Larry’s Diary, Week Three Hundred And Fourteen

Monday

Good morning, my friends. Today is a bit different, it is foggy! I do not think I have reported it being foggy in London since I started writing this diary, but it is not forecast to last. By the time I got back indoors, the moisture had settled on my fur and the duty feeder found a towel to rub me down. I rather enjoyed it, especially as the towel came from Legohead’s bathroom.

I love the announcement from the Prince of Darkness, late yesterday, that he had resigned from the Liebore Party, “to save them embarrassment”. Well, I think it was a case of jumping before he was pushed. I am sure even spineless Legohead would have slung him out of the party after the weekend’s revelations. Mandelslime says he does not remember receiving three payments of $25,000 from Epstein. How many people are so rich they do not notice an extra $75,000 in their bank account?

Other revelations in the Epstein files have more embarrassing photos and messages of Andrew, formerly known as Prince, and his divorced partner, Fergie. Her grovelling emails are just embarrassing, but pictures of Andrew kneeling over a woman lying on the floor. The photo raises some questions, but I suspect it was a First Aid course and he was about to give her the kiss of life.

Up in the North East of England, I hear that the £300 million new passenger train line, the Northumberland Line from Newcastle Central to Ashington, is proving to be a huge success, far exceeding expectations. It has halved the time it takes to commute from Ashington into the city centre using the bus service and has proved to be a lot more reliable. Since opening just over a year ago, it has carried 1,000,000 passengers. It has been such a success that the local council is proposing extending the line north of Ashington to Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, a place I know nothing about.

A new government website, Fuel Finder, has just gone live. The idea is that petrol and diesel buyers can use it to find the cheapest fuel on sale locally. The only problem I see is that joining the scheme is compulsory, so it should be showing users the cheapest local fuel, and the government boasts that filling stations signed up to the scheme must update their entry within 30 minutes of any change. My worry is that if a garage uses the site to see what all around them are charging, they could change their prices multiple times a day.

The Department of the Environment has announced that it wants the countryside to become “less white” to encourage more black and brown people in using it. The strange thing is some 85% of the UK population are white, so it is hardly surprising to hear that the countryside is white, with most black and brown people appearing to want to group together in cities. One of the things that made me chuckle was the DoE saying that country pubs are a problem because they tend to sell alcohol and traditional British food, which do not appeal to Muslims. Pubs have enough problems attracting enough customers without putting off their traditional trade, making them Muslim-friendly by not selling alcohol, banning dogs and removing roast pork, ham sandwiches and bacon rolls from the menu.

I have been reading about the Dutch use of “Sea Cubes” around their North Sea wind turbines. When wind turbines are being designed, a number of things are required. A windy location, close to shore and a flat seabed are just some. But around most offshore turbines, the work of building foundations has led to a sterile area completely denuded of sea life. This is not helped by the foundations encouraging fast water movement that sweeps away nutriment. The Dutch are trying to encourage sea life back into these sterile areas by dropping cubes into the sea around the turbines. The cubes are often hollow or have holes in them and a rough finish. These work on many levels. They reduce water movement, which encourages nutrients, the rough outsides encourage the likes of seaweed and molluscs, and holes encourage fish. When are we going to do something similar with our wind turbines?

Tuesday.

Hi folks, a little damp and chilly this morning, but I came back indoors to a nice bowl of Felix Chicken in Gravy, my absolute favourite, it hardly touched the sides. The Mandelslime story gets worse and worse, now it looks like he could have been selling government insider information to Epstein for years, and he has been reported to the Met Police, who are investigating.

Could we be in for a second parliamentary by-election? Yesterday, MP Dan Norris was arrested for the second time. The MP for North Somerset is already on police bail for the rape of a woman, and this time he was arrested on suspicion of raping a second woman, sexually assaulting a third woman, voyeurism and upskirting women. Of course, he has put out a statement saying he is totally innocent. Norris was elected as a Liebore MP, taking Jacob Reece Moggy’s old seat, but had the whip withdrawn and now sits as an independent. The question is, can he hang on as an MP, and if there is a by-election will Moggy stand for the Tories? Would Reform run and risk letting in Liebore, or stand down to let Moggy have a free run as a true, right-wing Tory?

Well, the Prince of Darkness is getting deeper and deeper into the poo. A story has emerged in the press saying that, as Business Secretary, Mandelslime handed government emails over to Epstein back in 2009. It is claimed that this is another story emerging from the weekend’s release of 3,000,000 Epstein files and photos. If it is true, I do not know if it is espionage or malfeasance in public office, either way, being found guilty would mean a very long prison sentence.

The captain of the Russian container ship “Solong”, which hit an oil tanker, the “Stena Immaculate”, loaded with jet fuel, and at anchor off the Humber Estuary, last March, has been found guilty of manslaughter. The ship’s captain, Vladimir Motin, had been on solo bridge duty on the night of the accident, but denied falling asleep. But the ship was on autopilot, and no attempt appears to have been made to disconnect the autopilot. Fortunately, there was only one death, the bow lookout on the “Solong”, whose body was never found. There was a huge explosion on the tanker, but its crew appear to have been well trained and abandoned ship almost immediately.

A huge fire in Southampton General Hospital has caused chaos in the hospital. The fire is believed to have started in the Endoscopy Department, has put over 200 beds out of use, including one high dependency unit. Nobody was hurt, but the rush to move patients to other, unaffected, wings, intensive care and high dependency units of the hospital has caused chaos and a rash of appointments and operations being cancelled. The fire was in an old wing of the hospital without sprinklers.

I have a happy cat story for you today. Last August, a four-month-old kitten, called Munch, was on a continental road trip with her owner, Anita Adamecz, her husband and their two young daughters, heading to Hungary. They stopped for a toilet break in Belgium, and when they let the kitten out, for its own comfort break, it ran off. The family spent four hours trying to find the cat before giving up and continuing the trip. But the family did not totally give up, and posted widely on Facebook about the missing tuxedo cat. Eventually, a local group, “Cattitude”, found Munch and identified him by his chip. The cat arrived back in Basingstoke at the weekend on the seventh birthday of Anita’s daughter, Naomi.

It is beginning to look like yet another U-turn is on the way from Legohead, this would be at least number 16 since Liebore came to power, depending on how you count them. Once again, he is under pressure from backbenchers over the government’s plan to provide council houses for illegal immigrants. Mind you, I heard a big Liebore supporter on the TV saying it only applied to brand new houses built directly by councils. So, the government could still let councils buy houses from developers and put illegal immigrants into them, or they could refurbish houses to a nearly new state and put immigrants into them. All this while we have well over a million people on council house waiting lists.

Wednesday

Good morning everyone. Gosh, it’s actually sunny in London this morning, but it is not so nice as it looks. You tend to forget that it’s winter when the sun is out and the central heating is on. This morning Legohead has announced that he is going to publish documents that were used when Mandelslime was appointed. It is the careful wording of the announcement that bothers this cat. It does not say all the documents, so my guess is it will be a careful selection that supports the appointment.

It’s all Mandelslime this week. Once again he has jumped before he can be pushed. This time he has announced that he is stepping down from the House of Lords, shortly after the Government announced it was going to draft legislation to have him removed. I understand the mechanism is for him to write a formal letter of resignation. However, it is an opposition day in the Commons today, and the Tories are tabling a motion to get the government to publish all the information it based its decision to make Mandelslime the British Ambassador to Washington on. I wonder if any Liebore back bencher will vote in favour of the motion.

Another day and another Liebore MP in trouble. This time is a second time around for the corrupt ex-corruption czar Tulip Saddiq, who has been found guilty of corruption for the second time. First time round she was sentenced to two years in prison. This time she rounded it to four years. I do not know if the sentences are in parallel or are sequential, which would mean being banged up for six years. Saddiq is moaning that she was found guilty in absentia, but she could have gone to Pakistan and appeared in court. She seems not to have wanted to do that as she knew she would have been in prison by now.

A story coming out of Japan is rather interesting. It seems that after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown, sea water has seeped in the mud under the busted reactors. Scientists have found bacteria living in the highly radioactive water, and a bacterial film has formed over the metalwork below the reactor. But these same scientists have had a surprise, as these are ordinary bacteria, not those ones that are known to be resistant to ionising radiation. This is not the first time odd things have happened in and around failed nuclear power plants. For example, a black mould has developed at Chernobyl that is not just nuclear resistant but seems to be indestructible. The other thing at Chernobyl is the emergence of radiation-resistant wolves.

I watched the Reform press conference on saving pubs and the hospitality industry, and jolly interesting it was too. They listed a five-point plan to save them, including reducing VAT, removing the recent NI increase and cutting the alcohol tax on beer by 10p. All this and more would be funded by only removing the two-child cap for British citizens, saving nearly £3 billion a year.

The Government has confirmed the rates of the state pension increase in April, it will either be £575 or £440 per annum, depending on when you retired. The oldest pensioners get the lower amount, which seems a little unfair as the oldest are more likely to need more money. If you are a man over 74 you will be getting the smaller amount of £9,615 per year, but if you retired after 2016 you will be getting £12,547 per year, a two-tier pension from two-tier Keir.

Just as I was looking for my last story of the day, I learn that the Met Police have decided they have enough to make a full criminal investigation into Mandelslime passing government information on to Epstein. I wonder how many letters passing on information from both the Government and ex-PM Gordon Brown. Taken with his decision to quit as a peer, it has not been a very good day for Mandelslime.

Thursday

Hello folks. Surprise, surprise, it’s wet and cold in London this morning, and I was as quick as I could possibly be on my daily excursion. Well, the atmosphere in Number 10 was awful after yesterday in the Commons. Legohead looks like a dead man walking. He had a load of his cronies round late yesterday, plotting late into the night, and I mean late. When I curled up in my cat basket they were all still at it. I think I will keep out of his way today, he is in a foul mood. It is strange, it was never like this under the Tories. No matter how bad a day Bozzie or the Rich Boy were having, they always had a minute to say hello and stroke me.

It took several questions at yesterday’s PMQs for Bad Enoch to draw the admission from Legohead that he went ahead and appointed Mandelslime knowing that he was still a supporter of Epstein. It was lovely seeing Legohead squirming, and gosh did he squirm. I wonder if Morgan “the Pirate” McSweeny is going to survive this affair, as it seems like he was one of those pushing Mandelslime to be made the Ambassador to Washington.

In Birmingham, a group of Muslims calling themselves the “Independent Candidate Alliance” have said they are going to stand 60 candidates in the local elections in May. Amongst them is Shahid Butt, who is a convicted terrorist, who was found guilty of plotting to blow up a British Consulate in Yemen. I read that Sharon Osborne, the wife of Ozzie Osborne and a well-known Brummie, is talking about returning from California to live in Birmingham and stand against Butt. Come on Sharon, come back, join Reform, and you will walk it.

For months now the Liebore lot have been boasting about falling NHS England waiting lists. Apparently, the number on the waiting list fell by 80,000 in November, the last month the numbers were published. But how was that achieved when the same figures show a drop of 10% in operations and people seen in appointments? The answer is down to the Government paying the NHS to use contractors to email, phone or write to patients on the waiting list to a) check if they are still alive and b) still want to stay on the waiting list. In addition, they also removed those who were deemed no longer to need the appointment for some other reason. So, in the month in question, they removed 340,000 people from the waiting list. But the list grew by 260,000. The difference is the 80,000 Liebore is boasting about. I wonder how many of that 260,000 added to the waiting list had been removed the previous month.

Boeing has hit yet another problem with its 777X programme. The jet that was supposed to be delivered to its first paying customer in 2020, and is not now expected to be delivered until 2027, has got a new problem, this time with the durability of its giant General Electric engines. The reports say the engines have “durability” problems. I can think of little worse than flying on a plane with engines that have a problem. Boeing has had a string of problems with this new plane and its engines, which are obvious from the long delays the plane has suffered. This time, I understand the problem is with a seal, so it should be reasonably easy to fix. But I wonder how long it will be before another problem emerges.

The release of the latest batch of over 3,000,000 Epstein files last week included over 1,000,000 redacted documents. But the redactions were so poor, over 1,000 victims have been identified. As an example, on one page there was a list of 32 Epstein victims, of which only one was redacted. Consequently, all the redacted documents have been withdrawn. That’s a pointless exercise, as there are now certain to be copies out there on the web.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince, has been evicted from Royal Lodge, Windsor. I hear he has started moaning about the accommodation his brother, the King, is providing him with on the Sandringham estate. He is in temporary accommodation while his new permanent home, Marsh Farm, is renovated. Word reaches me that the farm is considered “ramshackled” and “shoe box sized”. However, what some consider a shoe box, others would consider a large five-bedroom and two living room house, with numerous outbuildings and stables.

Friday

Hi everyone, I am getting fed up saying it, but it is wet in London again this morning. I see the Government are trying to release a squirrel this morning. They have announced that three African nations have agreed to take back illegal immigrants. But the agreement is only after we threatened to stop issuing any visas to their citizens. In another world that would be called blackmail.

I am hearing that there is a problem developing at Sandringham, where Randy Andy is being temporarily housed in Wood Farm while waiting for the refurbishment work on Marsh Farm to be completed. As a bit of background, Wood Farm is one of several properties, now owned by the King, on the Sandringham Estate and was the place that the late Duke of Edinburgh retired to when he knew he did not have long left. Apparently, he could be a bit blunt at times, but the Sandringham staff loved him. That is, I hear, not the case with Randy Andy, and many of the old staff are refusing to work for him. I wonder why that is. Is he nasty to them, or maybe he is demanding. I think it will all leak out in the end, it always does.

This Epstein thing is not going away. In fact, it is getting worse every day, as more and more of those three million documents are read by the press. Yesterday we heard, from emails, that the infamous picture of Randy Andy with Virginia Giuffre was genuine. And Epstein and Randy Andy asked a stripper for a threesome. People are beginning to speculate that Epstein was an agent of a foreign power, who became immensely wealthy by blackmailing the famous visitors to his island, not for money, but information. There is speculation that Epstein was working for the Russians, but he was Jewish, so this cat thinks Israel is more likely.

Do you remember Richard Keys and Andy Grey were the kingpins of Sky Sports football coverage? Then Grey was sacked in 2011 for making on-air sexist remarks about a female assistant referee, although I think they were known as linesmen and lineswomen back then. Keys, he of the very hairy hands, was sacked shortly after for his part in the incident. Since then the pair have moved their programme to the Gulf-based TV channel beIN TV and its English-language coverage of the Premier League. I now learn that the pair’s contracts run out at the end of the current season and will not be extended. I understand that there has been no falling out, but the channel just wants to move on. What odds they are hiring someone cheaper.

Last year I told you about Kiev signing a Letter of Intent with Sweden’s SAAB to buy up to 150 x JAS39 Gripen jets. As I understand it, discussions are still taking place as to the exact fit-out, cost and armaments. But what I do hear is that the planes are likely to be supplied with the MBDA Meteor air-to-air missiles. These missiles are state of the art and are only cleared to be carried by the Gripen, Rafael and Typhoon aircraft, and their actual performance is classified. However, it is known that they operate in the “beyond visual sight” arena, and that is admitted to being 100km plus. The word I hear is it is plus a lot and is probably over 200km. It is also initially rocket powered, but unlike most air-to-air missiles, once the rocket burns out it does not glide to the target. The Meteor has a ramjet that cuts in and powers the missile to its target at Mach 4+.

The news came out yesterday of another little bit of a misleading tale that came out of the Government in a Freedom of Information request. At the time it happened, everyone thought the Lucy Connelly case was a touch unusual in how fast it was pushed through the courts and dealt with. The Connelly legal team, through an FoI, have learnt that the case was sent to the CPS with a request for expedited prosecution. It now seems the Attorney General gave his permission for the case to be fast-tracked. Legohead said there was no political interference in this case, but the AG is a political appointee and a close friend of Legohead.

With the economy falling apart and the Bank of England indicating that it was reducing its predictions for annual growth, it was hardly a surprise when the interest rate was left untouched yesterday lunchtime. Liebore has been making a lot of our growth rate and falling interest rates and how we are doing better than most of the G7. It is not looking so good now.

Saturday.

Morning, my friends, wet and chilly yet again. Legohead went off to Chequers yesterday afternoon because he was holding a charm offensive party for backbench MPs last night. I understand these are dull affairs where the food is invariably spaghetti bolognese because they can supply big pots of it and visitors help themselves. I would love to have been a fly on the wall.

After I had finished my diary entry yesterday, the news broke that the Metropolitan Police were raiding what they said were “two homes belonging to a 72-year-old man being investigated for malfeasance in public office”. Well, to anyone with half a brain it was immediately obvious that it was the London and Wiltshire home of Mandelslime. In fact, it was later said that Mandelslime was in the £12 million London house when it was raided. It is all falling apart for Legohead very, very quickly.

A report has been presented to MPs about rebuilding the rotting hulk that is the Palace of Westminster. The place is said to be in a terrible state structurally and mechanically. Its heating, plumbing and electrical systems all need ripping out and replacing, and the building leaks like a sieve. So, the report says it will cost around £41 billion to repair and take 60 years to correct while working around the MPs and Lords. A cheaper alternative plan is to move the people out and then do the work. This would reduce the time to just 20 years and cost just £16 billion. I have an idea. Move everyone out, knock the place down and build new modern debating chambers and offices on the same site. I bet that is a lot cheaper.

Is the Ginger Growler going to succeed in her attempt at a comeback? She is clearly on manoeuvres to replace Legohead and is said to have accumulated a £1 million war chest and has the unions on side. I am rather worried that she could become the PM, as she is far left and we would suffer all the unions being handed massive wage increases. But there is still one big problem for her to overcome, she is still in trouble with HMRC.

At the moment the UK uses the Aster 30 missile for air defence on the Type 45 destroyers, and we have quite a large stock of the missiles. The Type 45 uses the European 48-cell Sylver vertical launch systems, however the Ministry of Defence has determined that the Royal Navy will standardise on the American Type 41 Vertical Launch System and this is being installed on the Type 26 and 31 frigates that are under construction, meaning they cannot use the stock of Aster missiles. For once the MoD has done something sensible, it has just contracted the missile’s maker, MBDA, to study the integration of the Aster 30 into Type 41 VLS.

I sometimes wonder if the big airlines will ever stop placing huge orders for new planes. I hear that two of the big airlines are in the final stages of negotiations with Boeing and Airbus over big replacement programmes. The smaller order is likely to come from SAS, who I understand is looking for a combination of either Boeing 787 and 777X jets or Airbus A330 and A350 jets. SAS is part of the Air France-KLM Group, so you would think Airbus might be favoured. But the second order, which would probably be for over 100 planes, is from Saudia and would be for both narrow-body and wide-body aircraft. Saudia’s current fleet is all Airbus for its narrow-body and Boeing for its wide-body jets, so this order could be split. I wonder when we will learn who is buying what.

A very odd story reaches me from the Winter Olympics. The accusations are that some male ski jumpers have been injecting hyaluronic acid directly into their penises, in order to boost their size and merit a bigger ski suit. I wondered why a bigger ski suit is desirable, and I am told it offers better aerodynamic performance and hence a potential improvement in distances. Apparently, it is a sugar found naturally in the body and can hold 1,000 times its weight in water and thus increase an organ’s size. Whether this is a banned drug is in question, but drug testers are investigating.

That’s me finished for the week, and it’s time for my afternoon snooze. It’s still raining, though not very much, and there is no sun, so it is still too chilly out for this old cat. I think I will nap in the Thatcher Room today, I am unlikely to be disturbed there. Chat to you all again next week.
 

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