Larry’s Diary, Week Three Hundred And Forty-0ne

Monday

Good Morning, my happy readers, and a happy Bank Holiday Monday to you. It was dry and sunny when I woke up, but a little breezy when I popped out before my Felix. Mind you, it looks like it could rain at any time, as there are some big black clouds scudding across the sky.

Did you see the recording of Mascara Man on the BBC Breakfast yesterday morning? For once, he looked quite smart, he had a collar and tie on and what looked to be a suit. Mind you, as the camera only showed him from the waist up, it might have been that he had no trousers on. Mind you, he didn’t look very comfortable, he was sweating and bumbling a bit. So, he has decided to keep the Police killers in and not let them out early. I just don’t know what took him so long, was it a battle with his left-wingers who don’t think anyone should be in prison?

It was Family Day at the Notting Hill Carnival yesterday, the day when all the children are paraded in their costumes. A day when everything is peaceful and happy, according to the Met, so I was delighted to see there were only 169 arrests. I hate to think what it is going to be like today. I hope it pours with rain this afternoon, that should make it easier for the Met, who will issue a statement saying what a good job they have done.

Home Office data out this morning says that the Police Forced Marriage Unit in the last 5 years had referrals of 21 children under the age of 5. The number under 12 was over 100. Of course, the majority of these cases had connections to Muslim countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. I hear that the Police keep being told it is OK ‘because it is their culture’.

I see that Iceland has held a referendum on whether the country should hold talks with the EU about joining. The vote was 52.5% No and 47.5% Yes (where have I seen those percentages before?). What I find interesting is that this wasn’t a vote about joining the EU, it was about having talks about joining. I suspect that if it had been about joining, a lot more would have voted No. When the early votes were counted, it looked like a Yes vote, but that was mostly the Reykjavik vote, and as the more rural votes came in, it all changed. It’s like the London vote in the UK.

It’s lunchtime here in the Street and, as I was eating a lunchtime Felix (a small portion), I was watching the News on TV, and it seems Bad Enoch has started her reshuffle, and a few big names are gone. Out goes Mel Stride (shadow chancellor), replaced by Andrew Griffith, who I believe has a strong financial background. Also out are Dame Priti Patel, Sir James Cleverly, and Stuart Andrew (?). Tom Tugendhat is now in to replace Priti Patel as Shadow Foreign Secretary.

The free travel area between the Irish Republic and Great Britain is about to become not so free. As from the end of this month, you will need to have your passport with you to travel on a ferry between the Republic of Ireland and England or Wales. But a passport will still not be required to travel on a ferry between Northern Ireland and England or Scotland. Now, this creates an obvious loophole. If you cross the land border between the Republic and Northern Ireland, you don’t need a passport, so you just hop on a ferry from Belfast to Liverpool or from Larne to Cairnryan, and you have skipped any passport check. I wonder how much longer this loophole will be left standing.

Tuesday

Hi folks, a brightish morning, but still not warm. I see Mascara Man is to address the Commons today and, according to ‘The Powers That Be’, he will be talking about his policies. That could be interesting, as I didn’t know he had any, apart from £2 bus fares and “growth in every postcode”. I do hope it will be fully funded.

Talking about fully funding things, I see that there is still talk about a wealth tax, a type of tax that has failed wherever it has been tried. There are two big, interrelated problems, where do you pitch the tax start point and how do you ensure the really wealthy stay here to pay it? Pitch it too low and you catch all the asset-rich and cash-poor who have a house in the London suburbs that has gone up in value and has far exceeded their income. On the other hand, there is the multimillionaire who already pays a huge chunk of income tax, and if they have to pay a lot more, they will up and leave the country like the 16,000 millionaires who have left the country since Liebore came to power.

I see that, despite my hopes and prayers, it didn’t rain yesterday at the Notting Hill Carnival. But according to the Police, it was “overwhelmingly positive and celebratory”. That is despite there being 560 arrests at the last count. I bet that goes up today. There were over 100 stabbed, despite the Police finding 62 knives and one handgun. When will it get moved to Hyde Park and become a ticketed event?

This morning I learn that Legohead is to resign as an MP only 6 weeks after he told the BBC he was going to serve as a backbencher until the end of this Parliament. I know he has resigned as PM, but today it is as an MP from his seat in Holborn and St Pancras. So, we are in for another by-election. It is such a left-wing area that I guess whoever the local Liebore Party nominee is will be a shoe-in. Legohead says he is going to concentrate on international affairs. I wouldn’t mind betting he already has a job lined up and that he gets a peerage. What odds Zack Polanski stands for the Greens?

Today, being the 1st of September, is not only the first day of meteorological autumn, it is the day when we become full members of the CPTPP trading bloc. All the members of the group have to agree to admit a new member, and the last to agree was Canada, who signed back in July. So, our formal admission was fixed for today, and we can now trade tariff-free with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. The new group has economies that total £13 trillion, and we would have to leave if we went back into the EU. This grouping isn’t political and doesn’t enforce things like free movement, it is what the EU could have been.

I understand there is only one type of large passenger plane, the 737 Max, currently being made that has integrated ‘airstairs’ offered as a factory-fitted extra. In addition, there is only one operator who buys it, Ryanair, who have it on virtually every 737 they own. The 737 is closer to the ground than any other plane. Due to its original design, it can accommodate the built-in airstairway, and Ryanair buy it because they operate to so many secondary airports that it saves them time and money, as they don’t have to pay for, or wait for, the airport’s mobile stairs to arrive. Now I read the Italians have discovered that 82% of falls during embarkation or disembarkation involve these stairs. And it’s just because Ryanair want to save the money.

Today is the last day of the summer football transfer window. If a club hasn’t got its buying or selling done by 11pm, the window is shut, that’s it until the winter window opens in the New Year. There is, of course, an exception. You can get an extra hour if you manage to fax in an official deal sheet before the deadline. But in this day and age, I want to know why they still use fax machines. Well, apparently it’s because a document can be signed and not interfered with, so it is still used by the legal profession.

Wednesday

Good morning all, it was a bit chilly and damp when I popped out, but the drizzle had blown away when I got back for my brekkie. I understand we have a visitor coming to No. 10 this morning. No, not Mascara Man, but you might think so, judging by the amount of time he has spent here since being anointed as PM. It is that horrible little Froggy midget who runs France. Will he stand on a higher step to be the same height as MM?

Did you see Mascara Man on the TV yesterday? I thought he was terrible, he might not be as robotic as Legohead, but he hardly answered a question. Mind you, he blamed all the country’s problems on the Liebore favourite bogeymen, Thatcher and Brexit. Still, the bond market hated what he said, and bond rates went up to the highest since 1968! Not only that, the stock market has gone down this morning. I wonder if New will do better at PMQs today.

The village of Egginton in Derbyshire doesn’t have a pub, it doesn’t have a Post Office or a village shop. But it does have a brand-new bus stop, despite the hourly bus service having been withdrawn in 2017 due to it being uneconomic. Apparently, the pole holding up the old bus stop had become corroded and dangerous, so the local authority decided to replace it with a brand-new bus stop, just in case someone started running a service in the future. Sounds like a total waste of money to me.

Recently, about 22 oil tankers a day have been exiting the Persian Gulf loaded with crude oil, most of which comes from Kuwait or Oman. This is still a lot less than the 100+ a day before the Iran war, but the number is growing. I only hope the recent escalation of fighting dies down quickly and the number exiting grows.

The BBC is struggling to save money as so many people have stopped paying the licence fee. Back in June, they announced the death of Football Focus, a Saturday lunchtime fixture for many years that had lost its once huge audience for a programme reviewing the Saturday afternoon games. But times have changed and few games kick off at 3 o’clock on a Saturday now, and there are loads of other channels to watch, usually including a live game at the same time. Today, the BBC has scrapped another programme that has been leaking viewers, Ski Sunday. This programme has been about for 50 years, but its audience has dropped so far that it can no longer be justified in taking up screen time.

According to Sad Dick, he has been caught by a scam. A car, for which the DVLA had him recorded as the Registered Keeper, was reported for having no Road Tax. The tax on the 24-year-old blue Nissan Micra expired last September, and in January this year it still hadn’t been taxed. The DVLA charged him, as the registered keeper, for not taxing the car, via the fast-track Single Justice Procedure. The papers were sent to a restaurant several streets away from City Hall, so Khan didn’t know of the court case, and he was found guilty without being in court or entering a plea. Sad Dick says the car was not his and has never been his. I expect he has grounds to appeal.

Just Stop Oil caused traffic chaos in London this lunchtime when about 60 protesters sat in the road outside Parliament during Mascara Man’s first PMQs. In fact, he had difficulty leaving the Commons to return to Downing Street. As I write this diary entry, the Police say they have arrested 47 people for obstruction-type offences, and some have glued themselves to the road. A spokesperson for the group said, “We are back”. This seems to refer to the fact that the group announced it was disbanding in April 2025. Fortunately, the Police seem to have been rather robust.

Thursday

It’s a good morning to you, my friends. A bit of sun when I went down the garden and no rain. Mascara Man spent the night here last night, that makes a change. But I don’t see his slippers in his bedroom, so I doubt it is a permanent move. I hear that the Little Frog has promised 45 additional Gendarmes on the French beaches. I really am surprised that he can’t do a little better, considering how much we give him.

Overnight, the news broke that Liebore intends to reopen talks with Mauritius about the reverse sale to them of the Chagos Islands. I had thought this stupid idea was dead, mainly because the Yanks would have to agree, and they don’t. But I really don’t know how we could think about giving away the islands and paying Mauritius £35 billion to take them. If we have that money to spare, and I’m pretty sure we haven’t, why not spend it on something that might be useful in the event of a war, like buying 225 or so F-35 5th-generation fighter jets?

Last week, an odd thing happened at the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant, owned and run by Florida Power and Light. The No. 1 Reactor on the site was buzzing along quite normally, producing 100% of its normal output, when, without warning, three of the 217 Boron Control Rods dropped into the Reactor Core. This is basically the way the nuclear reaction in the core is controlled, allowing the output of the reactor to be varied from 100% all the way down to 0%. When a control rod enters the Reactor Core, the Boron absorbs the free neutrons and the nuclear reaction stops. The control rods hang in guide tubes and are normally lowered or raised together in tiny increments to control the reactor’s output. The control rods are held suspended above the reactor’s core by electromagnets, and in the event of a power failure, the magnets would stop working and every control rod would drop, under gravity, and fully halt the reactor.

In this case, the magnets holding three rods just let go at the same time for some unknown reason. Now, if one rod had dropped, as is not unknown, the people running the reactor would almost certainly have continued letting the reactor work, as a tiny dead spot would not have made any difference and the control rod would have been recovered. But three at once is unusual, so the operators manually lowered all the control rods and took the reactor offline to investigate. At the moment, the reactor is still shut down as the reason the three rods dropped at the same time remains unknown, but apparently it has happened before on similar reactors, and no one knows why.

I read that Australia is moving fast. Apparently, the island continent is drifting northwest at about 7cm a year. This may not sound very much, but it is 1.7 times the speed at which your fingernails grow. But I don’t think it is anything we should be concerned about, the prediction is that it will bump into Southeast Asia in about 400 million years to form a new supercontinent.

The Indian regional airline Fly91 has just placed an order for 40 new aircraft. But what is unusual is that the order is for the ATR 72, a turboprop plane manufactured in France and Italy and assembled in Toulouse. The 72 refers to the standard number of passengers the plane can carry, and ATR is a joint venture between Airbus and Leonardo. There have been over 1,200 ATR 72s built in various versions, and the current model, the -600, accounts for most, but with this order Fly91 will become the 5th-largest operator. At list prices, this order is worth $1 billion, but no one pays list price for a 40-aircraft order.

I read that the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Serenade of the Seas has just cancelled its sailing from Vancouver to Alaska and back. Every ship has its problems and has to cancel the occasional cruise, but not usually when 1,700 people have already boarded. This episode has cost Royal Caribbean rather a lot of money (I nearly said royally). They have given every passenger a 100% refund, and a 100% future cruise credit, and paid up to $400 towards amended travel costs. In addition, the passengers were allowed to stay on board for two days and use the ship as a free hotel, until the ship had to leave its cruise terminal berth.

I see the left wing of the Liebore Party, led by Foreign Secretary Ed Millipede, is calling for sanctions on Israel because it looks like they are authorising building on ‘Arab Lands’. This is supposedly land that was designated as Israeli in the Balfour Declaration. But what I find worrying is that Israel has threatened to sanction us in retaliation. As we hardly export anything to Israel, about £3.5 billion a year, including F-35 parts, pharmaceuticals and cars, but we have important military imports. Another case of Millipede cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Friday

Hi everyone, well, it was grey and grotty in Westminster when I headed down the garden. The only thing I would say is that it was not cold. It is odd, Mascara Man is missing again today. Since becoming the PM, he has been away from here far more than he has been here. Long may it continue!

Overnight, Javier Milei, the Argentine President, made a TV address in which he threatened to impose sanctions on the companies exploring for oil in the waters off the Falklands. I’m not sure either of the two companies, one from Britain and one from Israel, is that bothered. Neither trades in Argentina, so sanctioning them is a bit pointless. Milei also claimed he was going to ‘get the Falklands back’. Perhaps he could explain when the Falklands ever belonged to Argentina, they have been British from before Argentina existed.

The Froggy Midget and his mother arrived on the red carpet yesterday morning. But before they walked down the street, I went to see the French press corps, and gosh, did they make a fuss of me. There are one or two of our lot who always call me over to say hello, but with the Froggy lot it was all of them, stroking me, talking to me in broken English and getting me to pose for them. I bet I am on the front page of all the French papers this morning.

As predicted, Zack Polanski has announced that he wants to run for the vacant Holborn and St Pancras seat as the Green Party candidate. But I understand that he first needs to be nominated by the Greens, and he is likely to be up against a nominee from the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel branch of the party. Polanski has a bit of a problem here, as he is Jewish and the Greens have been suffering from a huge pro-Palestinian influx.

With the plan to build a third runway at Heathrow, the question that needs answering is how to move all the new passengers into London or out to the West. At the moment, more than half the passengers come to Heathrow by road, and the current plan does not call for any more terminals or road improvements. So, we need to make better use of the trains. At the moment, the Piccadilly Tube line is close to capacity. So, the answer seems to be either the Heathrow Express or the Elizabeth line, or both. Since the Elizabeth line started serving Heathrow, the Heathrow Express has lost a load of its passengers and now operates an overpriced service that is only 20% used. Passengers prefer the Elizabeth line as it runs through London, connecting to many other rail and Tube lines. If the Elizabeth line took over the Heathrow Express’s five trains an hour, you could move an extra 5,000 passengers an hour. It’s a no-brainer.

One of the daftest things I have ever heard came out of yesterday when the UN announced that we British should build statues of Black people to make up for slavery. We were the country that did the most to stop slavery, spent a fortune on it and lost many sailors’ lives implementing it. In fact, we even suffered from our people being enslaved by the Barbary Pirates. Then, of course, it was African and Arab leaders that sold their people into slavery. So why not get the African state whose leaders were involved in slavery to build the statues.

I’m going to pop off to the office now as I suspect they will have the Reform UK Annual Conference on the TV. I hear that there were huge queues to get in as the conference centre only had two security guards on the door! A few years ago, when Reform was starting out, that might have been enough, but right now that is clearly ridiculous.

Saturday

Morning, my friends, it was sunny when I trotted out this morning, not terribly warm, but I hear it is going to be a decent day. I have been learning from the radio that there are 630 criminals out there walking around free, who were released from prison early and have been recalled but haven’t bothered to hand themselves in. These are criminals who have breached their terms of early release or committed another crime and have been recalled, but have just slipped off into the underworld. Next month the Government is going to release thousands more prisoners on early release. In the past, around 80% are recalled for one reason or another. I wonder how many will bother to comply.

Rumours reach me this morning that the Government will give the Jackdaw gas field the go-ahead next week. The opponents say that it will do the country no good as gas is sold on an international market. But if this is so, why is gas in America four times cheaper than gas in Britain? In any case, they conveniently forget about all the tax the Government would collect. I also hear that if they get the go-ahead next week, then gas from the field will be in our own gas network by winter, saving us importing some gas from overseas at a time when our gas storage is low.

I watched the speech made by Jordan Bardella, the leader of the French National Rally, yesterday, a most impressive young man. I rather like the theatrical signing of a Memorandum of Agreement on illegal immigration, which commits a future National Rally government to stopping the small boats and would allow a future Reform UK government to return cross-channel immigrants to France.

I hear that earlier this week a young girl was taken to Salisbury District Hospital with suspected meningitis. The hospital had every bed occupied and every cubicle in A&E in use, so she was treated in a corridor and a doctor put her on a drip. However, there was a shortage of drip stands, but one was found in a teaching room. Just one problem, the stand had been in use to hold up a teaching skeleton, and no one removed it before the drip was installed. The girl’s mother said her daughter wasn’t the only one to have an unusual drip stand, as other drips were supported from picture frames. The hospital apologised for not removing the skeleton and explained they had run out of drip stands and had to improvise.

The first of the latest version of the F-15 Strike Eagle has just left the Boeing factory in St Louis and is destined for a USAF airbase in Japan. The F-15EX is a special version of the F-15E, optimised for longer range and to carry a heavier load than the F-15E. The EX can carry a 13,381 kg load to 50,000 feet, which equates to 12 x AMRAAM missiles. The AIM-120D AMRAAM is the latest US beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile and is said to be a fire-and-forget weapon capable of hitting a target over 100 miles away at Mach 4.

I hear that a building firm in Queensland, Australia, has been ordered to fix a repair it undertook to the coping of a swimming pool under warranty, after the coping became damaged in a storm. The tribunal hearing the case deemed the repair work to have been substandard and therefore it should be redone immediately. There is only one problem, in the four years it has taken for the tribunal to rule, the swimming pool has been removed, so the work is impossible to carry out! It has been suggested that the tribunal should suspend its ruling indefinitely. I suspect that this is a sensible solution.

I hear that Ukraine has started deploying the British-made Rapid Ranger close-range air defence system. Rapid Ranger is a missile launcher and control system that can be bolted onto various vehicles. In this case, they are mounted on Spanish-built URO VAMTAC off-road vehicles. The launcher primarily uses the Belfast-made LMM and Starstreak missiles, which both ride a laser beam to their targets. The system is said to use a combination of radar and cameras, both daylight and night vision, to detect its targets and illuminate them with a laser that the missile follows, meaning it can’t be jammed or decoyed by flares. The system is used by the British Military on the ground and from helicopters, and has also been purchased by Portugal, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia. I hear that the launcher can also be used to fire in ground-attack and anti-tank modes and, for this, can use other missiles such as the British Brimstone, which Ukraine has in large numbers.

That’s me done for the week, and it is much better outside than last week, so it’s going to be my favourite windowsill this afternoon. We are actually due another week in Parliament, the last full week before the conference recess for a month. Do they ever do any work? Chat to you all again next week.

 

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