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

Monday

Good morning my happy readers. I understand that Legohead has invited EU leaders to come here today to hear him announce his ‘EU Reset’ later today. I really can’t understand what Legohead thinks he is doing, we vote leave, and he is going against the majority. To me he seems to be handing the key of No 10 to Reform.

I enjoyed watching Dame Elton John on the TV yesterday morning. He was having a right moan about the Government allowing Big Tech to steal intellectual property rights to set up Artificial Intelligence. He is threatening to sue the Government that he supported and raised money for. The best was when he called the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle, a moron.

Good news from the BBC Sports Department, the big-eared crisp muncher is quitting. The boy Lineker has announced his resignation and will leave the BBC after he has presented the season’s finale Match of the Day on Sunday, which will be a week before you read this. He has finally realised that he has overstepped the mark by retweeting a tweet that included an image of a rat. The rat was used by the Nazi Party to represent Jews. I wonder if the BBC finally found some balls and told him that if he didn’t resign he would be sacked.

The news about Joe Biden having cancer is sad for the man but not unexpected. Apparently the cancer is an aggressive form and has already spread to his bones and brain. Is this the reason that he has clearly been suffering from a declining mental ability for years and chose to stand down from the Democratic nomination last year. I understand that a new book is being published this week that describes how Dr Jill was really running the White House in the last few years as Sniffer Joe was a virtual cabbage.

I hear of another disastrous estimate of numbers by the Government. This time it is the number of schoolchildren who have left the private school system and joined the state school system. The Government numbers were based on only 3,000 children moving to the state system and getting an increased VAT take from those who remained in it. However, it has not worked out like that, over 13,000 have left and will have to be accommodated in the state system. So that’s 13,000 not paying the budgeted VAT and making use of the taxes they are already paying but not using for state education. So instead of raising money it looks like the whole thing will be costing money.

The national railway timetables changed to the new summer version yesterday, but it being Sunday it was not much noticed. Today is a working day so there are more changes to negotiate but they are mainly just tweaks like departure times moving a few minutes here and there, stopping at the odd extra station and some adding extra carriages. The only major change I am aware of is that an extra platform (Platform 0) has opened at Bradford Foster Square and consequently there will now be seven daily direct trains to London Kings Cross instead of the previous two. The Government has been boasting that this is due to £24 millions of Government money. The only thing is the money was granted under the last Tory Government.

I have just seen a table showing how much each Premier League club have earned last season (23/24) in payment from the Premier League. All 20 teams received 6 different payments: three domestic, two international and one from commercial rights. The three domestic payments consist of an equal share of the money negotiated from British TV, which amounted to £31.2 million each. Then came a ‘facilities fee’ based on how many times they appeared on live domestic TV. Arsenal got the most with £26.9 million and Burnley the least with £9.6 million. The third domestic payout was what is called merit money with the team finishing top getting the most (£33.8 million) down to the team finishing last getting £1.7 million. Then comes the international fees: an equal £55.7 million payment and a merit payment varying from £22.6 million at the top to £1.1 million at the bottom. Finally, there is a share out of the commercial money, i.e. central sponsorship deals, of £8.2 million each. Manchester City, the league winners, took home the most £175.9 million and relegated Sheffield United the least on £109.7 million. Of course, you can add in match tickets, souvenirs, programmes and refreshments, and the teams that got into European competitions got a whole lot more, but that’s another story.

Tuesday

Good morning everyone, it was back to a lovely sunny morning when I popped out this morning. I saw Legohead reading the papers this morning and he couldn’t understand why everyone was unhappy with his ‘reset deal’ with the EU. I heard him muttering about what a wonderful deal it was. Then he got even more upset when someone showed him the latest YouGov poll. It had Reform leading Liebore by 7%. That one makes every one of the last 20 or more polls from numerous companies having Reform in a growing lead.

The big news this morning is the birth of Peppa Pig’s new baby sister. Apparently Daddy Pig announced the baby was born at 05:43 this morning and the piglet will be called Evie after Mummy Pig’s Aunt Evie. What I have never understood is why Peppa and her younger brother George have been around for 20 years but have never aged a single day.

So Legohead has revealed his true colours and signed us up to be EU rule takers. We seem to have given away all sorts of things and in particular fishing rights in our territorial waters. What have we got in exchange? Well, it seems we will at some point in the future be allowed to use the EU Electronic Passport Gates. At the moment EU citizens entering the UK are allowed to use our Electronic Gate so you would think that it would be simple enough for us to use theirs. The problem as I understand it is that EU law says that EU citizens must be given priority over the citizens of third countries (that’s us) so I wonder if we will ever see that happen.

The bill creating Great British Energy passed through its final stages in Parliament last Friday and became law. I must say I’m not very sure what they are supposed to be doing. I thought they were meant to be investing in small independent energy schemes so I was a little surprised to hear that their first investment was £400 million in Chinese solar panels for schools and hospitals but that has got into trouble over most Chinese solar panels being made by slave labour. But now I understand that they are getting £8.3 billion from the Government to invest over the length of the Parliament and the next £300 million is going to an offshore wind project.

At 06:14 on Sunday morning South Western Railway became the latest train operator to be renationalised and operated a train bedecked in Great British Railways red, white and blue stick-on livery. Intriguingly, this is the only one of SWR’s trains that has been decorated in the new GBR livery and was obviously a publicity stunt. What, of course, is more important is will renationalised rail bring better services, that run on time, at reduced fares and have fewer strikes. It is going to be many years before all the train operators are renationalised and we can get answers, but I somehow doubt we are going to see any improvements any time soon.

Yesterday the Great Northern railway line (part of the Thameslink/Great Northern network) between Finsbury Park and Moorgate became the first line in Britain not to have any trackside signals. In fact, over the weekend all the remaining traffic light type signals were removed after physical signals have been on the branch for the last 121 years. So, on Monday morning the trains relied entirely on the digital signal system they have been using for a few months now. The signals appear in the driver’s cab computer, that controls their speed, distance to the next trains and brakes are applied automatically when required. This is the first step of converting the complete East Coast Main Line to digital signalling at a cost of £1.4 billion. The Thameslink core tunnel from London Bridge to St Pancras also uses digital signalling but the old signals remain as backup. The next bit of the ECML to be converted will be Welwyn Garden City to Hitchin and then Biggleswade to Peterborough.

I hear that the Government is reviewing the cutting of the Winter Fuel Allowance. They have had a number of high-level discussions on what they should do as they picked up the feeling on the doorstep at the local election that people hated what they had done. From what I hear candidates really were told their fortunes and this has now trickled up to Downing Street. Of course, there are various things they can do ranging from fully restoring the benefit, to fiddling with the income level that triggers it, to trying to restore it but only to standard taxpayers. They know they are in huge trouble, but I think even a full restoration is not going to do them any good as they have messed up on so many other things such as WASPI women, fishing, school fees, and National Insurance.

Wednesday

Hi folks, not so sunny this morning both on the weather front and on the political front. Yet another opinion poll out yesterday, this time by More in Common, and this one put Reform 8% in the lead. But perhaps more important is the inflation figure that has gone up by more than expected to 3.5%, a huge jump from last month’s 2.6%. Legohead is not a happy bunny.

Another gay man has been charged with arson after the fires associated with Legohead, while a third man has been arrested but as yet not charged. The man in court today has a Romanian passport but I understand he was born in Ukraine. This is getting to be very interesting, is there a connection between Legohead and these two gay men and is there a D Notice or a Super Injunction in force. Am I breaking an injunction by even speculating that there is one? How would I know if its existence is secret?

The shop chain Poundland is up for sale by its Polish owners after profits at its 825 British shops fell by over 8% last year. The owners, Pepco, have decided to get out and I hear the chain is available for, guess what, £1. In the meantime, they have started on a programme of shop closures with four closing this month alone. The chain employs some 16,000 people in the UK and I expect they are all praying a buyer can be found.

What is happening in the world of food deliveries? Last week I told you about American Door Dash buying Deliveroo, now I learn that Dutch technology investor, Prosus, has made a £3.4 billion bid to buy Just Eat. Prosus are majority owned by South African company Naspers and have offered £17.02p a share. Prosus already owns 28% of rival company Delivery Hero. I have never heard of Prosus but apparently they are a huge company. They have a food business spanning 70 countries and 100% own the delivery business iFood in Latin America and 25% own the Indian delivery business Swiggy. It seems a major shake-up of food delivery businesses worldwide is happening.

Some of the cabin crew employed by the Spanish division of Irish airline Ryanair are not very happy. A Spanish union called CCOO won a pay increase, and it was applied to all cabin crew, not just CCOO members. But a second Spanish union called Unión Sindical Obrera (USO) went to court to get the deal for their members nullified because they wanted to negotiate their own deal. USO won and Ryanair has consequently reduced the wages of all its USO members back to where they were before the increase agreement with CCOO. But Ryanair have gone one step further and demanded the USO members repay all the extra money paid them under the initial agreement and this seems to be between €2,500 and €3,000 depending on their grade. Do Ryanair really want to stir up a strike?

In 1973 Frank Elliot decided that he couldn’t be bothered with changing all the stock in his corner shop, grocers and sweet shop in Saltash in Cornwall from pounds, shillings and pence (LSD) to the new decimal currency of pounds and pence. Frank just locked up the shop, boarded it up and walked away. When he died in 1995, aged 98, he left the shop and all its stock to the Tamar Protection Society. The shop is now run for them as a museum by the appropriately named Gerry Sweet. The shelves are still stocked with the tins, jars, packets and bars of the 1970s, but Gerry has revealed that many are empty. It seems that in the years the shop was not serving customers Frank and his brother ate their way through much of the stock and placed the empty packets back on the shelves.

I am waiting for Legohead to start telling us about how he is smashing the gangs after an Egyptian called Ahmed Ebid was jailed for 25 years. The problem is Ebid was part of a gang smuggling illegal immigrants across the Mediterranean to Italy and is believed to have smuggled over 3,800 people. But it was the Italian police that smashed the gang and passed the information on a phone they captured to the British police. Ebid, who skipped out of Italy after serving 5 years for drug smuggling, arrived here on a small boat and claimed asylum. He was waiting to hear if it was to be granted and was living in government-paid-for accommodation. Basically, nothing to do with Legohead but he will claim it was.

Thursday

Good morning everyone, it’s a lovely sunny morning and reasonably warm. Another bit of news reaches me under the doors of Number 10. Apparently, they want to castrate convicted paedophiles. Unfortunately, this would not be physically but chemically, either by injection or enforcement of pill taking. Like all things coming out of the Liebore think tank, there is a lack of details, particularly how they would ensure the treatment continued when the paedo is released from prison.

The Welsh Liebore Government were roundly ridiculed for bringing in a speed limit of 20 mph on many roads. But not content with that, they are now looking at reducing the 20 mph limit to 10 mph or to 5 mph in some cases. This is totally ridiculous, most people walking will be able to overtake a car doing 5 mph. I wonder if they have tried driving a car at this speed, it is almost impossible. What next, a man with a red flag walking in front of every car?

We are now not just getting humans coming across the Channel on small boats, I hear we recently also took in an Alsatian dog an immigrant brought with him. We are now paying for the dog to be put into quarantine for four months, while its owner is put up in a migrant hotel at taxpayer expense. Will its immigrant owner be charged with animal smuggling? I doubt it. I understand that it has been suggested that the dog should be handed over to Border Force and trained to detect illegal immigrants.

The Costa Favolosa, with 4,000 people on board, put into Lerwick in the Shetland Isles yesterday and found that coach and taxi drivers were refusing to take them anywhere. Apparently, there is an outbreak of norovirus on the ship. Passengers were already on their R. Robertson and Son coaches when a director of the company was informed, and an instant decision was made to cancel the tours and deep clean the coaches. However, passengers were still able to wander the streets of the town, use the pubs and cafés, and infect the locals.

When I was reporting on inflation I wondered what was in the basket of goods that they used to calculate the index. I see it includes 752 items, but I don’t know how some are included as they are not exactly things you buy every day. The list includes air fryers, exercise mats, vinyl records, gluten-free bread, VR headsets, men’s sliders (?), pre-cooked pulled pork and oven-ready joints. Of course, some things make sense like electricity and gas, food, drink and clothing, but I do wonder how many VR headsets you bought last month.

More details are emerging of the traitorous deal with the EU. Our big win, according to Legohead, was that we would be able to use EU e-Gates. It seems that the agreement actually says the EU will not ban UK citizens from using them. That is because who uses an EU country’s e-Gates is actually down to the individual countries. Some, like Portugal, already allow it at some ports, while others like Malta don’t. But if any country decides to change the rules it is not likely to be implemented until late 2026. And that’s a big win!

I now understand that the Type 31 frigates are likely to be upgraded before they ever go to sea. As ordered, they are to be supplied with a 22-cell vertical missile system for Sea Ceptor missiles. But Babcock recently got an extra contract for £65 million to design the ships to take a 32-cell Mark 41 Vertical Launch System, and the word I hear is that the last three ships will almost certainly be built with them, while the first two will be changed over very quickly. The advantage is that the Mk 41 is now virtually a NATO standard and can handle Tomahawk missiles, the Future Cruise Anti-Ship weapon currently being developed, and each cell can take four Sea Ceptor missiles. Why the ship type wasn’t specified with the Mk 41 is anyone’s guess.

Friday

Hi everyone, it seems a cold front is sweeping down the country from the north and when I headed down the garden this morning it was a lot cooler. As I ate my Felix, I heard Legohead whinging again. This time it was about all the ungrateful people who didn’t realise what a wonderful job he was doing running the country, doing trade deals with the Yanks and EU, getting rid of the Chagos Islands, filling in the black hole. He went on and on before he came to the point — another opinion poll was out this morning and this one has Liebore 11% behind Reform, who were on 32%, which would give them a working majority. For a second I almost felt sorry for him and then I remembered what an idiot he is.

Reform seems to have wasted no time at all in carrying through one of its pre-local elections promises. They said they would get rid of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTN) and that is exactly what they have done in all 10 councils that they now control. There are, however, some roads that are blocked off as No Through Roads and I hear Reform is talking to residents as to if they want them to remain.

I read that York’s Liebore Council have run into a couple of serious financial problems on projects it is undertaking. Firstly, they have admitted that the project to rebuild York’s Station Gateway is short of £18 million and that some of the future phases will have to be cancelled unless the money can be found from somewhere. But the second problem is far worse. There is an ongoing project to dual the Outer Ring Road and a report has just found that another estimated £164 million is needed to finish the project, but the council has only got £51 million left in the budget for the project. Some tough decisions are going to have to be made.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has put out a new guideline code of practice consultation on how public buildings such as shops, hospitals and sports clubs should interpret the Equality Act in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. Some things like sports organisations being able to ban trans people from their sports, single-sex organisations not calling themselves that if they allow trans people in, and that a person’s sex is that recorded at birth. But what doesn’t make sense is that they say this can be proved by politely asking for someone in doubt’s birth certificate. But what they seem to have forgotten is that someone with a Gender Recognition Certificate can have their birth certificate changed to what the GRC says. The EHRC don’t seem to have thought that one through.

Before the Budget, the Ginger Growler sent a memo to Robber Reeves begging her to not make cuts, but instead to raise money by increasing taxes, particularly on pension pots and savings. This is all money that has been earned and has already had tax paid on it, but the Ginger Growler is a true left-winger and that matters little. In her view, anyone who has any savings is rich and is deserving of being soaked. Of course, one of the people who would be caught by the Ginger Growler’s favoured tax increases is Legohead, who has an enormous pension pot from his time as Director of Public Prosecutions.

Brighton and Hove’s Liebore Council have renamed their Refuse and Recycling Service but didn’t bother to tell anyone, not even the council opposition parties. The service was previously called ‘Cityclean’ and at a recent council meeting opposition councillors tabled several questions about Cityclean and were surprised to find all the answers referred to Environmental Services. It seems that over a month ago there was an internal discussion, and it was decided to rename the service because ‘many residents did not realise Cityclean was a council service and thought it was an outside contractor’. However, they didn’t bother to tell anyone what they had done. The Tory opposition say the name was changed because there was a standing joke that the city wasn’t clean.

You occasionally hear of passengers on cruise ships dying, in fact when Cunard operate their annual 3-month world cruise it would be unusual if there weren’t several deaths. But then the age profile on that particular cruise is rather high and so it is expected. But I hear of the death of the captain of the Diamond Princess while the ship was docked in Taiwan. Captain Michele Bartolomei died unexpectedly in what Princess Cruises said was a medical emergency. The Staff Captain has taken over command of the ship and it will complete its 19-day cruise to Japan as normal on 25th May.

Saturday

Good morning my happy readers, it’s my second favourite day of the week (workless Sunday is best). More opinion polls out this morning — since the by-election win not even one has not had Reform in the lead, and while it was originally 1% or 2%, it is now more like 10% and growing. Even the polls that always favoured Liebore are giving Reform the lead. No wonder Legohead is pinching Reform policies.

News reaches me from North Korea where the launch of the country’s second destroyer has gone disastrously wrong. The new ship was built at a new facility and is the first North Korean ship to be launched sideways as there was no slope to slide it down. With President Kim Jung-Un in attendance, the ship is said to have wobbled as it was launched and ripped out several plates, leaving it laying on its side on the sea bottom. Kim is reported to have been livid and demanded the 5,000-tonne ship is fixed by the next plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee in June, where those responsible will be dealt with. I would hate to have worked on the construction of that ship.

Scientists have been investigating whether it is better to shower in the evening before bed or in the morning when you first get up. The answer they have come up with is that the morning wins every time. Of course, a shower at night washes off the dirt of the day and leaves you clean when you get into bed. But a night’s sleep means you will shed loads of skin, which is the main food of bed mites and bacteria that live in every bed. So, the scientists say a morning shower is better as it washes away all the night-time muck and sweat and leaves you fresh for the day. Sometimes I am glad that I am a cat and don’t have to worry about this rubbish research.

Seven houses in the Cumbrian village of Fenton lost their internet connection and complained to their supplier, Fibrus, but 17 days later they were still without a service, so they went to the local press to complain. Of course, the service was restored the next day. Fibrus was approached to find out why it had taken so long to fix the problem. The reason they gave was that they needed access to an underground chamber, but access was temporarily obstructed, so the crew went away and didn’t come back. What was the obstruction? Well, it seems that the day the crew turned up, a van was parked over the chamber access. But no one from the crew could be bothered to knock on a door in a small village to find the driver. On the 18th day there was no van over the chamber and the problem was fixed. I hope Fibrus will be paying compensation.

The Royal Navy’s first Type 26, anti-submarine frigate was named HMS Glasgow earlier this week by The Princess of Wales. It has been a painfully slow process getting it to this stage, with its first steel cut some seven years ago, and it is not expected to be in service until late 2026 or early 2027. There are a total of eight Type 26 frigates on order for the Royal Navy. In addition, Australia has ordered six, which will be built in Adelaide, and Canada has ordered three, which are to be built in Halifax. However, Canada says that they are likely to increase this order to fifteen. I hear that Norway is also looking for at least five ASW frigates, and the Type 26 is probably the closest fit to their specification. If the Norwegians were to place an order with BAE, it would probably be integrated into the RN order, with the third ship, that is already under construction, being diverted to Norway. The resulting delays in the Type 26 deliveries to the RN would leave a gap in the programme, which it is speculated could be temporarily filled by ordering additional Type 31s.

I didn’t see it myself, but I understand that Eamon Holmes fell off his chair this week while presenting on GB News. I would love to have been watching because I understand it took the studio staff five minutes to get him off the floor and back in his chair. Holmes has not had a good time recently — he went through a divorce, had both hips replaced, slipped discs, and suffered spinal problems. With medical problems like that, you would expect him to give up work, but the story is he needs to carry on working because he needs the money. Poor man.

A fire that broke out at St Michael’s Maternity Hospital in Bristol on Thursday afternoon seems to have destroyed the roof. A spokesman for the Fire and Rescue Services indicated the cause of the blaze appeared to be the solar panels on the roof of the building. Now, I have heard of fires caused by electric vehicles, like the catastrophic one at Luton Airport and one last week at Brent Cross, but fires caused by solar panels are new to me. An awful lot of houses are getting them, and I have to wonder if the insurance companies charge more if you have them. I know EV insurance is more than for an equivalent petrol or diesel car, but that is a combination of the fire problem and the extra cost of an EV. But one silly thing I learnt is that both household insurance and EV insurance cover EV chargers and cables by default, so unless you are careful, you can end up paying twice and getting charged two excesses in the event of a claim.

That’s me finished for another week and I think it’s decent out. The sun is shining, and it is looking like a nice warm afternoon, so I am off to the windowsill to enjoy my afternoon snooze. But I might come back inside later to watch the Ladies’ Champions League Final on the TV — there is an English team taking part. Like last week, I think it will depend on how comfortable I am when the football starts. Chat to you all next week.
 

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