Larry’s Diary, Week Three Hundred And Nineteen

Monday

Good morning, my friends. It was a bit misty when I ventured out this morning, not cold or wet, but not very nice. Still, it wasn’t raining, and it was a bowl of Felix beef in gravy when I got back indoors, my second favourite flavour. My feeder this morning is one who puts the radio on. She must be right-wing because she put on Talk Radio. I agreed with nearly everything that Jeremy Kyle was saying. Does that make me a right-wing cat?

With better weather last week, the small boats were able to start crossing the English Channel once again. The taxi services operated by Border Farce and the Royal National Lifts for Immigrants landed over 800 fighting-age men at Ramsgate and Dover. That many crossing illegally this early in the year does not bode well for this year’s total.

I have mentioned it before, but it is beginning to look more likely that the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System (FCAS) looks to be dead, and it is the fault of the French company Dassault. The cost of FCAS was to be split between the three countries, and the initial agreement split the work in proportion to the financial input. Originally this was 40% France, 40% Germany and 20% Spain. But the French, represented by Dassault, have been demanding 80% of the work. First the German partner, Airbus, who also represent Spain, said no. Now the huge German union IG Metall has said no. But France will not back down. The Yanks have seen this as an opportunity to sell more F-35s, but last week Germany said they will not be buying any more. Instead, I hear they are looking at joining the Anglo-Italian-Japanese 6th generation fighter (GCAP), which should have a demonstrator flying in early 2027. The Germans were looking at buying 200 x FCA. A purchase of this size could reduce the GCAP (Tempest) unit price considerably, but the Indians and Saudis are both also interested. This could be massive for BAE and Rolls-Royce.

I see that HMS Dragon is still in Portsmouth a week after Legohead said it was off to Cyprus to protect RAF Akrotiri. He has also put our one working aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, on five-day notice to sail. The only problem with that is we don’t have any escorts available to protect it. Dragon won’t be available for air protection. Anti-submarine frigates are not ready, and our one at-sea submarine is on a courtesy visit to Australia. So it looks like the French will be on escort duty. How humiliating.

At a time when World War 3 could be breaking out, the British Army is launching a consultation with soldiers as to whether they want to wear makeup, hair extensions, earrings and paint their nails. That’s OK for the female soldiers, no one wants them to be butch lesbians. But it is not a good look for the likes of the Paras, the Royal Marines, or the SAS. There may be a few who would like to wear that stuff at the weekends, but I don’t think it would scare our enemies seeing our soldiers mincing into battle.

I hear that over 80 Liebore backbenchers have got together to oppose the Tottenham Turnips’ plan to halt many jury trials. That is just about enough to lose a parliamentary vote. The Labour government has lost a couple of elections since the general election, and several MPs have become independents by choice or by suspension, meaning that the government now is down to 404 MPs. But you need 320 to secure a majority in the Commons. Take that 80 away from 404 and the government majority is wafer-thin. It only means a couple more need to join the rebels, or a couple of MPs to be sick or absent for some other reason, for a vote to be lost. I do wonder if plans will be quietly dropped so as not to risk a humiliating voting loss.

The government has announced that they are worried that flying the Union Flag or the Cross of St George is divisive, and their use should be limited. They are the national flags of Great Britain and England, and there should be no limit to their use. No one seems to worry about people flying the Welsh and Scottish flags or, come to that, the European or Palestinian flags. I think it is the last two that are divisive.

Tuesday

Hi folks, a dry morning, reasonably warm, with high cloud. So Legohead had a twenty-minute chat with The Donald. I heard his end of the call, and it was cringe-worthy. I got the distinct impression that The Donald was ripping him a second one. Legohead was certainly not very happy when he got off the phone. I stayed well clear of him. I have heard of people kicking the cat, and I didn’t want to give him the opportunity.

I saw a Green politician on TV yesterday opining on the situation where no gas or oil was coming through the Strait of Hormuz and saying that what was wrong was that we didn’t have enough solar and wind. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Yesterday, solar was producing just 6% of national electricity demand, and wind just 9%. The rest was being generated by gas, nuclear, and biomass. When this was pointed out by Jacob Rees-Mogg, she shrugged her shoulders and said we shouldn’t be relying on gas. Mogg pointed out that the government was buying gas from Norway when we had hundreds of years’ supply under our feet. The Greeny said that the people don’t want fracking because of earthquakes. I suspect that when the lights go out and the heat goes off, the people won’t give a damn about a few minor earth tremors that hardly register on the seismic scale.

I read that the F-35 fighter has a bit of a problem with heat. When it was being designed, the engineers calculated that all the electronics onboard would generate about 12 kW of heat and tasked Honeywell with designing the cooling system. Honeywell over-designed the system to cope with 14 kW, but the first tranche of planes generated around 24 kW when everything is in use. Honeywell installed a fix that involved using double the amount of cooling bleed air from the jet’s engine, but this causes the engine to overheat and use more fuel so that all the electronics onboard can’t be used at the same time. But it gets worse. The projections for the coming Tranche 4 planes, which are supposed to be able to control drones and have a new, more powerful radar and laser weapons, indicate that they will need 80 kW of cooling, which will require a completely new cooling system.

The new Supreme Leader of Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei, was announced at the weekend, and immediately Israel promised to kill him. He is the son of the last Supreme Leader and is said to be the richest man in Iran, worth £130 billion, with property in London worth £38 billion. But all his money can’t protect him, as Iranian officials have already reported that he has been injured. Intriguingly, he has not been seen since the announcement, which for the Supreme Leader of Iran is unusual. When the last leader was killed, in the first few hours of the war, the regime announced he had been slightly injured when he was actually dead. Could we be seeing a repeat situation?

The Turkish Air Force seems to be happy to have ordered 20 x Tranche 4 Typhoons. So happy, in fact, that it is taking on a further 24 early models, 12 from Oman and 12 from Qatar, and upgrading them to Tranche 4 level so that they can meet the latest NATO standards. That takes their fleet to 44 aircraft. But I hear this may not complete their acquisitions. The story I hear is that the TAF has its eye on a fleet of 80, which would be four 20-plane TAF squadrons. Again, the 36 extra planes would be a mix of second-hand and new aircraft, with the new being as many as a second batch of 24 and another 12 second-hand from the Middle East.

Now that the 5th runway at Heathrow has been approved, I hear that it is expected to bring an extra 66 million passengers a year to the airport. This is far more than the existing transport infrastructure can handle. Consequently, a private company is looking at a new rail service. This one is interesting, as it would be privately financed and would only need 8 miles of new track to join it to the existing network. It would run south from Terminal 5 and join the line that runs via Hounslow, Richmond, and Twickenham into Clapham Junction and London Waterloo, where there are unused platforms that were built for the embryo Channel Tunnel service. Of course, the trains could also go in the other direction to the west via Staines and Bracknell. Much of the 8 miles of new track would have to be in tunnels under Stanwell Moor, close to the airport, as this is an SSI, but this is a cheap scheme.

AerCap and Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI) have spotted a gap in the market for large freight aircraft and are offering to convert old Boeing 777-300ER passenger jets into freighters. This puts them into direct competition with the proposed new Boeing 777-8F. Oddly, the old plane conversion, which they are calling “The Big Twin Freighter,” has a greater capacity for freight than the 777-8F but is able to lift slightly less payload by weight. There are about 300 Boeing 747 freighters already in operation around the world, which the Airbus A350F and the 777-8F are aiming to replace, and the introduction of a third big freighter is not particularly welcome by Boeing. The first A350F is due in service this year and has over 80 orders and options. But Boeing, which has a similar number of orders, says the 777-8F is running three years behind the passenger version of the 777-8, so they have a lot more to lose.

Wednesday

Good morning, everyone. Yes, it was sunny and pleasantly warm when I made my way down to the bottom of the garden, and I’m delighted that the forecast says it will last all day. I was also delighted to see HMS Dragon slowly moving out of Gosport late yesterday afternoon. OK, it was in dry dock having a bit of “light” maintenance when it was decided to send it out to Cyprus. This means that the crew were not on board, the missile tubes would be empty, ammunition lockers close to areas of “hot working” would be emptied, and many of the on-board stores would be run right down, especially fresh items. OK, there was lots of work to do, but in eight days, working 24 hours a day, a lot should have been able to be done. I was a little bit disappointed to see, in the video of Dragon sailing, that she had big rust patches. I hope they loaded gallons of battleship grey paint before she sailed.

Down in Australia, they are currently playing the Ladies Asia Football Cup. On Monday, all hell broke out in the hotel of the Iranian women’s team. Team officials suddenly realised that five of the team, who had just been knocked out of the competition, were missing. The team’s minders raced around the hotel lobby looking for the missing women, but they were gone. The five missing women had been heavily criticised in the Iranian media for not singing the national anthem, and they were expected to be harshly punished on the team’s return. It seems they had been in contact with the Australian authorities, and the police had secreted them in a safe house, and they had applied for political asylum. I understand The Donald has said that if they are not granted asylum in Australia, he will give it to them in the USA.

In the Caribbean, the government of Trinidad and Tobago has imposed a “state of emergency” due to gang violence. They have issued a long list of places in the capital, Port of Spain, to avoid, which includes several areas and the beaches. I understand that at least 12 of the big cruise lines are still visiting the islands, where the U.S. Department of State warns that terrorists may attack tourist locations, transportation centres, hotels, restaurants, and other areas without warning. I really don’t understand why cruise lines are risking going there until the violent criminal gangs have been sorted out.

I get fed up with the Greenies trotting out the same old lie that the price of natural gas is set by the international market, and that if we were to increase our production from the North Sea or by “fracking”, it would all be sold on the international market. This just doesn’t stand up to inspection. Every single cubic metre of gas produced in the North Sea is consumed in the U.K., and there is no reason to think that “fracked” gas would be any different, at least until our market was satisfied and any surplus could be exported. But first we would have to build pipelines or plants to liquefy it. Because it is not easy to transport, natural gas has a number of regional prices, meaning, for example, gas in the USA is much cheaper than in other places. Our gas could be sold internally at one price and internationally at another.

The Royal Navy is panicking about drones after seeing what is happening in both Ukraine and Iran. They have put out a request for information to the defence industry, which calls for a “rapidly procured and installable counter UAS (unmanned aircraft system) capability” that is “suitable for maritime platforms to detect, track, identify, and defeat airborne threats”. Companies are expected to reply by 17th March, and the RFI says an order will be placed within a month. Of course, our bigger warships, like frigates and destroyers, have vertical launch missiles to protect them, but they are lightly armed and vulnerable to a swarm attack. The likes of our River-class patrol boats are unprotected. Mind you, I’m not sure why we are bothering to put out an RFI when we have the DragonFire laser weapon ready to go. I hope it’s just one of those things where we have to be seen to be picking the best and cheapest system available.

I had never heard of it before, but I have just been reading about the Great Sea Interconnector. This is a planned 2,000 MW electrical connection between Greece, Cyprus and Israel. Phase one would comprise a pair of 500 MW cables, and phase two would replicate phase one. But what is the reason for it being planned? The answer is simple. Greece and Cyprus are short of electricity, and most is generated from gas and oil, which in general is imported, although Cyprus has recently discovered a small offshore gas field. Greece also supports the isolated electricity network on Crete by €300 million a year so that electricity on the island is the same price as on the mainland. But in Israel, they have an offshore gas field that alone can supply all its gas needs for over 50 years. But it is, as I mentioned in a previous story, not easy to export gas. It is expensive, as it has to be converted into LNG and loaded onto a giant refrigerated gas carrier. How much cheaper would it be to build a CCGT power station, convert the gas into electricity, and export the electricity to the Greek mainland via Cyprus, with a spur to Crete? The spur alone would save €300 million a year, quickly offsetting the projected €2.5 billion cost of the project on its own.

For my last story today, I bring you news that volunteers are being trained to refloat stranded dolphins and whales without injuring them. The report was on local TV and explained how the team were not learning with real dolphins and whales, but inflatable ones. I was only too happy that this was the case, as the whale they were using started going down, and I was a bit worried for the poor thing as it started looking rather wrinkled. But it was soon fixed when someone inserted an airline into it.

Thursday

Hello folks, grey and grotty this morning, with rain in the air, not very nice at all. I see the Lords voted to scrap “non-crime hate incidents” completely last night. It was a close vote, but it now goes back to the Commons as a Lords amendment to the Police and Crime Bill. I do hope that Legohead doesn’t try to throw the amendment out.

The first batch of the Mandelslime papers was released yesterday afternoon, just 23 minutes before the debate in the Commons and after PMQs. It doesn’t read well for Legohead. The main “due diligence” report he is said to have relied on said there was a “general reputational risk” over his relationship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. Another thing revealed is that Mandelslime wanted £547,000 in severance pay, but he was paid £75,000, which in my view was far too much. He should have got nothing. I’m sure that after a better reading, more will come out. Can Legohead survive this?

I was happy to see a Home Secretary has finally had enough guts to ban the annual al-Quds Day march in London. Al-Quds Day was first introduced by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was the first Supreme Leader of Iran, in 1979. It is supposed to be in support of Palestine, named after the Palestinian name for Jerusalem, and occurs on the last Friday in Ramadan. In the U.K., the march was due to take place on Sunday, but it has become a march in favour of Iran, the Ayatollah, and Islamic terrorist groups like Hezbollah. At a time when our bases are being attacked, how can it be appropriate for a march in support of those who attacked us to take place?

Robber Reeves is said to be looking at increasing allowances for employees who use their own cars on company business. The current maximum rate that an employer may reimburse an employee is a tax-free 45p a mile for the first 10,000 miles a year. Over 10,000 miles, the rate drops to 25p per mile, but you can then claim up to 5p per mile per passenger. It has been over 15 years since the allowance went up, so it seems that it is due a revision. The 45p is supposed to cover not just the cost of petrol or diesel, but also other consumables such as oil, washer fluid and tyres, as well as insurance, tax and depreciation. It is about time this allowance was increased.

I read that the United States has been moving parts of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system from South Korea to the Middle East. THAAD systems can take out ballistic missiles in their terminal approach to the target. Are the Yanks taking a chance by removing these weapons that are protecting South Korea from North Korean ballistic missiles?

I see that a Royal Navy Leonardo AW101 Merlin HM2 helicopter arrived at RAF Akrotiri early this week. The Merlin HM2 is equipped with the Crowsnest early warning radar and is designed to protect navy ships, particularly the aircraft carriers, from airborne threats, but they need to be paired with either missile-equipped helicopters or aircraft. Then, on Wednesday afternoon, an RAF C-17 brought in 3 x Leonardo Helicopters Wildcats. These helicopters were seen to each be armed with a triple Martlet missile launcher. The Wildcat-Martlet combination has never been tested in action, but is said to have proved successful repeatedly on test ranges. I suppose we will find out soon if the system works in a real-life situation.

Nearly every week since the last full council election, there have been council by-elections, the results of which are broadly comparable to what the opinion polls predict a general election will bring us. Since the last lot of council elections, Reform have gained 63 councillors, the Limp Dumps 21 and the Greens 3. The Tories have lost 23 and Liebore have lost 51. The discrepancy is made up by the minor parties. There are five more seats being voted for today. I shall be watching the results carefully.

Friday

Hi everyone, the sun was shining when I went out this morning, but my, was it a cold wind. I was shocked. The temperature must have dropped considerably overnight, but the bright sun hid the drop.

The Mandelslime papers reveal that Legohead had been warned about him, despite him saying he was lied to by Mandelslime over Epstein. These papers appear to show that Legohead has been the one who misled the public, as he was warned by Jonathan Powell, his National Security Advisor. I think there is something we are not being told about this affair. Why would Legohead ignore a clear warning from Powell?

The news is emerging that the new Ayatollah of Iran is not dead, as was widely rumoured, but is in hospital, unconscious, and has had a leg amputated after being injured in the initial attack on Iran that killed his father, the previous Supreme Leader. The new Ayatollah has been conspicuously absent from the airwaves. His only appearance so far has been widely dismissed as an invention of AI.

I haven’t mentioned it before, but earlier this week the Home Secretary announced a new scheme where we would pay illegal immigrants £10,000 each to go home. But it goes further than that, as the scheme would pay £10,000 each to a husband, wife and up to two children. This would mean an illegal immigrant family could be paid £40,000 to go home. This is about £5,000 more than the average annual wage in Britain. The average annual wage in Afghanistan is £1,800, in Sudan £1,750, and £900 in Iran, where the majority of our illegal immigrants come from. If we gave them a year’s wage in their own country, it would probably be too much.

The word is that the Government is looking at sending the RFA Lyme Bay to the Middle East to evacuate Brits from the area. Lyme Bay has bunks for around 500 people. Yesterday, a military medical team was flown out to meet the RFA in Gibraltar. The word is that the same RAF flight carried a mobile field hospital that can be erected inside the Lyme Bay’s helicopter hangar. It’s only a pity we didn’t do this two weeks ago.

The Bank of England has announced that the next series of English banknotes will replace the current portraits of famous historical figures with British wildlife. The proposal is to replace Churchill (£5), Jane Austen (£10), J. M. W. Turner (£20) and Alan Turing (£50) with the likes of otters, owls, badgers and field mice. Personally, I would like to see the two mixed, say Churchill with an owl on his shoulder or Turner with an otter at his feet. I would volunteer to be a cat sat on Jane Austen’s knees, as I can be wild when my dinner is late.

I told you a couple of weeks ago that the troubled ferry Glen Sannox was in Cammell Laird’s yard, after just over a year in service, to have a load of cracks welded up. It seems that the yard also investigated the cause of the vibrations that were believed to be causing the cracks. They have now announced the cause of the vibrations as the propeller design, meaning that the ship and its still-to-be-finished sister need them to be replaced at a cost of a mere £3.2 million. The big problem is that new propellers will take about six months to design, manufacture and install. It looks like the ship will go back into service with the old propellers and shake itself into more cracks that will need repair.

Saturday

Morning, my friends. The Tories have asked the Ethics Committee to investigate the Mandelslime scandal and whether Legohead misled the Commons with the statements he made. What seems to be happening is that we are only being shown a small percentage of the documents, despite issuing 147 redacted pages, and they are not looking good for Legohead. I hear that there are loads more to come once the fuzz agree.

The news has leaked in the media that Legohead didn’t personally speak to Mandelslime during the vetting process. Instead, the claim is that he handed responsibility to two of his underlings, Sir Matthew Doyle and Morgan McSweeney, who were close friends of Mandelslime. This makes Legohead’s claim that Mandelslime lied to him rather contentious. If he didn’t speak to him, how could he have been lied to by him? Of course, he could have been lied to by either or both of Doyle and McSweeney, but rather conveniently both have been sacked.

It looked promising when it was announced that tomorrow’s al-Quds march had been banned. But now I hear that it has been replaced by a “static rally”. Apparently, marches and static rallies are governed by different pieces of legislation, and while the march has been banned, a rally has not. But I have a question. How do these demonstrators get to the rally, do they march?

On Monday just gone, a Ryanair plane was seized in Austria by bailiffs. A man had been on a Ryanair flight in 2024 that was badly delayed and, under EU law, had been entitled to €840, but as is not unknown, the compensation was not paid. The man called in the bailiffs, who held the plane until the money was paid. There is a rumour doing the rounds that the aeroplane’s crew had a whip-round to pay the bailiffs, but this has been denied by the airline.

On Thursday, the USAF lost a KC-135 airborne refuelling tanker over Iraq, with the deaths of all of the six crew. The KC-135 is not equipped with ejection seats. The USAF says it was involved in an accident and was not lost to either enemy action or friendly fire. But this is not good enough for the media, with several speculating it was shot down by an Iranian missile. But I can reveal that it was a mid-air accident, involving a second KC-135 that made it safely back to the ground despite losing a big chunk of its vertical stabiliser.

I hear that the USAF and Israel have come up with a novel new tactic in Iran. It seems that military checkpoints have cropped up all over the country and have become targets for marauding aircraft. I wonder if this is why the Yanks sent the A-10 Warthog to the arena. It is ideally suited to this sort of thing, with its 3,900 rounds-per-minute rotary cannon and Hydra rockets.

I read that a red fox has stowed away on a car transporter sailing between Southampton and New York. No one has explained how the fox got on board or when he was discovered, but I understand that he is now in quarantine in the Bronx Zoo. Once he has been cleared, it will be decided where he will go. Red foxes are native to North America as well as Europe, so he could be released into the wild, where I guess he will be a hit with the vixens because of his British accent and manners. I wonder if he is the fox I chased out of Downing Street.

I told you earlier in the week that on Thursday there were five local by-elections. Well, the results are out, and it was a bit of a nothing burger this week. The Limp Dumps held on to two seats, gained one from the Greens and lost one to the Greens. So the Greens lost one and gained one. This week’s winners were Reform UK, who gained a seat from the local independents with a mere 30% lead in the polls. Liebore only bothered to stand in three of the five seats, and the best they could manage was 10% in the Liverpool seat the Greens gained from the Limp Dumps.

That’s me finished for the week and time for a snooze. It’s still sunny this afternoon and quite nice in the sun, so I’m trying the windowsill this afternoon. If it’s OK, then that will be two weeks running on the windowsill. Chat to you all again next week.
 

© WorthingGooner 2026