Larry’s Diary, Week Three Hundred And Thirty-Nine

Monday

Good morning, my happy readers. Well, the weather seems to have changed for what, to me, is much improved. The sky over Downing Street is clear blue this morning and it’s pleasantly warm. But there is a little breeze, this is definitely Larry weather. Mascara Man is off on his travels again this morning, he is resuming his learning tour. Mind you, I haven’t seen any signs that he has learnt anything.

Speaking of Mascara Man, I was interested to learn that just after he became PM, he was fooled into exchanging a string of text messages with someone pretending to be the Donald’s Chief of Staff. This poses a few questions, like how the scammer got hold of MM’s phone number, has his phone now been checked for spyware, and is he so thick that he thinks the White House would be phoning him on anything but his secure government phone?

I was a little surprised to learn that the alarm that went out to mobile phones on Friday had been authorised by Louise Haigh, as she was in charge while MM was gallivanting around on his ‘listening tour’. But what shocked me was the report that it cost £5 million. Most people have free text messages on their phones, wasn’t this just a glorified text message? I suspect that the phone companies made a lot of money from it. But my real problem with the message was that I thought the system was reserved for serious emergencies, like an outbreak of war, an imminent meteor strike, a flood or an earthquake. This usage was calling ‘Wolf’.

The Jason Arday story is still on the front pages this morning. It seems the story is being fed by the woke left, who are now claiming that his death was because he was hounded by the right-wing media. I suspect his death was because he had been living a lie. But that hasn’t stopped the loony left from setting up a fund for his funeral. As I write this, the fund has topped £145,000 and has been expanded to also create a memorial for him. Mind you, I’m not sure why his family needed a whip-round for his funeral when he had been given a £1.45 million advance for his autobiography.

A big set of announcements from Reform this morning. Firstly, a future Reform UK Government would only pay benefits to British citizens. This will mean renegotiating the terrible EU exit agreement, which I don’t think many will object to. Then they want to amend the PIP scheme so that it still caters for the badly disabled but no longer pays out to those with mild disabilities. They also plan to return to having people assessed in person. The final big thing is what they call Welfare to Work, under which anyone claiming unemployment benefits for over a year would have to provide 20 hours a week of work for their community. They say that these three actions would save £50 billion a year, which I reckon would be a good start. Of course, there was an immediate outcry from the left-wing media.

It is lovely to see we Brits have a new sports heroine. Amy Hunt was not just a four-times sprint gold medal winner at the European Championships in Birmingham, but she is pretty and can speak well when interviewed. Amy has a degree in English from Cambridge and is the sort of person the TV cameras love. She is only 24 and has a good few championships ahead of her, as long as she doesn’t get injured. But when she stops competing, I’m betting she ends up on TV presenting athletes.

It seems that influencers have come up with a new thing, getting the perfect photo of themselves with a shark. The idea is to swim with sharks and get a picture of them petting a shark or, in one case, riding it. In recent months, someone had both hands bitten off in the Caribbean. A girl, who I am told is a famous influencer, had a shark try to take a chunk out of her thigh off Brazil. Finally, I hear of an influencer being killed by a shark in the sea off Israel. Personally, I think if you try to ride a seven-foot shark, you are too stupid to live.

Tuesday

Hi folks, grey and cooler, with a little rain this morning when I was taking my morning constitutional. Back in for breakfast, and I hear on the radio that the unemployment rate has remained unchanged for the quarter to June at 4.8% and was 4.9% for the month of June. There is much disappointment amongst all the SPADs in No 10, as they had been expecting a slight fall. Personally, I’m surprised it didn’t go up with all the stupid policies and taxes on employment that Robber Reeves oversaw.

I see that Richard Tice has upset the lefties by daring to say that people should make the most of climate change and improved weather. He made the point that some people were enjoying the weather, particularly the makers of English wine. According to the rabid left, including the Daily Mirror, Tice was a climate denier. Strangely, seconds before mentioning wine, Tice had said that he believed that the climate was changing.

I read that HM Prison Millsike, our newest ‘super-prison’, has a recruitment problem, meaning that there are around 350 empty cells. Apparently, the problem is that they just can’t hire enough staff to replace those who go through the training, make a start at the prison, find the job is not for them and leave. There are also prisons with numerous cells not being available because the cells need to be fire-rated. Apparently, there are over 2,000 cells that do not have fire and smoke detectors wired into a central alarm system. I wonder how much it would cost to make these cells habitable.

Since the Government’s mobile phone alert, the fire brigade has had an avalanche of 999 calls from people reporting their neighbours for having a barbecue in their back gardens. The message that went out on Friday evening confirmed the temporary ban on the sale of disposable barbecues, but it did not ban their use or the purchase or use of garden barbecues. It is not surprising that many stupid people reported their neighbours for an imaginary crime.

Liebore MP Bayo Alaba, the MP for Southend East & Rochford, has been suspended by the Liebore Party after it emerged that a company owned by him had applied for voluntary liquidation in 2022, before he was elected as an MP. Alaba Properties Ltd had two outstanding Covid Bounce Back loans, coming to a total of £50,000. Companies can only apply for voluntary liquidation if they have no debts.

Over in the US, the forces have been using up their weapons stocks rather quickly, supporting wars in Ukraine, Israel and Iran. One missile in particular, the Tomahawk attack missile, has been running down rather fast. One of the problems is that its makers, Raytheon, have only been making 60 a year, just enough to replace peacetime practice rounds. Today, I have read that Raytheon have been given a $22.9 billion contract to provide 1,000 missiles a year for seven years.

You may know that the U.K. has a single desalination plant at Beckton on the Thames Estuary, but it has not produced a single drop of drinking water during this hot summer. The plant is believed to have cost Thames Water somewhere in the region of £500 million, and for that it has produced just 7.2 billion litres of drinking water in its 15 years of life. That is around seven days’ consumption in London. So why is it not being used right now? This is because it is down for maintenance. The membranes that it uses to take salt out of seawater are all old and needed to be replaced. The good news is the plant is expected to be back online by the winter, and Thames Water say it will be used to help refill reservoirs in readiness for next summer. I am so happy that it will be back online, using electricity to produce its expensive water just when we have the winter rains.

Wednesday

Good morning all. It is wet and cool in London today. It’s not pouring with rain, but it has been raining steadily since it woke me up at about 5 o’clock, according to the microwave clock. The duty feeder gave me a stroke this morning and complained that I was wet. What did she expect when I had been out in the rain just before she arrived! More bad news for the Government on the radio this morning, inflation is up to 2.9%. I wonder how much higher it is going.

I hear that we had a narrow escape from another mega dinghy-load of illegals yesterday. The people-smuggling gangs have modified their methods recently, and loading 250 people onto a boat launched at Calais is a thing of the past. Instead, the dinghy sets off from way down the coast and picks up passengers who wade out at several beaches, ending at Calais, before heading out to sea and heading to U.K. waters. This new practice takes advantage of the French police not stopping boats once they are in the water, and by launching at many small beaches along the coast, the police can’t stop them. Yesterday, a boat chugged up the coast picking up its 250 passengers, turned out to sea and had gone only a short distance before its outboard motor fell off, stranding the passengers. Apparently, the Gendarmes called up a jet ski that towed them back to shore.

Rolls-Royce plc has announced that it is partnering with the Indian company Reliance Industries Limited to develop a jet engine to power India’s Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) programme. India has made it clear that they would love to have a home-made engine in their AMCA, but don’t currently have the capability. They also don’t want to be in a position where they are reliant on foreign-built engines, as they have already suffered from that with the intermittent supply of General Electric engines. This partnership looks to offer India the best of both worlds, Rolls-Royce technology and Reliance manufacturing.

Last year, the Guardian was full of stories about the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. So, I was rather interested to read that coral growth this year is about five times more than average. I suppose that scientists will claim that it is all the result of Climate Change. I have an interesting bit of information about Climate Change. I guess you have all heard the scare stories in recent years saying that the Gulf Stream was going to alter course and consequently the U.K. was going to become colder, and we were all going to starve because it would be too cold to grow food. The good news is that the Gulf Stream is unchanged. What we are experiencing is just weather. If you don’t believe me, have a look at the summer of 1540, when we were in the Little Ice Age, and before the Industrial Revolution and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There was a mega-drought that summer, and the South of England went for months without rain.

I hear that the U.K. is undergoing a Salmonella outbreak. Every year we get a few thousand cases, but it seems that this summer the number of cases has suddenly peaked. This year, there have already been 199 outbreaks in England, with all ages affected, from babies to 90-year-olds. The United Kingdom Health Security Agency has not firmly nailed down the source yet, but the belief is that it has come from imported eggs. The last major outbreak in the U.K. was blamed on imported eggs, and this is beginning to look like the case again. It looks like Edwina Currie was right all along.

Russia is not very happy with the U.K. and has said we are in a lot of trouble. They are annoyed that we have been giving drones and drone technology to Ukraine and are partly blaming us for the destruction of over 20 Wildberries warehouses. It would seem that none of the Amazon-type warehouses have sprinkler systems, as one or two strikes set the sites on fire, which destroys the warehouse. I mentioned to you recently that there are now three rings of air defence around Moscow. The latest attack, on Sunday night, burned to the ground a 200,000 sq m warehouse located inside the second ring.

Do you remember when the U.S. Senate voted to ban the export of F-35 stealth fighters to Turkey because they had ordered S-400 air defence missiles from Russia? The Yanks were bothered that operating both could compromise the F-35. The Turks never stopped wanting F-35s, as Greece has acquired them and not having them puts Turkey at a disadvantage. Now I hear that Turkey has a tacit agreement that if they get rid of the S-400 systems, they can have the F-35. So, Turkey has been negotiating with the United Arab Emirates to purchase the air defence system, but reports say negotiations have broken down. Apparently, the Turks are considering blowing up the missiles, launchers and controller so they can get F-35s.

Thursday

It’s a good morning to all my readers. The forecast said it was going to rain again, but it hasn’t yet. In fact, it was pleasant when I went out, sunny and warm but not hot. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I heard that the Montecito two were coming back to live in the U.K. I thought they had labelled us all as racists and a terrible place and unsafe. Have they run out of money? It seems not. Rumours have it they will live in the Cotswolds, and the children are registered at a school and will be starting in September.

I was listening to breakfast radio while I was eating my Felix, and there was a Liebore MP from the Northeast being interviewed. He was asked about a ridiculous French government official who has been saying we should pay the frogs more money to stop the small boats from launching. We are already paying them £500,000 and bonuses of up to £150,000 based on the number stopped. So, what did this stupid MP say? He said there are two reasons for illegal immigrants wanting to come to the U.K. The lure of the black economy and the fact that they all speak English due to colonisation. But this just doesn’t hold up to inspection. The most illegal immigrants come from Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, Vietnam and Eritrea. The U.K. fully colonised only Sudan out of the five. Afghanistan and Iran were never colonies, while Eritrea was an Italian colony and Vietnam a French colony.

I understand that the gardeners who look after the back garden here at Number 10 are threatening to go on strike. The garden is officially looked after by the Royal Parks but is subcontracted to a company called Idverde. It is a row over pay that is causing the GMB union to threaten to withdraw their labour. Apparently, they have been offered an extra 70p an hour, which they claim will leave them only 55p an hour more than the London Living Wage. Now, the grass is hardly growing in the back garden, as we have been so short of rain.

I was delighted to read that the Rosebank North Sea Oil and Gas Field has now joined the Jackdaw Gas Field off Shetland in successfully passing its consultation period. Now all that remains is for the Government to give it the go-ahead. Of course, the climate change lot don’t want it to proceed and argue that the product will have to be sold on the open market and won’t do us any good. But this completely misses the point. The two projects still need an investment of £10.8 billion ($14.6 billion), more than three-quarters of it spent in the U.K. They are expected to deliver £1.4 billion ($1.90 billion) in tax revenues before the end of this Parliament, rising to £3.8 billion ($5.2 billion) by the end of the next, and support 3,500 jobs at peak construction. They will also lead to 880 full-time, highly paid jobs. None of that is to be sniffed at.

This week’s YouGov opinion poll has Reform UK back in the lead after a short spell of Liebore being in the lead, the so-called Burnham bounce. What is interesting to me is not that Reform have gone up, but that the Liebore vote has crashed back to where it was before Mascara Man became PM. Has the public realised that, once again, we have a PM without a plan?

If you ever go through Canada’s Pearson International Airport at Toronto, you will see a giant Antonov An-124 cargo aircraft parked there. It has been there for over four years, since the start of the Russian war with Ukraine. The freighter, owned by Volga-Dnepr Airlines, originally arrived from China carrying a load of COVID-19 face masks and fell foul of Canada closing its airspace to Russian aircraft. Since then, the Canadians have passed sanctions on Russia and have seized the plane. They say that the ultimate intention is to hand the plane over to Ukraine. However, in the meantime, Volga-Dnepr have brought numerous court cases to try to recover the plane, all to no avail.

The Ukrainian company Fire Point has revealed that its FP-7 ballistic missile will be introduced to Ukrainian military service next month. The FP-7 is Ukraine’s first domestically produced ballistic missile and is said to have a range of 300 kilometres. Fire Point is also working on a longer-range version, the FP-9, and this is expected to enter service later this year. The FP-9 is expected to have a range of 850 kilometres. Having their own ballistic missiles means that Ukraine will no longer need the permission of foreign countries before it can use their missiles.

Friday

Hi everyone, sunny but a little cool this morning, and no rain yet. I read something intriguing just now. Apparently, Winge and Ginge have somehow picked the perfect time financially to come back. Under HMRC rules, they will have been out of the country for the six years required to be most beneficial for tax. Call me a cynical old cat.

I have been looking at this nine-page guidance leaflet that the Home Office has been handing to illegal immigrants, setting out our rules and laws on all sorts of things, including rape, sexual assault, sex with children, women’s rights to vote, work, dress as they like and not be leered at or abused. I suspect the idea is so that illegal immigrants can no longer claim in court that they didn’t know it was against British law. Well, the Home Office has only produced the leaflet in English, so all the immigrants have to do is claim they can’t read English and therefore didn’t know the law. The Home Office must know there is a problem with immigrants, or they wouldn’t have produced this document, but they have denied this for years.

I told you last week about the French power station shut down when its filters were blocked by a swarm of jellyfish. I have a bit more news of the event. It occurred on 10th August, which is exactly one year since the same thing occurred. It wasn’t as if Électricité de France hadn’t tried to protect the plant with screens and filters, CCTV and even fishing boats on patrol, spending €1.5 million. But the swarm was so dense it overwhelmed the boats and clogged the rotary drum filters, triggering the reactors to shut down automatically. I hear the workers removed 26 tonnes of jellyfish.

The Government has mandated local councils to all make waste food collections by now, but many have sought a postponement of the start date due to numerous things, including not having the necessary vehicles, bins and caddies. The almost universal weekly system calls for a smallish caddy with a plastic liner to keep in your kitchen and a bin to dump the contents into, which will be taken once a week. I hear from my scribe that his local council has had problems with the delivery of the ten collection vehicles and will now be starting the system in September. But what happens to all the waste food collected? My scribe’s council will deliver it to an Anaerobic Digestion Plant operated by the County Council. The waste will produce gas that generates electricity to power itself and fertiliser to be sold to farmers. The project is expected to cost the local council £1.69 million a year to operate, for which they get a £1.61 million grant. But who pays for the set-up costs?

Euronews reports that Russia is suffering from a worsening shortage of petrol and diesel. A Russian filling station monitoring app showed that just 28% of filling stations reported a normal stock level. I learn that Russia has even imported a tanker load of refined petroleum from Morocco. The ship loaded in Tangier and delivered to Murmansk to avoid the Ukraine war zone. However, the fuel has yet to reach the Russian motorist and has joined a tanker load from India in storage until the Russians and the importers come to an agreement on the cost of the shipments. I understand that they are currently tens of thousands of roubles a tonne apart.

Reform’s policy announcement today was aimed at increasing the number of apprenticeships available for school leavers. The idea is to pay small and medium-sized companies 30% of an apprentice’s wages. According to Reform, this would encourage companies to hire more apprentices. They will also give companies a £2,000 bonus for retaining an apprentice for two years following the end of the apprenticeship.

The Yanks have come up with a novel way of building some modern frigates after their disastrous last attempt. Now, U.S. law says that U.S. Navy ships must be built in the U.S. But the suggestion is that the law could be modified for a new class of frigate with sufficient inherent capabilities to perform anti-submarine warfare, surface warfare and convoy escort duties. The Americans want a proven design, and for this they are willing to allow the first two ships in the class to be built overseas, but the rest must be built in an American shipyard, which is either built new by the contract winner or one bought in the States. This could suit both BAE and Babcock, as both the Type 26 and Type 31 appear to fit the requirements.

Saturday

Morning, my friends. It’s still cool this morning, but at least it is dry and the sun is streaming in the flat’s kitchen window. It’s lovely and quiet here this morning with no Mascara Man. I don’t know if he has gone to Manchester or Chequers, and I don’t care which. I’m just happy he is not here.

The judge in the Ginger gang’s lost case against the Daily Mail awarded interim costs in favour of the Mail yesterday, to the tune of £9.45 million, which must be paid by the 28th of August. This shouldn’t be too difficult, as I hear the Gingers’ lot have got £16.5 million in ‘after the event’ insurance. The problem that is coming is that the Mail’s full claim for costs is £34.8 million and the Gingers’ side’s costs are thought to be an estimated £20 million. There is an enormous shortfall there.

Is our broke Government mad? I learn that they are talking about restoring the overseas aid budget to the full 0.7% of GDP that the UN recommends. We were paying that when we had some money, but it was cut to 0.5% a bit back and was due to be cut to 0.3% next year to help pay for extra defence spending. But that is not good enough for Mascara Man. He thinks we need to look virtuous and spend on things like buying £75 million worth of condoms for Pakistan.

I have been reading about Arsenal’s 16-year-old first-team squad footballer Max Dowman. He was at Brentwood High School earlier this week, for the last time, collecting his GCSE results. Not for him a struggle to get the results he needed to go to college or the sixth form for A levels and university, or being a NEET. His future is quite different. He will be in the Arsenal squad, doing what 1,000s of lads his age would love to be doing, training and playing as a professional footballer. Now he is paid as a scholar, and that is an amount fixed by the FA of about £400 per week, plus expenses. However, once 17, on the 31st of December 2026, he is free to sign his first professional contract. Premier League football clubs tend to have fixed wage levels for a first contract at around £5,000 a week. But on top of that there will be bonuses and appearance money, meaning a conservative £20,000 to £30,000 a week. Not bad for a 17-year-old straight out of school. But ultimately, the sky is the limit. Right now, the highest-paid Arsenal player is reported to be Bukayo Saka, a fellow ex-scholar, who is believed to be on a £300,000 per week basic wage.

I see that government borrowing was £1.8 billion, up by £0.8 billion on the same month last year. July is usually a good month for government income because self-assessed tax is paid in the month. The numbers show that receipts were £17.1 billion in July and were actually up on the same month last year. So, when you put it all together, we must have been spending loads more if we are taking in more and still borrowing more. It was Maggie Thatcher who said, “The problem with Labour governments is that they all run out of other people’s money”.

I have bad news for all you rubber duck racing fans. The annual race on the Great Ouse at Buckingham has had to be postponed due to the lack of rain causing low water levels in the river. The race is organised by the University of Buckingham, and they hope to reorganise the event for the half-term break in October, by which time we might have had a bit of rain.

The Ukrainian football club Shakhtar Donetsk has qualified for the league phase of this year’s Champions League, but they have a bit of a problem. Their home city of Donetsk has not been safe to play football in since 2014, when it was taken over by Russian separatists. For many years, Donetsk played their home games all over Ukraine. But with the Russian invasion in 2022, they have had to play matches in European competitions outside of Ukraine, initially in Poland and latterly in Germany. This coming competition, they have an agreement to play home Champions League games at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge. They have yet to obtain UEFA permission, but that should be a formality. I wonder how big the home crowds will be.

That’s me done for the week, and as it’s still sunny and a bit warmer than when I first went out, I am off for my nap on my favourite windowsill. But I don’t think it will be the shady corner this afternoon. Is Mascara Man going to put in an appearance next week, or is he still off on his ‘learning’ tour? Chat to you all again next week.

 

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