Larry’s Diary, Week Three Hundred And Forty-Five

Monday

Good morning, my happy readers. It was grey, grotty and chilly this morning when I went out, so I suppose autumn is well and truly here. It’s rather nice here in Number Ten, as all of the Ministers and hangers-on are missing at the Liebore Party conference in Liverpool. It’s going to be a lovely few days.

The big story of the weekend must be the attempted attack on the US Air Base at RAF Fairford. I have heard various versions of this story, but the one I think is most likely is the lady farmer coming home from a party at 12:45, who found her drive blocked by three white vans and a load of men in balaclavas. Knowing she lived close to the US Air Force base, and seeing how the men scattered into the woods, she wondered if it was a Police operation. But she decided to phone the number at the base given to locals to report suspicious incidents, just in case. The phone call was never answered. So, she dialled 101, the non-emergency number, but once again the call went unanswered. Eventually, at about 01:30, she rang 999 and armed Police arrived 10 minutes later, catching five men who were arrested. No word on the other men that the farmer saw.

How about the other versions of the event? Well, the Police said they were called out at 12:45. Of course, this could be true, and the farmer was a subsequent caller, but if that was the case, how did it take very nearly an hour before armed Police turned up? Then we have the Donald telling the press that it was a joint operation and the security forces had this group under observation. Maybe there is a bit of truth here, in that some of the group were being watched, but not all of them. Oh, there is one other thing. I note that not a single name or nationality has been released, so under our two-tier rules they weren’t white British and far right.

I hear that Airbus has found a problem with some spars on its A320 planes. The spars are in the front section of the fuselage and are made by Leonardo, who built the complete front section of the plane. After manufacturing the spars, Leonardo sent them to a subcontractor to receive an anti-corrosion coating before being painted. It seems that a technician checking damaged paint found patches where the spar had no anti-corrosion coating. Airbus says that 500 planes are affected, of which 250 are still in production. The maintenance period on this part has been reduced to two years from four.

What is the matter with our Home Office? I hear that they gave a former head bodyguard of the leader of Hamas political asylum in the UK and British citizenship. Of course, he got all the trappings and was living under a new ID, and was granted anonymity for 100 years. Interestingly, he changed his name several times. But he never stopped being a terrorist. He is currently in custody awaiting trial in the U.K., but he is also wanted for plotting to attack Jews by Germany and Austria. However, we have to refer to him as Mr X, as he has anonymity.

Thames Water has applied for planning permission to build a reservoir with a capacity of 115 billion litres at Abingdon in Berkshire. All well and good, but I doubt any sensible person is going to object to a much-needed resource. But I had a question: how do you fill up a huge reservoir with that much water? I don’t think the Thames Valley gets that much rain. The answer being proposed by Thames is to take the water from the River Thames during winter, when there is a good flow. I do hope they are planning to take the water from above the tidal reaches.

I see the National Grid has made an announcement that there is expected to be a 1.4 GW shortage of power generation late this afternoon. The problem is the lack of output from wind farms due to little wind. According to forecasts, there should be more wind late this evening, but by making the announcement now, the grid is able to buy in power from emergency generators and from the continent. It just goes to show what a mess our power system is in due to net zero commitments.

Tuesday

Hi folks, it’s a sunny morning today and delightful in Downing Street with MM still “at conference”. I hear it’s his big speech this afternoon, and he is going to float several ideas, state ownership of water and energy, and scrapping the pension triple lock. Well, that’s the pensioners’ vote gone.

What is going on with this RAF Fairford supposed terror plot? The whole thing is getting murkier and murkier. The five arrested have been released on bail, not something that is normal in terror cases. The Yanks seem to think it was a plot to blow up the base, but I hear there were no explosives found in the white vans, although they did have black plastic barrels in the back. I have heard several theories, including that it was a dummy run for an attack, it was a gang looking to steal red diesel from local farms, and it was an SAS exercise of the RAF base’s defences. I see three of the five on bail live in Westminster, which isn’t the cheapest place in London to live. Could they live in Wellington Barracks? There is a lot we aren’t being told.

Another brainwave from the Ginger Growler was announced at the Liebore conference. Her department has increased the powers of councils to grab empty homes. At the moment, councils can grab a home that has been empty for two years. They can then make it fit to live in and rent it out for between one and eight years before returning the property to the owner. Of course, the owner is supposed to be paid a portion of the rental income that is based on how much the work to make the home fit for rent cost. What has now happened is that the property may now be grabbed after being empty for only six months. Although this sounds harsh, the current law has never been used.

Yesterday, we narrowly escaped another 102 illegals crossing the Channel when their small boat sank off Calais, with one young girl and two women drowning. The numbers crossing on Sunday and Monday are not out yet, but it was 524 on Saturday, bringing the number in the seven days to then to 1,655. However, I do hear that 11 Albanians landed at Mylor Harbour in Falmouth on Sunday, a long way away from the usual crossing routes. I wonder how many more landed without being detected or came in by other means.

What is happening to climate change? Is it changing? This summer there was none of the usual reporting that Arctic ice was shrinking. That’s because I read that it didn’t shrink, unlike previous summers. But that’s not the only thing that has slipped out of the headlines. I remember when the newspapers and TV were full of reports of how, down in Australia, the Great Barrier Reef was dying and large sections were dead, with the coral appearing bleached white. Well, it seems the bleaching just hasn’t occurred recently. Well, actually, a bit more than recently, the experts say that it hasn’t occurred for the past three years. All the climate disasters that were predicted just a few years ago don’t seem to be happening. I’m still waiting for one of those Indian Ocean islands to slip below the rising sea.

Over 100 years ago, a scientist discovered that the hot water that flooded Cornish tin mines contained lithium in a useful concentration. The only problem was no one had any use for either the hot water or the lithium, and the water was treated as something that had to be pumped out and dumped, adding to the costs of tin mining. In more recent years, engineers have developed geothermal energy. In recent times, we have developed a geothermal power station in Cornwall that feeds power into the National Grid by extracting heat from the water that is coming up from thousands of metres below the surface before returning the water underground to be reheated by hot rocks. Now, a company called Geothermal Engineering Limited is going to start making use of the geothermal power station’s water by extracting the lithium before the water is reinjected underground. I hear the plan is to produce around 1,500 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year. Interestingly, there is a second source of lithium-infused water in the Tees Valley that is being developed.

It’s Tuesday, so it’s the weekly YouGov poll out today. After a run of Liebore being in the lead, following the so-called “Burnham Bounce”, Reform are back in the lead. Admittedly, it is only by 1% over Liebore, but the Tories are this week’s big loser, falling 6% behind Reform from being tied with them last week. I wonder what will happen next week, as there is often a “conference bounce”. But Burnham has come out with a whole load of spending promises in his conference speech, and not a single mention of where the money is coming from, or of the huge economic problems we are in, defence spending or illegal immigrants. I wasn’t impressed.

Wednesday

Good morning all, a bit grey when I wander down the garden this morning. It looks like it is going to rain at any time. Over breakfast, I heard the forecast on the radio, and it is thunderstorms this morning and warm and sunny this afternoon. Still no Mascara Man until tomorrow, and isn’t it nice here in Number Ten without him?

I have been contemplating the MM speech at the Liebore Party conference yesterday and have realised it was all pie in the sky. Hardly a word about what he is going to do to fix our current problems. I only heard two things. The first was temporarily removing the 5% VAT from electricity bills for the winter, worth £45 off the average household bill, while the bill is going up by 4% next month and a predicted 21% in January. Secondly, it was reintroducing the £2 maximum bus fare, that Legohead put up to £3. Neither of these were new, having already been announced. Every other thing he talked about was to go into the next manifesto for what he says will be an election in three years’ time. I somehow think he is telling lies and is going to announce an election in the spring.

My scribe was rather happy yesterday afternoon when the third-quarter results came out for Carnival Corporation. The numbers were rather good. In fact, they were the company’s best ever, with earnings per share and quarterly turnover beating the forecasts the experts were expecting. Not only that, but they have also increased the full-year earnings. I understand that my scribe originally bought shares in Carnival because it gave him extra cabin credit. The fact that the shares have more than doubled in value is a nice little extra.

The Premier League finally came out with a press statement confirming the very strong rumours that Manchester City had been found guilty of all the charges of cheating that had been brought against it and all but one of the charges of not cooperating with the investigation into the charges. Manchester City have until Friday to appeal. I was under the impression that City would have a week to appeal from the day they were told they were guilty, so they must have been told last week. I further understand they can’t appeal over their guilt. They can only appeal about the process. City are certain to appeal and drag things out, but I do want to know what the penalty will be.

Strangely, with regard to the Manchester City case, I am hearing something that, if true, is even more disturbing. The story I am hearing is that the tribunal actually found them guilty of all the financial charges back in June, and they were told in July. As a consequence, they feared that one of the punishments they were likely to get would be a transfer ban, so they decided to purchase a lot of players in the summer transfer window to future-proof the team. I have no idea as to the validity of this tale, but I do know they spent £450 million in the summer transfer window.

A couple of bits of aircraft news today, good for Airbus and bad for Boeing. The Airbus A350F made its maiden flight yesterday. It is a bit sooner than its revised timetable of “before the end of the year”, so it is still on line for first delivery next year. On the other side of the Atlantic, the FAA has put the Boeing 737 MAX 10 certification on hold because a software fault has been discovered with its “go-around” software.

It was announced at the Liebore Conference that the MoD is to run a competition to build three floating docks for the nation’s submarines to be maintained at Faslane. The docks will have to be quite big, as the Dreadnought-class Trident missile subs will weigh around 17,200 tonnes. So, my guess is they will need to be capable of taking 20,000 tonnes to have a safe margin. This raises a couple of interesting questions. Is a floating dock considered to be a warship, as the Government has a policy of only building warships in the U.K.? However, the last Navy floating dock was built by Portsmouth Dockyard in 1966 and was not nuclear submarine certified. Does any British shipbuilder have a design and the experience to build a floating dock?

Thursday

It’s a good morning to you, my friends. I hope you all said “White Rabbits” first thing, as it’s the 1st of the month. Nice and sunny and quite warm in London this morning. It’s a big day for prisoners this morning, as the first 700 of 4,500 are being let out under the Government’s early release scheme. The last time this happened, within a week, loads were back in prison for breaching their release terms, including someone who committed murder and someone who committed rape.

My first story today is about the FlyDubai flight heading from the UAE to Tel Aviv with 178 Israelis on board. The Omani co-pilot stabbed the Indian pilot in an attempt to fly the plane into the ground and put the plane into a steep dive, a dive so far outside the plane’s design criteria that parts of the tail fell off. However, the pilot managed to push the button that released the cockpit door lock, and passengers rushed in and overcame the co-pilot. I understand that a plumber pulled the plane out of its dive before two pilots who were on a positioning flight took control and landed the plane safely in Saudi Arabia. How stupid is a hijacker who attacks a plane load of Israelis who have all done their national service and been trained in unarmed combat?

I have now had a chance to look at the 40-page document put out by the Premier League on the Manchester City case, and it makes interesting reading. In summary, it says that when the club was acquired by Abu Dhabi United Group, the new owners wanted to win things and, to do so, they had to spend lots of money on top players, but they were restricted by the League’s spending rules. So, they set out from the very start to feed money to the club by surreptitious means. The document says the group injected and managed to hide more than £830m of sponsorship funding, while other devices hid £90m in expenses. This allowed them to buy the best players, pay hidden top-ups to wages, hidden commissions, etc. The document says that over the nine years being investigated, City claimed to have received £949.49 million in sponsorship income, while they actually received only £119.25 million, the rest coming from the owners. I suspect Manchester City are in deep doo-doo.

There are some very odd reports coming out of the war between Russia and Ukraine from the Russian salient north of Lyman. For some reason, the Ukrainian military asked the Ukrainian press and military bloggers not to report what the Ukrainians are calling Operation Vivaldi, other than what the military releases. The result is that the Russian military bloggers are reporting that Ukraine has crossed the Zherebets River and the fighting is deep into the east bank. The official Ukrainian line is that they have just taken the village of Nove, about 10 kilometres west of the river. The official Russian line is that they are clearing the last pockets of Ukrainian resistance from the town of Shandryholove, 30 kilometres west of the river. Why the discrepancy?

It is clearly to the Ukrainian advantage to keep their military movements secret, but surely the Russians must know where their troops are fighting? But they may not, as over the past months Russia has reported taking towns and villages that are not in their hands and are many kilometres behind the front line. Why would they do that, and do the generals know the true positions? You have to wonder, as even PooTin has announced the capture of the same town several times, only for it never to have happened. No wonder the Russians have just announced they are to increase the size of the Army by 13,000 men. They are reported to be losing around 1,500 soldiers a day, dead and wounded. And I still don’t know who to believe as to where the front line is north of Lyman.

I hear that after being tied to the dock since April 2017, HMS Daring was taking on fuel oil on Tuesday. A ship unmanned and tied to the dock does not need to fire up its engines, so does not need to be fuelled. During the nine years and six months the ship has been tied up, it has gone through the “Power Improvement Programme” and had its generators replaced so it could work in warm waters without losing power. I understand that the destroyer will be undergoing sea trials before the end of the year. This is good news, as we need every operational warship we can get our hands on.

Today, being the 1st of October, brings the end of the infamous “one in, one out” scheme with France. It seems the agreement under which it had run ended today, and the French have flatly refused to renew the agreement unless it was expanded to an EU-wide scheme, with a request to scale up the scheme. Frankly, I am not sorry to see the scheme go, as it was never of any use to us, as it did not reduce the numbers seeking asylum one jot. As I understand it, we have sent about 1,400 illegals back to France and, in return, we have received about 1,400 who are supposed to have been pre-vetted by the French. This was always a sham operation.

In Germany, there has been an accident with a 279-foot-long, 30-tonne wind turbine blade while it was being transported to the turbine it was to be attached to. The blade was on board a special transporter on a twisty road heading up a hill to the wind farm site. Because of the difficulty in getting something that long around hairpin bends, the transporter grips the blade at its hub end and tips it up at 60° so it can more easily turn corners and not hit the ground, trees or barriers at the roadside. But on this trip, the hydraulic lift mechanism failed as the transporter was going around a corner, and the blade crashed down on the transporter and its tractor, wrecking both. Apparently, the blade is wrecked beyond repair, at an estimated cost of €1 million.

Friday

Hi everyone, the sun is shining brightly this morning, but it was chilly when I first went out. However, the forecast is for warm weather here in the south of England. I loved the interview with Mascara Man on Channel 4 last night, when he was skewered about wanting to rejoin the EU after telling the voters of Makerfield he would not do so, as they had voted to leave. Wouldn’t it be ironic if he called a snap General Election, despite saying there will be no early election, and Makerfield chucked him out?

Earlier this year, the Panama Canal Authority cut the number of ships being allowed to use the Canal on a daily basis to just 23, with a corresponding reduction in the maximum draft of ships using the canal. This restriction on draft has made some ships unload part of their cargo at a port at one end of the canal, where it is transhipped by train across the country and reloaded at the other end. This was caused by a lack of rain and the consequential drop in water levels in the lakes the canal connects. Now I hear that the rain has arrived in Panama, and the number of crossings is being increased to 33 a day. I’m not sure if it’s good news for the people of Panama, but the weather forecast says there is to be 20mm of rain every day for the next 20 days.

I was sorry to see that Dame Esther Rantzen had finally succumbed to lung cancer. Although I am an old cat, I am not old enough to have watched her TV programme, “That’s Life”, which attracted a Sunday evening audience of over 20 million. However, I have seen bits on YouTube, like the talking dog who said “Esther” and “Sausages”, and the story of the beloved cat who had been stuffed by a taxidermist and made to look like a comic monster. I don’t want to be stuffed. I want to be buried in Hyde Park Pets Cemetery with a nice headstone, which people can come and visit and talk to me.

Back in the summer, there was a train accident which killed a train driver when his East Midlands train ran into the back of a train from Nottingham to London near Bedford. The preliminary report says the Nottingham train had come to a halt when the automatic brake had stopped the train in error. The train with a driver under instruction passed a green light, and the system gave an erroneous audible “signal passed at Red Alert”. Two and a half seconds later, the brakes were slammed on automatically. The following train did go through a red light, which the driver acknowledged, and instead of stopping, he sped up, only applying the brakes when the stopped train came into sight. The second train could not stop in time, crashed into the halted train and the driver died. I guess we will never know why the dead driver accelerated instead of stopping.

At the end of last month, Ukraine was reported to have hit the Azov Optical-Mechanical Plant with four Neptune ballistic missiles, setting it alight and virtually destroying it. Why is this important? It seems AOMP is the sole source of many of the electronic navigation and steering parts for seven different Russian missiles. Without these parts, some Russian missiles, such as the Kh-101 cruise missile and the Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile, are going to be in short supply, which will be a huge relief to Kyiv.

If you have a few quid to spare, I hear that one of the apartments built into the St Pancras Station hotels is on the market. The three-double-bedroom apartment is a mere £1.7 million, but does have a lot of extras. The master bedroom has his-and-hers dressing rooms and bathrooms. Both the other bedrooms are en suite. There are three utility rooms, as well as a huge kitchen and even built-in accommodation for staff. There is one enormous open living space on a separate level, which is 51 feet by 49 feet. Of course, there is a private lift, and you can make use of all the facilities of the five-star hotel below you, including the spa, gym and room service. The 5,000 sq ft apartment also has 24-hour security and a doorman. If you win the Lottery, I will accept the apartment as a retirement home.

What is going on with this RAF Fairford business? It all seems very strange to me. The Yanks seem convinced that it was a bomb plot. But the Police say there were no explosives in the three white vans, although there was rather a lot of petrol. Then the Police let the five men they arrested out on bail, and Mascara Man says he thinks Iran was involved. Then yesterday more news broke when a British man was questioned under caution, and a man with 27-year-old dual British/Iranian nationality has been arrested on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts. The dual national was said to have an address in Westminster, as do three of those previously released on bail. I always thought Westminster was home to loads of villains.

Saturday

Morning, my friends, a bit better out there this morning than yesterday, with a touch of sunshine. But according to the lady on the radio, it is going to get a bit warmer during the day, with rain in the evening when it gets dark. MM wasn’t happy yesterday; he put his foot in it, saying that the owners of Manchester City should catch a break for all the investment they have put into the city of Manchester. The Government had to put out a calming statement, but I wonder what damage his original statement has done.

Some time ago I told you about Grand Central Trains’ plans to run a service between Newcastle and Brighton. Of course, it has to take a bit of a roundabout route, going via the East Coast Main Line to Doncaster before heading to Birmingham, Reading, Redhill, and Gatwick to Brighton, but it could be very useful for people flying out of Gatwick. Now Grand Central has offered up a bit more of its plan. They say, if granted permission, they would run five return services a day. The services would be operated by four x five-car Class 180 Adelante trains they would lease. Grand Central already operates 10 Class 180 trains on its existing routes, and these four trains are owned by a train leasing company and have been sitting in sidings somewhere, unused, for the past three years. In the event that Grand Central gets permission to run the service, the trains will be refurbished before going into use.

How incompetent are the authorities in Tennessee? A woman has been on Death Row for nearly 30 years after being convicted of murdering a girl who was a classmate, and was supposed to have been executed yesterday. The woman was strapped to a gurney and, following the state’s legal procedure, was injected with what was supposed to be a lethal dose of chemicals. In line with the protocol, she was then given a second lethal dose. The problem was that neither injection killed her, she just went to sleep and was snoring. Then she woke up and was taken to hospital, as the procedures don’t allow for a third injection. I wonder what they will do now. Would another attempt to execute her be banned as cruel and unusual punishment?

I see that there is a bit of an international row going on over diesel. It is in short supply worldwide, mainly because of the war between the US and Iran and the restrictions on the Straits of Hormuz. But in recent years the USA has become the world’s biggest refiner and supplier of diesel. We get a large percentage of our diesel from the US, and the Donald wants countries in Europe to use their reserves so he can increase the domestic supply and reduce the price. The majority of reserves in Europe are in France and Germany, who both have 900 days, whilst we have about 40 days. One of the other big diesel suppliers used to be Russia, but they have stopped exporting because Ukraine has taken out nearly 50% of their capacity to refine both diesel and petrol. Mr Poo Tin says he will only resume exporting diesel if the sanctions on Russia are lifted. I suspect that even if sanctions were lifted, he has no diesel to export.

What is happening at Hull City FC? Back on the 21st of September, a player from the club flipped his car onto its roof while heading to the club’s training ground in Cottingham. Fortunately, reports said he was uninjured. Now I read that a second player has flipped his car in the same street on his way to training. This time photos reveal the Mercedes on its side, and it is reported that once again the player walked away unscathed. I understand the road is a rather narrow rural road and, given footballers’ known liking for powerful, expensive cars, I suspect the football club might be suggesting they give themselves a little longer to get to training in future.

I have been reading a bit more about the diesel shortage, and in Britain it is another case of us making a problem for ourselves. In the 1970s there were 18 refineries in the U.K. This was down to six a couple of years ago and is now down to four, and we only produce about a quarter of the diesel we consume, with the majority of the rest coming from the USA. The stupidity of the situation is that the amount of crude oil passing through the Straits of Hormuz is now back to the pre-US/Iran war level, but not refined products like petrol and diesel. But we have taxed the U.K. refineries almost out of existence and decided to rely on imports that don’t pay our carbon tax and so appear cheaper, until a war shortage shows how stupid governments are.

I hear that after two hair transplants, Wayne Rooney is so happy with his new hair that he has insured it. I wonder how that works, how much does he have to lose before the insurance pays out, and who decides if it meets the terms of the policy. I wouldn’t want to be a bald cat; I am very fond of my fur and like to keep it well groomed. But there are some hairless cats, Sphynx?, that I think are ugly. I wonder if they do hair transplants for cats.

That’s me done for the week. It’s not terribly warm and the sun is not out. At least it’s not raining yet, so it’s the windowsill for me this afternoon. I should be in for my dinner before it rains. MM is due back on Monday, so I will have to make the most of the weekend. Chat to you all again next week.

 

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