Larry’s Diary, Week Two Hundred And Sixty-Nine

Monday

Good morning, people. Surprise, surprise, it’s damp and gloomy once again in Downing Street, and that’s not only outside Number 10. Inside, we have a wet, rather than damp, PM, and he is very gloomy because he has lost another MP who has been nasty about OAPs and Jews on WhatsApp. But I hear he might have got away with it, but for being rude about black people, namely the Abbotpotamus and Bernie Grant. Now I hear the WhatsApp group where this occurred includes another MP, Oliver Ryan, and a load of Liebore councillors. The second MP is meeting the whips this morning.

There is another farmers’ rally in London this morning, and there are going to be hundreds of big tractors driving around. I love a big tractor, especially those with fancy air horns. I think I might go and see those nice policemen on the big iron gates this morning and watch the tractors go by. I hope they see me and blast those air horns. I see Nigel is with them again and has said a Reform government would restore the status quo on IHT.

Labour has been boasting about how many illegal immigrants it has deported since coming to power, saying 16,400 have been sent home, including 2,580 foreign criminals. But they have been putting this information out on Faceache as an advert pretending to be Reform, with the ad in Reform colours and no Labour branding. Now, I have been thinking about this advert, and it is rather misleading because, since Liebore came to power, this is under 19 people a day, and it is fewer than come in illegally every day. There are something like 750,000 illegals in the UK, according to official statistics, and one in twelve in London is an illegal. I bet that 750,000 is miles lower than the real number.

I read that back in 2001, Albanian national Klevis Disha entered the UK as a 15-year-old illegal immigrant, claiming to be a refugee from Yugoslavia. It was discovered that this was a lie, and his request for asylum was turned down. However, he was granted exceptional leave to remain and then granted British citizenship in 2007. He then met his partner, also an Albanian but with British citizenship, and they have two daughters and a 10-year-old son. In 2017, he was sent to prison for two years for the possession of £250,000—the proceeds of crime. His citizenship was stripped, and he was recommended for deportation on release from prison. Now, a judge has ruled that he can’t be deported because his 10-year-old son, who only speaks Albanian, has a problem with socks and won’t eat ‘foreign’ chicken nuggets, so it would be unfair on the child to separate him from his father. I only eat British chicken nuggets, so I’m safe in the UK.

I have been reading an article talking about the colour of ships. It points out that most cruise ships are painted white and that the reason is that it is associated with cleanliness and luxury. It is also the colour that best reflects heat, so it is ideal for cruising in hot places. But many cruise lines are painting their bows with splashes of colour to differentiate them from other lines—for example, Princess Cruises’ bright blue waves and P&O’s stylised Union Jack. Warships are painted grey to reduce their visibility—they want to make it harder for the enemy to see them. Cargo ships, by tradition, have been painted black, red, and white, but some are now being painted in bright colours.

I hear rumours that Sky TV is running down stock on its Sky Glass TV with built-in internet TV. They have been teasing a ‘smarter, brighter’ product coming soon but not giving any other clues as to what it may be. The Sky Glass TV is advertised as being available in five colours, but in most sizes, it is only available in black at the moment, with every other colour being marked ‘sold out’. If you want one and are quick, I see there are some 43” ones in green still available! It’s not uncommon for a company bringing out something new to try to sell off its old stock before launching the new model—Apple do it all the time with iPads and iPhones. But Sky is so short of stock that it makes me think the new product will be launched very soon—maybe this week.

At 08:55 on Wednesday morning last week, a TUI Airways Boeing 737 Max took off from Gatwick with 150 passengers on board, heading for Cape Verde. At 1,000 feet, moments after take-off, it hit a pair of swans, which left two huge dents in either side of the aircraft’s nose cone before bouncing off and hitting the two windscreens. Fortunately, the windscreens cracked but held, but both were coated in blood and guts, which were smeared up the fuselage above the windscreens. No one was hurt, and the plane landed safely after going around. The passengers were switched to another and took off three hours later. Interestingly, this is not uncommon—there are about 1,500 bird strikes each year in the UK—but hitting birds as big as swans is unusual. In Britain, it’s normally smaller birds like pigeons. But in the past few weeks, there have been several foreign air crashes caused by birds being ingested into engines. Perhaps those passengers to Cape Verde were lucky.

Tuesday

Good morning, it’s grey and cold again this morning, but not raining yet. Well, Legohead has thrown another MP, Oliver Ryan, out of the party for his antics in that infamous WhatsApp group. At this rate, the independents will soon be the biggest party. I bet Legohead doesn’t want these people to be thrown out of Parliament because it will give Reform two more seats at the by-elections. I nearly forgot the other one he suspended a few weeks ago when he pleaded guilty to assault. Liebore is losing MPs faster than the last Tory lot.

So, Legohead has named a new Health Minister to replace the one sacked at the weekend. The new minister is Ashley Dalton MP, who represents West Lancashire. I must admit I had never heard of her, so I had to do a bit of research. I have learnt that she is from the woke left of the party. She believes that 1% of women have a penis and that people can identify as a llama. Is this a cunning plan to reduce NHS waiting lists by sending all llama identifiers to the vet?

I hear that in North Wales, a strange event has occurred. The police force has recovered a stolen mobile phone. You would think the man whose phone it was would be delighted, but he isn’t—he is totally annoyed with the police because they have refused to give the man his phone back. Why, I hear you ask. Apparently, the thief had been using the phone, and it had some of his private data on it in the form of messages and texts, so if they gave the owner the phone, they would be disclosing the thief’s personal data. Surely, it is not beyond the wit of the police to delete all items added after the date of the theft.

On Sunday morning, there was a nationwide power blackout in Sri Lanka caused by a toque macaque monkey. The monkey climbed onto a transformer at a power station north of Colombo and shorted out the whole grid. In temperatures of around 30°C, engineers struggled for many hours to restore power to the grid, and it was early Monday morning before the grid was fully restored. The grid must be in a poor state of repair if a single incident like this can black out the whole country. It’s not reported what became of the monkey—I expect he was fried.

This week’s story about a fellow cat is about the oddly named Mozzarella from Wellington in Somerset. He is not a young cat; in fact, he is quite old, having just celebrated his 21st birthday. But back in 2021, his human, David, noticed he was a bit unsteady on his paws and kept walking around in circles to his left, so he took him to the dreaded vet. Mozzarella was diagnosed with a brain tumour—not just any tumour, but one a third the size of his brain. He had it removed, but as a result, he had several fits for which he now takes medication. Apparently, Mozzarella is now quite healthy, and the white cat with blue eyes only has two side effects. One is that he has become as playful as a kitten, and two, he has become obsessed with roast chicken. Now, I can quite understand the roast chicken thing, as it is beyond a shadow of a doubt my favourite food. But at 21, he is an old man and should be grumpy like me.

Did you read the story of the daughter of a Georgian billionaire and her husband who have been taking the vendor of a house they bought in Notting Hill to court to force the property developer to take the house back and refund the purchase price? Iya Patarkatsishvili and Dr Yevhen Hunyak bought the Victorian seven-bedroom Notting Hill home in May 2019 for £32 million. The house had a pool, spa, gym, wine room, library, cinema, and a “snoring room” designed for peaceful sleep. But as soon as they moved in, they discovered it was infested with thousands of moths that attacked their clothes, carpets, and curtains—even diving into glasses of wine. The court was told that the moths were not declared on the house enquiry paperwork. The defendant’s lawyers said he had been legally advised that the paperwork said he needed only to declare the presence of vermin, and moths were not vermin. The judge ruled a breach of contract and ordered the purchase price to be refunded, less £6 million for the time the couple had lived in the house, plus an additional £4 million in damages for the infestation, including £15,000 for ruined clothes and £3.7 million paid in stamp duty.

Wednesday

Hi folks, it’s grey and grotty but not raining. More problems for Legohead over the rogue WhatsApp group. It has now cost him two MPs and 11 councillors. The councillors are members of Tameside and Stockport councils and include the wife of Andrew Gwynne, the MP who was sacked as an MP. I wonder how many more Liebore MPs are praying the content of their WhatsApp groups is not leaked.

The City of London has launched a crackdown on those abandoned electric hire bikes you see on the streets of London after getting loads of complaints regarding blocked pavements. In the past two weeks, the council has collected over 100 electric bikes and stored them. They then told the operators, mainly Lime and Forest, that they could collect them on paying a fee for ‘removal and storage’. I hear the city councillors intend to keep the pressure on the operators to keep the streets clear.

In Wooler, Northumberland, a whole lot of WW2 bombs have been found in a children’s playground. Late last year, the local parish council received £170,000 in funding to change the playground into an ‘inclusive play park’, whatever that may be. When work started on the foundations at the end of January, two suspicious objects were quickly unearthed and identified as WW2 practice devices that still contained a charge. A two-day site scan then revealed a further 65 live devices. A pit was excavated to retrieve the bombs, but as it got wider and deeper, the number has gone up to 176 devices, and only about a third of the area has been investigated! It seems the area was a Home Guard training ground during WW2, and at the end of the war, it was just covered with spoil. Incidentally, the parish council may have to declare themselves bankrupt over the unexpected, enforced costs.

You may think that we are in trouble with our power supply industry and infrastructure here in the UK, but it is nothing compared to the EU. I have discovered that over there, they have built about 500 GW of ‘green’ generators, like wind turbines and solar panels, that cannot be used as the grid doesn’t have the capacity. This is total madness, but just what I would expect from the idiots who run the EU. Surely, you upscale the grid at the same time as you build generating capacity—they go together hand in glove. I hear the boss of Hitachi Energy has said the problem is the planning regulations in the EU, where it can take six years to get permission to build a transmission line, then only two years to build it. They’re lucky—here, planning permission for Hinkley Point C took four years, but construction started in December 2018 and is now expected to generate power in 2030. The infrastructure should be in place by then.

Down in West Sussex, I read that since coming to power, Worthing’s Liebore council has burnt through all the cash reserves it inherited from the previous Tory administration (sounds familiar). They claimed they had no money to renew the parking system in the town’s car park. It was one that charged you on exit for how long you had stayed. It has been replaced with a pay-on-entry one, where you have to guess how long you will stay—collecting more money for them. Now I hear they are going to ‘greenify’ the main shopping area at the cost of £3 million. There is currently a paved, traffic-free area between the rows of shops where the council plans to plant trees, ‘drought-tolerant’ plants, lay grass, and build a children’s playground. Surely, people who want a park would go to one rather than the town’s main shopping area.

I told you earlier in the week that Sky was about to launch something new. Well, it seems the reason why they were running down the stock of their old Sky Glass TVs is because they have launched their new Sky Glass Gen 2 product. It’s like the Sky Glass it replaces, but they say it is improved with a better picture and an improved built-in soundbar, staying at the same price to buy outright or by instalments. It is available to buy as of today and from Currys later this month. I think I might want to see it in action before committing my savings.

A bit of news on the long-delayed Boeing 777X. Boeing has announced that Lufthansa will receive the first production aircraft in early 2026. This is a bit of a surprise, as Qatar Airways had always been expected to be the launch customer. Emirates, who have more than 100 on order and were talked about as a possible launch customer, have recently said they don’t expect to see any of the planes before 2027. But the late delivery seems to have bothered some customers enough to have cancelled orders. The latest order backlog has fallen by 36, without any explanation from Boeing.

Thursday

Good morning all, and it’s still grey, grotty and cold. Yesterday, Reform held a press conference on their energy policy. The key item I took out of it was that, in power, they would introduce taxes to recover all the subsidies the government are pushing into wind and solar farms. This would put all generators on the same basis and ultimately cut the cost of electricity. Roll on the next election.

A bit of a problem at ASDA, where cases of 24 Fanta Haunted Apple flavour have been selling for £3—that’s just 12p a can. The black-and-white striped cans of a bright green drink were originally launched for Halloween last year in association with the film Beetlejuice. However, the drink was not very well received, and it looks like it is being sold off below cost.

The government publicity puff films that were pumped out earlier this week tried to show how wonderfully the government is doing with returning illegal immigrants. They showed an illegal immigrant being arrested, boasted about thousands being ‘removed’, and showed people being escorted onto a flight. It now seems that over half of those removed did so at their own volition or were encouraged to do so by being paid thousands of pounds. But it was the removal flight that was the biggest con. On the 250-seat aircraft, there were only 49 passengers, and they were all Albanian criminals who were being deported at the end of their sentences. The plane to Albania cost the country £1,000,000. Can you believe a word this government tells us?

In Bristol, opposition councillors are not happy about two new bus stops that are being installed—one in Rupert Street and the other on The Haymarket. The problem is that the bus stops will cost £75,000 each, which is as much as a flat in some parts of the city. The Liebore-run council says that these are the very best type of bus stops, complete with a shelter and an electronic bus time display. Whatever happened to a bit of enamelled metal saying ‘bus stop’ being bolted onto a lamp post?

Eurostar has restarted its direct service to Amsterdam this week. It had been halted because the facilities at Amsterdam Station were unable to handle customs and immigration. Instead, passengers caught a train to Brussels, where they went through customs and immigration before boarding the train to London. The facilities at Amsterdam Station have now been built, and consequently, direct trains have been restored with the advantage that longer trains can now be operated. Only one problem with this—it will only be for a month before the service is again suspended as further work needs to take place at Amsterdam Station.

I see we have a new Border Czar designate, who will earn £120,000 a year for a four-day week overseeing our Border Force. Seventy-three-year-old John Tricket is the government’s ‘preferred candidate’ for the job, but in an interview with MPs, he revealed he lives in Finland and intends to spend most of those four days ‘working from home’. On Tuesday, we had a health minister who thought people could identify as a llama. This government goes from bad to worse daily.

Liebore MP Stella Creasy spoke up on the radio yesterday and said that we should treat illegal immigrants who come to this country in small boats the same way as we did Paddington Bear and give them passports. I have news for her—Paddington Bear isn’t real; he is a children’s book and film character. In the last film, he went home to Peru to visit his aunt, and the Home Office joined in the joke by issuing him a pretend travel document with his photo on it. So, let’s give all these illegal immigrants a one-way travel document back to their home nation—just like Paddington Bear.

Friday

Hello, my happy readers. It’s dry again with a bit of sun, but my, is it still cold. I suppose it is only the middle of February, so I should expect it to be cold, but I hear we have just had the ‘warmest January on record.’ Well, you could have fooled me. But then it wasn’t said where this ‘warmest’ was—maybe Australia or China—it certainly wasn’t here in Downing Street.

The story of Robber Reeves’ time at the Halifax Bank of Scotland gets murkier and murkier. The whistleblower who originally revealed that she worked as a customer support manager and that there was an expense scandal now seems to have their tale backed up by the BBC, of all people. The word is now that Robber and two other managers had a nice little fiddle going on, involving signing off each other’s expenses. Things like earrings, handbags, champagne, and a £500 leaving meal seem to have featured in an internal inquiry that was never fully concluded because Robber Reeves took voluntary redundancy. If all this is true, can Robber hang on as Chancellor?

So, Legohead wants to build 12 new towns in the UK. I can see the first town now. ‘Starmergrad’ will have thousands of identical houses, all to be painted red and fitted with solar panels and heat pumps. You won’t be able to hang washing in your garden, which will have a compulsory vegetable-growing patch. The houses will only be built on the left-hand side of the street and all face Mecca. All electricity will be from wind turbines, and only electric cars will be allowed, but not more than one per home, no matter how many people live in the three-bedroom houses. The cars will preferably be red, some green will be allowed, but blue and turquoise are definitely banned. House numbering will be by the Abbotpotamus and obviously can’t be 1, 2, 3, etc.—instead, it will be 47, 12, 101, 7, 55, and so on. It will be on a flood plain and have no shops, schools, or doctors’ surgeries. There will be one bus a day into the nearest big town. But there will be statues of Lord Alli and Tony B. Liar.

It has been announced that the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia is going to be alcohol-free. Well, bang goes half the fans who need a beer or two to keep hydrated in the 40° heat. The local version of Coke or Pepsi will be all you can get. How do they hope it will be profitable without the huge sponsorship of brewers? Without alcohol, will the hospitality industry be interested? I can see the stories of fans getting public floggings for daring to consume bootleg hooch. Will you be going, or staying in the UK and watching down the pub or in your own front room with a case of 24 bottles of Hooky?

After testing the digital control system of signalling and trains on the branch of the Great Northern service from Finsbury Park to Moorgate, the first Class 717 train has been upgraded to the production standard. Testing with the empty train is said to have gone perfectly, and all the Class 717 trains are being upgraded to production standard, which is a good job because the analogue signals are to be removed on this branch line in May.

Electrical power in China is an interesting thing. Last year, they added 356GW of wind and solar capacity. Despite this huge jump in availability, consumption of green power actually fell! Why, you may ask? The answer is easy—it wasn’t a lack of wind or sun, simply that power produced from coal is cheaper. That is why China also added about 30GW of coal last year. At the same time, they commenced the production of 94.5GW of coal plants, restarted another 3.3GW of plants that had been temporarily paused, and approved 66.7GW of new coal-fired capacity. If you believe China is going to hit net zero in 2060 as promised, I have swampland in Florida I can sell you.

It looks like the railway branch line from Bristol Temple Meads to Portishead is going to be reopened. This line was originally opened in 1867 but closed under the Beeching cuts in 1967. This must be one of the country’s easiest lines to reopen, as much of it, up to Pill, is already open to freight. It is only the final three miles to Portishead, the final station, and a station at Pill that need to be newly built. The track from Pill to Bristol needs to be upgraded to take passenger trains. Work is due to start in the summer, with trains running by 2027. Isn’t it a pity Dr Beeching’s report recommended so many lines and stations be closed? We could do with all those lines now.

Saturday

Good morning, everyone. Once again, it’s grey and cold. I think it’s the wind—it’s horrid. There is a rumour going around that Legohead is looking at a reshuffle and has already told Robber Reeves she is out. I’m not so sure—there is a lack of candidates who are capable of taking over. In fact, there is a lack of talent in all areas.

Apparently, the ‘Safe Containment Building’ at the Chornobyl nuclear site has been hit by a drone. The concrete structure was built to contain the remains of the No. 4 Reactor that had a runaway meltdown back in 1986. Who would be daft enough to fly a drone even close to this site? Of course, Ukraine says it was the Russians, and the Russians say it was Ukraine. I wonder if it was just someone making a film. I suspect we will never know the truth, but at least the containment wasn’t breached.

Transport for London has spent £942 million on much-needed new trains for the Docklands Light Railway, but the majority of the new trains are stuck in Spain. The order was for 54 air-conditioned trains, painted in Reform Turquoise and White, from Spanish train maker CAF. So far, 40 have been made, but only six have made it to the UK. Thirty-four of the trains are sitting in sidings at the factory, mainly because there is nowhere to stable them in London. TfL’s problem is that the contractor building the sidings, Buckingham Group, went bust. The Buckingham Group had numerous construction contracts, and many have been picked up by other contractors. There is also a second problem that is potentially very serious—it is proving difficult to integrate the new driverless trains’ braking systems with the DLR signalling system, causing test trains to slide past red lights. TfL aimed to have the new trains running by spring, but it now looks like late summer at the earliest, with all in service by 2026.

I have been reading about problems on a TUI flight from Cancun to Manchester. For some reason, not explained, the Boeing 787 was getting low on fuel, radioed for a diversion to a nearer airport, and was diverted to East Midlands Airport. The controllers at East Midlands wrongly told the pilot they couldn’t take planes as big as a 787 and handed him on to Birmingham Airport. The plane’s first attempt to land was abandoned because of high winds, meaning the plane had to go around. But the controller decided to slip in a Wizz Air plane, causing the TUI jet to issue a low-fuel ‘Mayday’. It landed with less than ten minutes of its emergency fuel left. Apparently, the CAA was not very happy with the controllers at East Midlands and Birmingham, and revised emergency procedures are now in place.

Arsenal has an injury crisis at the moment and would like to be able to promote another one of their youngsters to the first-team squad, just as they have already done with two other ‘kids’ this year. But they have a problem with the football regulations. The player they would like to promote is 15-year-old Max Dowman, but under the rules, he is banned as too young. To play in the Premier League, you must have reached 15 by the end of August, and although he is now 15, it was after August. The daft thing is, different rules apply for the FA Cup, and Dowman was eligible to play in that. I wonder if Arsenal will ask for ‘special dispensation’ to play the lad—he certainly looks ready to play in the first team.

Right now, solar panel membranes are being installed on the roof of the London Stadium—what was the Olympic Stadium and is now the home of West Ham. The total cost of the job is reportedly £8.3 million, £4.3 million of which is a grant from the Mayor of London’s Green Finance Fund. Again, according to reports, this power source should save 10% of West Ham’s annual electricity bill of £3,678,000. At that rate, it will take 22 years to pay off the cost of the panels.

The German company Helsing has announced that it has received an order from Ukraine for 6,000 of its HX-2 strike drones. Each drone weighs 12kg and has four electric motors. It can fly for 100 km at 220 km/h. Helsing says they have the capacity to produce 1,000 of the HC-2 drones a month, in addition to the 5,000 HF-1 drones they are currently manufacturing for Ukraine. I bet we couldn’t churn out that many drones a month.

That’s me done again for the week. It’s been another rotten week for Legohead and, in particular, Robber Reeves. His Christmas Eve assignation with his voice coach seems to have slid into the background and been replaced by Robber’s CV problems. It’s absolutely freezing yet again this afternoon, so I’m still not going to the windowsill. Instead, it’s the Thatcher Room again—it was so lovely and quiet last Saturday. Chat to you all next week!
 

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