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

Monday

Good morning, happy readers, from a sunny but chilly early morning London, where I am happy to see Liebore has learnt nothing from last week’s election, and its representatives on the Sunday morning political programmes continued to tell the same lies about Reform. They were saying Reform has no policies, they are in bed with PooTin, and that they want to charge you £15,000 for a hip replacement. Well, they clearly haven’t read the 28-page ‘contract’ with the people (manifesto) that is readily available on the Reform website.

Over the weekend I learnt that Mad Red Ed Millipede had got rid of one of his senior advisers. What’s so interesting about that, I hear you asking? Well, the answer is that the person sacked was 80-year-old Dame Mary Archer, who is the wife of Tory peer and author Lord Archer. She was an academic in her own right, having been a lecturer at both Oxford and Cambridge, and was an expert in solar energy. She was already a member of the Advisory Board when Red Ed was appointed Energy Secretary. Apparently, she was one of the few who continually told him when he said something factually wrong, had demanded proof that his plans were going to save £300 on electricity bills, and, like Tony B. Liar, told him his implementation of Net Zero was doomed to fail. I hear that Red Ed was too big a coward to sack her himself and had a minion phone her over the weekend. I don’t think we have heard the last of this.

During WW2, Japan flew a fighter plane officially called the A6M, but better known as the infamous Zero. When the war came to an end, they were developing an improved replacement, the A7M, which carried the popular name Reppu (Strong Wind). The Reppu prototypes were bombed to oblivion by the Americans and the project died. Now the Japanese are considering calling their models of the joint Japanese, UK, Italian GCAP (which we call the Tempest) Reppu. I suppose the proposed Japanese name, F3 Reppu, is really a close approximation of the UK Tempest.

Again, over the weekend, Security Force have arrested eight people in anti-terrorism operations. It seems that the eight arrested were involved in two separate and unrelated incidents – five in one and three in the other. But were they unconnected, as strangely seven of the eight arrested were Iranians? The eighth person’s identity is not currently known by the police, who say they are working to find out. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was also Iranian. The first men were arrested in Swindon, London, Stockport, Rochdale and Manchester, while the other group of three were arrested in various parts of London. No details of what was being planned have been released. I wonder if this eight arrived here illegally in small boats, and if anyone dare to mention it.

I saw an interesting interview with Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the new Reform Mayor of Lincolnshire, where she was asked how she was going to save money in Lincolnshire by getting rid of council DEI officers when a Freedom of Information request had revealed that Lincolnshire Council didn’t have any. Dame Andrea explained she knew all about the FoI, as it had been put in by Reform, and it was true that there were no specific DEI officers, as they were now all being employed as DEI consultants, DEI mentors, and similar. I think Reform has sussed them out.

Here’s another mad Net Zero idea from our government. They have approved plans to develop a large terminal on the coast of Lincolnshire to receive liquefied ammonia shipped all the way from Neom in Saudi Arabia. Why do we need to import large amounts of ammonia? Well, it is to use it as feedstock to convert to hydrogen gas. We will then use the hydrogen to fuel buses, HGVs and factories, which could be using our own gas fracked from under the fields of Lincolnshire. But that is not allowed, as it might be noisy and dirty – not at all like a big plant converting ammonia into hydrogen gas.

Yesterday I read that Pakistan has got itself into a bit of a military pickle, and apparently only has enough small arms and howitzer ammunition to fight for four days should an all-out war break out with India. How has this happened? Well, it seems that Pakistan has been selling off its reserves to the Ukrainians. Apparently, someone in government thought that the money was more important than being able to defend itself. I wonder if the Indians have been watching these developments.

Tuesday

Good morning everyone, a similar morning to yesterday when I popped out – sunny but chilly. This morning, the government say they are going to crack down on the 40,000 people who overstay or misuse their visas each year. One particular ruse is to apply to take a college or university course and then not appear for class, instead disappearing into the black economy. If they are ever caught up with, they suddenly apply for asylum claiming they are gay or an anti-government protestor, so they can’t go back.

Palma, Majorca, is one of the favourite Mediterranean stops for cruise ships, but the inhabitants of the island were not terribly pleased when the city got 23 cruise ships in port in the last seven days, delivering nearly 60,000 visitors. Although the island basically makes its living from tourism, vast numbers arriving on mega ships cause massive congestion in the city. Since 2022, there has been an agreement in place that the big ships will not bring more than 8,500 visitor passengers a day averaged over a week, but this can lead to huge numbers arriving on particularly busy days to be balanced by few arrivals on others. Another problem is that cruise ships with fewer than 500 passengers are not included in the 8,500 daily limit. The ships that count brought 58,255 passengers to the island in the last seven days – that averaged 8,322 a day and fell just below the agreed limit – but there were also seven ships below the 500 limit so weren’t included. No wonder the Majorcan authorities want a new agreement.

At most airports, random checks can be carried out on electronic devices like laptops, tablets, phones and book readers to ensure they are not bombs. A suspicious security agent will usually ask for the device to be turned on and for you to show that it works. If you can’t do this, they may confiscate the device and consider you a terror risk and ban you from the flight. But of course, your £1,000 top-of-the-range iPhone might only be suffering a flat battery, but they don’t know that, so I suggest you charge up your electronics before you fly.

I see that Ukraine has a new version of its drone boats that have been used to attack Russian warships. The new version is termed ‘an air defence version’ and comes with two missile launchers. The launchers look like the launchers that you normally see under the wing of fighter aircraft, where a missile gets power and data from the aircraft’s internal systems before it is launched. However, the boat launchers are the other way around, with the missile on top instead of hanging underneath as on a plane. The missile appears to be an American AIM-7X Sidewinder air-to-air missile with a range of about 10 miles. The boat is already credited with shooting down two Russian Su-30 jets.

One of the effects of last week’s collapse of the Iberian Electricity Grid is that the interconnection between Spain and Portugal is still down. This is resulting in Portugal having to rely on its own ability to generate power to keep its customers supplied instead of importing Spanish electricity. In the past week, this has been a problem as there has been very little wind in Portugal, resulting in them having to fire up some old inefficient and expensive fossil fuel generators. Subsequently, the cost of generation in Portugal this past week has been about four times that of Spain. I can report that the interconnection should be restored by the weekend, much to the relief of Portuguese electricity purchasers.

Yesterday, the government announced they were making £102 million available for over 1,000 GPs’ surgeries to be expanded so they could see more patients, thus reducing the 8 o’clock phone scramble for appointments. If this does anything to improve the situation, I’m in favour, but it is such a tiny amount it will hardly make a scratch on the problem. Firstly, there are 6,252 GPs’ surgeries in the country and in March only 45% of people got an appointment on the day they requested it. But many of those appointments were over the phone – last year doctors only saw 66% of patients in person. £102 million is clearly not going to clear up this failure.

At six o’clock on Saturday evening, the MSC Virtuosa sailed from Southampton on a two-night booze cruise to Bruges, in Belgium. At 20:30, while the ship was still in British waters, a fight broke out and a man was killed. The dead man’s body was put in the ship’s morgue (all big modern ships have a morgue for at least six bodies) and the suspected murderer detained. But the ship carried on with the cruise, and apparently the British police swarmed on board when the ship arrived back in Southampton on Monday morning. The suspect was arrested and witnesses interviewed. It seems the dead man and the suspect knew each other and were both members of a group of 20 cruisers. MSC Virtuosa sailed for Zeebrugge on Monday evening.

Wednesday

Hi folks, it was sunny and a little warmer when I went down the garden. The questions are growing over Legohead’s trade deal with India. The Tories say this is the same deal they turned down because it gave Indians too much access to the UK, and the Indians are saying it is a wonderful deal for them. Of course it is – Indian employees of Indian companies working in the UK will not pay National Insurance, so of course it’s a great deal for India.

I nearly forgot to tell you, my feeder this week likes to listen to Mike Graham on Talk in the early morning and usually puts the radio on to hear what he has to say. This morning, he had a bit of a scoop – he had an interview with the new Reform UK MP, Sarah Pochin, and what a nice, sensible lady she sounded. If I had a vote, she is the sort of person I would vote for. I rather hope Farage becomes PM, because I’m sure she would get a seat in the Cabinet, and I would get to meet her. She can stroke me any day.

I see Legohead’s lot have announced that they are having a rethink on cutting the Winter Fuel Payment to millions of pensioners. They have been shocked by last week’s local election results. They thought that Reform was going to take votes from the Tories, but they never dreamt that they would lose seats on such a scale. But it was the messages received on the front doors that really got through. The big topics were the WFP and immigration. While Liebore were pushing their financial competence, the voters didn’t believe a word, and Reform were saying what the people wanted to hear. So, they have realised that the current WFP policy was wrong and have had a rethink, but they have decided to tough it out and not do anything. I guess they are hoping that people will forget what they have done – I suspect not. I predict this will be their Poll Tax moment.

Yesterday lunchtime, it was announced that after three years of negotiations, the UK and India have signed a trade arrangement. Last year, we did £41 billion in trade with India, and the government says that this deal could increase trade by an extra £21.5 billion by 2040. The interesting thing about this deal is that it is a pure trade deal, and the announcement says it does not include the trade-off of changing immigration rules for Indians, as had been put about as going to happen. But it seems that Indians coming to Britain will not pay National Insurance for three years. If this helps us export more whisky, cars, lamb, and planes to India, then I will be a very happy cat – particularly if imported frozen Indian prawns are cheaper. I like the occasional prawn.

A year ago, Avanti West Coast decided to stop its direct train service from Wrexham to London, presumably because it wasn’t profitable. I now understand that an ‘open access’ operator, Wrexham, Shropshire and Midlands Railway (WSMR), has applied to run five return services a day from Wrexham to London. The Office of the Rail Regulator (ORR) has recently been objecting to new open access services on the grounds that there are not enough ‘pathways’ available on the proposed route. This will not be possible with this application, as there are eight pathways available that were given up by Avanti.

Interesting political developments in Germany, where the coalition’s proposal for Chancellor has failed at the first hurdle by not getting a majority vote in Parliament. The coalition needed 316 votes for candidate Friedrich Merz to be elected, but he only got 312, while the coalition has 328 MPs – so 16 coalition MPs didn’t vote for him. I hear that the AfD have been calling for a rerun of the general election. However, he got elected a day later.

This morning, it has emerged that Deliveroo is being taken over by the American company DoorDash. The two companies operate a very similar business but without a geographic overlap, making Deliveroo a perfect target for the much bigger DoorDash, allowing them to expand into Europe. Since Deliveroo was launched on the London Stock Exchange, its value has fallen by around 56% to the £2.9 billion DoorDash is paying. I wonder if the name Deliveroo is going to disappear in the UK and become DoorDash – I wouldn’t be surprised.

Thursday

Good morning everyone, a little cloudy and chilly this morning, the sun kept coming and going while I was eating my Felix Beef. So, 35,000 illegal boat people have now arrived since Legohead won the election last July. Of course, it is all the fault of the evil Tories, and it takes a long time to ‘smash the gangs.’ Well, he has been in power for over 10 months, and you would have thought we would have seen something happening by now.

I hear that Robber Reeves’ plan to raise £3.1 billion a year from her non-dom crackdown is failing miserably. Instead of bringing in money, it is losing money because nearly 11,000 millionaires have fled the UK since Liebore came to power. This equates to a loss of £12.2 billion over the length of the Parliament. Oh, by the way, I read that the disgraced and convicted fraudster Louise Haigh is urging Robber to put up taxes to fend off Reform. How does that work?

The Indian military has launched missiles at nine sites in Pakistan that it says are terrorist bases. They say this is in retaliation for 26 people killed by Pakistani terrorists. Of course, Pakistan denied this and claimed this was an unfounded Indian attack on Pakistani civilians, and they will retaliate. I wonder if India read my report on Monday that said Pakistan only had enough ammunition to sustain four days of war. Has India hit Pakistan now before it has a chance to rebuild its reserves?

I hear that we have signed a Defence Industry Cooperation Agreement with Turkey. Not a lot of details are available as yet, but I do hear that Turkey is anxious to build up its defence industry. I understand that BAE are already cooperating with Turkey on its Kaan 5th generation stealth jet and that the plane’s engines use a design from Erudite, who build the engines for the Eurofighter Typhoon and is basically a Rolls-Royce design. Another thing I hear Turkey would like is to have nuclear-powered submarines. But there are only a few nations capable of building submarine reactors, and the UK is one of them. I rather doubt we would be allowed to pass on this technology under the non-proliferation rules, but we could provide ‘sealed units’ as we are doing with Australia under the AUKUS deal.

The conclave to decide the new Pope started yesterday, and they will be voting for which cardinal gets the top job. There are 135 cardinals entitled to take part, but I hear that two of them are sick, so only 133 will be voting. The cardinals will now be living in the Vatican until the new Pope is decided and having regular votes. The last few elections have taken about three weeks to come to a conclusion, but one conclave took three years to sort things out. I’m not sure I’ll still be around in three years, so I hope they get on with it.

An opinion poll says that the only chance that the Tories have of not being virtually wiped out at the next general election is to have Boris back as their leader. But this is easier said than done, as Boris is not an MP and the Tories’ leader is elected from the ranks of their MPs. So, first off, Boris needs to be selected to stand as an MP and then get elected. What are the chances of that happening? But first we need a by-election in a seat that the Tories have a chance of winning, and judging by the local elections, that sort of seat is few and far between. I can’t see my old friend Bozzie being back in Number 10 anytime soon, if ever.

The United States has found a new way to get rid of the old F-16 fighter jets they have in storage in the Mojave Desert in what the USAF call ‘The Boneyard.’ They are shipping these non-flying planes to Ukraine where they can be broken down for spare parts to keep the Ukrainian Air Force F-16s working. We have done a similar thing with our AS-90 155mm mobile howitzers, gifting every single one to Ukraine. As an interim, we have obtained 10 Swedish Archer mobile artillery, but these are due to be replaced by the Boxer RCH 155. We have ordered 116 RCH 155s, all to be delivered before 2030. Let’s hope we don’t need heavy artillery before then, as we will be a bit short.

Friday

Hi everyone, a nice sunny morning and a bit warmer. I can reveal that the trade deal with the US was all very last minute. The Don phoned Legohead on Wednesday evening while he was watching Arsenal on the TV and told him he was making the announcement the next day. Number 10’s media department then decided to make their part of the announcement at Jaguar Land Rover and told the media but gave them the address of JLR’s Coventry plant instead of the Solihull plant. The media turned up at Coventry only for security to redirect them to Solihull, where they arrived just as the press conference started. In addition, this and the deal with India could only be done since we left the EU and rather screw the proposed ‘alignment’ with the EU.

The news reaches me that the Don could well be using the accommodation we paid for to be built in Rwanda. He has been looking for somewhere to send illegals and Rwanda fits the case. If sending illegals to Rwanda all the way from the United States works for them, it would have worked for us. But the Liebore lot never gave it a chance. They had decided long before the general election that on day one they would kill the project for ideological reasons, and it never had the chance to work. I would love it if the Don did this, even if it is in accommodation we paid for.

Last week I told you how the weekly YouGov opinion polls had switched from having Liebore in the lead to having Reform UK in the lead. Over the last four weeks, the lead they have been finding for Reform has been growing from one point to three points to yesterday, when it was up to seven percentage points. And it’s not just YouGov who now have Reform in the lead; six other polling companies now have them leading. It’s a long time until the next general election, unless something catastrophic happens to Liebore, so who knows what is going to happen before then, but it is all very interesting.

Ørsted, the giant Danish electrical company, had decided to pull out of its planned Hornsea 4 offshore wind farm. They were given a ‘contract for difference’ for the 2.4GW electricity plated project in an auction last autumn, and Red Ed boasted about how they had awarded CfDs for 5.3GW of offshore wind. Apparently, Ørsted have had another look at their costs and have realised that even with all the subsidies they would have got, this 180-turbine project wouldn’t make them money. I wonder how many of the current crop of wind farms would make money if they weren’t subsidised.

I read that Reform say they are going to fight what Richard Tice calls Net Stupid Zero projects in Lincolnshire now that they have the Mayor and the County Council in their control. The thing is, they can’t really stop them easily, but they can make it very expensive for the government to force them through. For example, solar farms over 100MW are classed as nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs) and therefore decided on by Ed Miliband, but below that they are subject to the Town and Country Planning Act (TCPA) and are decided by the local planning committees. But they can be “called in” by Red Ed. But this adds costs to any project. Of course, any decision by Red Ed can be referred for judicial review, and this can add considerable cost to a project with very little financial cost to the person or organisation referring the project for review. If a council press on with all the steps in the objection process, they can add considerable costs to a project and make it financially unviable.

I talked yesterday about the Indians launching missiles at what they said were terrorist sites in Pakistani Kashmir and Pakistan itself. I now hear that the Indians say they used SCALP standoff cruise missiles (these are the French version of what we call Storm Shadow and have been used in Ukraine and the Middle East). The Pakistani authorities say they shot down five Indian planes, but this sounds rather like propaganda, as I suspect the missiles will have been launched from well inside Indian territory. But the Pakistanis were quick to show off the wreckage of what they claimed to be an Indian jet. Unfortunately, the wreckage was quickly identified as the remains of a Martin-Baker ejector seat of an old type used in Mirage V, which is exclusively used by Pakistan. So, did Pakistan shoot down its own plane?

Due to a shortage of train drivers, the minimum age to become a driver is being reduced from 20 to 18. I’m not sure that an 18-year-old driving an express train fills me with anything but worry. There are not a lot of things I would trust most 18-year-olds with other than taking drugs and drinking alcohol. But what amazes me is that we are short of train drivers when they were given a huge increase last summer. Starting salary is about £30,000 per annum, not bad for an 18-year-old. This rapidly increases to around £65,000, or up to £85,000 for an experienced freight train driver.

Saturday

Good morning, happy readers, it’s an absolutely beautiful morning in London and I’m in a hurry to get my jobs done this morning and get out to my windowsill.

Yesterday afternoon was interesting, we got a trade deal with the Yanks. Now I’m not sure it is the best deal in the world, we seem to have given up on a lot of what we were told were red lines, like buying their beef, which I always understood was pumped full of growth hormones so we wouldn’t buy it. At his press conference, the Donald seemed to imply that only non-hormone treated beef would be exported to the U.K. But a big chart (the Donald loves a big chart) indicated that most of our exports to the US would be subject to 10% tariffs, while American imports will only attract 1.8% tariffs.

The other big announcement of the evening was that a new Pope had been elected. This time they have elected an American Pope who was born in Chicago. I hope he doesn’t have links to the Chicago gangsters. I was a little bit disappointed that they didn’t elect a British Pope. The British Cardinal is Vincent Nichols and is a Liverpudlian. I would have loved a Scouser Pope.

Once again the radio was on while I was breakfasting, and I hear that the ‘experts’ are worried that if the Indo/Pakistani situation deteriorates, we will have them fighting on the streets of Britain. Last time there were border troubles, there were running battles on the streets of Leicester. I think that anyone arrested, from either side, even if they claim to be British, should be deported.

A little snippet I learned about the India and Pakistan Air Forces yesterday is that the Indians have 640+ combat aircraft and Pakistan has around 410+. But 74 of the Pakistani fleet are F16s, and they were sold with an ‘End User Agreement’ that bans them from being used in a war with India. I’m not sure how exactly such an agreement can be enforced. You can hardly see the American makers taking Pakistan to court in the middle of a war. I suppose they could stop supplying spares or withdraw any maintenance instructors. Mind you, this would only be possible after the F16s were used, unless there is a secret ‘kill’ switch as rumoured to be included in the export version of the F35.

Just as I suggested yesterday, the Pakistan claim to have shot down five Indian aircraft seems to be propaganda. A Pakistan minister being interviewed by a news agency was asked where the proof was—could he show the crash sites? The minister said all the aircraft had crashed in Indian territory, so that was impossible, but he pointed to video on the internet. The Indian Air Force crashes on the internet have all been shown to have been genuine crashes, but all were old and had happened in peacetime, mostly due to mechanical failures. I’m not saying they didn’t shoot down Indian planes, just that so far they have not proved anything.

I see the news from the National Audit Office has come out saying that illegal immigrants and asylum seekers are costing us over £4.5 million a day to house in hotels. This is about £1.7 billion a year—an horrendous amount of money. The problem is this is four times the amount that was budgeted, and a lot of it is going to the likes of Serco for management fees. The government seems to be able to find this money; I wonder where it is coming from—are we borrowing it, or is it all coming from the bloated overseas aid budget?

That’s me finished for another week—and what an interesting week. Two trade deals, much heralded by Legohead, that are turning out not to be very good for us. The VE Day celebrations on Monday were good, but the concert on Thursday was awful. Forty-five Liebore MPs have told Legohead he needs to change policies. The opinion polls have Reform miles ahead and the Tories almost wiped out. Who was it said, ‘we live in interesting times’? The sun is out, and it looks like a nice warm afternoon, so I am off to the windowsill to enjoy my afternoon snooze. Chat to you all next week.
 

© WorthingGooner 2025