Larry’s Diary, Week Three Hundred And Three

Monday

Good morning, my friends, and welcome to another week of my musings. It was a bit grey when I went out this morning and trying to rain. Not very nice, and I hear we are stuck with this grotty weather for a few more days. I saw that bloke who calls himself Zack Polanski (real name David Paulden) on TV yesterday morning, and I have decided that he is an out-and-out lefty, with no idea of the real world. He wants a wealth tax, which he thinks will raise lots of money, when one has done no such thing in any country. He wants to legalise hard drugs. Well, I think he is already on them. I wonder if the BBC will treat him like Tommy Robinson and, every time he appears on TV, say that is not his real name and he was once a hypnotist who specialised in increasing the size of women’s breasts.

I hear there is a huge internet outage this morning caused by Amazon Web Services being down for the second time recently. It’s not just Amazon things like Prime, Music, and their website, but at least 20 UK government departments, banks like Lloyds, Snapchat, and some mobile phone companies’ head offices are also suffering, as were Delta Air Lines and United Airlines. By late morning, some limited services were said to be returning. As people like HMRC, the DWP, the Home Office and the DVLA are all struggling, I hate to think what a state the country would be in if we were all relying on it for a digital ID.

George Freeman, the long-serving Tory MP for Mid Norfolk, has posted on Facebook that there is a deep fake video circulating on the internet that claimed he was about to switch to Reform, which he denies. Well, I wonder just what has happened here. Has someone got it in for him and made all this up? Has he applied to join Reform and they have said no, or maybe the Tories have discovered he was in negotiations with Reform and put pressure on him to pull out? I rather fancy the second, as I’m not sure that he would bring much to Reform other than another body.

Mad Red Ed Millipede was doing the milk run of TV studios for yesterday morning’s political programmes. He was pushed on electricity prices and blamed the fact that we pay four times the price for it on the price of gas, despite it being lower now than for ages, and denied that it has anything to do with his various green subsidies. Not a single interviewer believed him. He was asked about his promise to reduce everyone’s energy bill by £300 p.a. and waffled on about it happening by 2030, even though bills have gone up by £297 p.a. since Liebore came to power. He also claimed that his ‘Green Revolution’ would bring 400,000 jobs. I will have a 50p bet that it never happens.

More problems for Randy Andy this morning. After the story emerged of him asking one of his close protection officers to ‘dig the dirt’ on Virginia Giuffre, it seems the Metropolitan Police are going to investigate the story. Well, I wonder what the police officer did at the time. Did he cover his arse by asking his senior officer, did he refuse, or did he do as he was asked?

I hear that Robber Reeves has a new nickname in the Treasury. She is now known as ‘The Dragon Lady.’ Why, you might ask? Well, it seems that it is because she is so desperate for Chinese investment in the UK. As far as I know, it is a long time since China invested in the UK (Hinkley Point ‘B’?) and they only want to sell us their products, like electric cars, steel, and slave-made solar panels.

The French have had a bit of a shock over the weekend with a major robbery at the Louvre in broad daylight. Initial reports say four men arrived with a ‘cherry picker’ on the back of a flatbed van and used it to access a balcony. From the balcony, they used a ladder to access a window, which they forced with an angle grinder and other power tools. Once inside, they threatened unarmed guards and stole eight pieces of ‘priceless’ historic jewellery, including a necklace given by Napoleon to his wife, from two glass display cabinets. However, they managed to drop and break a crown, which has been recovered. To the French, this is the equivalent of someone breaking into the Tower of London and stealing the Crown Jewels. The authorities think that the jewels were either stolen to order, or the items will be broken down and the jewels re-cut.

Tuesday

Good morning everyone, down here in the south of England I have woken up to sunshine for the first time in days. It’s not terribly warm, but it’s nice to lie in a shaft of sunlight coming through the window. So, Legohead has found another overseas place to visit and escape to. This time he has announced he is going to attend the next COP in Brazil. I think this is him playing for the Liebore Party’s Green vote, which he sees is slipping away to the Green Party, Your Party and the Limp Dumps. He is also bleeding votes from the right of his party to Reform, and I suspect he is only going to lose more votes to Reform by going to Brazil.

The Greenies keep telling us how wonderful China is, building record amounts of solar panels and wind turbines. In fact, I understand that last year they built more than the installed renewables in the USA. But they were still the globe’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. In 2024 they also built 93% of the world’s coal-fired power plants. There are several reasons for the rush for new power sources. The Chinese were caught out in 2021/22 when they had major power shortages due to grid problems, extreme weather and population growth. They have also set a 2060 date for net zero and want loads of coal and gas capacity in place before then. Of course, the Chinese are being more sensible than us and building solar farms near coal-fired power stations to make use of the existing grid.

I read of an unusual aircraft accident at Hong Kong International Airport. An empty Emirates Cargo Boeing 747 being operated by a Turkish airline landed on its runway, which runs parallel to the coast. After landing safely, it was supposed to turn right onto one of the taxiways that are all on that side. But instead, it turned left, hitting an airport patrol vehicle with two people in it and pushing it through a wire fence and over the sea wall, where both the plane and the vehicle landed in the sea. Fortunately, the plane crew survived, but both the ground crew were dead when they were recovered from five metres of water. At least the pilot is alive to tell us why the plane turned left instead of right.

The Daily Express has published a big investigation into child sex grooming gangs in London. They have only used information that was already in the public domain about gangs taking young girls to hotels to rape, something that Sad Dick has continually denied. Interestingly, the paper gave Sad Dick and the Met a deadline to reply before they published the report. Of course, Sad Dick missed the deadline by 24 hours but says it is a smear, while the Met Police have admitted that there have been a significant number of grooming gangs’ investigations. The Express says Sad Dick was shown reports while he was denying in public that the gangs existed in London.

King Charles yesterday paid a visit to the Manchester synagogue that was attacked by an Islamic terrorist. The King is clearly not a well man, but he was well received by an enormous crowd of Manchester’s Jewish residents, who were clearly delighted to see him, and he was either happy to be there or an excellent actor.

Barnsley’s Liebore council has decided to ban poppies this year on safety grounds. Apparently, there were to be a number of large wooden poppies mounted on lamp posts, but they were worried that they could fall off and injure people. How utterly ridiculous. The hanging baskets the council put on lamp posts could fall on people. In fact, come to that, the lamp posts themselves could fall on people.

The Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan, who wrote Father Ted and was arrested by five armed policemen at Heathrow as he stepped off a plane, has been told that the Met are not to proceed with the case. He was accused of inciting violence over a tweet he wrote while in the USA. Following the incident, the Met Police have announced that they are no longer going to investigate ‘non-crime hate incidents’, although they are still going to record them. Does this mean that you can now get a police record without even knowing it?

Wednesday

Hi folks, it’s sunny again this morning, but I see that it’s likely to be wet and windy tomorrow. This morning the latest inflation rate is out, and for the third month running it’s stuck on 3.8%. From what I have heard, the government is celebrating that it hasn’t gone up! Well, I can’t see anything to celebrate. It’s double what it was when Liebore came to power, and it is supposed to be about 2%.

I read that the grooming gang inquiry has suffered another setback, with two of the groomed girls who had been co-opted onto the liaison panel quitting before it even begins. As I mentioned previously, the inquiry can’t find a chair, and the government is considering a retired police officer or a retired social worker, both professions that are believed to have been involved in the cover-up. The two girls were asked to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements not to reveal anything they heard or were told. Then they were given lists of questions to ask. No wonder they quit, saying the government was trying to fix the inquiry.

It’s bad news for lovers of Club and Penguin biscuits, as they can no longer be called chocolate biscuits, as the amount of cocoa in them has been so reduced. They now have to be marketed as ‘chocolate-flavoured’ biscuits. The reason is that after several bad harvests in the cocoa-supplying areas of West Africa caused by drought, the amount of cocoa available has been reduced, and the cost has gone up. The manufacturers say the biscuits are now coated in something called cocoa mass rather than chocolate. When cocoa beans are processed, they are turned into cocoa liquid, which comprises 50% cocoa butter and 50% cocoa solids. In the UK, chocolate must contain at least 20% cocoa solids. It would appear that the new covering doesn’t meet the 20% solids rule and is bulked out with something cheaper like palm oil or shea butter. I guess they can no longer use the slogan, ‘If you like a lot of chocolate in your biscuit, join our club.’

As per the usual agreements for Champions League games on Monday evening, Atlético Madrid were allowed a training session at the Emirates Stadium at 18:45. Atlético staff told Arsenal that there was no hot water in the visitors’ showers. A quick investigation took place, and it was realised there was no hot water in the home showers either. The plumbers leapt into action, and with the session due to end at 19:30, they breathed a sigh of relief when they fixed the system and had hot water available at 19:25. Only then did they find that the training session had finished early at 19:15 and Atlético had gone back to their hotel to shower. I understand Arsenal have apologised to Atlético.

Back in June, did you read about a five-year-old girl falling into the sea from the Disney Dream as it was returning to Florida from a cruise? The little girl’s father jumped in and held her above water until a rescue boat arrived within a few minutes. Well, it now seems that it was all the mother’s fault. The family were walking along a deck, with the father several yards ahead, when the mother encouraged the five-year-old to climb up and sit on a railing for a photograph. The girl lost her balance and fell over backwards into the sea before the father jumped in. The police have investigated the incident and recommended prosecuting the mother, but apparently the DA decided not to. I think the father and the rescue crew deserve medals.

Now that the summer cruise ship sailings to Alaska have ended, Holland America Line has put out a press release detailing some of the events. Apparently, there were 113 cruises in the season, which served 130 Arctic brunches on deck while the passengers viewed the glaciers. At the brunches they served 85,000 cups of Dutch pea soup. I understand it is not like our green pea soup but is thick, made with split peas and usually served at the Dutch New Year. They also served 125,000 pounds of fresh Alaska seafood. I will let you into a secret, this cat is not keen on fish. I am a meat lover, particularly chicken, and I can go without seafood.

I hear that the female NHS doctor who has been posting pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli, and antisemitic things on the internet was arrested yesterday morning. I hear she is also being investigated by the General Medical Council. As I dictate this, she hasn’t been charged with anything yet. However, I wonder how a Jewish person would feel being treated by her.

Thursday

Hello folks, gosh, what a horrible morning, wet and windy. I sprinted down the garden and back while it was only light. I was so worn out I had to lie down before my breakfast Felix. I am feeling very old. The ‘one out, one in’ programme had its first big failure yesterday when what a lot of people predicted would happen did. So far, 42 have been sent to France and 24 have been sent here. But yesterday, one of those 42 came back on a small boat, claiming he was the victim of a smuggling gang. I only hope he is packed off to France straight away. Not.

I read that Eurostar have ordered 30 double-decker trains to run through the Channel Tunnel from London St Pancras to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. The £1.7 billion fleet will be built by Alstom in France and should start to run by 2031. They will replace the current single-deck trains built by Siemens. The new trains will only be 16 cm taller than the current trains because they will have a dropped floor, but that 16 cm will make them impossible to use on the majority of the British network. The HS1 and HS2 lines are OK because they are built to the European loading gauge. I understand that the new trains will take only 20% more passengers than the current ones because they need to accommodate stairs. Eurostar have taken an option on 20 further trains for their proposed services to Frankfurt and Geneva.

I hear of a new Vietnamese start-up airline called Sun PhuQuoc Airways. The initial services are supposed to operate between the resort island of PhuQuoc and various cities in Vietnam before expanding into a regional airline over the next five years, by which time it hopes to be operating 100 aircraft. But the question is, what planes will it use? It is launching services with just three leased A320s, two seven-year-old A320-211ceos and a six-month-old A320neo. You might therefore expect them to go with an Airbus fleet, but both Airbus and Boeing have huge order backlogs, which would not have the capacity to supply 100 aircraft in just five years. My guess is they will lease the fleet, and several lessors have numbers of both manufacturers’ planes on order that would satisfy the new airline. But of course, they could be looking at Chinese jets.

The Irish airline Ryanair has announced that it is giving up routes to some airports in France, Germany, Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Spain due to increased airport fees and taxes. This comes at the same time as they are beginning to receive the last planes from their order for 210 Boeing 737 Max 8-200s. They also have an outstanding order for 150 (plus another 150 options) Boeing 737 Max 10s. But the Max 10 hasn’t been certified yet and is years late. The Max 8-200 was a special version of the Max 8 developed for Ryanair that squeezes in more seats on a narrower seat-to-seat pitch than the standard Max 8 but requires an extra door to enable the emergency exit rules to be met.

Here’s a strange bit of news that I have just read. A glass of pure fresh orange juice with your breakfast can lower your blood pressure. But on the other hand, it doesn’t say how big (or small) a glass should be, or just how much it lowers your blood pressure by. A bit of a useless article.

Interpol has just raided what it called a SIM farm in Latvia, containing 1,200 SIM-box devices, 40,000 SIM cards, and five servers. I had no idea what a SIM box was, what it did, or how important this was. It seems a SIM box is a device that contains many mobile phone SIM cards and allows crooks to make bulk overseas calls at cheap local rates. This is one of the reasons why your scam calls display local numbers. Mind you, I suspect there are loads more of these SIM farms, so I doubt you will see any fewer scam calls.

I see that after nearly two months without speculating, the media has once again started reporting who football clubs should be buying or selling in the winter transfer window. The window is open from the 2nd of January until the 3rd of February 2026. Of course, much of the speculation is total rubbish, designed to sell papers or clickbait to get readers or viewers on the internet. I wonder if any of the predictions will be correct.

Friday

Hi everyone, at least it was dry when I made my morning constitutional, but was it chilly. This morning’s news is that PC won the Welsh Parliament by-election, Reform UK came second, with Liebore and the Tories becoming a distant third and fourth on 11% and 4% respectively. Despite leading in the opinion polls, Reform seem to have been beaten in the actual election for two reasons, being seen as ‘English’ and tactical voting by Liebore voters who voted PC to keep out Reform.

With over two months of the year still to go, the number of illegal immigrants crossing the Channel in small boats, at 36,734, has passed last year’s total. This is from the government that was elected on the slogan “smash the gangs”. Instead, they have been enriching the gangs, with those crossing paying the gangs around £2,000 per person. That’s over £73 million the gangs have made so far this year. No wonder they are still carrying on the evil trade.

Did you see the story of the lady from Richmond who popped into a shop to buy a coffee to drink while waiting for her bus? Being environmentally aware, she had a reusable mug. With just a drop left, she saw the bus approaching, so she poured the tiny remains down a street drain. But she was approached by three council workers who gave her a £150 on-the-spot fine for littering. Apparently, the only thing that should go down the drain is water. The men told her she should have poured the coffee into a rubbish bin so it could spill out the bottom over the street. I am happy to report that the media has been so scathing that the Limp Dump council has rescinded the fine.

I mentioned yesterday that one of the illegal immigrants returned to France was back in this country only 29 days after being deported. So how could he afford to pay another £2,000 to the people smugglers? Well, the answer is very simple. The government gives all the deportees under this yo-yo scheme a pre-loaded plastic card with £2,000 on it. Then we also pay for their accommodation and food in a Paris hotel. So, we have invented a scheme that pays for illegal immigrants to have a month’s holiday in Paris.

Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, made a fool of herself in the Commons, ranting about the National Child Rape Gang inquiry. Four of the raped girls and two of the people named as potential chairs have resigned because of the way the inquiry is developing. They were asked if they wanted the inquiry widened to take in all violence to women and girls, and they were told what questions they could ask. Obviously, the government is trying to water down the inquiry, and the reason is obvious, the vast majority of councils where the gangs operate are controlled by Liebore. Oh, I nearly forgot, Jess Phillips only won her seat with a 679 majority over a Gaza Independent candidate.

We all know that the major development of the Russo-Ukraine war is the use of drones. Drones to do reconnaissance, drones to drop bombs into trenches, drones to attack tanks, drones to attack cities, oil refineries and power stations as they get bigger. Now I hear that Ukraine has started building a fleet of interceptor drones that are designed to attack the Russian Shahed-type attack drones. The ‘Octopus’ drone is designed to form a defensive wall and is a new concept that Ukraine has cleared for export. But the interesting thing is that the manufacturer, Ukrspecsystems, has announced that it is investing over $267 million in the building of a new factory in Mildenhall, UK. I understand the aim is to produce 2,000 drones a month.

Finally for today, I see a report that Sweden and Ukraine have signed a letter of intent for a future contract on the purchase of up to 150 modern Gripen E fighter jets to bolster the Ukrainian Air Force. No timetable or cost is mentioned, but this is an intriguing development. The Gripen E is the latest version of the fighter jet that only started to be delivered to the Swedish Air Force earlier this month. According to Jane’s, the Gripen E costs around $85 million a unit, and only about $8,500 per hour to operate, which is far less than the F-35, F-16, Rafale, or Eurofighter. It can also fly further and faster than the F-35, which the Yanks are never going to sell to Ukraine.

Saturday

Good morning people, and my, was it cold when I went out. It was sunny, so I thought it would be nice, but how wrong I was. Not a good morning again for Legohead. The police are still looking for the Epping Hotel sex offender who the incompetent authorities accidentally let out of prison yesterday. The backbenchers are calling for his head after the loss of the Welsh Parliamentary seat yesterday. And then Lucy Powell has been elected Deputy Leader, something he didn’t want.

I read that in Oxford the ‘Cowley Line’ is to reopen to passengers after becoming freight only back in the early 1960s as part of the Beeching cuts. The line only remained because it connected the, what is now, BMW Mini factory to the main line. The line will include two new stations to be called Oxford Cowley and Oxford Littlemore, serving a large housing development and a science park and costing £120 million. With the line only being single track, the initial service is only going to be two an hour. I wonder how long it will take for demand to outstrip supply.

While talking of trains, I understand that London’s Northern Line has had the week from hell due to a signalling problem at Stockwell in South London. The problem first developed last Sunday and, despite engineers working on it all week, the problem hasn’t been fixed, and things are only a little better. Transport for London have admitted they have no idea what is causing the problem. The station normally has a train every four minutes in either direction. At its worst, this has become one every fifteen minutes as trains are talked through Stockwell at a crawl by men with walkie-talkies. This has caused huge delays over the complete line.

I really don’t understand things these days. I see an article about how a car maker is bringing out a hybrid version of its EV and it will be cheaper by £800. So, I continued to read the puff piece to try and find out how much it is going to cost me. Well, I learnt it can do 60 mph on its battery, it has a 1500 cc petrol engine and is ideal for city use, except that it is a fairly big SUV. Finally, it’s there in the last paragraph, you can buy this ugly monster for ‘just’ £39,950. That’s a crazy amount of money, but the motoring journalist thinks that nearly £40,000 is ‘just’. That’s more than a year’s wage for the average Brit.

I hear that we are spending £110 million on a branded contraception campaign in Pakistan. I have several questions about this. Why are we sending condoms to Pakistan? What advantage is it to us as a nation? Perhaps in the very long term it could reduce the number of illegal immigrants coming here. But why do they have to be branded? Are they sponsored by Durex? What’s wrong with Tesco Value? If they are not good enough, then we could send the Tesco Finest or Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference (please make up your own jokes).

So, the Irish people have started doing what the Irish do well, attacking the police over asylum seekers. They have been complaining for some time, but their woke government has done absolutely nothing except to accept more illegal immigrants, much like our lot. I hear horrible stories, like the small town in Co Clare with a population of 1,000 that was doubled overnight. Literally doubled, as 1,000 asylum seekers were bussed in under cover of darkness. But it seems the final straw has been an asylum seeker staying in a Dublin hotel who has been arrested for a sexual assault on a 10-year-old girl. The very Irish thing that amused me was that when the Irish police called up the Mounted Constabulary, the Dubliners retaliated by sending a dozen riderless horses back at the police.

Word reaches me that Air Mauritius is looking to grow its fleet and replace some of its older aircraft, mainly Airbus A330ceo. All its jets are Airbuses, A330 and A350-900, and from what I hear they have gone out to Airbus with a request for A330neos and for more A350s. I suppose that makes sense, as the Airbus planes all have very similar cockpit layouts, so that flight crew can be switched between aircraft with only a few days’ training. This can make changing between Airbus and Boeing rather expensive, even if you discount spares and mechanics needing retraining.

Well, that’s this week’s tales done, and although it’s very sunny here in London at the moment, it’s much too chilly for me to snooze on my favourite windowsill. I think it’s back to the Thatcher Room today, I won’t be interrupted there. Chat to you all next week.
 

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