Larry’s Diary, Week Three Hundred And Forty

Monday

Good morning, my happy readers. It’s the start of another week of madness in Westminster and lots of tales from your ageing cat reporter. It was a little chilly overnight. I woke up in the middle of the night with cold paws and had to get under my cat blanket to warm up before I could get back to sleep. Now I am up and the sun is up. It is dry, but still not warm. This morning’s Mascara Man News is that he is off to Ukraine and is apparently going to give them the blueprints for Storm Shadow attack cruise missiles so they can make them themselves.

A lovely story emerged about Mascara Man over the weekend. He has been accused of being given hospitality in the form of a huge party in Japan in the year before he was elected to Parliament and not declaring it in his Parliamentary expenses. This is exactly the thing that Nigel Farage is accused of. Admittedly, it is for a lot less money. The party only cost £6,600, but that is not the point. Numerous Liebore MPs have said that with Farage it is not the amount of money, but the fact that he didn’t follow the Parliamentary rules. I wonder if MM will be reported to the Powers That Be. Surely it’s a case of sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I just saw MM getting off the train in Kyiv and he had tried to smarten up. He had ditched his black T-shirt and was wearing a polo shirt.

The Green Party has a very strange system for deciding the party’s policies. Anyone can submit a policy resolution to their party conference for it to be voted on for adoption. This year, I understand they will be voting on banning the police from using Tasers and pepper spray, disbanding the police completely, closing all prisons and having open borders. That would mean a lawless country, full of criminals and foreigners, so no change there, then.

The police forces of Leicestershire, Norfolk and Suffolk are to give both male and female warrant cards to gender-fluid officers. On one day, you could be arrested by Michael, but Michelle turns up in court to give evidence of the arrest. How would this affect the hearing? Could the person charged also swap between being John and Joan on the various days of the trial?

The Reform press conference this morning announced that a future Reform Government will jump British working married couples with children under 35 to the top of the housing waiting list. My only comment is, why isn’t this the policy of all the political parties?

The Home Office has admitted that it has a big problem with its post-Brexit eVisa system. It seems it often mixes up twins and attaches data to the wrong twin. This is what just happened to Nidia Webb, a woman who is legally settled in the UK but was left stranded at a Spanish airport after the Home Office’s post-Brexit visa system mixed her up with her twin sister. She was denied boarding on a flight home when it emerged that her settled status had been attached to her identical twin sister. Phone calls to the Home Office assured her the data error had been fixed, and the Home Office promised to send her written confirmation. However, it went to her twin sister. Apparently, she is now home, and her data has been manually fixed. I wonder how many others have this problem.

Here’s an odd tale I have just read. There used to be loads of Aussie male footballers over here in the Premier League and the Championship, but for some reason or other it has fallen to just three at the time of writing, Lucas Harrington at Hull City in the Premier League, while Mohamed Toure (Norwich) and Cameron Burgess (Swansea) play in the Championship. But the odd thing is that it is completely the opposite with women’s football. There are 13 Aussie women playing in the WSL, with three at both Arsenal and Charlton, and four in WSL 2. I think I know the reason why these Aussie women have come over here. It’s for the money. The average wage in the Australian Women’s A-League is just £13,900 per annum, while it is over £50,000 p.a. in the WSL.

Tuesday

Hi folks, it’s another sunny morning and rather nice. However, I see that it is the last decent day for a while, with heavy rain coming overnight. I see that Mascara Man didn’t actually give the blueprints of the Storm Shadow cruise missile to Ukraine yesterday, as the Government made out. What happened was that the Frogs have already promised to assist Ukraine in setting up a production line to make SCALP, the French name for the missile. But it contains parts made by the UK, which are on our secret list. What we have done is give the French permission to share the design of these parts. In return, we are getting Ukrainian knowledge of Russian battlefield secrets.

I see I must apologise to you, my reader. I told you a couple of weeks ago that a couple of illegal immigrants had changed their minds, got off a small boat and been taken back to France by the froggy cops. I have learned from a TalkTV report that the people taken off were, in fact, the people smugglers, and it happens on most crossings. Are the Frogs working in collaboration with the people smugglers, or are they just inept?

I saw an Essex Mayor on the TV this morning reporting on his visit to an 800-person illegal immigrant camp on an old RAF camp. He said what he saw was like a holiday camp, with football and cricket pitches, an enormous gym, restaurants serving three meals a day, only Halal food allowed, a snack bar, TV lounges with widescreen TVs. Everything is free, including the food. They get a free mobile phone and calls, and there is a fleet of 17 minibuses to take the residents to and from the local towns. Apparently, the camp is for “Asylum Seekers” while their application is being processed, but after being there for about 80 days, an Uber arrives to move them to an HMO where they can stay, free of charge, until a decision is made on their asylum application. If the application is refused, they are slung out and the Government doesn’t know where they go.

I hear rumours of a shadow cabinet reshuffle coming when the House resumes sitting at the end of the month. Apparently, Bad Enoch wants to promote some junior ministers who she thinks have been doing a good job. From what I hear, she would like to dump shadow chancellor Mel Stride and replace him with Clare Coutinho, the current energy secretary. However, Coutinho is heavily pregnant and due about the time of the Budget. So, I expect Coutinho to stand down temporarily and Stride to keep his job until she comes back to work. One person I hear who is in line for promotion is Katie Lam, who I have been quite impressed by.

The Ukrainian forces have come up with a new, novel way of attacking Russian drones. They have, for some time, had a range of interceptor drones which travel faster than the Russian drones so that they can catch them up and explode a proximity fuse. The problem has apparently been getting the interceptor up to the same height as the attacker, so it has a chance to catch up. I understand the latest idea, of helicopters fitted with launch rails, thus getting the interceptor into close proximity of the drone it is to attack, has proved effective.

Today I have been reading about another immigrant who a court has allowed to stay in the U.K. That is not that unusual, but the reason the judge let Isra Abdallah Ibrahim stay in the U.K. was because she had married her first cousin. Ibrahim claimed that returning her to Sudan would breach her husband’s rights under the ECHR if she was forced to leave her husband. Her original asylum claim was rejected because the Government believed she only married to stay in the U.K. Marrying your first cousin in the U.K. is not legal, but there have been many calls for it to be made so.

When trade talks between the US and Canada broke down last week, the Donald announced that he was going to slap a 50% tariff on Canadian goods going into the US. I must admit, when I read the sort of things that the US would be slapping tariffs on, things like electricity, oil, gas and timber, I did wonder if the US could manage without them. Today, Canada has announced $20 billion worth of sanctions on US goods going the other way. At least the Donald has given himself a bit of breathing space, as the tariffs are not due to start until 1st January next year.

Wednesday

Good morning all, a bit damp overnight and showery this morning here in Downing Street. I dived out before breakfast and managed to dodge the rain. Back indoors to the news that Ofgem is putting up the energy price cap by 4% in October. That’s an extra £60 a year on your combined gas and electricity bill. It makes the Government’s cutting of 5% VAT from electricity bills look a bit useless, but not quite so much as the Liebore manifesto promise to cut energy bills by £300 per annum, instead of them being up £400 since they came to power.

What was the CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, doing flying to Moscow yesterday afternoon, having several meetings, and then flying home? I read lots of speculation, but no one seems to know definitely what was going on. For the head of the CIA to jump on a US Air Force C-17 transport plane loaded with official limousines and fly all the way from Joint Base Langley-Eustis, in Virginia, to Moscow via Riga, is highly unusual. To do it publicly and to only be in Russia for a few hours is unprecedented. The analysts have speculated, and a couple of things seem to be favoured. But all seem to agree he was delivering a semi-public warning from Trump to Putin. If the USA had wanted to communicate in private, there are plenty of ways to do it, but they chose not to do it privately. The favoured rumours are about the likely Russian mobilisation of 300,000 recruits, or the three drones that attacked a Ukrainian cargo plane loaded with ammunition at a German airport. I favour the latter, as it was an attack in a NATO country.

I hear that the migrant camp at what was RAF Wethersfield in Essex is gearing up to increase its capacity from 500 to 850 and ultimately to a “surge capacity” of 1,245. No wonder the Government is boasting about closing down hotels, they are moving all the immigrants to luxury camps! Oh, I also hear that the number one request in the camps’ suggestion box is for a swimming pool. I bet it is being designed right now.

I have learned about a massive recall of EVs and hybrids in China affecting some 5 million cars. The problem revolves around the trend for these expensive cars not to have door handles, to make them look sleek and offer less wind resistance. Apparently, 60 of the top 100-selling EVs in China don’t have mechanical door handles, but every one has magic eyes or buttons. But the big design failure is that they all require electric power. In the event of a crash or a fire, EVs often lose power, trapping the passengers inside and not even allowing rescuers to open the doors from outside. The Chinese recall is to attempt to fix this problem. Tesla, who have 4 million cars to fix, seem to have a software fix that will open all the windows in the event of a crash. On 1st January 2027, it will become illegal to sell a car of any type in China that doesn’t have mechanical door handles and locks. When will we catch up?

Russia is trying to put into orbit its own version of Starlink called Rassvet 3. Russia put up its first satellite batch in March, and one crashed back to Earth in June, apparently having never responded to any commands from the ground. The second batch of 16 went up on 19th July aboard a Soyuz-2-1b rocket. I hear that this time, two satellites are being seen to be falling out of orbit and will enter the Earth’s atmosphere soon. I have no knowledge as to whether the satellites are working as designed.

I understand that ever since it was built, the Channel Tunnel has been run at well under its capacity. If you stand beside a main railway line, you will see trains passing every few minutes. But Eurostar runs only 25 round-trip trains a day from London to the Continent. Now Virgin has permission to add another 20 round-trip trains a day, and Trenitalia says it will add 10 round trips a day, but these will start from Stratford in East London. That all comes to 55 round trips a day, or a train every 15 minutes. That is still pretty low by modern standards.

Mascara Man has inherited a smoking problem from Legohead. There was a report sitting on the PM’s desk when he came to power, suggesting that the smoking of luxury cigars should be treated in the same way as cigarettes and should only be sold in plain wrappers, with only the brand name in a standardised font and a picture of a cancerous lung. However, the vast majority of the top cigars come from just three countries, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Honduras, and they are extremely worried that this will cause a huge fall in the sales of these hand-rolled cigars, throwing thousands of workers out of a job. So, MM has decisions to make, throw thousands out of work or ignore the report and suffer the wrath of the chattering classes.

Thursday

It’s a good morning to all my readers, and it’s a bit damp today. Not quite as wet as it was during the night, when a thunderstorm woke me up. As I was dropping back to sleep, I was disturbed by a loud buzzing from a mosquito flying round my head. I suppose I am lucky, I am covered in fur and so I am mostly protected, but I have had a bite on my unprotected nose. So, I stuck my head under my cat blanket and went back to sleep. When I got back from my trip down the garden, my duty feeder had sprayed the kitchen with insecticide. She said to me, “There was a mozzie flying round, so I have sprayed the room. I think I have got it.” I hope so.

I am going to start today with a couple of personal stories. You might have read a fake story that was put out on the internet that I was dead. I know of a few politicians who never like me hanging around Downing Street and would be very happy if I was. But I can assure you it was a fake and, as you can see, I am still fit and well and intend to keep on writing this diary while I and my scribe survive.

My second story is about another fake. I overheard a discussion in Number 10 about having me work at No. 10 North every other week. Well, I can tell you that just isn’t going to happen. I hate going in the cat carrier, it makes me think of the Cats Home and going to the dreaded vet. So, I was delighted to hear that the higher echelons of Government have decided to have a cardboard cut-out of me next to the fake No. 10 front door they have installed in Manchester. That is as close as this cat intends to get to Manchester.

The front page of the Times had a story saying that, at a meeting between Bad Enoch and Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, the Italian had told Bad Enoch not to form an electoral pact with Reform. What was odd was that there were lots of direct quotes from Kimi and not a single one from Giorgia. Interestingly, the Italian side has admitted Meloni and Bad Enoch had a chat over a cup of tea, but Meloni didn’t say anything about a pact. The question I have is, who made up the story of the warning? Was it the Tories, or the increasingly left-wing Times?

I have never been there myself, but I have seen many pictures of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, and it is spectacular. But I have been reading that for many years, visitors have been jamming coins of the realm into the cracks in the basalt columns. The National Trust, who look after the site, have become a little worried because, as the coins corrode, they can grow and force the rocks apart. They also leave unsightly stains on the columns. So, the National Trust has had a crew digging the coins out and collecting them. Apparently, teams of workers have removed over 10,000 coins so far this summer.

In the last year, we have freed 47,000 prisoners on early release, but 51,400 were recalled to prison. Admittedly, not all those from last year’s release, and many were returned for simply breaching the release terms and not committing new crimes. But this shows just how stupid the scheme is. In total, since Liebore came to power just over two years ago, just over 70,000 have been let out early, but I can’t find out how many of that number have been recalled. I guess it is too bad to publish.

Apparently, another reason the Russians are not happy with the U.K. is that we have been supplying Ukraine with new engines for its Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo ground-launched cruise missile. When it was first brought into service, the missile was powered by the Russian AI-25TL turbofan, but these motors were all salvaged from old Russian jet trainers that were being scrapped, and with only about 1,000 motors in Ukraine, the supply soon ran out. However, I hear that Fire Point looked around for a Western turbofan they could swap in. I don’t know what motor they are now using, but I hear that it is smaller, more powerful and about 15% less fuel-hungry. This means that it can now lift the same warhead 15% further. No wonder the Russians are not happy.

Friday

Hi everyone, a mild and sunny morning. I hear that it’s all change in Norway, as King Harald has died at the age of 89. His son Haakon is next in line, so it’s welcome to King Haakon. What is interesting is that the next in line for the monarchy is now Haakon’s daughter, Ingrid Alexandra.

The Meta out-of-court case settlement in the USA is rather interesting. The settlement, for a headline $18 billion, is a lot of money by anyone’s thinking, but it is next to nothing when compared to Meta’s $220 billion annual turnover. It is also to be paid over 10 years, and $7 billion is dependent on other social media channels like TikTok and WhatsApp joining the settlement. Somehow, I think Meta will be delighted to have settled for so little compared to the company’s $1.5 trillion valuation.

The Transport Minister has boasted that they are going to fix a long-term problem that has troubled passengers on Thameslink services. Passengers regularly complained about very thin cushions on the seats and seat backs. Liebore seem to have forgotten that it was the Department for Transport that specified the design of the trains and ignored passengers who told them the seats were too hard when a prototype train was shown to them. The Government says that, thanks to Thameslink now being part of Great British Railways, from next year all 112 Class 700 trains will get new, thicker seat padding. It would have been much cheaper for the Snivel Serpents to have listened in the first place.

Yesterday, the Government was boasting not just about trains, it was boasting about closing immigrant hotels, but a dig into the numbers has shown it is pure gaslighting. The numbers in hotels might have fallen, but the number in HMOs and ex-military camps has leapt up to over 70,000. Since the crisis started in 2018, just 4.3% of immigrants have been returned. Of the top five nations that 21,000 immigrants have come from, only 21 have been returned. I know the official number coming over in small boats yesterday isn’t out yet, but I hear it was another 550 who can be added to the numbers above.

What is going on in Middlesbrough? There seems to have been an outbreak of gang warfare. Over the weekend, two policemen were killed on the A66 when a car carrying five criminals hit them head-on, speeding on the wrong side of the dual carriageway, resulting in seven deaths. But a number of things have happened since, and just before the crash. An hour before the joyriders killed themselves, the house of the father of one of the five had a car rammed into it. Then a house was set alight, killing a toddler and her aunt. Another house has had a car rammed into it, and today a man was stabbed. The word is that all the incidents are connected by a gang war, and extra police have been called in from all over the north of England.

Next month, the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 will cross an invisible barrier no one ever expected, it will be over a light-day away from Earth. When it was launched in 1977, it was hoped that it would succeed in its mission to fly past Jupiter and then Saturn, sending back the first pictures of their surfaces ever seen on Earth. This was achieved, and the spacecraft got a slingshot from Saturn, sending it out into deep space at 38,844 miles per hour. The spacecraft was supposed to die electronically five years after launch, but it is still generating its own nuclear power today, nearly 50 years after its launch, although its power is down and seven of its ten experiments have been turned off to allow what power it is still generating to work the last three and send their data back to Earth. A while ago, it passed out of the heliosphere, the vast bubble that is created by the solar wind emitted by our Sun, which protects our solar system, and into interstellar space. The scientists had all predicted that interstellar space would be dead, with nothing at all happening and no data to send back. But Voyager has, in fact, found that there is a lot of magnetic energy and radiation out there, and this has caused a major scientific rethink. I wonder how much longer a 50-year-old spacecraft, designed before the PC, let alone the modern microcomputer, can continue.

The word I hear is that Mascara Man is so busy trying to sort out the £4.3 billion hole in Defence spending left him by Legohead that he can’t do anything about Welfare Reform. Apparently, MM is said to only be able to tackle one problem at a time. Well, this cat thinks that a Prime Minister who can only deal with one big problem at a time is not much use. He should be looking at the big problems we are facing as a nation, benefits, welfare, the NHS, defence, growth, investment, etc. Not the buses or cowboy builders. That sort of thing is for a Mayor to deal with. I think he has forgotten he is the PM, not the Mayor of the U.K.

Saturday

Morning, my friends. It’s a Bank Holiday weekend and, unsurprisingly, it’s raining here in London. In all my 19 years, I can’t remember it being warm and sunny on an August Bank Holiday. I have a little question for you to chew on. Why does England and Wales have eight Bank Holidays, while Scotland has nine and Northern Ireland ten?

This weekend is the annual stab-a-thon that is the Notting Hill Carnival. I see that the weather forecast for Monday is that it will be wet. I do hope the forecast is right, as it is probably the only way the stabbings will be reduced.

I have a lovely cat story this week, all about a tiny ginger kitten. I understand the Yanks would call it an orange kitten. The gang working on the construction of a dam heard a tiny meow coming from inside a Komatsu excavator. On inspection, the tiny kitten could be seen deep in the excavator, but the cat couldn’t be reached. So, the workers undid the skid plates, and out popped the noisy kitten. They put it in a blanket and gave it milk, and it quietened down and went to sleep. One of the crew took the kitten home, has been raising it and called it Sue after Komatsu. The Komatsu company got to hear about Sue and have supplied a kitten-sized hi-vis jacket and a tiny hard hat with holes in it to accommodate the little cat’s ears.

I hear that the first of the ten additional Elizabeth Line trains entered service this morning. The official reason for the additional trains was to allow for the extra passengers who will be changing from HS2 onto the Elizabeth Line at Old Oak Common. But as the HS2 line is not now expected to be open to passengers until 2036, that seems to be a bit of gaslighting. I am more inclined to believe that the plant where the trains are being built was in desperate need of the work, and this was, in fact, a Government handout.

This week, SAAB has recorded the first flight of its Gripen F, the two-seater version of the regular single-seat Gripen E fighter. The F is an interesting tweak of the fighter. It is not just a two-seater trainer version, although it is that, but it is much more than that. The two cockpits are duplicates of each other, so it can be flown from either. It is fitted with exactly the same equipment, armaments and radar as the single-seater, but it is also powered by a new engine, 20% more powerful than that in the single-seater. Consequently, it can be used in place of a single-seater or as a trainer. No wonder it is proving popular with customers.

A nice little order this week for Boeing, valued at just $131 billion. The order revolves around the F-15, of which there are 872 aircraft in the global fleet, and maybe over 1,000 if all the orders are delivered. The contract is for aircraft production, systems integration, modernisation, upgrades, retrofits, sustainment and the establishment of organic depot maintenance capabilities, not just for the US Air Force but also for half a dozen other air forces.

The news broke today that Sir James Cleverly is quitting his Shadow Cabinet position of Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government to run for Mayor of London. I do wonder if this is a “jump before you are pushed” position, as I have heard rumours that he was going to be one of the shadow frontbenchers who were going to lose their jobs in the upcoming reshuffle. I don’t know if he is an official Tory candidate, or if he has just announced he is running to be seen in that position. Sad Dick is not expected to run, but Reform’s official candidate, Laila Cunningham, has been campaigning for at least a year and is often on TV.

That’s me done for the week, and it is very wet and blowy outside this afternoon, even if it is not too cool. So, my window sill is out this afternoon, and I will be looking for somewhere indoors. Mascara Man is missing again, and I don’t expect he will put in an appearance until late on Monday. As the Commons is back on Tuesday and it’s MM’s first PM’s Questions on Wednesday, it’s going to be an interesting week. Chat to you all again next week.

 

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