Larry’s Diary, Week Two Hundred And Ninety-Eight

Monday

Good morning friends, a bit of watery sun and not very warm when I trotted down the garden this morning. What a huge crowd in London on Saturday, it was amazing and it was far more than the 110,000 that the police claimed. If there were fewer than 1,000,000, I’ll be astounded. Who was in charge of counting, was it the Abbotpotamus? Once again, I see the ANTIFA lot got a special escort but bugged off early when they saw the size of the crowd.

I thought things couldn’t get much worse for Legohead, with the Prince of Darkness vowing revenge, plastic Andy Burnham plotting to replace him as PM, the country falling apart, his MPs plotting against him, and the threat of legal action against his one in one out scheme. On the plus side, there is no PMQs this week for him to ignore every question asked of him and say the problem is Reform UK, as Parliament is on its Conference Break. Then there is this week’s visit from Trump, that is sure to be a distraction. But he has just slapped massive tariffs on India for buying Russian oil and then rebranding it as Indian oil and selling it on. I’ll give you one guess where Legohead is scheduled to be going next week, of course it’s India.

So, the one in one out deal is supposed to kick off today, with a number (yet to be announced) of illegal immigrants flying to France on Air France scheduled services. The deal is limited to 40 a week, but I guess they are counting all the weeks since the deal was signed back in June. There are a few things about the deal that make no sense. Why are we paying the Frogs £100 million for them to take 40 people a week, only to give us 40 in exchange? Why can’t we know who is coming before they get here? Will the 40 have their passports with them and can they bring in their relatives? One other interesting thing is that each returnee will be accompanied by an outsourced ‘security officer’ who will bring back a replacement. That’s 80 return flights a week. Is that why flights to Paris this week have gone up to £400?

This week marks a computing anniversary. It is 69 years since the first hard disk drive went on sale. An IBM invention, it was called a Disk Storage Unit and was paired with the IBM RAMAC 305, and together they filled a complete room. RAMAC stood for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control and, as you might have guessed, was designed to run company accounts on. Until then, data was stored on punched cards and later giant magnetic tape. But the storage of hundreds of trays containing thousands of punched cards was difficult. And tapes were slow, especially if the data you wanted was at the far end of the tape. The new device had 50 magnetic metal 24” platters spinning at 1,200 rpm and stored a total of 3.75 Mb of data. It was huge and weighed a ton, but it could retrieve anything stored in 800 milliseconds. Today we have moved on to solid-state drives (SSD) and talk about storage in gigabytes and terabytes, even on home computers.

The Dome Goblin was yesterday claiming her ‘peace flotilla’ to Gaza of 21 small boats has again been attacked by an Israeli drone in Tunis harbour. The first attack has been dismissed by Tunisian authorities as never happening. Apparently, they have established that a crewman let off a flare and it fell back on deck. What are the odds that the same sort of thing has reoccurred on another of the boats?

I saw a bit of the women’s rugby on the TV at the weekend, and I was delighted to see the English stuff the Scots. I am, after all, an English Cat. But I see there was a bit of controversy in the France – Ireland match, where a lady Frog has been cited for biting Ireland’s Aoife Wafer. I think the Frog was a bit confused. The poor girl was obviously hungry and thought it was a wafer biscuit she was biting into.

I read that ‘Make UK Defence’ have come up with the brilliant idea of training 5,000 young offenders to be welders to fill a huge shortage, particularly in shipbuilding. But the idea is not to offer the unemployed or those wanting a well-paid job training. They suggest training 5,000 ex-category D prisoners. Many years ago, as an apprentice, my scribe did an 8-week course at the Babcock welding school, and he tells me it is a hot, dirty and nasty job with lots of fumes. I can’t see thousands of young offenders wanting to do a job like that when there are plenty of mobile phones to nick.

Tuesday

Good morning everyone, it was a little damp for my trip down the garden, but you will be pleased to know I only got a little damp and soon dried out as the central heating is on this morning. There are reports this morning that the first ‘one out one in’ illegal Channel migrant was supposed to be on an Air France flight from Heathrow to Paris yesterday, but the exchange was halted at the last moment after complaints from charities and threats of legal action. I am not really surprised. Legohead seems to have no appetite for getting shot of the illegals. He was, after all, one of the signatories to a letter about deporting criminals back to the Caribbean.

A huge announcement from Reform UK yesterday with the defection of Tory frontbencher Danny Kruger to them. Kruger is the first current Tory MP to defect and was on the right of the party, with views that very much reflect the Reform point of view. He was a Brexiteer and opposed the Stop the Boats policy of Rishi Sunak as not strong enough. I hear he is going to lead the Reform Department for Preparing for Government, as he has frontbench experience. I wonder who will be next to defect. As I wrote this, the news came through that the ex-Tory MP for Lewes and ex-Junior Health Minister, Maria Caulfield, has joined Reform, the 13th ex-Tory to join.

This week in 1940, the Battle of Britain had just begun, and the RAF were fighting to save the UK from the Germans. It was the thing, along with the Royal Navy, that saved us from invasion and set us on the way to winning World War II. Today I read a survey that said that two-thirds of the under-40s questioned have never heard of the ‘Battle of Britain’. How could this be? Well, it seems that the vast majority of British schools don’t teach pupils about World War II. Is it because we mustn’t upset the Germans?

I hear that the recent Brazilian offshore oil find by BP is its biggest in 25 years. The Bumerangue field is said to be 500 metres thick and spans over 116 sq. miles. Although it is going to take a while to fully explore and evaluate, BP think they have at least 200 billion barrels, and it is recoverable at something like 400,000 barrels a day for decades to come. This is excellent news for BP shareholders, as BP owns 100% of the field. No wonder BP recently decided to dump its green credentials and move back wholeheartedly into oil exploration and recovery. I bet the board had seen the early drilling results.

So, the Doom Goblin’s flotilla has sailed from Tunisia and is going to join up with other boats sailing from Sicily, Greece and Spain to try to deliver 500 tonnes of aid to Gaza. In total, I hear there should be 31 boats, but I don’t think they have much chance of getting any boats to land in Gaza, as the Israeli Navy has full control of the seas surrounding Gaza. The Israelis are not scared to arrest every last one of these ‘sailors’, and I suspect 31 boats will either be confiscated or sunk while the Doom Goblin and her colleagues rot in a cell.

One of the odd things about the football contract system is that it can be both very profitable and very expensive for clubs. If a player under a long contract is playing well and another club wants them, it can cost many millions of pounds to buy out the contract. But if a player falls out of favour, they can be stuck at a club for years, not playing in matches while their contract runs down. This is the case with two players at Chelsea, Raheem Sterling and Axel Disasi. Both have years to run on their contracts, and despite being put up for sale in the summer transfer window, neither was sold. Apparently, in the case of Sterling, it is because of his high wages at Chelsea, where he is reported to be the highest earner on over £300,000 a week. It is reported that Sterling was open to a move to another London club but didn’t want to move abroad, as his family home is in London. But it is the wages that are the big problem. Other clubs are reluctant to pay him £300,000 a week, but play or not, he is under contract to Chelsea, and he is entitled to that money. So now Sterling is training with Disasi away from the rest of the team and pocketing the money, which will come to over £30 million in the two years remaining on his contract. Money for nothing.

The Poles have a little problem with their FA-50GF light supersonic fighters. The South Korean-designed and built F-50 is a family of small, cheap fighters originally designed for the South Korean military as a supersonic trainer. They have purchased 12 x FA-50GFs as an interim fighter while they await the arrival of 36 x FA-50PL versions of the plane that should start to be delivered later this year. The problem is the 50GF is armed with an M197 20mm cannon, while their F-35A and F-16 aircraft have M61 20mm Vulcan guns, and the M61 ammunition is not certified for the M197. The Poles have had the 50GF for three years and have been struggling to find a suitable supplier of ammunition. I hear they have now signed up with a Turkish maker for 50,000 HE rounds and 50,000 training rounds. But it is not just the cannons that are a problem. The plane is not certified with the AIM-9X that its other fighters use, and Poland has been hunting for the older AIM-9L, which it is certified for. It looks like the Poles didn’t do their research on the FA-50GF very well.

Wednesday

Hi folks, another dull and gloomy morning, but at least it’s not raining at the moment, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Legohead’s senior aide, Paul Ovenden, has resigned from his job over text messages he sent eight years ago about the Abbotpotamus. It seems in the messages he was talking about a version of the game Snog, Marry, Avoid, where he described graphic sexual images with her to a female colleague. Is Legohead practising one in, one out with the government? Yet another awful day for Legohead.

The latest iPhone 17 in the UK, and most of the world, comes with a translation app that works with AirPods. It can translate speech in the major languages of English, French, German, Spanish and Italian, and feeds it directly into your AirPods using Bluetooth. A highly useful app to have on your phone. But I understand that it won’t be available on iPhones sold within the EU. Why, I hear you ask. The answer is very simple, EU law. If the app was on iPhones sold in the EU, Apple would have to make the app, and the code behind it, available to Android phone makers. Of course, Apple are not going to spend an arm and a leg on writing an app only to give it away to its biggest rival. The EU haven’t thought this one through.

I recently told you that Babcock were hoping to get orders for the Arrowhead 140 frigate from both Denmark and Sweden to add to the existing export orders from Poland and Indonesia. Now I hear that Babcock is talking to around another 15 countries, including New Zealand and Chile, about selling them frigates. Of course, there is a split among the nations as to exactly where and how the various nations would want the ships built. Some would just like to have Babcock design the ship or ships, some to build them themselves but with some technical assistance, like Poland and Indonesia are currently doing. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who would want ships built and fitted out by Babcock in Rosyth. But more interestingly, I understand that Babcock are also talking to countries about building ships in modules for assembly in the purchaser’s country. Mind you, I understand Babcock say they have plenty of space at Rosyth to expand manufacturing if countries want them to build ships for them.

I hear that Airbus is about to open a second Final Assembly Line (FAL) at its plant in Mobile, Alabama. Airbus has FALs in France, the USA and China, where it mostly assembles A320 family planes close to its markets. So far this year, Airbus has delivered over 100 planes more than Boeing, and another FAL is only going to increase this lead. One interesting thing is that I understand this new line is capable of assembling both A320 and A220 aircraft.

The failure to deport someone to France on Monday seems to have now added to the stupid numbers of 5,600 in and none out. But I understand it gets worse, as the French have a flight arranged to bring in their exchange immigrants to Britain on Saturday. So, it looks like we are getting more immigrants in without any going out. And that mess has cost us £100 million to bribe the Frogs to operate the system. This is gross incompetence.

I have been trying to make sense of an article in the Grundian. The lefty rag says that if we were to tax SUVs at the same rate as our European neighbours, we could raise an extra £2 billion per year. It gives the example of the BMW X5, which costs £85,000 in the UK, including £3,200 vehicle tax. It then tells me that the tax on the same car would be £66,000 in France. So, this £2 billion comes from multiplying the number of SUVs sold in the UK by the extra tax on SUVs in, for example, France. Where this all falls down is in the next line of the article, where it says Britain sells four times the number of SUVs to France. So, obviously, if we charged such punitive taxes, people in the UK would just stop buying SUVs, as they have in France. Even me, a cat, can see this is a stupid suggestion.

As of the second quarter next year, the Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD is planning to bring 1000kW charging to Europe, using the standard CCS connector and cable. This level of charging is already available in China but uses two cables. The BYD plan will only use a single cable. There are a couple of problems to overcome first. Firstly, you need chargers capable of delivering 1000kW DC. This is not common, and the BYD plan is to build an initial 200 ‘Flash Charging’ stations across Europe. Then the car’s electrical system must be capable of receiving a 1000kW charge. From what I understand, only two of the BYD luxury models are capable of this, and neither are available in the UK. Finally, the CCS connector is designed to take a maximum of 400kW, although some companies are pushing it to 600kW. However, I read that a company has developed a CCS connector with novel cooling methods that should make 1000kW possible. Have BYD been working on the same sort of thing?

Thursday

Hello folks, grey and damp this morning but the forecast says the rain is headed north and we are going to have a nice afternoon. I must say that every time I watch us doing pomp and ceremony, I marvel at how well we do it and wonder if anyone does it better. The arrival of the Donald, and the ceremony at Windsor and then the State Banquet, were spectacular, and you could see from the Donald’s face he was lapping it up. Whatever it cost, it was worth it.

European car makers are worrying about their future car sales. The EU, like the UK, has imposed an EV mandate, banning the sale of petrol cars. The EU has pushed the ban back to 2035, while Britain is sticking with 2030. The big EU car makers have started running down ICE production but are not seeing an equivalent uptake in EVs. Consequently, they want to reintroduce small, cheap petrol cars that many have stopped making. I hear they have approached the EU President, and she is open to discussions on what she calls the new Small Affordable Cars initiative.

The insurance company Aviva has had a bit of a catastrophe at its Perth, Scotland headquarters. Ten months ago, they were boasting about a wind turbine being installed in their grounds and supplying green electricity to supplement their power consumption at the HQ, together with a solar farm and Tesla battery storage. The 77-metre-high turbine has apparently been working quite well until the weekend when all three blades fell off. Luckily, the failure happened at 1 in the morning, meaning no one was using the footpath the blade fell on. Although the fire brigade was called and attended the site, there was no fire. It looks like it was a simple mechanical failure. I wouldn’t want to be the engineer who signed off on that job.

I hear that Hibiscus Petroleum and Ping Petroleum, the owners of the production rights of the Teal West field in the North Sea, have ‘spudded’ the field. I didn’t know what spudded meant, so I had to look it up. Apparently, it is an oilman’s word for commencing production drilling. Teal is one of the last fields to have a production licence before Ed Millipede introduced a ban on producing oil and gas in the UK. Teal West is close to the existing Anasuria floating production platform, so it will be cheaper to link it in for production. Hibiscus say they expect to produce 4,982 barrels per day from Teal West. They also hold production licences for the Greater Marigold field but are looking for partners. I bet Red Ed is not very happy.

News reaches me of a scandal in Scottishland. There has been cheating going on at the World Stone Skimming Championships. It seems several of the 2,000 competitors have been found to have been using man-made stones. Stones are normally expected to be selected from the billions available on the beach where the championship is taking place, but some competitors have been caught bringing their own stones that are perfectly round, flat and smooth, and ideal for skimming. Apparently, the cheats have held their hands up and admitted to cheating.

Another net zero idea has emerged from the department run by Red Ed Millipede. It seems that crematoria are putting out too much CO₂ and something must be done about it. Among the suggestions are wicker or cardboard coffins, and cutting back on the gas consumption per body by burning them in a continuous stream rather than one at a time. That way, the heat from one burning body helps ignite the next, and so on. That method has got me thinking, how will they be able to distinguish any individual’s ashes if there is one continual burn? You might get a mix of a dozen people’s ashes. Also, if the burning has to be continuous, will we be forced to hold cremations day and night? How would you fancy going to Great Aunt Lucy’s cremation at three in the morning?

When my scribe worked in the building refurbishment business, he was employed by a company who made a comfortable living doing the jobs that the big London refurbishment companies wouldn’t get out of bed for. On several occasions, the big boys pulled out of bidding for a job, saying that anything under £1 million wasn’t economically viable for them. Now I read of the big refurbishment company Overbury having a contract to refurbish the Citi Bank building at 25 Canada Square for £1.1 billion. Citi Bank first talked about its plans to refurbish the 20-year-old 42-storey building back in 2022, but then the estimated cost was a mere £100 million. I wonder how the cost of the work has increased 11 times in a few years. Citi Bank says its employees will be getting best-in-class workspaces.

Friday

Hi everyone, we seem to have got a rather nice sunny, windless day in the south of England today, perfect to cross the Channel in a small boat. Well, it has finally happened. Yesterday, after trying and failing on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, we finally managed to deport one illegal immigrant to France on Thursday and one this morning under the ‘one out, one in’ scheme. That’s right, just two out against the thousands who have come here illegally, and Thursday’s one just happened to be an Indian national, who is not exactly coming from a war-torn country and the French will return to India. It might be a poor country by British standards but that is not a reason to claim to be a refugee.

Here is a strange little tradition that I doubt many of you will know about. Football teams that have won the FA Cup are allowed to change the flags that top the corner poles on their grounds from the regular rectangles to triangles. Of course, the FA Cup has been about since the 1871-2 season but there have only been 45 different winners as some clubs have won it multiple times. In addition, some of these early winners like Wanderers, Royal Engineers and Clapham Rovers don’t exist anymore. But I understand that the latest winners Crystal Palace, who won the cup for the first time last season, have just changed to triangular corner flags.

This ‘one out, one in’ business has descended into farce. So far we have failed to send anyone to France, apart from seven journalists who were briefed that a deportee would be on the flight but wasn’t. Just empty pairs of seats on the plane that the deportee and escort should have been occupying. Now a judge has ruled an immigrant can’t be deported because he would be destitute in France, but didn’t he come from France? I’m not sure how the man would be destitute anyway, as the scheme puts him up in a Paris hotel at British taxpayer expense. Then I hear seven more immigrants who have been told they are to be deported are to bring a high court case. In the meantime, I hear the French are to hold up their end of the bargain and fly their ‘replacements’ in on Saturday. This scheme should be renamed ‘none out, many in’.

Earlier this week, the planning authorities gave the green light for the biggest skyscraper in London to go ahead. The so-called ‘Cloud Piercer’ is planned to be 730 metres high, well above the current tallest building in Europe, the Lakhta Centre in Saint Petersburg, which is only 462 metres high. I have no information on cost or timescale, but I suspect it will be for mixed commercial and housing. I will keep my little eye on this story for you.

Once again, the weekly opinion polls from YouGov and More in Common show the continued advance of Reform UK. The polls agree this week, both putting Reform 9% above Liebore. YouGov have long been regarded as the Rolls-Royce of polls and have Reform on 29% with Liebore on 20%. More in Common have Reform on 31% and Liebore on 22%. Both polls have the Tories a few percentage points behind Liebore. Reform have topped more than 100 polls now.

It seems that for years the OBR have been overestimating growth in the economy and have leaked a report to the Financial Times which says they intend to correct this at the next budget. This will have the effect of increasing the black hole in the economy and will probably mean that the only way to plug the gap is to increase Income Tax, National Insurance or VAT as nothing else can raise enough money. Of course, we could cut the size of state spending but Liebore won’t do that. The sh*t is going to hit the fan soon.

I read that ALDI have hugely ambitious plans for expansion in the UK. They plan to open 80 new stores in the next two years, spending some £1.6 billion in doing so. The plan calls for 21 to be opened by the end of this year. ALDI have been trading in the UK for over 35 years and now have over 800 stores.

Saturday

Good morning, people. It is supposed to be another nice day, but when I got up it was a bit grey, warmish and dry—not exactly nice. Because the weather was decent yesterday, the illegal immigrants started coming over in small boats once again. None came over earlier in the week as the weather wasn’t suitable, but over a thousand made it yesterday. So, two out on flights and 1,000 in on small boats.

The Government and the cruise industry have come up with a plan to get more cruise ships visiting British ports. Last year over 2 million Brits went on a cruise, and this year it is expected to be even more. But quite a number of those flew overseas to join their cruise in America, the Mediterranean or the Caribbean. It is the foreign visitors—among the 3.7 million passengers who pass through British ports, 77% of whom are foreigners—that the industry wants to increase, as they bring in lots of revenue and spending. It’s not just the port taxes, but the money spent in the local economies that are important, sustaining tourist attractions, cafés, restaurants, taxis, shops and buses in those 50 ports and their surrounding areas that the plan wants to increase. In addition, they want to develop the UK into even more of a hub than it already is for cruise departures. The more international cruise company ships based in the UK, the better, as this will mean people flying into the UK to start their cruise and often spending a day or two at the beginning or end of the cruise in a UK hotel and visiting attractions. The plan aims to have more ships based in the likes of Southampton, Dover, and Liverpool. I hope it works, as the spend by cruise passengers in the UK in 2023 was calculated at £5.3 billion and rising.

I hear that funding has been found for a new station on the London Overground’s Windrush Line. Provision for the station at Surrey Canal Road has long existed, but its provision has been tied to the development of housing around Millwall football stadium. However, the station going ahead needed the houses to be built, and development of most of the houses was stalled because public transport locally was poor and the station was needed to complete the housing development. I hear that funding for the station has now been found from various sources, and the station is expected to be open by 2028, allowing the go-ahead for 8,400 homes in the area.

The USS Winston S. Churchill has been visiting Portsmouth this week. The ship is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and normally part of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford’s Carrier Strike Group 12. The USS Winston S. Churchill is rather special among United States warships in that, because of its name, it always has a British exchange officer on board. The current one, Lieutenant Commander Owen Long, serves as the ship’s navigator and was allowed to pilot the ship into Portsmouth for the visit. I hear that Long is not a great lover of the coffee that the ship seems to sail on and instead keeps his own big box of Yorkshire Tea bags in the chart room.

The Chair of Nationwide Building Society has been criticised by the left-wing Guardian for attending a breakfast meeting held by Reform UK and sitting next to Richard Tice. Of course, the Guardian sneers at the ‘right wing’ Reform Party and says that banks and other organisations only sent lowly employees to the recent Reform Party Conference. But it then goes on to list a whole load of organisations and companies who took part in events at the conference, including Heathrow who sponsored a lounge, First Group who loaned buses for meeting rooms, Tic-Toc who sponsored a drinks reception, the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses, the British Chamber of Commerce, Airbnb, Japanese Tobacco International and JCB. The billionaire owner of JCB is particularly interesting as he was a major Tory donor, giving them millions of pounds, and has switched his allegiance to Reform. In the article, the Guardian makes it obvious that it disapproves of Reform, which makes me think Reform must be doing something right.

What’s this I hear about the asylum seeker who has been convicted of raping a girl in Hyde Park and is claiming that he can’t be returned to his home in Egypt because it wouldn’t be safe for him to be returned there? It has emerged that the real reason he doesn’t want to go back to Egypt is that he is a convicted terrorist and is facing eight years in prison. It seems he was a bomb maker for the Arab League and skipped the country before the trial. But he was found guilty in his absence. I would throw him out ASAP.

Sad Dick has been at it again, trying to suppress a report he commissioned because it doesn’t say what he wanted it to say. This time the report is into LTNs, and it reports exactly the reverse of what he has been using as a justification for introducing them. This claim is that they reduce car usage, and the report says, of course, this is true within the LTN. But the LTN also displaces traffic that would normally flow through it, around it, and instead of reducing traffic in the areas reported on, the total volume of traffic actually grew, making air quality worse and not better, as Sad Dick claimed. So, instead of taking notice of the report and not creating any more LTNs, Sad Dick tried to suppress it and carry on as if he had never seen it. But it has been leaked, and he has been caught out once again.

Well, that’s me done for the week and it’s nap time. The sun was out earlier but now it’s nap time raining, so it’s no windowsill for me this afternoon. I’m off to find somewhere I can be comfortable and left alone; the Thatcher Room usually meets the criteria but with Legohead at Chequers I might use his bed. Chat to you all next week.
 

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