Larry’s Diary, Week Two Hundred And Seventy-One

Monday

Good morning and welcome to another week of my ramblings. It’s rather wet this morning but still not cold. Legohead went off to Scottishland to speak to a half-empty hall of Scottishland Liebore supporters. There he told them that he was working for the people and listed a bunch of things the Grangemouth Refinery could be used for, like biofuel. What a pity his government is closing it with the loss of 400 Scottishland jobs. Then he went on about Reform and said they want to make people pay for the NHS. I thought we all paid for it now. But if he means making people pay at the point of use, this has been denied so many times by Reform that Legohead must be considered as simply telling lies.

The story of the weekend is the Greater Manchester Police turning up on the doorstep of grandmother Helen Jones because she dared to criticise some Liebore councillors. The granny had taken to Faceache to speak about the Liebore councillors who have been suspended by their party for what they said on WhatsApp. It seems the police had received a complaint from one of the councillors, and the police said they were obliged to tell her that she was ‘under investigation’ although she had done nothing wrong. When the councillor complained, why didn’t the police tell him/her to go away, or words to that effect?

The Liebore MP, Mike Amesbury, who pleaded guilty to punching a constituent in a drunken assault in a taxi queue, is up in court for sentencing this morning. The MP has been suspended by Liebore and is currently sitting as an independent. If he gets a prison sentence, even a suspended one, a recall petition is automatically triggered once the appeal process has expired, and if 10% of his constituents sign the petition, a by-election takes place. But ridiculously, he can stand in the by-election if the sentence is for less than a year. Of course, if he gets a lesser sentence, he remains an MP, but I can’t see even Liebore having the cojones to have him back in the party. I will listen to the radio closely today.

A while ago, BP, or British Petroleum, decided under the leadership of the aptly named Bernard Looney to go green. They decided to advertise BP as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and to switch investment spending from oil and gas exploration to things like wind farms and solar panels. Well, Looney has gone, for some ‘indiscretions’, and the green policy has been a failure, so what are BP going to do? Well, you probably guessed—they are going back to oil and gas exploration. This is the green version of ‘go woke, go broke’.

BMW have announced that they have decided to suspend the conversion of their Mini plant in Oxford to build the electric Mini because of the costs added to production by the government. With the increase in the minimum wage, the increase in employer National Insurance rates, National Insurance threshold changes, and the increase in electricity and gas prices, BMW have looked again at costs and decided it is currently cheaper to build the cars in Leipzig and China, so who can blame them?

The Liebore government has been boasting about how many jobs AI is going to create, but it seems the opposite is actually the case. The British computer industry has reported that rather than more people being required to write AI code, the industry has lost 50,000 jobs. It seems the people who wrote the AI code are now being replaced by AI!

I have been reading about a mysterious black cat that has recently been putting in appearances at the Karachi National Stadium during cricket matches. Apparently, the cat suddenly appears when a batting side is doing badly, and so far, when the cat has stalked across the outfield, the batting side has lost. No one seems to know where the cat comes from or goes to, but an online survey has decided the cat should be called Vigo. I have no idea why.

Tuesday

Good morning, it’s raining again. Do you remember me talking about how it had been announced that we just had the warmest January ever, and I asked where? Well, it seems it wasn’t in the UK because when the fuel cap price went up, it was said part of the reason was because demand for gas was up as it was unusually cold in January. Does anyone in government tell the truth?

So, the independent MP Mike Amesbury has been sentenced to 10 weeks in prison, with the judge saying he could be released after four weeks (40%) inside and then spend a year on probation. As he has been given a custodial sentence, it automatically triggers a recall petition. If the petition succeeds (is signed by more than 10% of his constituents), then a by-election will occur, at which Amesbury can stand, but it will be as an independent as he has been thrown out of the Labour Party. Reform have been very active in the constituency, and Liebore are preparing to find a candidate. Amesbury had a 14,696 majority at the general election, so I suspect Reform would like him to stand and split the Liebore vote to allow them to walk through the middle. Of course, Amesbury could always resign.

I read a very strange story this morning about an event last Wednesday when the pilot of an Iberia Airbus A320 was bitten by a tarantula in mid-flight from Düsseldorf to Madrid. The plane’s emergency first aid kit was cracked open, and the pilot was treated with Urbasón, a corticosteroid with anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive properties, allowing the flight to land in Madrid. But the spider escaped, causing the next flight to Vigo to be delayed for three hours while the plane was fumigated by a specialist team. It is suspected that the spider had got on the plane earlier when it had been used on a Madrid-Tangier round trip. I hear the pilot has fully recovered, but the body of the spider has not been found. I don’t think I will be flying in an Iberia A320 any time soon.

A cruise ‘expert’ has recommended that you should avoid choosing scrambled eggs for your breakfast. I won’t waste time by explaining why immediately. Apparently, particularly on US cruise lines, scrambled eggs are very popular at breakfast; consequently, it is made in bulk and kept warm under those heated lights. But that’s not the worst thing—it seems the Yanks have, for convenience, taken to making it with powdered eggs, meaning that it is often watery. Brits much prefer their full English with a fried egg or two, and it is impossible to make a fried egg from powdered eggs. My in-house cruise expert, WG, tells me that he is pretty sure his cruise company of choice, P&O, uses real eggs in its scrambled eggs, as last time he ordered it, he got some shell.

Our Type 31 frigates, which are currently under construction, will be armed with 32 × Mark 42 Vertical Launch Silos (VLS), able to fire a combination of 32 missiles from a selection of the ‘future cruise/anti-ship missile’, Sea Ceptor missiles, or Tomahawk cruise missiles. But I hear that the ship is actually designed to be able to house an additional 32 × VLS silos. Poland, who have licensed the ship design from Babcock, are equipping their three ships with a similar Mark 42 VLS, but they will be of the double-cell type, meaning they can carry double the missile load of our ships, with 32 × CAMM missiles and 32 × CAMM-M, a longer-range version we are developing with Poland. So, Poland is doing with 32 silos what we will do with 64—and at a much lower cost. Who signed off on that?

In Germany, it looks like the CDU has won the election, but with only 28% of the vote, they are going to have to form a coalition to be able to form a government. The AfD, the more right-wing party, has come second with 21%, and the old government, the SDP, crashed to only 16%. The way the proportional representation system works in Germany, the CDU will have around 208 seats and the AfD about 152 seats, but the SDP will still have about 120 seats. The CDU say they will not form a coalition with the ‘far right’ AfD, so here comes a coalition with the SDP, the party just completely rejected by the electorate. This coalition, if it can be made, won’t last, as it is more of the same for the Germans. I see another election on the horizon and an AfD government coming.

The row over the BBC documentary on children in Gaza is growing exponentially. The BBC’s Palestinian bias in the documentary aside, it seems that the way in which they initially claimed they had full editorial control of the programme has been shot to pieces. But it is the young teenager who was presenting the programme so eloquently that should have raised questions—and seemingly didn’t. The fact that the lad was so different from other Gazan children should also have raised questions. If the BBC had done due diligence, they would have found the boy was the son of a Hamas leader. They would also have found that he had appeared in previous films for Channel 4, where he had a differently named father. The whole thing stinks, and I’m not surprised that Kemi Badenoch has asked if BBC money made its way to Hamas.

Wednesday

Hi, folks—yet more rain. The garden is very soggy and has big pools of water on it. I hear Legohead is to make a statement in the House at lunchtime, telling how he is going to increase defence spending to 2.5% by 2027 and look at 3% by 2030. This means spending an extra £13.4 billion a year from 2027. So, where do we get the money from? Well, Legohead has a great idea: he will reduce the overseas aid budget, something he pledged in that work of fiction, the Liebore election manifesto, that he would increase. Mind you, this is exactly what Reform said we should do in their election ‘contract’, which is what they call their manifesto.

I had to chuckle when Legohead stood up in Parliament and said he was going to increase defence spending to 2.5% by 2027. But it was where the money is coming from that many Puffins will like—it will be cuts in the overseas aid budget. The Liebore Party have got themselves in a deep hole promising not to increase taxes, so they have had to take the money from one of the Liebore sacred lambs. What a pity the money wasn’t coming out of the stupid Net Zero budget. I hope we are going to spend that extra £13 billion at home, buying British arms and employing British people.

Ofgem has announced that the energy price cap is to go up by 6.4% in April. This is double the rate of inflation and more than anyone predicted. This comes at the same time as the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) has insisted that the two viable fracking wells in Lancashire be filled with cement. This means that they can never be used to extract the 2,281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Bowland and Hodder Shale Gas basin. Red Ed Millipede would have you believe that all we need to keep our fuel prices down is more subsidised renewable energy, but at the same time, he has stopped us extracting cheap gas—not just here in Lancashire, but also last week in East Anglia. There is enough gas for ten years under East Anglia, while the gas under Lancashire would last over 100 years. There are also several other shale gas basins in the UK. At the moment, we import 50% of the gas we consume—think how much money we could be saving.

What is going on at Rolls-Royce? It seems that big American investors are piling into one of the most British of companies around. Are we looking at a possible takeover by the Yanks, or is it that they are simply looking at making money? The price of Rolls shares has gone up threefold in the last few years, and the word on the street is that they are about to restore the dividend they stopped paying five years ago. Then, of course, there is the massive prospect of the Rolls Small Modular Reactor making pots of money. Should I follow the Yanks and buy RR shares for my coming retirement?

Down in Southampton, they have a planning application to build a hotel on Town Quay, which is a pier sticking out into the Solent. The builders want a nine-storey, 180-bed hotel and four tower blocks with a total of 460 flats. They also want to increase the Town Quay Marina from 100 to 300 berths. My first thought was that the quay would sink under that lot, but the applicant, Nicholas James Group, wants to drive another 850 piles to support it! The planning committee says there are “significant weaknesses” in the application, including the increased traffic and shortage of open space, but they recommend the full council accept the application because they need the housing in the city.

At the recent Zhuhai Airshow, China talked a good game about its 6th-generation fighter jet, which it is calling both “White Emperor” and “Baidi.” They even displayed the aircraft, but it wasn’t real—it was a crude mock-up. The Chinese say the Baidi is intended to carry anti-satellite weapons, nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles, and even directed-energy (laser) systems, and is designed for near-space altitude operations. Is this all true, or is it a bluff to push the Americans to waste more money trying to match the Chinese?

A bit of news from north of the border, where I see that there are big worries that they aren’t installing heat pumps at anything like the rate the Scottishland government would like. The report I saw said that fewer than 9,000 had been installed since 2019—that is under 2,000 a year. One of the problems is that 95% of houses in this country have gas heating. In comparison to electricity, gas is cheap, so who wants to swap to a heat pump that requires electricity? The support scheme in Scottishland is claimed to pay 60% of the cost of a heat pump. I’m not sure how the scheme works north of the border, but in England and Wales, you get £7,500 towards the cost of a £10,000 heat pump, but you get nothing to help with the cost of extra insulation and ripping out the current piping and radiators and replacing them with the bigger ones needed to keep your house as warm as with gas.

Thursday

Good morning, all—it’s a bit murky here in London, but at least it’s dry, and the forecast is for a sunny weekend. Legohead has eventually gone off to Washington to meet the Donald to get his new orders, having completed his previous instructions to increase the defence budget. I suspect that he will be told to dump the Chagos Island deal. That will free up another £18 billion for him to spend on supporting one-legged lesbian spaghetti-knitting lessons in the Congo.

I see that the wonderfully named ‘Gravehawk’ anti-aircraft system that we have developed and are gifting to Ukraine has been shown on an MoD video. It really is an interesting bit of kit that looks like it has been thrown together by a mad inventor from bits and pieces that were in the back of the stores. It is based on a forty-foot container in which there is a hydraulic platform with two air-to-air missile launchers from a MiG fighter bolted on. The doors of the container are opened to allow the missile exhaust to escape, and half the container’s roof is missing to allow the missiles to be fired out. The system is designed to use Russian heat-seeking air-to-air missiles, like the R-27, of which the Ukrainians have huge stocks. There is a manual crane to help with reloads, as the missiles weigh about 100 kilos each. There is an optical/infrared targeting system, and the firing controls are on what looks like a ruggedised military laptop so it can be used remotely. It looks like something we could use for our own air defences if we used modern kit—our own missiles and launchers on the back of a British truck.

I know many of my lovely readers are not all from London, but I just have to tell you this story emerging from our capital city. Members of the London Assembly have been analysing Sad Dick’s budget proposals and have worked out that he is proposing spending £1.1 billion on policing and £1.8 billion on climate change and Net Zero. How is this remotely acceptable?

In Coventry, a start-up company called Volklec has signed an agreement with China’s Far East Battery (FEB) company, which will allow them to produce FEB’s advanced lithium-ion batteries. Production will start in a small way later this year in Volklec’s initial factory in Coventry’s UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC). But Volklec have big plans—they intend to create a £1bn, 10GWh EV battery gigafactory in Coventry, which will create over 1,000 jobs by 2030. I seem to have heard similar stories before.

Times must be hard at Manchester United, as they are now making petty cuts that will affect staff morale. At their Old Trafford stadium, they are going to close the staff canteen that currently offers a free lunch. The idea is that instead, staff will be offered fresh fruit! A similar thing will happen at the club’s training ground, where staff currently also get a free lunch. Here, it will not involve shutting the canteen, as it also provides lunches for players. So here, staff get a bowl of soup and a roll. It sounds like a return to the workhouse. A gathering of staff was told that there will also be redundancies among the 900 non-playing staff, probably amounting to between 150 and 200. How much is this expected to save the club? Well, I hear it is about £1 million a year. Manchester must be desperate.

Russia has confirmed that it has restarted production of its Tu-160 supersonic bomber, production of which was originally halted in 1995. The Tu-160 is a non-stealthy plane and was conceived in an environment when it was thought to be possible to use it to hit mainland USA. In today’s environment, with rich air defences, it was declared no longer viable. Instead, Russia has been developing a stealth bomber, the Poslannik. So why relaunch the Tu-160? I hear it has a double purpose. The Poslannik is proving a hard task and is running years behind schedule, and the 50 projected new Tu-160s are thought to be wanted for the war in Ukraine, where they are used to launch stand-off missiles from Russian territory.

I hear that Heathrow Airport is looking at who uses which terminal building, with the idea of making things a bit more logical and easier for passengers. Apparently, all 82 operators who use the airport are involved, but it is most unlikely that British Airways, the biggest operator at Heathrow, will be asked to move its operations from Terminal 5, which it alone uses. Terminal 1 is no longer used for passengers, as it was getting rather outdated, and airlines using it were mainly moved to a completely modernised Terminal 2 when Terminal 1 closed back in 2015. The idea is to make interlining as easy as possible and have airlines of the same airline alliance in the same terminal. It will be interesting to see if Heathrow can manage this without upsetting someone.

Friday

Hello, my happy readers. It’s a lovely sunny morning, but heck, is it cold with a frost. I watched Legohead on the TV with the Donald, and gosh, was it cringeworthy. The Donald totally owned him—he looked pathetic and walked away with absolutely nothing.

The Climate Committee has come out with more green crap. They are still doing their utmost to push climate change and now have decided that we should all install heat pumps, eat less meat, drive electric cars, only make two flights a year, and stop installing gas boilers. What do the people of the UK get in exchange? Well, as far as I can tell, more taxes and higher prices. What does the Climate Committee say? Basically, that we might start to see the benefits in 2040. This is total rubbish; it’s all pie in the sky and just isn’t going to happen.

Yesterday, Mike Amesbury MP appealed his 10-week prison sentence and had it suspended for two years, but in addition, he has been sentenced to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work, undertake a 12-month alcohol monitoring programme, go on an anger management course, and carry out 20 days of rehabilitation work. I’m not sure if he thinks he has got away with things, but I am delighted to see that now the appeal process is over, a recall petition can get underway. The fact that the sentence has now been suspended makes no difference as far as the petition is concerned—it is launched when any MP is sentenced to prison, even if it is suspended. The bookies have already installed Reform as odds-on favourites to win the seat, overturning a huge Liebore majority, if the petition is successful and gets the signatures of more than 10% of constituents.

DEFRA has announced that, as a result of some experiments, they have determined that black wind turbines kill substantially fewer birds, so they are talking about painting wind turbines black. But I thought wind turbines were white for a reason—white reflects sunlight and consequently, the carbon fibre blades are cooler. When glass fibre gets warm, it tends to delaminate. I wonder if DEFRA has considered this little fact.

I understand that using the existing emergency runway at Gatwick as a permanent second runway is not as simple as it sounds. It’s OK to use either one or the other, but they are too close together for them both to be used at the same time. So, what is the solution? Well, it is quite simple—move the emergency runway north, nearer the airport buildings, by 12 metres. There is only one thing wrong with this: the new runway will only be suitable for narrow-body aircraft. Of course, adding 100,000 flights a year will mean an extra 30 million passengers annually, so that means a new terminal building, expanding existing terminals, more administrative offices, more engineering hangars, more car parks, more hotels, and a re-jigging of the road layout to suit. How much will all this cost? At current prices, only £2,200,000,000, but the good news is that the airport is paying.

I quite like watching the F1 Grand Prixs on TV on Sunday afternoons when the races come from nice, warm places. But I must admit that the race at Monaco can be a bit of a procession, as there are so few chances of overtaking on this circuit. So, I was happy to see that there is to be a special one-track-only change of the rules starting this year. The standard rule that says that cars must stop at least once for a change of tyre grade (except if it is declared a wet race) will be abandoned at Monaco. Instead, cars will have to stop at least twice, using three grades of tyre, even if it is a wet race. The idea is that at Monaco, most of the overtaking takes place in the pits during a tyre change. So, this rule change is designed to liven up racing.

Amazon Prime has changed a bit since it launched as a video-on-demand channel on the internet. It has brought in a lot of its own programming, made its own films, ventured into carrying other people’s live channels like GB News, and even bought in live sport—live tennis and Champions League football. Now, I hear that in Germany and Austria, they are going to compete with the traditional broadcasters by putting out a linear channel with the same programme going out at the same time each day or week. The German boss of Amazon Prime says the channel will carry a minimum of advertising and will be used to lure people into what he calls the ‘rich environment’ of Amazon on-demand programmes. I wonder if we will see something similar in the UK.

Saturday

Good morning, everyone, and it’s another sunny but chilly morning. The ugliest woman in the Cabinet quit yesterday because she didn’t like Legohead cutting the foreign aid budget. I can’t say I had a lot to do with Anneliese Dodds—there are much nicer people in the Cabinet. But I think it was very odd that she was happy to accept cuts to Winter Fuel Payments for British pensioners but not cuts to poetry lessons for prisoners in Peru.

I loved the White House slanging match between the Donald and JD on one side and Zelensky on the other. It’s not often Presidents shout at each other on live TV. Zelensky had no chance of winning that row, and frankly, why he bothered trying is beyond me. I loved it when he went off in a huff.

I like to keep my eye on the by-election results up and down the country and see how they seem to be reflecting the opinion polls. In most of the polls, even YouGov, Reform has, for over a month now, had a growing lead over Liebore. In the last 20 polls, Liebore has only been leading in three (plus two ties with Reform), the Tories have led in one, but Reform has led in all the others—by as much as 6% over Liebore. What I find interesting is that for two of the three that had Liebore still in the lead, it was the same polling company and by only 1%. I see that Reform picked up a council by-election win on Thursday with 54% of the vote!

The more I read, the more I feel that Transport for London is desperate for money. They have just sent a bill for £58,000 to a fashion company for a fashion shoot in an underground train carriage. Now, I might be able to understand the bill if the company had been conducting the shoot on a working train, but this shoot was on a carriage in a museum. It seems that TfL has retained the intellectual property rights on underground maps and other London transport symbols. The brand Peachy Dan managed to get some of these items in their photo, and TfL sent them a bill.

Amongst all the news coming out of Westminster is the announcement that the government is going to allow the release of beavers into the wild all over the country. The original British beavers have been extinct in this country for a few hundred years because they were hunted for their skins and meat. So, all the beavers you see in the British countryside today are immigrants. I wonder if they have to learn to speak English and take a citizenship test before being allowed to build dams and lodges.

Openreach currently has some 6,000 telephone exchanges dotted around the UK, but with the rollout of Fibre to the Premises (FTTP), the plan is to reduce this to just 1,000 exchanges. With the old copper cables, there was a falloff in signal quality the further the user was from the exchange. But with FTTP, the home being served can be much further from the exchange, hence the closure programme. Openreach has just announced the first 108 exchanges to close, and people who use these exchanges will find right now that only FTTP lines are available to rent in the areas served, and existing landline users will be forced to move to fibre if they want to retain a landline. My scribe’s telephone exchange is on the list of 108.

Boxer Tyson Fury used to live in an eight-bedroom mansion in Cheshire, but when he was refused planning permission to knock it down and replace it with a six-bed luxury home built on the same site, in 2020 he moved to a new £1.7 million mansion in Morecambe. However, he has apparently just abandoned the house in Cheshire. I read the roof has fallen in, rooms have been stripped back to bare brick, and the site is all weeds. It must be nice to have so much money you can just leave an eight-bedroom home to rot.

I’m done again for the week. It’s quiet in No. 10 today, and there is not a cloud in the sky. It’s warmish in the sun but chilly in the shade. I might find a sunny spot outdoors to snooze this afternoon—my mother cat used to say fresh air is good for you! Legohead has loads of foreign Johnnies coming to No. 10 tomorrow, so I suspect it’s going to be a mad day, and they will want me out of the way. We’ll see about that. Chat to you all next week!
 

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