, I have only just heard that the Government go-ahead was based on the trains running at only normal speed on the link so as to save money. I wonder how much this will actually save? The tunnels and tracks have been planned for ages so there is no saving there, the trains will still be running at High Speed once past Old Oak Common so no saving there either. That leaves signalling on that short bit of line which is hardly a game changer.

I hear that the rumours, back in the early summer, that Ukraine were interested in obtaining the surplus French Dassault Mirage 2000-5 has come true and the French defence minister Sébastien Lecornu announced the jets will be handed over early next year. Lecornu also announced that France will also be supplying French weapons for them to use. This bit is interesting as many of the old Ukrainian Migs have been converted to carry the likes of SCALP-EG cruise missiles and Hammer glide bombs. The 2000-5 was effectively an upgraded 2nd version of the Mirage 2000 with better radar but only 37 were ever built.

For this week’s cat story, I bring you the tale of the day back in March 1960 when the RAF parachuted an army of cats into Bario in Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. The story starts a little earlier when the town was suffering from swarms of mosquitoes, and they were biting the population and passing on malaria to them. So, the WHO started a mosquito eradication programme and sprayed the area with DDT. The only problem was that the DDT killed off all the cats in the area, and this led to an infestation of rats who started eating the villagers’ stores of grain. So, the RAF came to the rescue and cages containing cats were parachuted into the area. The cats came from Kuching, Sarawak’s capital and known affectionately as the City of Cats. An RAF Blackburn Beverley dropped 7,000lbs of stores, including an 800lbs vibrator roller, used to compact large areas of soil, vegetable seeds and 20 cats.

Today I heard that when Taylor Swift appeared at Wembley she got a police escort to and from the stadium, but how did it come about? The story I hear is that her security people asked the Met for an escort but after assessing things they said it was unnecessary. But the security went behind the Met’s back to the Mayor of London. Thanks to the intervention of Sad Dick with the Home Secretary she ordered the Met to provide the escort. Is it any surprise that Sad Dick got six free Taylor Swift concert tickets? Only three members of the Cabinet have not taken a freebie in the past year. The Home Secretary is one of them, but her husband got four free Swift tickets and took her, so she didn’t have to declare it.

Friday

A nice sunny morning for a change but it’s rather chilly out there. My feeder put the TV on this morning, apparently they are a huge cricket fan and wanted to see if England could win the First Test in Pakistan. Well, it was all over before I could finish my bowl of Felix. The last three wickets went in next to no time and England had absolutely stuffed the Pakistanis. Well done England.

Back a week ago, Airbus booked another big order but have only just revealed it, but not the name of the customer. The unnamed customer has signed up for 85 aircraft comprising 5 x A350-900, 5 x A350-1000, 20 x A320neos and 55 x A321neos. An order like this is more than likely for lessor rather than an airline. In the last couple of months, the Airbus order book has been growing quickly, as they have been delivering fewer planes than are being ordered. For example, in September they took 235 orders but only delivered 50 aircraft.

I hear that back in 2021 the dot matrix indicator boards at Edgware underground station went down with a technical fault. This led to a bit of a problem for people boarding trains there as Edgware is a terminal for one branch of London’s Northern line and trains from its three platforms could depart for four different destinations via either the City or Charing Cross branches. This meant boarding the right train was a bit of a lottery. I am happy to be able to report that the departure boards have finally been fixed three years later.

A side effect of the two hurricanes hitting Florida seems to have been the displacement of alligators into the flooded streets. Many of the residents in the path of Hurricane Milton have moved out of the coastal cities and seem to have been replaced by some of Florida’s 1.3 million alligators. A warning has gone out to those remaining residents not to venture into the flood waters as the alligators will be looking for food.

I read that immigration officials have raided a caravan park at New Stadium Road, next to the M32 in Bristol and arrested 17 people most of whom were working as casual lorry drivers. Thirteen people had overstayed their permitted leave, two were in breach of their visa conditions and two had breached their immigration bail conditions. The thirteen are now subject to deportation and the other four are on immigration bail. Putting two who had already breached their immigration bail conditions on immigration bail seems to be a particularly stupid thing to do. I bet they never report to the police, or whoever they are supposed to report to, and disappear into the black employment scene. Why are they not on the next flight out of town and in custody until it happens?

Legohead told the House of Commons that he has no intention of giving the Falklands away because he has a personal interest. He said that his uncle had nearly lost his life when his ship was torpedoed. Now this is interesting as no British ship was torpedoed during the Falklands war. In fact, the only ship that was torpedoed was the Argentinian Ship ARA General Belgrano. It was detected by the British nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine HMS Conqueror. Is this Legohead’s way of telling us his uncle was an Argentinian sailor?

I see that in a recent interview Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard has committed the government to ‘building British ships in British shipyards.’ Well, I assume he is talking about Royal Navy warships as we hardly build any large civil ships here anymore. You only have to look at the mess that is the two ferries being built in Scottishland to see why. But I see it now looks like the Solid Supply Ships for the Fleet Auxiliary are no longer going to be built in Northern Ireland due to the precarious financial position of Harland & Wolff. But wouldn’t it be nice to see British shipyards building container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships once again? Think of the jobs in the shipyards and the supporting infrastructure. I suppose I can only dream.

Saturday

Morning everyone, it is dull and grey in Westminster this morning and not very warm outside. Today marks the first 100 days of the Legohead government and it is plainly the worst government in my time here, worse even than Liz Truss, possibly the worst start to a government ever. Today’s news is that the Tottenham Turnip has just spent £10,000 of taxpayer’s money having his office in the Foreign Office redecorated. Can a drop of matt emulsion on the walls and white gloss on the window frames really cost that much, he needs to call in Wright Refurbishment! This is just another example of Liebore hypocrisy after the fuss they made over Bozzie’s wallpaper.

I read that the construction of Old Oak Common HS2 station is about to start shortly, causing major problems to GWR trains terminating at Paddington on many occasions. The station is going to have 14 platforms and will initially be the HS2 terminal in London until the HS2 service will be able to reach their yet to be finally announced terminal at Euston. It seems that at times the construction will block all the tracks into Paddington, so GWR have a number of things planned. Most trains to the West Country and Wales will run to/from Didcot Parkway with a shuttle service to Ealing Broadway which is on the tube. However, on the days when Paddington is inaccessible, two trains an hour, one from the West Country and one from Wales, will terminate at Euston adding 15 minutes to the journey time. Oh, a couple of other small things, for the next three years trains will only be able to run at 60 mph through Old Oak Common and it has still not been decided if GWR trains will call at Old Oak Common when it eventually opens.

Good news for anyone considering a trip to the EU. The biometric checking system that was down to be introduced on 10th November has been indefinitely postponed. The media in the U.K. has christened it a fingerprint checker which is surely not too difficult to implement. Surely the police use fingerprints to identify people multiple times every day of the week. In fact, if you go into the USA they use it at every point of entry. The Germans, French and Netherlands all say that their border computer systems are incapable of working the proposed system yet and cannot give a date when they will be ready. They say the real problem lies with the EU system which is not yet capable of integrating all the Schengen free-travel area nations.

I read that the London Borough of Newham is in financial trouble and needs to save over £20 million to balance the books this financial year. There are a lot of cost-saving suggestions and ideas down to be discussed at the next council meeting. Some ideas could save decent amounts of cash, but others are petty. For example, free tea and biscuits for staff and at meetings is up for the chop, as are Christmas lights, the maintenance of bowling greens could be cut, as could fitness schemes for the elderly. But more sensibly they are also looking at selling off some of the properties they own. However, the predictions say they will need far more over the following three years probably over £100 million. I wonder who will be paying for that?

I have been reading about the police seizing £187 million worth of cocaine that was smuggled into the U.K. The Bulgarian gang that organised the operation had bought a legitimate banana import business and had brought the slabs of cocaine into the country packed in boxes of bananas from Colombia. The customs and police had intercepted the shipment at Portsmouth docks and removed the drugs, before repacking the bananas and shipping them on to the gang’s warehouse in Edmonton, North London. They then raided the warehouse when the gang started to unpack the cases of bananas. The last member of the gang has just changed his plea to guilty, so the judge has lifted reporting restrictions on the case. Sentencing will take place next month.

It seems like Transport for London has messed up yet again sending out fines to black cab drivers. Black cabs are supposed to be exempt from ULEZ and congestion charges, but it appears that TfL has been sending out hundreds of fines relating to them. Particularly irksome has been ULEZ fines received by hundreds of drivers of electric cabs which are clearly not in breach of ULEZ conditions. TfL says there is a glitch in their system caused by an “error with a routine data upload” and the fines “will be cancelled”. The issue seems to have arisen on Thursday and over 500 called The Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association (LTDA) on Friday because the TfL lines were jammed. TfL seems to struggle with lots of things.

I have told you several times that Sky TV’s aim is to ultimately switch all its satellite customers to internet-based streaming services like Sky Glass and Sky Stream, but right now it is only the old standard definition services that are going. The Sky High Definition satellite services are currently remaining which is good news for owners of Sky Q receivers. Perhaps better news is that Sky has just signed a new contract with SES who supply their satellite transmission that lasts until 2029. That gives the 17 million users of Sky Q in the U.K. and Ireland at least five years to save up for a replacement streaming system.

That’s another week’s reporting finished and guess what, now I have finished work it started to rain and I am not going out, you know I hate getting wet. I am feeling evil so I think I might see if I can find Legohead’s kitten, Prince, and chase it. Legohead is here today, working on a Saturday on his ‘great reset,’ so early after getting into power. Then I’m off for my afternoon rest. The forecast for tomorrow is much better so I might be on the windowsill tomorrow. Chat to you next week.
 

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