Larry’s Diary, Week Two Hundred And Twenty-Three

Monday

Good morning, my friends, and a Happy Easter Monday to you all. I hope you have had a load of chocolate eggs. It is a beautiful, sunny morning here in London, with not a cloud in the sky. It’s lovely and quiet in the street today, with Legohead still missing. I hear he has taken advantage of the Easter closure of Parliament and gone to Spain on holiday, so it’s like a second Sunday. I think I’m going to rush through my stories today and get out onto my windowsill before he comes back with one of those donkeys, no, not Lammy, that used to be all the rage.

I had to chuckle over the weekend when the news broke that a passer-by had found a holdall containing a machine gun, pistols, and a taser on the pavement outside Sad Dick’s house. The boyfriend of the girl who found the bag spread the contents on his bed and photographed it before calling the police to report his find. It seems the bag was left behind by part of Sad Dick’s protection squad when they went off duty. The ironical thing is that Sad Dick has been boasting about how safe London is. I suppose this could be the case when you are driven around in armoured Land Rovers and protected by armed police.

I told you some time ago about cruise lines with ships stuck in the Persian Gulf because of the war and the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. Stuck ships are MSC’s Euribia, TUI’s Mein Schiff 4 and Mein Schiff 5, and Celestyal Cruises’ Discovery and Explora Journey II. But, with ships missing, the parent companies are having to cancel cruises. Most of those ships would have been moving to the Mediterranean right now, so the knock-on effect is that people who had not booked for a Persian Gulf cruise are now being bounced. Explora Journeys has gone even further and cancelled all Middle East departures until March 27. I think I would be avoiding going to the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea, full stop.

For the third time since Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia has announced that it is in total control of the Luhansk region of Ukraine, something that Ukraine has denied for the third time, saying the front line hasn’t moved an inch in either direction in six months. I suspect Russia wants to hide the fact that it is losing over 1,100 troops a day, a number it is finding hard to replace. It seems they have taken to sending a couple of soldiers on a motorcycle, with a flag and a camera, to plant the flag in a Ukrainian village, take a photo, and post it on the internet before they are killed.

I have been reading about the elections for the Welsh Senedd in May, and I must say I am a little confused. I like to think I am a politically savvy cat, but I hate to think what it is like to be a Welsh voter. I understand there will now be 16 constituencies, and each will return six Members to the Senedd, making a total of 96 MSs. But the confusing bit is that people will not vote for a Member of the Senedd from a list of candidates, but for a party in each constituency. Then the authorities will work out the proportion of the vote each party got, and MSs will be allocated depending on the proportion of votes received by a party. The MSs will be appointed from ranked party lists, and six winners will be elected. It all seems rather complicated, if you ask me.

If you are booked on the Virgin Cruises Valiant Lady, sailing out of New York to Bermuda tomorrow for a bit of sunshine, then I have a bit of bad news for you. The ship is going to Saint John, New Brunswick, in Canada instead. The Bermuda weather service is forecasting heavy rain and strong winds for Wednesday, when the ship is supposed to be in the dockyard.

I read that Ukrainian drones have set the Sheskharis oil terminal in Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk ablaze overnight. The port can handle tankers up to 250,000 tonnes, but is reported by Russian media to be out of action, with the loading pier on fire. Ukraine appears to be attacking Russian oil and gas facilities every night in an attempt to reduce the money from oil and gas flowing into Russia’s coffers and supporting the war.

Tuesday

Hi folks, another lovely morning here in Downing Street, sunny, warm, and with a gentle breeze as I happily strolled slowly down the garden. All was right with the morning, then I remembered that Legohead might be back later, the junior doctors were going on strike today, and the good weather in the Channel will mean that the illegals will be jumping into small boats and arriving in their hundreds.

Karl Turner, who was the Liebore MP for Kingston upon Hull East until he had the whip removed last week for speaking up against some Liebore policies, is not very happy. He has accused the whips’ office, and in particular Peter Kyle MP, Secretary of State for Business and Trade, of putting it about that he has mental problems. Turner, a barrister who has practised criminal law, suggested that there was something fishy about McSweeny’s loss of his mobile phone, and it seems this was the final straw that led to him losing the whip and becoming an independent. I understand that Turner has taken legal advice and has issued a “cease and desist” letter to Kyle and others.

Since the Russian invasion of Crimea, there have been many stories of small Russian Volga-Balt class ships with AIS tracking turned off, loading grain at occupied ports and transporting it to Russian ports, where it becomes Russian grain and is exported to third countries. Ukraine says this is stolen grain and has long been tracking several Volga-Balt class ships. There have been hull losses in the past, partly because some of the river and coastal ships are over 50 years old. But it seems that Ukrainian drones hit and sank one in the Sea of Azov yesterday. I suppose this is another step in Ukraine’s economic war.

Back at the end of March, Ukraine used Storm Shadow, or the French version SCALP, to hit the Kremniy El microelectronics plant in Bryansk, Russia. At the time, I thought it was an interesting strike, but it wasn’t until I read a recent analysis that I realised just how important this attack was. This is one of only two microchip factories in Russia, and its output is irreplaceable. It was perhaps 30 years behind plants that use a 2-nanometre process and have fully sold out their production for 2026. The Kremniy plant was making chips using a 500-nanometre process that was the global standard in the 1990s. The plant had been attacked four times in the past, but this time satellite photos show five holes in the roof where the drones have entered the plant and exploded inside. The analysis says that the plant has been completely destroyed, and its machinery and clean rooms are impossible to replicate, as the machines required are not made in Russia and cannot be imported because of sanctions.

I had a laugh this morning when I heard people in the office talking about their favourite sandwiches. There were lots of interesting ones, from a steak sandwich to a sausage sandwich, via a chip butty. Someone said cheese and onion, but that’s not for me, I would prefer chicken. But when it got round to a fish finger sandwich, which sounded interesting, someone said that Birdseye invented the fish finger in 1955 and it is still a massive seller, although only the most expensive ones are now made with cod. But it was a man who made me chuckle when he said that when the delicacy was invented at the Birdseye factory in Great Yarmouth, the girls in the factory had a vote to select the product’s name. Mind you, I understand it was a close vote and battered cod pieces nearly won. I don’t fancy eating a battered cod piece, you don’t know who might have been wearing it.

Greece has contracted with Israeli defence contractor Elbit to supply it with its PULS multiple rocket system and ammunition over the next four years. The number of systems is yet to be revealed, but the deal is said to be worth 2.1 billion New Shekels. There is also a ten-year support deal. I wonder how Israel can keep up its home production and supply the export market.

I didn’t see it at the time, but back in February 2025 an entrepreneur and a vet went on Dragon Den looking to raise £75,000 for one percent of their pet food company, Omni. The twist was that the dog food they were producing was plant-based but contained all the nutrients a dog needed. As usual, both Peter Jones and Touker Suleyman dropped out because they said the company was overvalued. But Deborah Meaden and Steven Bartlett put in the money between them, but for 3% of the company. Now I learn that in the year since, the company’s sales have gone from £1.2 million to over £11 million and it is now looking at adding cat food to its range. I’m a carnivore and I love my Felix chicken, but I would give it a try. But I don’t know if I would like it, so I reserve the right to go back to Felix.

Wednesday

Good morning, everyone, another lovely day in London, where it’s going to be hot today. The forecast says 25° and wall-to-wall sunshine. Overnight, there has been a two-week ceasefire announced in the Iran war. This is to allow full negotiations to take place, hosted by Pakistan. Of course, both sides are claiming victory, well, they would, wouldn’t they. But I think there have been two wars going on, the physical war that has been won by the US and Israel, who have used precision weapons to cripple the Iranian Army, Navy, and Air Force, and decapitate the leadership. Then there is the propaganda war, which has been won by Iran, which has convinced the Left, the BBC, and much of the media that they have won, and Trump is a mad man. This cat thinks that Iran was forced to negotiate but can’t say so, as it would lose face at home. But I note not a single word from Legohead yet, perhaps the communications in his Spanish hotel are not the best.

A couple of interesting bits of news emerged yesterday about benefits. Apparently, last year £850 million in benefits was paid out to people who were later found to be dead. But that’s not the best of it, £9.5 billion was “overpaid”. Seventy-five percent of this was in fraudulent claims, the rest was mispaid. So that’s a total of over £10 billion that was collected in taxes that could have gone to build hospitals, fill potholes, build warships, or even to help fill that famous black hole.

I read that the venomous lionfish has become entrenched in the waters around Cyprus. The native of the warmer waters of the Indo-Pacific is believed to have found its way through the Suez Canal to the Eastern Mediterranean, and the waters around Cyprus appear to be much to its liking. The fish is equipped with long dorsal spines that carry a poison that means that it has no natural predator in the region other than man. But the fish, not being native to the area, are not regularly fished for, as there is no established market. However, once the spines are removed, the fish is perfectly edible, and some restaurants have taken to offering it, as it sells to tourists at a premium. The waters around the U.K. are generally considered too cold for them, but I hear that one was caught off Dorset’s Chesil Beach in 2021.

I read that in the USA, Microsoft has the next release of Windows in beta testing. Users are reporting that every time Windows is started, it defaults to Microsoft’s Edge browser in a blatant attempt to push usage of the browser, which in the US is way outused on PCs by Chrome. Apparently, a banner appears at the top of the screen that advises that if you don’t want to use Edge, you have to change it in “Settings”. I’m not sure they could do this in Europe. I seem to remember the EU banning an earlier attempt to have Windows default to whatever the Microsoft browser was at the time. I can remember when Windows first started, it asked what browser it should default to.

The BMA has called the junior doctors out on strike this week. It’s a bit artful, really, as it means they have the four-day Easter break at the beginning and a weekend at the end, so for four strike days they effectively get ten days off. But it is the cost I am worried about. Every day they are not working costs the NHS £50 million. In fact, I hear that the 15 strikes over the last three years have cost the NHS £3 billion. I wonder what the NHS could have spent that on. But what I had to laugh at is that the BMA’s own staff are on strike for a wage increase that the BMA says is unaffordable.

In the United States, a few years ago the FBI warned about the security of text messages sent between mobile phones. Android phones use the Rich Communication Services, RCS, which is the successor to ageing SMS texting, while iPhones use the iMessage protocol. Both are secure within their own system, the problem starts when you text between the two systems, and messages can be intercepted and decoded. It seems that Apple will be introducing a version of RCS in iOS 26.5, when it appears. It will run alongside iMessage and allow secure communications with Android devices once it has been released sometime in the future. Hard luck if you still have an old iPhone incapable of running iOS 26.

I hear that the USAF lost an A-10 Warthog while it was rescuing the F-15 weapons officer downed in the Iran war. It seems that the Wizzo was hiding in a cave up a mountain, and the A-10s were sent in to insert themselves between him and the Iranian hunters. One was hit while doing this job, but not so badly that it couldn’t carry on with its mission. However, when it came in to land at a friendly air base, it couldn’t lower its landing gear, so the pilot ejected safely and let the plane crash where it did no damage.

Thursday

Hello, folks, the weather seems to have turned, still sunny but colder, and no rain, but it’s definitely not so warm. Yesterday was what they call in The Sun, “scorchio”. The mood has changed in No.10 with the possible return of old misery guts Legohead. It is always so much better at the weekend, when he is in Chequers or away on one of his not infrequent overseas trips, playing his make-believe role of important world leader. The place seems to run so much better without him being here. Wouldn’t it be nice if he spent even more time away from here.

Legohead broke his holiday yesterday to go to the Middle East to talk about the “ceasefire” with local leaders. He says we were not involved in the Iran war, but he wants to be involved in the peace, something he has had nothing to do with. He sees it as a “photo opportunity” to be seen with countries that have joined the “coalition of the unwilling”. I think he would have been better off staying in Britain and sorting out our problems.

I understand that the Republicans have held on to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old seat in Georgia after she resigned. The winner was Clayton Fuller, who was firmly backed by the Donald, and polled 55.8%. This result was much to the dismay of much of the media here in the UK, who were backing the Democrat and saying the Donald was in trouble. Expect a lot more propaganda in support of the Democrats and against the Donald in the run-up to the midterms in the autumn.

This business of Kanye West, now supposed to be called Ye, and the Wireless Festival rumbles on. When it emerged that Ye hated Jews and had even released songs praising Hitler, the big festival sponsors, like Pepsi, started to pull out. Ye then said that he really loved Jews and that the song and swastika on his website were because he was bipolar. The festival organisers said that the show would go on as Ye had a visa. But the Government decided to revoke the visa. So, without the main attraction, the organisers have cancelled the festival. A whole lot of trouble could have been avoided if the Government had been smart enough not to issue a visa in the first place.

News from our warship HMS Dragon off Cyprus. After taking three weeks to get there, I hear it now has plumbing problems and there are issues flushing the bogs. The problem has come just at the right time for the Navy, as it coincides with the ceasefire. They now have a convenient period to pop into port to fix the plumbing. I always knew the whole thing was shit.

I have been hearing that the Russians have shot themselves in the foot over air defence in Crimea. It goes back to the early days of the war when Russia was using cruise missiles fired from its Black Sea Fleet based in Sevastopol. Ukraine needed to stop it, and to do so they had to attack the Russian fleet, but they had no warships. So, it meant air attacks by cruise missiles and drones, and Crimea was riddled with powerful air defence systems like the Pantsir, Buk, Tor, S300, S400, and S500 systems. The Ukrainian plan was to erode the defence systems and clear a path to Sevastopol, which succeeded so well that the Russians withdrew the fleet to Novorossiysk in Russia, and now it is rarely seen. Now the interesting bit, the air defences are so degraded in Crimea that the Russians have started posting untrained Crimeans to help. The result is that as soon as a system is repaired or a new one installed, the resistance knows, and hence so does Ukraine, who then take it out.

I watched Liz Truss on the TV yesterday, and it was quite intriguing. She explained that the market crash she was blamed for was actually caused by the Bank of England. The day before she took over as PM, Carney had the BoE dump £40 billion in gilts on the market, and it was this that caused the market instability, and this has never been denied by either Carney or the BoE. She also talked about the Blob and how they work against their ministers and the Government. She said they are impossible to work with unless you think like them, and Reform, or whoever comes to power next, will have to make a clean sweep of the high-level Civil Service mandarins to get their ideas implemented.

Friday

Hi everyone, when I went out, it was again a touch cooler and there was no sun. I heard a chat on the radio about Legohead giving the Navy permission to board Russian shadow fleet tankers that enter our waters, but not doing so when a Russian frigate escorted two sanctioned shadow tankers through the Channel. The presenter said that everything was OK because there was a Royal Navy ship there that could destroy the frigate in seconds. The guest pointed out that the ship wasn’t a Royal Navy vessel, it was an unarmed Royal Fleet Auxiliary. This makes Legohead look pathetic. We don’t have an armed Navy to patrol our own waters, and Poo Tin is thumbing his nose at him.

Now the weather down here in London has returned to more normal conditions for the time of year. I see the BBC couldn’t resist saying, in its news bulletins, that the warm spell was down to climate change. When it’s cold, they don’t bother to say that is due to climate change. Of course, climate changes, it does so most days when it switches between warm and cold, wet and dry, foggy and clear, and has always done so. I bet they don’t say it is climate change next time it rains.

I read that BAE Systems has been successfully testing its APKWS rockets from RAF Typhoons. The Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System is an add-on section for the unguided Hydra 70 rockets US and Canadian warplanes use against soft-skin targets. BAE won the contract to develop the laser guidance module for the Hydra rockets for the USAF in a competition with a big US defence contractor and is busy churning out the modules from its US factories. The $20,000 add-on turns an unguided rocket into a laser-guided missile. Surprisingly, the Hydra 70 rocket has not been adopted by the RAF but is common across multiple USAF platforms. Could the RAF be interested now the Hydra 70 can be used as a relatively cheap guided ground-attack missile.

I read that in the past few weeks a bird long extinct in England has been seen in the wild in West Sussex. This confirms that the efforts to re-establish the sea eagle, also known as the white-tailed eagle, have been successful. The sea eagle is Britain’s biggest bird, with a wingspan of over eight feet, and the last breeding pair in the south of England were killed in 1780 on the Isle of Wight. The breed struggled on in England for a bit longer, with the last bird being killed on the Isle of Man in 1815. Forty-five young sea eagles from the Scottish Highlands were reintroduced along the south coast in 2019, and it is reported that they have raised chicks in the wild over the last few years, adding at least six birds to the total. The recent sightings seem to indicate that the birds are now established in West Sussex, so I will not be visiting there, as they are a bit big for a little cat like me.

This week’s report on the Scottishland islands CalMac ferries is a little worse than last week’s, with 10 ships out of order, one more than last week. The most noticeable absentee is once again CalMac’s biggest ferry, Glenn Sannox. The disaster of a ship returned to service at the end of last week, but by Monday was out of service once again, this time with a fuel leak. The ferry is currently supposed to be operating on the Troon to Brodick, Isle of Arran, route, together with secondary ship Alfred. However, Alfred was undergoing planned maintenance and, due to problems discovered, was taking an extra two days to fix, so there were no sailings on the route until Wednesday. The Glenn Sannox, which was delivered six and a half years late, has now spent nearly half its 14 months in the CalMac fleet out of service for repairs. Its sister ship, Glenn Rosa, is still under construction and is now expected to be delivered in December this year, some eight years late.

The Green Party asked its members for ideas for its General Election manifesto, and apparently making people retake their driving tests regularly was rather popular. So, they have announced that as their policy that in government they would make every driver retake their test every five years. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have thought it through. There are currently approximately 42 million driving licence holders in the UK, and if you divide that by five years it would mean retesting 8.4 million people a year. At the moment, there are about 1.6 million tests available a year, with about a 47% pass rate, and the average wait for a test is 15 weeks. Clearly, this policy is clearly bonkers.

I learn that South Korea has just changed the rules regarding subsidies for companies buying battery electric buses. The South Korean market has been flooded with cheap electric buses made in China, and the likes of BYD have been benefiting at the expense of South Korean makers. The South Koreans didn’t want to look bad by slapping tariffs on Chinese buses, so they have been clever. They have changed the €50,000 subsidy given on every electric bus purchase so it is only paid on buses with batteries with a power density exceeding 500 Wh/L, a standard met by nickel-cobalt-manganese batteries produced by domestic manufacturers. The Chinese buses use lithium iron phosphate batteries with a power density of just 365 Wh/L or less. So, they have immediately made domestically produced electric buses €50,000 cheaper than Chinese-made ones.

Saturday

Morning, my friends, this morning it was dry when I went out, but I’m sure it’s going to rain later. Interesting news about Chagos has been leaked out overnight. The Bill has run out of time to become law in this session of Parliament, because they have been waiting for America to approve the deal, as they have to by law, and Trump won’t do so as he thinks it’s a bad deal. Legohead hasn’t included a replacement Bill in the King’s Speech for the new session next month, so the deal is effectively dead. Legohead says he will wait until there is a new US President, but that is nearly three years away. I bet Legohead is not PM then, and whoever is will probably have different priorities.

Something strange is happening in the Eastern Mediterranean. Israel, Egypt, and Cyprus have all found huge natural gas deposits, and the area looks like becoming a big energy hub. The odd thing is that several of these fields seem to be in the same basin, and fields overlap between different countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones. The Cypriot finds seem to have come at a perfect time for them, as they have had to import all their fossil fuels, but they seem to have found some 18 trillion cubic feet of gas in four discoveries. The Aphrodite field is believed to hold 3.6 tcf of recoverable reserves, and production is expected to begin in 2032. There is a minor problem in that about 10% of the reserve is believed to be in the Israeli EEZ, and when Cyprus starts producing, some will be coming from the Israeli side. But at least they are talking about it. The other oddity is that it looks like all the Aphrodite production is going to Egypt to be turned into LNG.

The sister ship of HMS Dragon, HMS Daring, is out of its nine-year refit and is being tested by the Royal Navy. It looks like it will be returning to active service later this year. The Type 45 destroyers, we have six, were infamous because they often lost power under high electrical load, especially in warm water when everything needed cooling. The Navy has an ongoing £160 million Power Improvement Programme to replace the ships’ two diesel generators with three bigger generators. Three ships have gone through the programme, and two, Dragon and Dauntless, are back in service. But Daring’s upgrade was combined with the ship’s major refit, and it is this that has taken years, including Covid delays. Two ships, HMS Defender and HMS Diamond, are currently receiving upgrades, and the final ship, HMS Duncan, is to follow. We were originally supposed to have 12 Type 45 destroyers, but the Government cut that to just six to save money. Now we have two which are supposed to be fixed, one under test, two undergoing upgrades, and one that is no good in warm water. What is happening to our once magnificent Royal Navy.

Russia has declared a 32-hour ceasefire in the war with Ukraine, starting at 4 pm local time today. It is the Orthodox Easter this weekend, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Ukraine had already proposed an Easter ceasefire, but there had been no response until now from Russia, who seem to have been suffering a bit of an infrastructure battering recently. I’m not saying this has caused the sudden change of heart, but it will give Russia a chance to put out the fires at the big oil export terminals without being attacked. I hope it goes better than last year’s Easter ceasefire, which both sides accused the other of breaking.

I have been learning today that special cheap tickets to tourist sites, many in London, are available to people on Universal Credit. An example of this is tickets to enter the Tower of London. A family ticket for two adults and two children is normally £115, but a special family ticket is available where just one of the adults is on UC, and it only costs £4. I will say that again, as you might think I had written the wrong number, a UC family ticket costs just £4. Then a UC ticket for a royal place like Kensington is just £1 per person, and York Castle Museum is free. But the best of it is that I understand this scheme costs around £10 billion a year to operate but doesn’t appear on the benefits bill, because the cost of the “cheap” tickets is added on to the ordinary tickets, so every ordinary visitor is paying for them.

An opinion poll out this weekend has revealed that two thirds of the British electorate believe that Starmer is useless, want him out, and want a general election. What I don’t understand is who the other third of the electorate are. It certainly isn’t those I hear chatting, it must be only the extreme left who don’t want him to go. Mind you, if the predictions of Liebore losing 2,500 local councillors at the May local elections are right, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him go.

I read that Lockheed Martin has been awarded a contract worth $11.4 million to modify the software that runs Israel’s F-35 fighters. Israel is the only buyer of the plane that has official permission to make changes to the operating software. Well, that’s only half true, they can’t alter the original software but can add software that runs over it. This is a bit like having an app on your mobile phone. It is how Israel runs its own electronic warfare software and is probably why Israel has not lost a single one of its 50 F-35s in its wars.

That’s me finished for the week, and it is now time for my snooze. With the lovely weather earlier in the week, I was looking forward to spending my Saturday afternoon on a sunny windowsill. But the sun has disappeared, and it’s a bit damp in the air. It is supposed to be sunny by about 3 o’clock, so I am going to rest on the big leather wing chair in the lobby until it appears, and then I will be going out to the windowsill. Chat to you all again next week.
 

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