911 thoughts on “Monday 13 January: The Sussexes shouldn’t be punished for doing things differently”

  1. Morning everyone. All Quiet On the NoTTLing Front this morning?

    Any tips on connecting Samsung Subwoofers and Sound Bars gratefully received.

    2. Morning Minty, the only tips I can give you is check your sound settings on the TV carefully on installation.
      When, after you get it up and running, it plays up and fails to connect to TV is to pull out both mains plugs for sound bar and subwoofer and wait for a minute.
      In my experience the difference in sound quality is remarkable but I have found it troublesome at times.

      1. Thanks for that VVOF. At the moment I am a trying to get the Subwoofer to connect to the Soundbar itself via Bluetooth. It refuses to do so!

          1. No problem with my Jack Russel Sub Woofer, He barks on command and does not need blue tooth, An occasional biscuit though does help

          2. Very reliable, although the picture was prone to revolving. Unfortunately it is not so easy these days to obtain the required paraffin.

        2. Can’t help you there I’m afraid. If memory is correct I had no problem connecting between soundbar and subwoofer, only between Samsung TV and soundbar.

  3. Who said poetry is dull?

    When me prayers were poorly said
    Who tucked me in me widdle bed
    And spanked me till me ass was red?
    Me Mudder!

    Who took me from me cosy cot
    And put me on the ice-cold pot
    And made me pee when I could not?
    Me Mudder!

    And when the morning light would come
    And in me crib me dribbled some
    Who wiped me tiny widdle bum?
    Me Mudder!

    Who would me hair so neatly part
    And hug me gently to her heart
    Who sometimes squeezed me till me fart?
    Me Mudder!

    Who looked at me with eyebrows knit
    And nearly have a king size fit
    When in me Sunday pants me shit?
    Me Mudder!

    When at night her bed did squeak
    Me raised me head to have a peek
    Who yelled at me to go to sleep?
    Me Fadder!

  4. The start to the New year on the MSM has been deeply depressing,
    We’ve had double climate change, double TDS, and now double royalty.
    It can only get better, I suppose.

  5. Good Morning, all

    What a dire bunch of letters today

    A NoTTLer view of their Wokenesses latest ruse as leaked via Tom Bradby

    “Max Bonamy 13 Jan 2020 2:48AM

    HEADLINES

    “Buckingham Palace fears Sussexes could go public with damaging accusations if plans are thwarted”

    Let’s call a spade a spade. They are threatening blackmail.

    I suspect this will not go down well with the British public.”

    1. Aaand this was yesterday’s top rated BTL@DTletters comment….NoTTLers rule, OK!

      Max Bonamy 12 Jan 2020 4:15AM

      “The couple’s decision is understandable”
      James Dixon, Suffolk

      I heavily dispute this. Rather, it is hasty, petulant, and very poorly thought-through.
      But let’s be generous and say it is, nonetheless, for the long-term best – providing, of course:

      1. the British taxpayer is not expected to subsidise their choice
      2. they do not seek to set up a rival transatlantic court
      3. they are discreet and don’t sell their story in ways that undermine or diminish the Queen and her successors
      4. HRH Sussex Royal woke yoga mats and other tat doesn’t debase the Royal brand.

      What is not understandable, or forgivable, about the couple’s decision is the manner and timing of it. Indeed, it’s nothing short of disgraceful, inflicting maximum insult and hurt to the Queen, Prince Philip, Charles and William.

      Moreover, what an unbelievable nerve to say in their press statement they will seek to “collaborate” with the Queen. Nobody ‘collaborates’ with the British monarch, one SERVES the British monarch. Or, to de-personalise it, one serves the institution of a constitutional monarchy, and, by extension, the British people. And it should be seen as a great honour and privilege to do so.

      Moving forward, clearly this episode raises questions about the suitability of people from cultures, domestic or foreign, with ‘me-first, elbows out, grab-what-you-can’ values marrying into one of necessary restraint and duty. That, of course, has nothing to do with colour – it’s an attitude. If the constitutional monarchy is to survive it cannot be allowed to happen again.

      2. “….it’s nothing short of disgraceful, inflicting calculated maximum insult and hurt to the Queen, Prince Philip, Charles and William.

  8. I’m trying to get my head around the US trade policy.

    It seems that they are putting punitive tariffs on British organic dairy products (where there is a shortage in the States because of the way they keep cattle) and Scottish whisky because the EU subsidise Airbus at a time when Boeing’s most popular product has been grounded after the US corporation took shortcuts over safety, attempted to corrupt the inspectors, and then “upgraded” their aircraft firmware so that it is as full of malware as a PC running Windows 10 and crashes aircraft after takeoff.

    Is this the “Special Relationship” we should expect from the Americans post-Brexit?

    1. Morning Jeremy. I’m surprised at you! There is no “Special Relationship”. It is a fiction.

          1. You’ll be saying next the 40 thieves are as fictitious as the virgins promised to jihadi “martyrs” who self-destruct.

          4. No, there are plenty of thieves about, a good deal more than 40…..and mostly in government.

            Shame the Beast lost his seat, I always liked the way that when rebuked by the speaker and made to modify his statement that £Half the Tory front bench are crooks” he relented and said instead “Half the tory front bench are not crooks.”
            His was the sort of attiti=ude we needed and reverenced…. as for his policies, that’s another matter.

    1. I can still recall the formula for resolving quadratic equations! The nadir of useless education!

      1. Morning Araminta.

        To refresh your memory……

        If 2 eggs = why
        And 3 eggs = an omelette
        Why make an omelette?

      2. I long ago erased that from my memory. Having once learned it I have never ever had any need to use it

        1. I thought you had to have a proficiency in Maths to work for HMRC even if punctuation, spelling, grammar and syntax were considered rather less important?

          1. Not sure that HMRC need to solve quadratic equations so very often, Rastus.
            Morning!

      3. I had forgotten it but I had to relearn it when I was home-schooling my two sons for Maths GCSE. One is now an aerospace engineer and the other is writing software professionally and studying for an M.Sc in computer technology.

      4. 20 years after I left school I was doing some site design work and dealing with quantities of material and the dimensions of the space to store them. I was about to embark on a trial and error approach when it occurred to me that I was looking at a quadratic equation. Five minutes later, problem solved quadratically.

        Not at all useless.

      5. I can recall the formula for photosynthesis – an inconvenient truth as far as the greens are concerned 🙂

      1. That may have been because it’s on a metric blackboard. Wait till 1st February and try again.

        Morning Grizzly.

    4. It is the formula for creating a policy to choose a process to select an electable Labour leader.

      1. In order to select an electable Labour leader, you first have to get rid of all the current candidates.

        1. That man Lewis got a mental uptick from me this morning when he said that he was black, as opposed to “a person of colour”.

    6. Ah, this takes me back!
      There’s an error in line 14, I seem to remember.
      Morning, hall.

  10. Regional airline Flybe in bid to stave off collapse

    I think these sort of airlines probably don’t have much of a future. They focus on Internal and very short haul flights. These are the flights where there are more environmentally friendly modes of travel such as rail or the channel tunnel . There may even be taxation changes to discourage such travel. It is unlikely that trading conditions for these airlines will improve

    Flybe, Europe’s biggest regional airline, was locked in survival talks on Sunday night less than a year after being bailed out by a Virgin Atlantic-led consortium.

    Amid mounting losses.EY, the accountancy firm, has been put on standby to handle an administration of Flybe Group, according to aviation industry sources.

  11. Good morning all.

    Read an amazing book last night which was a Christmas present. “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris.

  13. ‘Split ticket’ rail fares to go mainstream say experts

    This just indicates the current ticketing system is flawed and far to complex and the price variations are just crazy. Even the ticket office staff dont understand the system so you will probably not get the cheapest ticket there and you will certainly not get the best price from a ticket machine

    Thousands of passengers could save money on rail fares as “split tickets” become more common, experts predict.
    Buying multiple tickets to split one journey into sections can work out to be cheaper than having a single ticket.
    Users do not have to change trains, as long as their train stops at the final destination printed on each ticket – but the practice has been “niche”.
    Booking site Trainline has now released a SplitSave tool to help find cheaper journeys by splitting trips into legs.
    “Split tickets” are legal provided that trains stop at ticket destinations.

    1. I get UK fares through the Android app “Trainpal” that does this split ticketting. Saves quite a wedge sometimes.

    2. When returning from Edinburgh, by sitting on Crewe station for twenty minutes and catching the following train to Euston, MB and I saved £180.

      1. Nice one. There’s no consistency or logic to train fares – next month I have a ticket from Stansted airport to Southampton airport for £6.60. This includes the tube between Liverpool St and Waterloo. It can cost £42 ish.

        ‘Morning Anne.

  14. UK weather forecast: More warnings in place as Storm Thunberg set to bring 80mph winds

  15. All is not well for Jess Phillips

    Perhaps she ought to take more care in selecting her staff. There seems to be a contradiction in her post when she says it is totally unacceptable and then goes on to say he was a valued member of her staff

    Labour leadership contender Jess Phillips has suspended one of her key aides over “completely unacceptable” messages posted on social media.
    The decision came after the The Mail on Sunday uncovered tweets from the team member, in which they described Israel as “the murderer” that was “inflicting Holocaust conditions on Palestinians”.

    Despite admitting she was “really sad” to have taken action against “a valued member of staff”, Ms Phillips said the suspension was necessary and “the only was to start building a bridge again with the Jewish community”.

    1. So, all the antisemitism reported in the Labour party was down to Israel stirring the pot, was it? Hmm…

      1. ‘Morning Oberst

        Of course that’s rite. The Labour party sez so

        Anti-Semitism election row was stoked by Israel, Labour report says

        Danielle Sheridan, political correspondent – 13 JANUARY 2020 • 12:50AM

        Labour’s overseas members have been accused of “conspiracy mongering” after compiling a report that claimed the party’s anti-Semitism row was “stoked by Israel’s government”.

        Charles James, author of a report which has been seen by The Telegraph entitled “General Election Part Two: Why didn’t we win?”, wrote: “Many of us believe that the row about anti-Semitism has been stoked by the government of Israel and its helpers in the UK.”

        Citing a 2017 documentary produced by Al Jazeera, which explored the relationship between the Israel lobby and British politics, Mr James, who is secretary of the 3,500-strong group, wrote that the “government of Israel is putting significant efforts and finances into influencing British politics, including the Labour Party”.

        He said the motive was to “prevent the election of a Labour government that will recognise a Palestinian state”.

        The report also questioned how there could be anti-Semitism within the Labour Party when Ed and David Miliband, who are both Jewish, ran to be leader in 2010.

        Mr James made reference to the fact that when Jeremy Corbyn met two Jewish organisations in 2018 to discuss anti-Semitism “many of these representatives had links to the Conservative Party”.

        “Jeremy was conciliatory. He could have pushed back on his visitors by asking why they never addressed anti-Semitism in the Tory party,” he said. However, the report did acknowledge that there had been a Holocaust denier within the group and that, from “very clear” evidence, he was suspended and subsequently expelled.

        The Telegraph has also seen Facebook posts by Colin O’Driscoll, co-chairman of the group. He wrote: “Anti-Semitism accusations are a sideshow, a convenient weapon being used on behalf of the Right in British society to derail Corbyn and his supporters.”

        He also claimed that the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies were “overwhelmingly Tory supporters” who were “happy to participate in overheated hyperbole because it suits their class interests”. Mr O’Driscoll did not respond to requests for comment.

        Mr James said: “If any member of my Constituency Labour Party has concerns, no doubt they will contact me.”

        Jennifer Gerber, director of Labour Friends of Israel, said the report represented “the kind of conspiracy mongering and victim blaming that has been a constant feature of the anti-Semitism crisis under Jeremy Corbyn”.

        ******************************************************************

        Erasmus Amsob 13 Jan 2020 2:03AM

        Only Corbyn’s Labour Party could come up with the excuse that the Jews are to blame for Labour’s anti-semitism.

        It’s a new low when most thought going lower was impossible.

      2. Maybe she put aside her copy of ‘Das Kapital’ and read ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ instead.

  17. Well this is a new excuse from the railways

    Disruption details

    Due to a passenger being taken ill on a train earlier today between Cheshunt and Tottenham Hale trains have to run at reduced speed

  18. A subject I’ve written about before. This is my reply to John Redwood’s Diary entry today, Housing and Planning.

    We need green gaps between settlements, protection of woodland and good farmland, and maintenance of flood plain.

    Currently the above exists between my home town and adjacent urban areas. Sadly the County Council, and three district councils have a plan for three ‘Garden Communities’ – a misnomer if current building density is maintained – that will erode the current gaps with the provision of tens of thousands of homes.
    Combined, these ‘Communities’ represent the addition, population wise, of a small to medium sized town. Where are the people to purchase these homes to come from and where will they find employment are reasonable questions to ask. London at 50 miles away is the simple answer but with already overloaded roads and railways another problem will be added to what already exists.
    Strategic planning appears to be a lost art, starting at the very top with the political promotion of mass immigration without the provision of the infrastructure to cope. The Country is attempting to play catch-up with no end in sight and the current problems will worsen if little or no effort to reduce the incoming numbers is made.

    1. Morning M,
      You may as well ask how long is a piece of string.
      All the time the toxic trio lab/lib/con are
      a mass uncontrolled immigration coalition, & finding support / votes as such, the question will go unanswered.

      1. UKip is the answer.Oh no wait they have imploded as anybody with half a brain knew they would!

          2. P,
            Piggy backing on others rhetoric is not very becoming.
            Why not ask him ?

            By the by you have me at a disadvantage in so far as, who receives your support / vote ?

    3. There was a character on Radio 4 at the weekend predicting that urbanisation was the future. The UK cities are too small and will enlarge as people choose the city life. Thankfully I will be long gone before that becomes the reality.

      1. If that’s the case I wonder why there’s a stream of traffic heading west on the A303 every Friday evening and a stream heading east every Sunday evening.

  19. Why are contributors to this forum, even with all the latest technology available at their fingertips, still serially incapable of correctly writing the formula CO₂ ?

    1. Add that to referring to “carbon” when meaning “carbon dioxide”. I heard some worthy on the wireless claim that trees convert carbon to oxygen. Transmutation of the elements!

        1. I have better things to do with my time than muck around like that just to satisfy the pedants on here! CO2 is here to stay! ;^)

      1. Click on the small Union Flag icon on the top right of the menu bar.
        Click on “Show Emoji & Symbols” in the drop down menu. (this opens a Character Viewer).
        Click on “Digits–All”.
        Double click on your chosen symbol from the list that is revealed. It will then appear in your text wherever the blinking cursor is placed.

      2. Click on the small Union Flag icon on the top right of the menu bar.
        Click on “Show Emoji & Symbols” in the drop down menu. (this opens a Character Viewer).
        Click on “Digits–All”.
        Double click on your chosen symbol from the list that is revealed. It will then appear in your text wherever the blinking cursor is placed.

          1. That Character Viewer contains a cornucopia of useful characters. If you click on the small cog wheel (at the top right) you are given the opportunity of selecting quite a number of other lists.

      1. Don’t you think that is a poor reflection on the state of available technology in 2020?

        I do.

    7. Morning matey, With respect Grizz ‘C + O2 = CO2’ is a formula – CO2 is the chemical symbol for carbon dioxide and no I can’t be ar*ed going to subscript. :o)

      1. Agreed 100%. Can’t stand Apple Macintosh – awful system that limits one’s abilities with universally accepted tools like Microsoft Office.

    8. Because we do not know how to type lower case and can never remember the ALT keystrokes for the ASCII text.

      1. You DO know how to type lower case; most of your posts are in it.

        The ₂ in CO₂ is not lower case, it is subscript. If it were above the line it would be superscript.

      2. ‘Afternoon Bob, if you were to search for, and use ‘Charmap.exe’ ,in windows you will get more characters than you could shake a stick at but…

        …I still cannot find a subscript 2, hence my attitude, similar to Spikey’s, i.e., I can’t be arsed.

  21. Racism is one of the reasons put forward for the Duchess of Sussex’s antipathy to Britain. But if, as reported in today’s Daily Telegraph, this woman and her weak, stupid and gullible husband are prepared to blackmail the royal family then I do wonder if such behaviour would help encourage or eliminate more racial harmony.

      1. Perhaps David Lammy would like to explain why so many people – including himself – want to live in Britain and why so few want to live in Guyana.

        1. H’mmm …. a Guyanese settling in Blighty and doing very nicely.
          That rings a bell. No, don’t tell me …. it’ll come to me in a moment ….
          (Ponders deeply.)

        2. As they could find no evidence off Racism they had to invent a new concept called “Overtones of Racism”

          What does it mean who knows. no one can explain

          If the usual suspects believe the UK is such a horrible and nasty sand unpleasant country one has to ask why they choose to remain?

          THe answer Is suspect is the UK is not the unpleasant and nasty placed they claim and in fact every international survey back it up. These people though make a living out of claim the UK is racist and nasty and are make a very nice living out of it

    4. That would be the Royal Family, headed by a woman for the last 68 years.
      A monarch who has promoted the Commonwealth throughout her reign.

    5. Anyone even thinking about blackmailing the Crown in the past would have visited the gallows (of Royal descent or not).

    6. You mean, she’s racist towards the British people?? That might account for her demand to have the education curriculum “decolonised.”

        1. No problem with teaching the wrongs of colonialism, BUT, teach it in the context of the time it occurred and, as well as teaching what we got wrong, teach where we got things right and point out how successful the colonies have been since independence.

          1. Before we colonised .. they were eating each other, fighting , warring, enslaving , desecrating , chopping people up , look at Biafra, look anywhere on the black continent .. it has a soul destroying history that is sickening.. and of course no one blames the Arabs do they?

      2. You look around and find comprehensive web site have been set up and names registered and deals signed. Thees things do mot happen overnight months of work go into them,. How much Harry new about it who knows but it is clear Megan is calling the tune

        Being skeptical it could be she is just using him to make money? Who knows foe sure but it is a possibility

        Will the marriage last? Once she has made use of him will he be dumped ? Who Knows

        1. I get your drift… I have my own conspiracy theories…

          What is her purpose …femme fatale ..

          The Monarchy is already in a precarious postiton when the marriage fails she could do untold damage.

    9. I wonder what Doria thinks about her daughter’s performance? From what little one knows or has seen, she always struck me as being far more classy and would never bang the racism drum.

  22. Priti Patel defends inclusion of Extinction Rebellion on terror list

    Someone sensible for a change. Note it is the paper calling it a terrorist list. It is not. It is a list of extremist groups. Some may be terrorist groups but most will not be

    The home secretary, Priti Patel, has defended anti-terror police for putting the Extinction Rebellion environmental protest group on a list of extremist ideologies, saying it was important to look at “a range of security risks”.
    While accepting that XR was not a terrorist organisation, Patel told LBC radio that such assessment had to be “based in terms of risk to the public, security risks, security threats”.
    XR has threatened legal action after the Guardian revealed it had been placed on a list of ideologies that should be reported to the authorities running the Prevent anti-radicalisation programme. Police now say that was an error.

    1. She keeps up like this I might have to credit her with some merit in Government,unlike the woke police force who immediately apologised.

      Can she please add Antifa?

  23. Brexit: Irish border issue could land UK in court, report finds

    It is pretty much a load of rubbish. Systems already exist lots of non EU good flow through Dover with no problem. The way it is done is the goods are pre cleared. If goods are not pre cleared there may be a problem but we can just say all goods from non EU counties entering the UK must be pre cleared

    The Irish border could yet snag Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, with experts saying it will be impossible to deliver the computer systems for the special arrangements for Northern Ireland by the end of this year. Failure to implement the new systems will risk legal action by the European commission against Britain, the Institute for Government says.

  24. Well that’s enough of Harry and Meghan for me…….downvoting anyone?

    BTW I do object to the Royal couple labeled Brash and Trash.

      1. It’s blowing a hooley but rain free…!
        I’m up for a game but wil anyone else turn up, sweetie x…?

          2. ‘Bumble’ (David Lloyd) only plays a proper man’s game: cricket. None of that mincy lawn tennis crap.

    3. I have just finished scanning the Telegraph letters and could not agree with you more. The letters themselves were bad enough but the comments are almost exclusively about that couple.
      Is anything else happening in this world that they are trying to hide from us?

      P.S. I have been downvoted to the point where my score no longer shows.

      PP.S no we don’t want them in Canada

      1. I think the best answer might be to commission him into the Royal Navy for a decade or so….

      2. “PP.S no we don’t want them in Canada”
        It’s insulting to treat Canada as a C21 Bahamas; a convenient dumping ground for inconvenient royals.

    4. I get annoyed when the criticism slips over into overt racism.
      Criticise her by all means, and yes, there is lots to have a go at, but please refrain from giving her “Woke” supporters even more ammunition.

  25. Morning Each,
    Could it be that a good % of peoples of these Isles are on some form of loco weed ?
    Many of these same peoples have been supporting & voting year on year for parties that were / are hell bent on governance of this country coming from brussels.
    Many of these same peoples voted OUT in the referendum and immediately returned to supporting the
    very same parties that were / are hell bent in us staying in the crime syndicate.
    Many of these same peoples that have tried GE after GE
    to destroy a country are now judging what, after all, is said & done, a domestic in ermine.
    He should have told grandma first is his biggest fault other than that I cannot make him wrong in showing the bollocks to quit & walk, more is the pity we did not follow his example regarding the eu back in 24/6/2016.
    The question we should be asking 24/7 is what are the political tripe up to at this moment in time.

  27. Philippines: lava gushes from Taal volcano as alert level raised. 13 January 2020.

    Red-hot lava gushed out of the Taal volcano in the Philippines on Monday, with seismologists warning an eruption could happen any time.

    A day after a plume of ash and steam forced villagers to flee and shut down Manila’s international airport, offices and schools, scientists said they were caught out by the volcano’s sudden activity.

    “The speed of escalation of Taal’s volcanic activity caught us by surprise,” Maria Antonia Bornas, chief science research specialist at the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, told reporters.

    This is it! Super Volcano erupts! Armageddon! Ragnarok. Apocalypse. The End of Life as we Know it!

    Now what about Meghan and Harry?

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/13/philippines-lava-gushes-from-taal-volcano-as-alert-level-raised

      2. She’s sailing there as we speak on her copy of Thor Heyerdahl’s raft constructed from rushes. So very green!

          1. The papyrus rush vessel, so Ra II, I suppose. Google shows that Kon Tiki was made of wood, possibly balsa. Google can be your friend, sometimes.

    2. Nobody mentions how much CO2 is released into the atmosphere via volcanic action.

      Since it goes on 24/7 could it possibly be even more than all the man-made CO2?

      Just saying…

      2. Morning Nan. I believe there have been a couple of Great Extinctions caused by Volcanic Eruptions, notably the Siberian Traps. The quantities were prodigious but I’ve never seen any comparisons to the modern day!

        1. The Siberian Traps eruption caused the ‘Great Dying’ but their creation and the eruption went on for around two hundred thousand years. The Traps eruption wasn’t a single volcano but a huge fissure in the Earth’s crust that spewed out vast amounts of lava and gases. A small fissure opened up in Iceland a few centuries ago and had an effect on climate and harvests for a few years.
          When the effect of mega volcanoes, fissures in the Earth’s crust and asteroids are considered the EU and the House of Sussex are mere bagatelles.
          Don’t worry. 😎

    3. The volcano ‘Taal’, surely?

      I’ve noticed the media doing this in recent years. They talk about the ‘Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier’, rather than the ‘aircraft carrier, Queen Elizabeth’.

  28. Good morning my friends….no I don’t agree with the statement that the Sussexes should not be punished as I don’t see it as punishment what they ask….it is their choice. If that is what they want, it is up to them. I still think it is not right but we would all love to have the best of more than one world, life isn’t like that.

    Anyway, gales on the way here so batten down the hatches.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/350230e7ad579e379b19a0b5c5c43462201e3a7a188b22e603f0b26c4840e9cb.png

        1. I was reading a FaceAche forum, run by some of my old Derbyshire Constabulary colleagues, the other day when they mentioned a murder case at Via Gellia a while back. Do you have any knowledge of it?

          1. How far back?
            We had a taxi driver murdered at Cromford station a few years back, but going back even further, there were two youngsters blown apart with a shotgun up above Cromford before we moved up here, maybe 35 to 40y ago?

            I didn’t realise it at the time, but the mother of the girl used to be a regular at the Pig of Lead before it closed.

          5. Curiously those are two of the only archived records I could find online too.

            One of the officers talking about it said, “Definitely Balleye Quarry on Via Gellia, Spent a night up there ‘guarding the scene’ with Tim S**** overnight. Little did we know the second body—shot in the head—was lying a few yards from us! Spooky.”

      4. Tis on the way up here in the North but it is mighty cold and we have a deep frost…all crisp and even.

          3. Oh no!!!!!….that is not good. It was beautiful down there. I do hope it retains some of that beauty. I love my little cottage…..it is old, but then so am I….it needs a facelift…but then so do I. Lol. Part of the reason I have not been around much. We had a wetroom put in last year and a lovely herringbone brick ramp outside for my wheelchair but now we face a huge task in spring to have all the exterior cladding fixed and painted. Not looking forward to that one.

          4. That the trouble of being near the coast the weather and sand and salt spay takes its toll

          5. It certainly does. Chunks of our cladding have fallen off in places over the years and now we have to bite the bullet and get it sorted. Bread and jam for 2020 if we are lucky. Not had a quote yet, builder is staring in April – it will look nice and worth it in the end. It has to be done.

          8. A little while ago I tool a look on Google Earth (satellite view) showing the house my grandparents lived in and which I visited until about the age of 6 or 7. Beyond the back garden were playing fields of local industry. On Sundays in Summer I could watch cricket being played. Sadly today within a few feet of the back garden fence is an elevated 9 carriageway urban clearway! Made me feel very sad 🙁

      5. 90mph forecast for 10am for the Hebrides (20 miles across the Minche from me) but only a slight breeze has blown up. It’s damned chilly though

        2. Oh my goodness. Someone needs to buy the weather a calendar – these are March winds!!

          1. It was actually early Feb 15 years ago when an 80 year old Scotch pine in my neighbour’s garden got blown down, across one of my greenhouses. They employed a very skilled tree surgeon to remove it. Very impressive to watch his crew in action, winching the tree back up again and then taking it down piece by piece.

    2. Most of us have, at one time or another, resigned from a job. I certainly have done so but I parted on good terms with my employers. I did not expect to go on receiving a salary cheque or any other perks or titles from my ex-employers.

      If the Sussexes do not want to remain royal and want to be more like ordinary people then that is their decision but they must accept that they will be treated like other ordinary people who resign and no longer receive pay or benefits.

      Remember sad, self-deluded old King Lear? He wanted to be freed from the responsibility of being king while still keeping the rank, and enough money to keep him comfortable while “unburthen’d” he could “crawl towards death”.

      Those who know Shakespeare’s play will know that It did not end happily.

      1. Exactly!….you are spot on. Unfortunately, Harry needs to realise this is one job you can’t resign from. He will always be Prince Harry for the rest of his days unless he takes on a new identity and goes into hiding.

    3. It’s about duty and obligation, something that Harry should understand, even if his wife does not. It’s not something he can just walk away from without expecting a backlash.
      It’s a clash of tradition and custom versus the woke snowflake generation.

      And if nothing else, it demonstrates for everyone to see that woke liberalism makes people unhappy.

        2. I doubt there are many on here who can pronounce Pwllheli properly.

          [I can. I learnt how to back in 1955 at Butlin’s there when I was a four-year-old sprog]

  29. Those who have studied Antony and Cleopatra will know that in the play Antony is defeated at the Battle of Actium because his fleet gave up and followed Cleopatra’s ships out of battle.

    How clearly Shakespeare understood the folly of somebody whose judgement can be easily subdued by the person with whom he is besottedly in love.

    Antony
    ….thou knew’st too well
    My heart was to thy rudder tied by th’ strings,
    And thou shouldst tow me after. O’er my spirit
    Thy full supremacy thou knew’st, and that
    Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
    Command me.

    Cleopatra:
    O, my pardon!

    Antony:
    Now I must
    To the young man send humble treaties, dodge
    And palter in the shifts of lowness, who
    With half the bulk o’ th’ world played as I pleased,
    Making and marring fortunes. You did know
    How much you were my conqueror, and that
    My sword, made weak by my affection, would
    Obey it on all cause.

    Cleopatra:
    Pardon, pardon!


    I wonder if Harry’s wife will ever understand the hiatus she has caused to Harry and whether, if she does, she will have the integrity and honesty to beg the forgiveness of the man who, to borrow another phrase from Shakespeare, loved her, not wisely but too well.

    2. My guess is that she will never return to the UK except to annoy the Royal Family at state occasions. The big mistake IMHO was to give the couple a fancy title before Prince Harry’s wife had even been granted British citizenship.

        1. Another reason for them to return is that we do not allow titles in Canada, that is why Conrad Black gave up his Canadian citizenship to become Lord Mucky Muck.
          If they become permanent residents, it will be plain old Mr and Mrs.

          5. I had hoped we could do a “return to sender” with him but he has nwo some new busybody post on no real value but the potential to do harm.

      2. It depends on where they settle. Toronto has some nice cold winters and LA can be unbearably hot in summer, so you might see them resort to their little pied a terre for a few months each year.

        1. A bit of shopping whilst her hubbie appears at Ascot and then a convenient headache in case he fancies a spot of polo. As for the heat, she could spend the summer on Simon Cowell’s yacht, or some Greek’s island.

          1. I think once/if they leave, they will not get the reception here if they return that they may think.

          3. And the comments. I have yet to find a favourably comment nor even one giving them the benefit of the doubt,.

        2. Doesn’t LA also have cholera now that it’s one of the two homeless capitals of the USA??

        3. as an actress, in a Canadian Series, I suspect that her “Hollywood Luvvie “friends”would not normally have given her the time of day but with all her wokeness on full display and a Royal Prince as a Husband, she is, for the time being, certain they will fawn on her. But if she has to give up the title or divorces Harry (California style) that could all change and if she does harbour pretensions to become POTUS then their support may more rapidly disappear iin favour of either Hillary (if she hasn’t given up yet) or Michelle.
          She may be scheming but I doubt she is smart and she may believe they truly adore her…. until they get fed up with the two of them sponging of them.

  30. A towering intellect whose only crime was to be a conservative: As philosopher Sir Roger Scruton dies at 75, TOBY YOUNG pays tribute to the eminent intellectual
    By TOBY YOUNG FOR THE DAILY MAIL

    He was a brilliant philosopher and one of the most eminent conservative intellectuals of his generation, who spent his life fighting for freedom, whether in academia or on behalf of those oppressed behind the Iron Curtain.

    He loathed Communism and lived to see his criticism of it vindicated — first in Eastern Europe, then in Latin America.

    He wrote more than 50 books on a vast range of subjects and was knighted in 2016 for ‘services to philosophy, teaching and public education’.

    Yet Roger Scruton, who died yesterday aged 75, always remained something of an outcast, vilified by the liberal establishment for daring to challenge the fashionable nostrums of our age. Because he was an unapologetic conservative and defender of Western civilisation he was never given the respect he deserved.

    Following his knighthood, that respect appeared finally to have been conferred upon him. And when, in 2018, he was appointed as chair of a government commission on building and architecture, it seemed certain.

    But the announcement of his appointment was greeted by what he called a ‘hate storm’, with those appalled by it on the Left sifting through everything he’d said or written dating back 50 years to find opinions to be ‘shocked’ and ‘outraged’ by.

    Sir Roger survived that ordeal, but he had to endure a second wave of attacks following an interview he gave to journalist George Eaton in the New Statesman magazine in April last year.

    Sir Roger had been racist about the Chinese, suggested Eaton. He had apparently derided the influence of Jewish financier George Soros and dismissed Islamophobia as an invention to suppress criticism.

    https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/01/12/22/23314122-0-image-a-41_1578867342424.jpg
    In 2018, he was appointed as chair of a government commission on building and architecture. Pictured: Scruton in December

    The response was immediate and angry. Conservative MP Johnny Mercer declared that sacking Scruton was a ‘no brainer’. George Osborne, the former Conservative Chancellor, condemned Scruton’s ‘bigoted remarks’.

    Soon Housing Secretary James Brokenshire who had appointed Sir Roger as an advisor, announced he had been fired. And Eaton responded by publishing a picture of himself on Instagram quaffing champagne, and crowing about getting Sir Roger, the ‘Right-wing racist and homophobe’, the sack.

    Scruton published a rueful article in the Spectator magazine, lamenting the Maoist climate of intolerance sweeping through our institutions.

    ‘We in Britain are entering a dangerous social condition in which the direct expression of opinions that conflict — or merely seem to conflict — with a narrow set of orthodoxies is instantly punished by a band of self-appointed vigilantes,’ he wrote.

    And then, of course, it transpired that Sir Roger had been grossly misrepresented by Eaton. The full transcript of Sir Roger’s interview with the New Statesman was published — thanks to the efforts of the Right-wing journalist and writer Douglas Murray — and it became clear his remarks had been taken out of context and bore no relation to Eaton’s interpretation.

    https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/01/12/22/23314118-0-Following_his_knighthood_respect_appeared_finally_to_have_been_c-m-43_1578867405332.jpg
    Following his knighthood, respect appeared finally to have been conferred upon him. Pictured: Scruton with his wife Sophie and children Sam and Lucy when he was knighted in 2016

    Eventually, he was reinstated to the commission — for which, incidentally, he was never paid — and received a public apology. But it was too little, too late. He had been hounded by the kind of intolerance he had spent a lifetime fighting.

    In his 20s, Sir Roger was awarded a double first in philosophy at Cambridge, and attributed this achievement to the excellent teaching he’d received at the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe. But even as a boy he had to contend with Left-wing prejudice. His father, an austere socialist, would not let him read Beatrix Potter because she was too ‘bourgeois’.

    When he won his scholarship to Cambridge, his father refused to speak to him, regarding it as a bastion of class privilege. But Scruton considered this estrangement a price worth paying to pursue a life of scholarship and contemplation.

    It was during the May 1968 student protests in France that he first embraced conservatism.

    He was in the Latin Quarter in Paris, watching students overturn cars, smash windows and tear up cobblestones, and for the first time in his life he ‘felt a surge of political anger’.

    ‘I suddenly realised I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans.

    ‘When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilisation against these things.

    ‘That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.’

    It was brought home to him after the publication of his third book, The Meaning Of Conservatism (1980), that he would never be accepted by his academic colleagues, nearly all of whom were Left-wing.

    Because of his right-of-centre political views, he never would climb to the top of the greasy pole at Oxford and Cambridge.

    https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/01/12/22/23314126-0-When_he_won_his_scholarship_to_Cambridge_his_father_refused_to_s-a-47_1578867471216.jpg
    When he won his scholarship to Cambridge, his father refused to speak to him, regarding it as a bastion of class privilege. Pictured: Scruton in 1992

    Instead, he started The Salisbury Review, a serious conservative magazine that quickly earned him pariah status — not just on the Left, which was to be expected, but among the wets of the Tory Party as well.

    ‘It cost me many thousand hours of unpaid labour, a hideous character assassination in Private Eye, three lawsuits, two interrogations, one expulsion, the loss of a university career in Britain, unendingly contemptuous reviews, Tory suspicion, and the hatred of decent liberals everywhere,’ he wrote in the Spectator in 2002. ‘And it was worth it.’

    In 1984 the Review published a controversial article by Ray Honeyford, a headmaster in Bradford, questioning the benefits of multicultural education. Honeyford was forced to retire because of the article and had to live for a time under police protection.

    The British Association for the Advancement of Science accused the Review of scientific racism, and the University of Glasgow philosophy department boycotted a talk Scruton had been invited to deliver to its philosophy society (the university awarded an honorary degree to Robert Mugabe on the same day.)

    Sir Roger could be insouciant about the ignominy his views attracted, but the truth is he was a sensitive man who was often wounded by criticism. He found the almost universal derision that greeted his book Thinkers Of The New Left (1985) particularly hard to bear.

    A collection of essays that had first appeared in The Salisbury Review, it was a withering assessment of the leading intellectuals of the European Left whom he condemned for their dismissal of ‘bourgeois’ Western values and their endless excuse-making for totalitarian regimes, such as Mao’s China.

    Sir Roger had the temerity to point out that the admirers of John-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher, included Pol Pot, the Communist leader responsible for the genocide that wiped out a third of Cambodia’s population between 1975 and 1979. Pot was a student in Paris at the height of Sartre’s cult-like status.

    Not surprisingly, Thinkers Of The New Left was met with a fusillade of negative reviews and Longman, Scruton’s publisher, quickly caved in to demands from its Left-wing authors and took the book off sale.

    https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/01/12/22/23314136-0-image-m-51_1578867573966.jpg
    https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/01/12/22/23314134-0-image-m-53_1578867980366.jpg
    Sir Roger could be insouciant about the ignominy his views attracted, but the truth is he was a sensitive man who was often wounded by criticism. Left: Sir Roger in 1989 and, right, in 2010

    ‘I was actually very depressed by it,’ the philosopher confided in 2015. ‘I was close to suicide at one stage, actually, my first marriage had ended, I was very much on my own and all these reviews just went on and on about what I had done being a disgrace to the intellectual world. I had expected some people to be cross. But not that.’

    What made this contemptuous dismissal particularly hard to take was that Sir Roger knew first-hand just how destructive the ideas of Karl Marx and his followers could be. He helped the Czech dissident Julius Tomin create an underground university in the 1980s, smuggling in books, giving lectures in secret and even arranging for the Cambridge theology department to award external degrees to the mature students.

    For his trouble, Scruton was detained by the Czech secret police, ejected from the country by armed guards and placed on the Index of Undesirable Persons.

    In spite of the risks, he continued to do whatever he could to help the growing opposition movement behind the Iron Curtain, not just in Czechoslovakia but in Hungary and Poland, too.

    Needless to say, his intellectual peers back in London dismissed these efforts as those of a foolish romantic, standing in the way of progress. Even when Scruton might have expected to enjoy a moment of triumph, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he was shunned by his colleagues. He was teaching philosophy at Birkbeck College in London at the time and to mark the occasion the history department invited two Left-wing intellectuals to debate the momentous event.

    ‘It was going to be a debate between the old Left and the new Left,’ Scruton recalled 26 years later. ‘They were aware that I actually knew people who were then being appointed president and prime minister of various countries they were talking about, that I had been directly involved, but of course there was no suggestion that I be allowed to say a word.’

    I only got to know Sir Roger four years ago, having hired him to write a column for a magazine I was editing. I was lucky to have visited him at his 250-year-old farmhouse in Wiltshire which he mischievously named ‘Scrutopia’ — a haven from the constant brickbats hurled at him by the cultural warriors of Islington.

    Towards the end of his life, he could take comfort from a successful marriage to Sophie Jeffreys, a historian, as well as two children, both now young adults. It was his love of hunting, a passion he discovered in middle age, that led to him meeting his second wife.

    He was out hunting in 1993, when he fell from his horse and Sophie, then 22, stopped to help him to his feet. Two years later they were married. Only a few weeks ago, he agreed to be on the advisory council of a new pro-free speech organisation I am about to launch and I was looking forward to marching into battle with him by my side. Sadly that will no longer be possible, and Britain is the poorer for it.

    If Roger Scruton had embraced the pieties of the liberal elite, as most of his peers did, his extraordinary intellectual gifts would surely have earned him the very highest accolades the academic establishment can confer — a chair at Harvard, halls of residence named after him, admission to the Order of the Companions of Honour.

    As it is, he was a prophet who was never properly acknowledged in his own country, even when, unlike his enraged critics, he proved to be on the right side of history. Let us hope posterity is kinder to him than his blinkered contemporaries.

    1. Delingpole: RIP Britain’s Greatest Conservative Philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton

      Sir Roger Scruton has died and Britain has lost her greatest conservative thinker, writer, fox hunting man, philosopher and all-round-hero of the right.

      Like so many of the bravest and best, he was a prophet almost without honour in his own country.

      In the Eastern European countries where he had fought for freedom under Communism, he was properly recognised as a hero: in 1998 President Vaclav Havel awarded him the Czech Republic’s Medal of Merit (First Class) for his work in the Eighties smuggling samizdat literature and encouraging underground networks behind the Iron Curtain; in June 2019, the Polish President awarded him Poland’s Order of Merit; last month (December 2019) President Viktor Orban of Hungary awarded him their Order of Merit, saying he had ‘foreseen the threats of illegal migration and defended Hungary from unjust criticism.’

      In Britain, however, he enjoyed a more mixed reputation — epitomised by a shoddy incident following his appointment in 2018 as chairman of the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

      Though it was a well-deserved appointment for such an intelligent, architecturally well-informed, civilised thinker with a strong aesthetic, the left couldn’t bear the idea of anyone so shamelessly conservative being given a government advisory role.

      So an activist journalist from the left-wing New Statesman set out to ambush him — and by twisting Scruton’s words succeeded in getting him ousted from the job.

      What was most disgusting about the incident was not so much the cockroach-like behaviour of the scummy leftist hack — one George Eaton — as the reluctance of the cowardly, craven, politically correct Establishment to rise to Scruton’s defence.

      As I reported at the time:

      The smear — a result of selective editing of the interview and malicious tweeting by the magazine’s deputy editor George Eaton — cost Scruton his job on a government advisory body. Among those who initially condemned Scruton for his alleged remarks were various Conservatives, including MPs Tom Tugendhat, Johnny Mercer and James Brokenshire, and former Chancellor of the Exchequer turned freesheet editor George Osborne.

      It was only thanks to some digging from Scruton’s friend Douglas Murray that justice was restored.

      But now journalist Douglas Murray has got hold of the original interview recording and analysed the transcripts in the Spectator. What becomes immediately clear is that Scruton was badly misrepresented. Not only is Eaton shown repeatedly trying to provoke Scruton into voicing provocative opinions he doesn’t actually hold, but it is also evident that the version of events Eaton subsequently presented in a series of trolling tweets bears little relation to Scruton’s measured, thoughtful discourse during the interview.

      When I interviewed Scruton myself in 2017, we talked about the moment during the 1968 Paris évenéments when Scruton, who had been fairly apolitical up to that point, suddenly discovered he was a conservative.

      He had watched the educated children of privilege wantonly destroying the property of their social inferiors in the name of something or other, and realised: ‘Whatever they are for, I am against.’ That was the reason he has spent so much of his life since trying to develop a philosophy of conservatism as thorough, persuasive and enticing as the variations on Marxism so compelling to those students.

      Later, he provided the most satisfying definition of conservative values I have ever heard.

      ‘Conservatives are people who love something actual and want to retain it.’

      (Or it could have been ‘attain’ it – but whatever, the general sense remains. Conservatism, unlike the hate-riddled philosophy of modern leftism, does not define itself in opposition to things nor is it obsessed with theory. Rather it springs from the very things the left is always accusing it of lacking – positivity and love).

      My personal favourite of his many fine books is On Hunting. And I was so glad to read in the Christmas issue of the Spectator that as recently as February last year – on his 75th birthday – he was able, despite the protests of his lovely wife Sophie, to ride to hounds one last time.

      He concluded his piece in the Spectator:

      Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised to the top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad that I have lived long enough to see this happen. Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

      RIP Sir Roger!

        1. Britain will never regain its former “Great” status until the Left are eradicated by whatever means possible.

          To vacillate is to die.

          2. Good Morning Grizz.
            With all due respect, there are some people who believe that ‘Great’ refers to the geographical aspect, ie the inclusion of islands, Scotland etc, rather like ‘Greater London’.

          3. Good morning, Tim.

            I quite agree with you. A lot of people (if not most) are stymied by the difference between “Britain” and “Great Britain”. Geographically the former refers to just the single land mass of the main island. The latter is that main island plus all the other islands that make up the archipelago with the exception of the island of Ireland. Add Ireland to the mix and you get the British Isles.

            I was (erroneously) using the qualifier “Great” in my comment in the populist sense.

          4. “I was (erroneously) using the qualifier “Great” in my comment in the populist sense.”
            Next thing, before we know it, you will have given up on the correct use of apostrophe’s.
            ;-))
            Morning, Grizz.

        2. Not foretting Labour Tony Crossland ….”I’m going to destroy every fcking grammar school in the country”

      2. The Conservative Party showed just how devious, unprincipled and foul it really is in its reaction to Sir Roger Scruton and its craven inability to stand up for free speech and free thought.

        I would like to see Tom Tugendhat, Johnny Mercer, James Brokenshire, and the repellent Gideon Osborne put in the stocks and bombarded with rotten tomatoes because of the way they treated the greatest Conservative philosopher of our generation.

        2. Tom Tugendhat should take lessons from his Uncle Christopher who is an ongoing, thoroughly good chap – now Baron Tugendhat – who has moved on quite a bit since I knew him in the 70s.

    2. The late Sir Roger Scruton was not right wing in the implied by the politico-media-arts elite sense of having quasi-fascist views; neither is Douglas Murray in any sense the normative conservative figure of old. Indeed, the ‘Sir Tufton-Bufton’s’ Tory’s of my youthful political landscape would have not bothered to understand Sir Roger (R.I.P.) nor tolerated Murray for an instant. It says much about our contemporary politics that it is possible to write nothing more incisive than a typical essay as might have been written by George Orwell eighty years ago to be labelled right wing. Speaking up for a decent social democracy by reference to its astonishing world changing achievements is not right wing; it is today a true revolutionary act.

        1. Yes, socialist fascists. Fascism is, and has always been Left wing. Look at how they seek to control, to subvert, to twist meaning and language, to control thought?

          Good grief, no matter how they twist it, no matter how much they dislike it, the facts bear out the truth.

          Look at the similarities: destroying intellignce and competence, hounding the intelligensia, destroying the family unit, promoting state control, burning books and seeking to oppress and censor information.

          The Left have no choice but to accept the truth: they’re the ‘bad guy’.

    3. But “…dismissed Islamophobia as an invention to suppress criticism….”

      Is true. Same as ‘waycism’ is used by the Left to silence debate.

    4. I find it disgraceful and an indictment of the modern “woke” media that George Eaton,for betraying everything that journalism should be and damaging what’s left of any credibility the MSM might have, was not turfed out of journalism altogether. With shades of the Jonathan Ross/Russel Brand travesty, that he was instead nominally reduced from deputy editor to assistant editor.

      Disgraceful ain’t in it but then, maki9ng up stories and spinning them seems to be the new wave of “journalism”.

      1. Ah White but unwashed or as the Americans would say trailer trash. Better go off and have a bath

          2. No. I was born that way. Me dad were a pit moggie (coal miner). It must have been all them coal-soaked pork dripping sandwiches he ate on shift.

      5. I wish I loved the Human Race;
        I wish I loved its silly face;
        I wish I liked the way it walks;
        I wish I liked the way it talks;
        And when I’m introduced to one,
        I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!”

        Sir Walter A Raleigh (1861-1922)

        1. That’s very funny; but what I’d like to know is this: who was it that first coined the nonsensical expression “human race”? Humans are not a race (a race of what? Orang Utans?); we are a species.

          1. The noun “race” came into English in the mid-1500s from French, which got it from the Italian word razza (meaning species or kind). … In the phrase “human race,” the word essentially means “species.”

          2. That is most confusing to a naturalist, since species and race are on different levels of nomenclature in the taxonomic table.

            Kingdom
            Phylum
            Class
            Order
            Family
            Genus
            Species
            Race
            Tribe.

            The first seven are remembered by the acronym: King Philip Comes Over For Ginger Snaps.

            There are now far more levels in the taxonomic table for the classification of plants and animals but those above are the important ones to remember.

      6. Here is Hilaire Belloc’s account of skin colour:

        Lord Uncle Tom was different from
        What other nobles are.
        For they are yellow or pink, I think,
        But he was black as tar.

        He had his Father’s debonair
        And rather easy pride:
        But his complexion and his hair
        Were from the mother’s side.

        He often mingled in debate
        And latterly displayed
        Experience of peculiar weight
        Upon the Cocoa-trade.

        But now He speaks no more. The BILL
        Which he could not abide,
        It preyed upon his mind until
        He sickened, paled, and died.

    4. Reminds of today’s news on the Bbc about people being arrested for suspected FGM being ‘racially profilied’.

      1. If you combine Black & Mixed Race they are 6 times as likely to be involved in crime as any other group

        It tends to indicate that the number of black & mixed race people being stopped by the police is down to their high level of involvement in crime

  32. NI Devolution Deal Comes with a price

    The British government made a number of financial promises to get the “New Decade, New Approach” agreement over the line.
    Mr Smith promised major investment to tackle problems in Northern Ireland’s struggling public services, but declined to confirm the sums involved until devolution was restored.

    Ministers at Stormont are now keen to nail down precise figures.

    There are reports the government could announce a £2bn package, but a Downing Street source has described this figure as “just speculation”.
    Additionally, the Irish government made financial pledges within the agreement to honour commitments to part-fund some north/south projects, such as the A5 dual carriageway and a redevelopment of the Ulster canal system.

  33. Wasn’t there a narcissistic self-promoter with political activist tendencies called Yoko Ono who played a role in breaking up the Fab Four?

  34. If black and brown-skinned people must be referred to as “people of colour”, surely those of us with white skins are “people of pallor”.

    I’ll get me Factor 50.

    4. As white is the combination of all colours, would we not be “people of full spectrum”?

    5. Although Clive Lewis was a prime user of the race card, he at least was honest enough on R4 this morning to call himself black after the presenter had used some other vague term for people who are not white.

      1. I always looked on “black” as applied to people as being ore of a state of mind rather than skin colour. All the stereotypes come up as “victim”, “ghetto”, “loser” and the like – which is why Obama isn’t black, as he had the whitest job in the world, as well as having a priviledged background.

        1. Ah, but as a “person of colour” he was still oppressed by all those poor white folks who didn’t vote for him.
          Or something.

        2. His problem was that while he was an “African American” he was not an “African-American” (or the other way round) because he had trouble finding any slave ancestors (They didn’t say of he had any slavers as ancestors), though he had no trouble finding that other pre-condition to be POTUS; Irish ancestors.(I wonder if Meghan can find some Irish ancestors if she thinks she will be POTUS? It might mean tracing back through her father’s line which could prove awkward).

        1. A most respectable term, “Western Oriental Gentlemen”. And can we eventually look foreward to Robinsons finally putting the Gollywog back in the pocket behind the jam labels? PC is on its way out, we are told.

  36. For those without Premium. Rather lame but a vast improvement on the execrable scribblings of Danielle Sheridan in yesterday’s DT.

    Sir Roger Scruton, conservative philosopher of wide accomplishments who was a lightning rod for abuse from the Left – obituary

    Sir Roger Scruton, who has died aged 75, was a philosopher and academic variously identified as “one of the nearest things Britain has to a public intellectual”, Britain’s favourite “token reactionary” (his own description), and even “the thinking man’s skinhead”.

    As one of the most contentious figures in British public life, Scruton operated as an academic, journalist and prolific writer, and a lightning rod for criticism and abuse from the political Left. He was regularly shouted down in universities and prevented from speaking, yet he enjoyed a reputation as a first-class professional philosopher among academics of all political persuasions.

    Scruton was a man of parts, some of which seemed irreconcilable: barrister, aesthetician, teacher at Birkbeck College (part of London University with a tradition of a working-class intake), editor of the ultra-Conservative Salisbury Review, and enthusiastic fox hunter. He used to ride to hounds wearing Enoch Powell’s old hunting clothes, although the jacket split the first time he used it.

    In the mid-1980s: ‘The market economy was a good thing but it wasn’t the foundation of social order, and should be heavily qualified by all the traditions that enable people to live with each other rather than just compete’ CREDIT: CAMERA PRESS
    Predictably, his views on hunting caused indignation. “I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think,” Scruton observed. “And while I know it might not be everyone’s point of view, that doesn’t seem particularly intolerable to me.”

    Although he was sometimes credited with inspiring Margaret Thatcher’s embrace of the free market in the mid-1970s, Scruton was more comfortable aligning himself with writers at The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph at a time when they represented a more settled, patrician conservatism than that represented by Thatcherism.

    “It was about a subdued sense of the importance of history and tradition,” he recalled, “of doing things in an orderly way. Small-scale improvements. The market economy was a good thing but it wasn’t the foundation of social order, and should be heavily qualified by all the traditions that enable people to live with each other rather than just compete. But under Thatcher it was completely the free market.”

    Scruton’s politics were undoubtedly linked to his philosophy, which was broadly Hegelian. He took the view that all of the most important aspects of life – truth (the perception of the world as it is), beauty (the creation and appreciation of things valued for their own sake), and self-realisation (the establishment by a person of a coherent, autonomous identity) – can be achieved only as part of a cultural community within which meaning, standards and values are validated.

    Roger Scruton on his horse Sam with the Vale of the White Horse
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2020/01/12/TELEMMGLPICT000000926799_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=1240
    But he had a wide and deep understanding of the history of western philosophy as a whole, and some of his best philosophical work consisted of explaining much more clearly than is often the case how different schools of western philosophy relate to one another.

    Scruton could date his own conservative convictions to the Paris riots of May 1968, when he watched from a window in the Latin Quarter as students tore up the cobblestones to hurl at riot police.

    “I suddenly realised that I was on the other side,” he said. “What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook.

    “I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilisation against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.”

    His books were savaged by Left-wing reviewers and his views on society mocked. As an academic in the 1980s he defended education cuts, which caused much fluttering in scholarly dovecotes.

    But it was the issue of national identity that provoked the most venomous attacks. Where most commentators avoided involving themselves in the incendiary debates about nationality, race, history and culture, Scruton weighed in.

    In 1984, as editor of The Salisbury Review, he published an article headed “Education and Race” by a Bradford headmaster, Ray Honeyford, who argued that multicultural education was harmful for immigrant children.

    “All hell broke loose,” Scruton recalled. “But then, in the 1980s, any questioning of the Left-liberal orthodoxy could only have a racist motivation, or be seen to give succour to racists. I’d argue that not addressing these issues gives succour to racists. But it got us into terrible trouble.”

    His book England: An Elegy (2000), while earning its share of sneering reviews for mourning, among other things, the death of the hedgerow, the fading relevance of the Church and the demise of the English gentleman, also drew approval for the breadth of Scruton’s scholarship.

    The Labour peer Lord Bragg commended him for “bringing common sense to bear on the distressing frenzy which has overtaken those whose views of England can only be doom-struck and void of all praise”.

    But many on the Left were less forgiving and allegations of racism resurfaced in April last year after allegedly anti-Semitic and Islamophobic remarks were attributed to Scruton in an interview with the New Statesman, which later turned out to be misleading and carefully edited quotations.

    In November 2018, the Communities Secretary James Brokenshire had appointed Scruton as unpaid chairman of the government’s new Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, established to promote better design of homes and living areas, only to dismiss him abruptly after the publication of the New Statesman article.

    Scruton’s sacking was celebrated by the magazine’s deputy editor George Eaton, the author of the article, posting a picture of himself on social media with a bottle of champagne and the caption: “The feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government adviser.”

    The New Statesman was forced to apologise after a leaked tape recording of the interview, published in The Spectator, showed how Scruton’s comments had been taken totally out of context. Eaton was reportedly demoted; Conservative MPs who had joined the hue and cry were obliged to retract their comments; Brokenshire issued a public apology and in July Scruton was reappointed as Commission co-chairman.

    Roger Vernon Scruton was born on February 27 1944 at Buntingsthorpe, Lincolnshire. His father, Jack, a working-class Mancunian, became a teacher, detested the upper classes and loved the English countryside. His mother, Beryl Claris – always called Johnny – read romantic fiction and “entertained blue-rinsed ladies who appeared miraculously almost as soon as he [father] was out the door”.

    Scruton was educated at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, from which he was expelled shortly after winning a Cambridge scholarship for putting on a play in which a half-naked girl appeared on a burning stage. Arriving at Jesus College in 1962, he switched courses on the first day from Natural Sciences to Philosophy.

    Destined for an academic career, he nevertheless had ambitions to be a writer, but took a job at the University of Bordeaux. Moving to Rome, he wrote a novel that was never published, and returned in 1969 to Cambridge, as a research fellow in aesthetics at Peterhouse.

    Two years later Scruton moved to Birkbeck College, London, to take up an appointment as a philosophy lecturer, becoming professor of aesthetics in 1985.

    When he arrived he was “in a conservative frame of mind” and his colleagues at the generally Left-wing institution “regarded me with great suspicion”. He resisted attempts to introduce more Foucault and Marx to the curriculum, but decided it would be wise to have a fallback position, read for the Bar and was called in 1978.

    At Birkbeck, Scruton taught only in the evenings, and he was able to pursue a career as a writer and journalist as well as moving into the world of politics. Appalled by the Heath government – “there seemed to be a lot of thinking to be done and no one was doing it” – he founded the Conservative Philosophy Group with the MP Hugh Fraser, Jonathan Aitken (then a journalist) and the academic John Casey.

    Turned down for the Tory candidates’ list in 1978 for being “too bookish”, Scruton visited Prague the following year to give a secret lecture with the dissident Czech philosopher Julius Tomin.

    When he accompanied Tomin back to his apartment, he found waiting for them at the door a secret policeman who refused to let Scruton in, and then pushed him down the stairs. He was eventually arrested and thrown out of the country.

    “I realised that this was a situation that was completely outside anything in my experience,” he remembered. “And at the same time this was a place which was dear to my heart. The intellectual life was genuinely dangerous. They were being put in jail by a Left-wing police force.”

    His association with the Salisbury Review made him a hate figure for the Left-liberal elite
    Together with other British academics, mostly from Oxford, Scruton began to work with the Jan Hus educational trust, named after a 13th century Czech reformer and martyr, to provide books, support samizdat production and to teach.

    Scruton learnt Czech and became immersed in Czech culture. After the collapse of communism, he formed a consultancy firm to make contacts between Western businesses and the new government. He was subsequently awarded the Czech Republic’s highest civilian honour for his work.

    During the 1980s Scruton’s columns in The Times and his editorship of The Salisbury Review made him a hate figure for the Left liberal elite. When reviewers rubbished his novel Francesca (1991), about a grammar-school boy who falls for an upper-class girl, he stopped writing fiction and instead turned his creative energies to music.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2020/01/12/TELEMMGLPICT000221139714_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=1240
    Some struggled to separate the man from his work
    An accomplished pianist with a keen appreciation of 20th century music, he wrote an opera, The Minister, about a politician who sacrifices his personal life to ambition. It was staged in the Czech Republic and in Oxford.

    In 2005 he would write another opera, Violet, based on the life of the British harpsichordist Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, which was performed twice at the Guildhall School of Music.

    In 1992 he accepted the post of professor of philosophy at Boston University in the United States, where he found that some of his students possessed “that residue of European culture which most young people in England no longer have”.

    Scruton claimed English culture had become coarsened, the legitimisation of pop music and football as genuine manifestations of the nation’s culture being prime examples.

    His next work of fiction, Xanthippic Dialogues (1993), about Plato’s women, was better received, and encouraged Scruton to return in 1995 to Britain where, with his second wife, he lived on a farm in Wiltshire, also maintaining a two-room apartment in Albany in Piccadilly.

    Scruton on his farm in Wiltshire
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2020/01/12/TELEMMGLPICT000002628900_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqC_LLCXkS_z-CZqgOMP7Bey6NLFRCnp8jC6l5H1gpWZE.jpeg?imwidth=1240
    In 2002, however, Scruton was criticised in The Guardian for having written articles about smoking without disclosing that he was receiving a regular fee from a tobacco company, a revelation that led the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal to dispense with his services as a columnist, Chatto & Windus to withdraw from negotiations for a book, and Birkbeck to remove his visiting-professor privileges.

    The controversy and the introduction of the Hunting Act 2004 led Scruton to return to the US, where he and his wife purchased Montpelier, an 18th-century plantation house in Virginia, which Scruton promoted as a venue for weddings and other events, while holding part-time academic positions at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia, then at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

    From 2001 to 2009 he wrote a wine column for the New Statesman, which led to the publication of I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine (2009).

    The Scrutons returned to Britain in 2010, Scruton taking an unpaid research professorship at Buckingham University and an unpaid three-year visiting professorship at the University of Oxford to teach graduate classes on aesthetics. From 2011 until 2014 he held a part-time professorial fellowship at St Andrews in moral philosophy.

    He returned to writing fiction with Notes from Underground (2014), a novel based on his experiences in Czechoslovakia, and The Disappeared (2015), centred on child trafficking in a Yorkshire town.

    Scruton’s 2009 book on aesthetics and experience
    Scruton’s 2009 book on aesthetics and experience
    Scruton’s philosophy publications included Art and Imagination (1974); The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979); Sexual Desire (1986); An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy (1996); The Aesthetics of Music (1997); Animal Rights and Wrongs (2000), and Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet (2011).

    His political writings included The Meaning of Conservatism (1980); The Politics of Culture (1981); Dictionary of Political Thought (1982); Thinkers of The New Left (1985); Conservative Texts (1992); How to Be a Conservative (2014) and Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (2017).

    His book Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England (2013) argued for the continuing importance of the Church of England in the 21st century.

    Some struggled to separate the personality of the man from his work. The philosopher AC Grayling, who disagreed with Scruton politically, found him “very charming and somewhat sweet” in person. “This rather glum, obtuse figure who pops up every now again to say ‘bring back hanging’ or something, is not really characteristic of him,” he wrote.

    Meanwhile, the Marxist philosopher G A Cohen reportedly refused to teach a seminar with Scruton, although they later became friends.

    Scruton was knighted in 2016 for “services to philosophy, teaching and public education”, and was elected to fellowships of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. In 2019 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.

    Roger Scruton married, in 1973, Danielle Laffitte, a student he had met in France, but they divorced in 1979; with his second wife, Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian 28 years his junior, whom he married in 1996, he had a son and a daughter.

    Sir Roger Scruton, born February 27 1944, died January 12 2020

  37. The Lords are spending other next 3 days debating the EU Withdrawal Bill

    I suspect they will rubber stamp it. There is nothing they do to block it as the Salisbury Convention comes into play and if need be the Parliament act can be bought in

    I think we will get 3 days of waffle and they will then vote it through

    1. The big stumbling block will be when Boris takes his Bill to the EU. Blair and co will probably have been at work in Brussels . Will the EU turn it down and demand an extension or will the 27 stamp their feet and say NO? If so what will Boris do?

      1. The €64,000 Question. What he should do is say, “Too bad.” However, I don’t think that even now our Government realise that the EU may break apart if they do not keep our trade. They need us more then we need them. Germany is staring at recession without their sales to the UK.

    2. And every lord who rocks up will have another 900 smackers in their bank account and a lot of subsidised food and drink under their belts.

      1. It’s “Sir Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long Bailey, Lisa Nandy and Jess Phillips had already qualified for the next stage.”, plus Thornberry.

        2. Just one bloke..

          The others are Labour harridans .. how terrible , ghastly , horrible , termagants, all of them (if that is the correct word)

          2. A good choice of words.

            An alternative spelling is termagent – certainly not a termalady.

            A definition I found in the internet: termagant – a violent, turbulent, or brawling woman. (initial capital letter) a mythical deity popularly believed in the Middle Ages to be worshipped by the Muslims and introduced into the morality play as a violent, overbearing personage in long robes. … 1 shrew, virago, harridan, scold.

          5. A violent, overbearing, turbulent, brawling, quarrelsome woman; a virago, shrew, vixen.

            Yep. Sounds about right.

          10. Oddly enough I quite liked her contributions, but I know I am in a very small minority on that.

          11. Her contributions were spot on. Her attacking people was not. Calling people stupid just because they were mistaken…and worse.

            You were not alone. Peddy, Dev in Kent and Lotl all supported her. Which tells me all i need to know.

            Nice to see you back.

  39. Powerful words, indeed:

    “Or it can take the harder path, through the thickets of metropolitan scorn. This means seeing people primarily as producers not as consumers, needing more purpose not more stuff; rooted in places, not mobile units of labour; capable of virtue, capable of sin. It means fashioning a particularly British model, independent of the great powers, based on a distinct conception of the British person as both free (free-thinking, bloody-minded) and attached (fond of home, and quietly deeply patriotic).”

    Copied from this article.

      1. As I said earlier today, it is an absolute disgrace that the pathetic Conservative Party treated Sir Roger Scruton so very badly

        1. Richard, listen now.

          We haven’t actually had any deep thinkers in the bowels of Conservative party for years .. none that I have noticed anyway.

          The actual party has consisted of that’ll do merchants ..

          Men like Sir Roger Scruton would have been viewed with suspicion . The Tories consisted of champagne swilling wideboys , and still does!

          1. Afternoon TB,
            Deep stinkers in the bowels of the ersatz tory party more like,
            diarrhoea is not a fragrance you would dab behind the ears.

          2. Well, there was Two Brain Willets…. “I was too clever for the Conservative party” so that didn’t end well and it may be that all he had were two dysfunctional brains….

      2. Actually, the paragraph is Danny Kruger’s assessment of Scruton’s view, though it might have been written by the man himself.

    2. “Scruton explained to me why I love my country.”
      But did he explain why so many hate their country and want to destroy it? people like Bliar, Corbyn etc.

  40. Ipswich to Felixstowe branch service suspension

    Been like that for several days. It seems they only have one train and its broken

  41. Just heard on the radio about the loony plans for controlling traffic in Birmingham, the madness has begun and the reason for all that climate change propaganda.

    1. Quite a large place to cut CO2 they want to ban car travel in the center so to get around by car you will have to male a lot longer journey on the ring road

  42. Odds my be out pf date. Dont think much of any of them. Still others might

    – Rebecca Long-Bailey: 7/2
    – Keir Starmer: 4/1
    – Lisa Nandy: 6/1
    – Jess Phillips: 8/1
    – Emily Thornberry: 20/1

  43. “Disgraced ex-Labour MP Fiona Onasanya claims her conviction for lying to police about speeding is a miscarriage of justice”

    She’s claiming it was racist to prosecute a black woman for telling a white lie.

    1. I shall correct it then

      It is not racist to prosecute a black woman for telling a black lie.

  44. Britain’s racism pantomime: now starring Meghan and Harry

    t’s pantomime season again. Is Britain racist? Oh no it’s not. Oh yes it is! The script is ready – all we need is to find new stars, maybe update the rest of the cast here and there. The last performance, at the end of December, featured Stormzy, a crowd favourite whose misreported quote about racism in Britain sent the country into days of absurd debate. Is it “100% racist”? Or is it definitely racist, yes, 100%?

    s there a worse advertisement for victimhood than a literal princess? Are there worse advocates for the literal princess than the few black and brown people in the media – whose very presence in these exclusive debates (where they are generally not included unless race is the subject) is taken to demonstrate their own privilege? They will be accused of ungratefulness for living and thriving in a 100%-not-racist country that has provided them with the opportunity to appear on Newsnight approximately once a year to be sneered at.
    The chosen protagonists – the princess, the pop star, the TV presenter, the politician

    1. The way I see it is that that woman is totally against every emotion her elderly balding white father holds dear to his heart .

      It won’t be long before she turns against her white balding ginger feeble princling of a husband , the one who cavils to her every demand the way her father did!

      1. We’ve all seen this before; at work, amongst our friends and – if we’re unlucky – our family.
        One of the advantages (?) of being on this planet for a good few years.

      2. The Wedding was very strange in my view. The only member of her family present was her mother. She did invite along loads of celebrates though. How many of then she really new who knows. What woman only invites her mother to the wedding and ignores the rest of her family? I find that very odd

    1. You can tell the true character by the deeds that they do. A grand for a taxi ride is abusing the taxpayer.

        1. Wouldn’t it be great if the taxpayers had more say in how THEIR hard earned money was spent.

          1. Wouldn’t it be great if all politicians had to provide receipts for their expenses claims as everybody else has to!

          3. Apply the same rules to MPs as HMRC applies to all other people. No receipt, no reimbursement. If you’re extracting the urine, as he obviously was, no reimbursement.

          5. And an exenses budget (proportional to their constituency vote perhaps) with that well known Tesco slogan… “when its gone its gone!”

          6. No point asking for receipts if there are no controls over what could be claimed.

            I can just see what the expense deniers would have said if I tried that little trick.

          7. If their claims for expenses were to be published regularly I think there would be a change in the MPs’ behaviour.

          10. No they simply handed over their pay rises and expenses to a panel THEY appointed and thus they HAD to do as the panel suggests.

          5. Just what i prefer. It gets tiresome being followed about by the papparats all day. I just want to be let alone.

          6. The most conscientious MP ever in the history of the universe was (he never tired of telling people) the recently unemployed Dennis Skinner of Bolsover.

            Every Sunday evening he would catch the train from Chesterfield to London to be the first in the HoC on a Monday morning. Top bloke and top MP, our Dennis.

            That is, until he was followed by a reporter on one journey and discovered to be spending his Sunday nights in some posh terraced house in London with NOT Mrs Skinner!

  47. To join in the bore-o-rama.

    Meghan decided ‘it’s not working for me’ and pushed Harry, insiders revealed

    And that encapsulates the entire matter.

    Look you spoiled brat, the whole point is that having joined the royal club you work for “it”, “it” doesn’t work for you.

    By all means leave, but drop all the pretentions and accoutrements, including titles and monies.

      1. She is out to make money out of her now Royal Connections in my view. Was that her aim in the first place ?. Who knows. It all seems very odd to me

        2. And how soon will Harry be discarded as no longer necessary?

          I wonder what odds Ladbrokes are currently offering on them still being married to each other in two years time and to whom will be given the custody of Archie.

          1. Following the bookies announcing they had shortened the odds of her becoming POTUS a good many US citizens are concerned about the prospect of the first man being a prince of the British Monarchy. As I said elsewhere nothing could be better at spoiling any relationship with HIllary or Michelle who regard the post of POTUS as their’s ….. by right of succession. They may have dumped the Brits but the republic is rapidly showing all the signs of a dynastic leadership.

          2. When I had to watch the ceremony (I was staying with a staunch royalist French friend at the time), I said it wouldn’t last.

    2. Harry has been emasculated.

      I do wonder if he really would have been a strong and courageous leader of men when under fire as a soldier. It seems without dispute that Harry was ‘one of the lads’ but there is more to being an officer than being one of the lads.

      He seems to have absolutely no leadership qualities at the moment – perhaps his wife has systematically set about turning him into an uxorious wimp. Surely a stronger man would have stood up for himself?

          1. I fear you are right.

            Reminds me of Brexit – as soon as Mrs May and her remoaner negotiators showed that they were prepared to cave in to the EU they were lost. If Boris shows any sign of weakness a proper Brexit will be lost for ever.

          3. Yes, get ready for all the usual platitudes about in the best interests of the UK and the EU, our closest friends(shouldn’t that be “enemies”?) and neighbors, etc etc ….” and then he sells us out for a handful of beades and some trinkets…. He has what he wants, the keys to No 10 and no prospect of ever being forced out, not now the labour party has fallen off a cliff and are busy digging the whole they made ever deeper.

          4. Nigel Farage’s proposed pact offered Johnson the chance to go full steam ahead for a proper Brexit.

            Johnson refused it and in my view he refused it because he knew full well that he would have to accept a proper Brexit if he formed an alliance with The Brexit Party. But with Farage out of the fray who will hold Johnson to account?

            I still wonder what would have happened if Nigel Farage had held out for another week or two before agreeing to withdraw TBP candidates in all existing Conservative held seats. He should have stuck to his guns and said he would only withdraw in constituencies where the Conservative MP was a proven Brexiteer.

            Farage blinked first and it is this which could well prove to be the thing that really will scupper a proper Brexit.

          5. Yes, I have often worried about Farage’s descision but I suspect he recognised that it was important to destroy the labour party and any pretence of a Laboiur/SNP alliance and at least get a government nominally (and only that) in favour of brexit. The rest he has to trust to the force of circumstances.

      2. It seems to me that her head has been turned by suddenly becoming an “A-list++” celebrity and she thinks that the world fawns on her every utterance and desire. She’s the one who is doing the bullying and he doesn’t want to lose her.

        On a human level I can’t help feeling sorry for him. One of my children has worked with him on a charity and cannot speak highly enough about Harry’s drive and enthusiasm. It is a great pity it is moving the way that it is.

        1. I feel sorry for him too. It all seems to go back to the nature/nurture debate which never seems to produce a conclusion.

          We have two sons – they have both been brought up the same way but their personalities are entirely different..

          1. I think the loss of his mother in such a traumatic way, and the very public way he had to walk behind her coffin at the age of 12, left him with deep insecurities.
            In the army he was part of a family, fighting an enemy.

            Now his wife has given him an ultimatum – it’s her way or no way.

          5. I suspected so at the time and I also thought it was done deliberately to undermine both Charles and the Monarchy. Blair wants to be a President.

          7. He certainly seems to have run government along presidential lines rather than on the established cabinet style. For such an ardent fan of the EU I suspect he has been disappointed by their failure to reward him appropriately Perhaps they suspected that if they let him have any one of the numerous presidencies it wouldn’t be long before it was the only one left and that he would do an Arthur Scargill and turn it into a lifetime appointment. Then again it might have been the prospect of the Wicked witch being in close proximity every day that put them off.

          11. Yes, if ever there is anything malign or wrong with the UK or the wider world you can’t go far wrong in assuming that somewhere and somehow Bliar had a hand in it. Thus far this metric has proven unbelievably accurate. I’m just waiting to hear he is responsible for global warming or, less contraversially, that he is yet another consequence of AGW.

      3. In October 2013, The Telegraph reported, “For Cressida Bonas, the 24-year-old dance graduate whom Prince Harry is said to be planning to marry within the year, is strikingly similar to another “It” girl, albeit one 40 years her senior: her mother, Lady Mary-Gaye Curzon”. I wonder what went wrong there?

        1. Cressida Bonas was on t’telly t’other night playing a disturbed Sheila Caffell in White House Farm. I couldn’t work out if she was acting or was just being herself.

      4. “Surely a stronger man…..”
        But that’s the point. Never a fan of harry, he early showed himself capable of very poor behaviour even for the layman and absolutely unacceptable from a Royal. Meagain chose well, a simple malleable man. She couldn’t have chosen better for her purposes. I doubt even Wallis had that much of a hold. “David” at least had some dignity left to him by Wallis and he did give up a lot for her.
        Meagain will leave Harry with his character destroyed.

    3. I could never understand how people such as Meg, Fergie and Diana, didn’t know how to behave and act correctly. Kate comes from a humble background and knows what to do (so far) and jeez, even I would know how to behave – I just don’t get it how outsiders for want of a better word…except Diana wasn’t and should have known better…..don’t know what is expected of them. It could save a lot of heartache all round. I like Harry and always have, he is down to earth but his judgement on this one – well, they say love is blind.

      1. The Spencers had been involved with the Royal family for 400 years.
        There was no excuse for D’s behaviour; other than lack of brain cells.

          1. I think (can’t be @rsed to check) the Spencers’ fortunes really took off when Bluff King Hal ‘reformed’ the monasteries.

      2. Whatever reservations anyone might have had about Kate, and her family, she has come through in spades. She is the welcome addition. Meghan is yet another liability.

      3. Once upon a time such Royal attachments would have been courtesans and if they produced bastard offspring they and the child would have been ennobled.

        1. According to Wiki, the dukedoms of St Albans, Monmouth, Southampton, Grafton, Northumberland and Richmond and Lennox were all awarded by Charles II to his illegitimate sons.

    4. Hello Sos

      Good to see you have found us again.

      What were John F Kennedy’s famous words

      Ask not what your country can do for you… ask what you can do for your country.”

          1. Presumably Prince Archie has a British passport. Is there any record of her visiting the US consulate to obtain a US passport?

          2. She is required by US law to certify his birth as the offspring of a US citizen with the US Consulate. Otherwise he will only ever be British. And racist, presumably and according to the NYT.

          3. She has to complete the qualifying period yet so whether she is applying or not is mute. She obviously still has her US citizenship despite some claiming she will have had to renounce it to marry into the Royal Family….. and if she did renounce it, it could be treated by the IRS as a tax avoidance measure and result in her being barred from returning to the US…. and she really really needs the faux adulation of her Hollywood Luvvie friends…..

    5. Oh, don’t be so hard. It was nice to have a binge of Me-again stories on which to comment. More fun that Troll baiting and a relief from the Brexit stories and how Boris will get us out (I’ll believe it when it happens, not before. STill plenty of time for the EU to work its magic and turn him into a new Mrs May).
      Of course, she will love to be hailed as a “celebrity” not so much for her Canadian acting career (if one series is a career) as for her Royal Husband…. otherwise the Hollywood luvvies probably wouldn’t have given her the time of day. But I like the way the bookies have thrown out the idea she might have aspirations to become POTUS, by shortening the odds. This will tend to spoil any potential relationship with Hillary C or Michelle B who want it first. Nice one.

      1. The POTUS run was one I wondered about, but I would have put it two elections down the line if a Republican candidate succeeds yer top Trump.

  48. The Queen has said the royal family ‘had very constructive discussions’ and have agreed ‘there will be a period of transition in which the Sussexes will spend time in Canada and the UK’. More follows …

      1. Am I alone in loathing and despising computer-generated 3-D cartoons?

        2-D (Popeye, Mr Jinks and Pepe le Pew in particular) is King.

      1. Oh please pretty please Dan Trump lose the next election, they might move to LA sooner then.

        1. The threat of that will ensure a “Dan” Trump landslide.

          Canada’s stuck with them for the forseeable future

  49. Are Extinction Rebellion Extremists ?

    By the definition they are indeed extremists and very extreme at that

    1. She is the real Pinocchio

      When you wish upon a star!

      Lyrics
      When a star is born
      They possess a gift or two
      One of them is this
      They have the power to make a wish come true
      When you wish upon a star
      Makes no difference who you are
      Anything your heart desires will come to you
      If your heart is in your dream
      No request is too extreme
      When you wish upon a star
      As dreamers do
      Fate is kind
      She brings to those who love
      The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing
      Like a bolt out of the blue
      Fate steps in and sees you through
      When you wish upon a star
      Your dreams come true
      When you wish upon a star
      Makes no difference who you are
      Anything your heart desires will come to you
      If your heart is in your dream
      No request is too extreme
      When you wish upon a star
      As dreamers do
      Fate is kind
      She brings to those who love
      The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing
      Like a bolt out of the blue
      Fate steps in and sees you through
      When you wish upon a star
      Your dreams come true

    4. The royal family could not have done more to hepl markle. In return she did nothing at all to help. She is total trouble and harry is a mug.

    5. It has been denied by both princes.
      I wonder who was the source of that canard? (innocent face)

  51. Microsoft ends Windows 7 support: What should you do?

    Cyber-security experts are urging Windows 7 users to upgrade their operating system.
    Microsoft is going to stop supporting Windows 7 from Tuesday so that it can focus on “newer technologies”.
    As a result, Windows 7 users will no longer receive the all-important security updates and patches that keep their machines safe.
    One in four Windows users is running Windows 7, according to statistics website StatCounter.
    What does this all mean?
    It means that Microsoft is ending the cat-and-mouse game with hackers seeking to exploit software bugs in the Windows 7 operating system.
    If perpetrators find a flaw in Windows 7, Microsoft will not fix it.
    Without continued software and security updates, Windows 7 machines are more likely to be infected with viruses and malware, Microsoft wrote on its website.
    “Running an unpatched machine means that the flaws in the code will never be fixed and as exploits for those flaws become known and widespread, your chances of being successfully attacked grow very rapidly,” said Rik Ferguson, vice-president of security research at Trend Micro.
    David Emm, a senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, added that people need to move to a supported operating system as soon as possible.

    1. This constant updating of systems annoys me NO end. Still using my old main computer on XP.

        1. If something isn’t broke…don’t fix it. Unless of course there are mega bucks involved.

        1. Absolutely – we are still using it and very well too. There is nothing on my computer worth hacking into and my emails would cause the reader to lose the will to live….so it suits us.

    2. “Microsoft-as-chyte ends Windows 7 support: What should you do?”

      Get a life. Get a Mac.

      18th century: Abacus and slate.
      19th century: Quill pen and Basildon Bond.
      20th century: Microsoft computer and rat.
      21st century: Apple computer and trackpad.

    3. …people need to move to a supported operating system as soon as possible.

      Where, it’s a minefield? Windows 10 has it’s problems…

      Any advice appreciated.

      1. We are all being squeezed into the “one size fits all” bracket now. There are things you can do if you have an in-depth knowledge of computing, but you would already know them and not ask the question if so. You can use Grizzy’s idea below and get an Apple Mac, but with the best will in the world you will be unable to use some software that is designed for PC’s that run Windows. The Mac is better for some things, but I would not faff about with one.

        So when you are forced to eventually buy a new computer, you will almost certainly be given no option other than having Windows 10 pre-installed. It is nowhere near as good as Windows XP, but we are where they have forced us to be. So use Windows 10 and once you have the computer home and all of the upgrades have happened, get a friend in with some computer experience and get them to switch off as much of the spyware / tracking applications that you can.

        Cover up the camera with a blu-tacked piece of paper before turning it on for the first time obviously. 🙂

          1. Ndovu – I have used Linux many times before, and know its advantages. But it is not something that I would advise someone to install if they ask which operating system to use.

        2. Thanks Meredith,
          Can I continue using Windows 7?
          When I replace it I’ll have to get Windows 10 and lump it…

          1. Yes, Windows 7 will keep working, it is not suddenly going to keel over and go paws up. There just won’t be any new updates for it.

            I would still be using Windows 7 now if my laptop did not crash and burn a year ago. The only pre-installed Operating Systems back then were Windows 10. It is been 8 years since I installed an operating system from scratch, and I remember the search for the latest drivers for my hardware going on and on. I have better things to do with my life, so I went for Win 10.

            They will force the majority of us there in the end anyway. If we still want to be able to use commercially produced software that is not specialist. There are bigger things in life to worry about. 🙂

          2. The most frustrating thing i have found with Windows 10, is that you can no longer avoid, or postpone, updates. Hence, my old(ish) laptop was reduced to a brick on Christmas Eve, 2017. And there was bugger all I could do about it.

          3. Ditto.
            The second most annoying thing was that if the update failed, it would keep trying to download and rerun the update time after time. Obviously no one at Microsoft has a limit on their network usage.

            At least nowadays we can delay updates for a month, so it might be possible to keep Microsoft at bay until a more convenient time.

          5. Just play safe. Don’t visit weird websites and emails with attachments are also going to be a bit suspect in future. But there are many claiming to still be using WinXP and that has been unsupported for even longer.

            It will probably take a few weeks for hackers to find new vulnerabilities in Win7 and then you need to be unlucky enough to be targetted with the latest scam and then what will they do – copy all of your keyboard activity on this site?

            You do have copies of photos and other keepable stuff dont you?

    4. Windows 10 will be installed at work, once the IT bods have figured out how to make it sit happily with SAP and various other systems.

  53. Architect Peter Barber’s calls for a ‘Hundred Mile City’

    So fill the South with housing and ram the homes in even tighter and smaller. What could possibly go wrong

    His McGrath Road housing, designed for Newham, is a contemporary version of Victorian back-to-backs, a typology arranged around a courtyard and cleverly tweaked to allow in more light.

    This and careful internal planning means many more homes can be fitted on a site; an upcoming scheme, Beechwood Mews in Barnet, achieves double the densities of rival bids.
    Barber describes another tightly planned project by the Thames as a “little bit of Genoa in Wapping”.
    Some might find the densities challenging, but he is a great believer in neighbourliness: “What’s the point of being in the city if you don’t believe in your fellow citizen?”
    Last year the Design Museum showcased his idea for the Hundred Mile City, a 200-metre-wide ring of high-density homes around the edge of London, linked by monorail, that could house millions.

      1. “Some might find the densities challenging, but he is a great believer in neighbourliness: “What’s the point of being in the city if you don’t believe in your fellow citizen?””

        That could work in many communities of fairness and tolerance, if the walls were very thick to keep out the noise of the neighbours. But if you have large cultural groups who absolutely insist that you get on your knees and convert to what they believe, or they will drive you out, then that is not a community, it is a barracks.

        1. It’s not necessary to have multiculturalism to not get on with neighbours. Not everyone is nice. And people don’t like being crammed too close together. They get stressed and territorial.

          1. I would do away with council & Social housing. It is with these yo get most pf the problems. I would replace them with shared ownership. If people have a stake in the property they live in the are more likely to look after it and less likely to be antisocial

          2. I think that everything that you have just said is obvious, and was not what I was getting at. 🙂

            To put it bluntly, I would be more than happy to live in a Jewish town/city surrounded by 100,000’s of people of a different culture, or one made up of a million black Christians, before I would wish to live in a housing project with a single house full of “white converts to islam.”

        2. Lillington Gardens in Pimlico is about the only successful high density development of low rise I am aware of. It was designed by the late John Darbourne, a highly gifted architect who died tragically young at 56 years and for whom I worked briefly in the seventies. The practice was Darbourne & Darke and the office at 2 The Green, Richmond on Thames. Happy days!

          The buildings and the two integral pubs on the estate are listed and the apartments highly desirable residences.

      2. The councils spend decades demolishing the old terraced back to back houses now this bright spark want to bring them back

          3. How apt given the different flavours of terrorist that have to be monitored these days….

          5. If I remember correctly they held a competition to name that building which was built on the site of a former quarry. No prizes for guessing that the winning entry was”Quarry House”. However, given the state of NHS finances down the decades they should have painted the entrance red and called it “Deficit House” . …..

          8. Inspired we were told by Farrell by some transistor radio. Horrible mess and judged to be pastiche at the V & A exhibition by me and many others.

      1. Believe it or not there remain architects who believe in what were originally termed ‘megastructures’.

        The idea is that you design the supposedly perfect housing unit then roll out miles of the same, destroying everything of historic interest in its path.

        1. My original choice of career was Town & Country Planning. I graduated in 1975 by which time all the posts following the 1974 local government reorganisation had been filled. Even way back then, I thought the most attractive towns were the ones that had been developed and sympathetically redeveloped over discrete time periods were preferable to the mass demolition and identikit housing and office blocks often isolated by 4 lane dual carriageways.

          1. Precisely. I cite a piece written by Christopher Alexander in the late sixties entitled ‘The City is not a Tree’. Cities grow organically over centuries. Buildings might be replaced but historic land ownership through deeds and covenants mean that street patterns often survive as for example in London.

            The more enlightened architects do historical research and preserve such pointers giving a proverbial nod to the past. The arrogant idiots operating today such as Peter Barber are ignorant of their responsibilities to the past.

            I mentioned a few posts ago that Brussels and Strasbourg have large areas of their once tangible and humane areas (with their alleyways and historic streets) destroyed by the inhumane and alienating edifices built by the EU and its agencies.

            This should be a lesson to any aspiring architect.

          3. Hi Geoff, I found the photographs fascinating. I was working for Sir Frederick Gibberd and Partners in Percy Street, off Tottenham Court Road, when the principal project in the office was Regents Park Central Mosque.

            I’m those days none of us put two and two together regarding Muslims. In fact there was a single almost token Muslim working on the project at that time. There was a very strange elderly woman architect, working late most days in the basement who was called simply ‘C’. I believe the poor woman was responsible for much of the detailing of the Central Mosque. It is a horrible building.

          4. Agreed. So far, I’ve found one or three of my old projects, and a few old colleagues, but there’s a lot to trawl through. I instantly recognised Ted Drinkwater, foreman stonemason, on the ‘front page’. Laing Stonemasonry evolved from Carlisle General Works department, which was one of my responsibilities for a while. QS wise, at least.

          5. I worked with John Laing in Glasgow. They were a complete shower.

            Thereafter I worked with Gleeson, Harry Neal, Taylor Woodrow, Ashby & Horner, and several other major London contractors, also Durtnells in Kent. The list of sub-Contractors and direct contractors I was involved with runs into many hundreds.

          6. Thank you for posting this, Boss.

            My Father, his Father and Dad’s two brothers ran an English
            Timber Company…….to their great surprise they were awarded
            the Contract to remove all the timber from Luton to Watford Gap!
            The Contract was further extended to include a certain amount of
            Site clearance………..I am fairly certain this was the start of my love
            affair with ‘Civils’!
            I shall pass this link onto my youngest Brother who is researching the
            Family and the Village.

          7. My Dad was a Safety Officer for Laing, back in the days when such a creature had just been invented. I know he was involved in the Coventry Cathedral helicopter/spire thing, the M1 and the West Cumberland Hospital. Have yet to find a picture of him. Or me, for that matter, since a few of my old projects are up there too…

          8. My Mother came from ‘Brum’ and I took her to see Coventry Cathedral when it
            was first opened to the general public…….the sun was shining and the colours
            from the [new] stained glass windows still live with me.
            My Mother cried, as we viewed the ruins of the original Cathedral, yet she loved
            [she remembered the bombings] the new One and subsequently we would
            occasionally visit to attend Services.

          9. I was in Pool Meadow, when the Spire was lowered onto the New Cathedral, by an RAF helicopter.

            I have been to the Old One many times. it is one of the Three Spires of Cov

          11. Snap! I graduated in 1971. By the time I’d failed to find a post despite “a nation-wide lack of town planners” I came to the conclusion that my beliefs in human-sized and user friendly developments were never going to find favour and I’d be better off using my languages 🙂

    5. BJ,
      I do believe that pylons are being interspersed over the area on the strength of the lab/lib/con voting pattern continuing.
      The pylons are for the support structure for the upper layers.
      The NHS shortly will be instructed to
      teach the peoples new breathing exercises, as in inhale on a Monday,
      exhale on a Tuesday etc.

    6. Barber is slightly deranged and a poor architect. He won an award years ago for housing somewhere in the East End which could have been in Spain, white render and curved walls all over the place and completely inappropriate in England.

  54. – Harry and Meghan are going to spend a year transitioning, well Meghan had the balls anyway

    1. She seems to have transitioned already

      Baby in Canada tick
      Dog in Canada Tick
      Megan in Canada tick
      Harry in Canada Work in progress

  55. Swindon firm gives non-smokers extra holiday

    Employees at a recruitment agency are being rewarded with four extra days of holiday for not smoking at work.
    KCJ Training and Employment Solutions in Swindon wants to compensate staff who do not smoke, rather than penalise those who do.
    Managing director Don Bryden has introduced the measure despite being a smoker himself.
    “It’s been taken on and embraced within the company by both smokers and non-smokers,” he said.
    “I’m not discriminating against anyone,” he added. “What I’m saying is if you take a smoke break, fine, take a smoke break. I’m not saying stop that.
    “But if you say it’s three 10-minute smoke breaks a day that equates to 16 and a quarter days a year based on an eight-hour working day.

    1. Good for them!
      As a non-smoker, one thing that used to grit my shit was Friday afternoon barrack cleanup, trudging round the outside of the barrack blocks picking up dog ends.

    1. Evening TB,
      Decision made, done & dusted 3/4 days ?
      Near four years we have arrived at
      “let us HOPE the pm does the right thing”.
      Anyone know the true cost to these Isles of the bill these “honorable gentlemen” have past ?

  57. Vacancy

    Job Title: Prince

    Salary Negotiable

    Must be UK national and a UK resident

    Must be prepared to travel when required

    Starting Date negotiable but preferably second half of this year

  58. The Queen has decided to let them go.

    I think that most people would be happy for the Sussexes to resign from public life . But most people would be very unhappy if they are going to continue to cost the British taxpayer any more money.

      2. Couldn’t we compromise and come up with a solution between here and there?
        Doesn’t Iceland need a royal couple? They could act in TV ads for freezer food to help offset the cost of their security detail.

        1. Yes, she is, after all, an “actress” though having had a couple of bits of Suits and having, out of curiosity, seen the “How dare you” video, I suspect St Greta easily could act her off the stage.

          1. Not that long ago, 1989 according to wikipedia.

            I remember when the Bejam supermarket in Brentwood was a Fine Fare.

    2. The best result, surely? Do we want them performing ceremonial duties when we know they don’t even want to be there in the first instance? As long as they are gone on a permanent basis, that suits me.

        2. I feel sorry for Harry.

          Of course he should have married an English girl but where will he go and what will he do when Meghan dumps him as being no longer fit for purpose?

          (Actually a Dutch girl would have been even better. I speak from personal experience!)

          1. Harry will be rehabilitated, re-invented. I feel that this marriage was most definitely not a love match, not a marriage as we would recognise it; at best it was a ‘contract marriage’ and at worst, a coerced marriage. Look at stills of Harry’s face during the wedding (he looked as though he had been crying all night), look at the Queen’s face. No-one was happy except the supremely composed bride. And there were tell-tale differences at the wedding, too – no central carpet up the aisle, an ill fitting bridal gown, the hem of which was unravelling as she walked down the steps, the wedding cake (compare with those of other royal weddings even further down the line of succession), badly designed and fitting bridesmaids frocks. It seems to have all been done on the cheap and in great haste.

            Once you start to look at this event from a different angle, the strangest things start to fall into place. A game of chess is now underway.

      3. If they, as a couple, are performing in the public eye they are certain to get booed now. It will be an untenable situation for the RF. As a couple they are no longer welcome, but I feel Harry can (and will be) rehabilitated given time. I feel the statement made by William and Harry today was very telling, the theatre curtain slipped slightly on a different scenario from the one with which we are presented by the media.

        Evening, tp. A bit blowy down here.

    3. Evening R,
      To continue paying for a non service would put the issue on the same footing as the Broken Biscuit Co fee.

    4. Let Me Go

      You made plans and I, I made problems
      We were sleeping back to back
      We know this thing wasn’t built to last and
      Good on paper, picture perfect
      Chased the high too far, too fast
      Picket white fence, but we paint it black
      Ooh, and I wished you had hurt me harder than I hurt you
      Ooh, and I wish you wouldn’t wait for me but you always do
      I’ve been hoping somebody loves you in the ways I couldn’t
      Somebody’s taking care of all of the mess I’ve made
      Someone you don’t have to change
      I’ve been hoping
      Someone will love you, let me go
      Someone will love you, let me go
      I’ve been hoping
      Someone will love you, let me go
      It’s been some time, but this time ain’t even
      I can leave it in the past
      But you’re holding on to what you never had
      Good on paper, picture perfect
      Chased the high too far, too fast
      Picket white fence, but we paint it black

        1. Songwriters: ALESSANDRO RODOLFO RENAT LINDBLAD, ALEXANDRA LEAH TAMPOSI, ANDREW WOTMAN, BRIAN D LEE, JAMIE LIDELL

      2. Perhaps Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice could do an Elton John and re-purpose Evita for them? And maybe Argentina might offer them a new home…. they must have run out of Nasty Gold by now and Harry’s inheritance should last them for a few weeks at least.

    5. The weasel (apologies to weasels) word is “reliant”. It suggests that the taxpayer will still be expected to be on the hook for some of their cash.

    6. The Queen could scarcely do anything else. So far there has been no mention of titles and cash. I am reading the Canadian Finance Minister is already saying ‘no way’ and as she is not Canadian she would need a resident’s permit. So far the Queen has actually given nothing away except just enough rope….. and we should be aware the Queen can move in all directions.

  59. Cancelled rural train services doubled last month in Greater Anglia’s worst performance of the year

    The number of cancelled trains on rural lines doubled last month, with Greater Anglia ending the year with its wort performance in 2019.

    Figures released by the train operator show 55pc of rural services ran on time

    The number of cancellations, meanwhile, doubled, from 5pc to just under 11pc in December.

  60. Why can’t I find an Afro-Caribbean egg donor?

    When Natasha and her husband had difficulty conceiving a child, doctors gave her two pieces of bad news. The first was that she would need to find a donor egg. The second was that Afro-Caribbean eggs are rarely donated. But she hasn’t given up hope.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-51065910

    2. If she wants a BAME Baby, she just needs to dress as a schoolgirl and wander the streets of Rotherham, Telford etc

          4. Fabian, aka feminist solutions, was outed as a well-known journalist. Unfortunately I can’t remember her name. Kate someone? I had quite a few run-ins with her. She was a real fanatic.

          8. She claimed to be an Oxford graduate. I asked her some simple questions for proof and she did a runner! She gave herself away by referring to ‘uni’. No one who went to Oxford ever uses that chavvy term!

          9. She claimed to be an Oxford graduate. I asked her some simple questions for proof and she did a runner! She gave herself away by referring to ‘uni’. No one who went to Oxford ever uses that chavvy term!

      2. So much for the discussion earlier today in the letters comments about which opinion article to switch to after the DT closed comments on letters. It is almost like when all DT comments were closed down and nttl was started.

    7. That is a bit of a rakish stance for Starmer there. The way that he is standing displays more character than he does.

  63. And Storm Brendan has reached the Via Gellia and is rattling on the doors & windows as I type!

    3. I’ve been to a memorial service this afternoon. When I was having a coffee with friends after the wake, having dropped them off back at home, the rain beat against the windows and roof (they live in a bungalow) in a truly ferocious fashion. I waited until it had died down before I returned home, but even so, the road was flooded and the flood outside my studio was the greatest I’d ever experienced.

  65. What happens if Flybe goes into administration and can you get compensation for booked flights?

    Europe’s largest regional carrier Flybe is reportedly on the brink of collapse, leaving around 2,000 jobs at risk.

    It is understood the airline held crunch talks with the Government over the weekend to see whether emergency financing could be found to rescue it.

    Moves to turn around the loss-making carrier have apparently fallen short, as it continues to face issues including falling demand, rising fuel costs and the weakening of the pound

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/travel/news/what-happens-if-flybe-goes-into-administration-and-can-you-get-compensation-for-booked-flights/ar-BBYTT22?ocid=spartandhp

  67. BREXIT PARTY

    It seems to be pretty much dormant at the moment. The only update to their website is the Countdown clock

    The next big political events are in May with extensive local elections taking place. No signs of any Brexit Party o that though. They really need to be getting candidate in place now and doing the ground work now if they have any chance of making an impact

  68. Wont be around much for a bit,steroids are horrid making me very shakey and almost disfunctional took me 4 hours to dress to go see the doctor
    New batches of gloop so KBO

    1. Look after yourself. I guess that we will need to amuse ourselves with cat and dog pictures.

    4. Oh Rik, that is awful. I am sorry to hear that. Hope you get sorted out and feel a bit better soon.

    5. And you KBO!

      With best wishes to you Rik.

      We have the wagons circled and will
      keep the indiebobs out………..and if that is
      not a totally Non-Pc comment I don’t know what is!!!

    9. Any of us that are nearby i’m sure they would offer to help out, Rik. Shopping, cleaning, beating (PlumTart),,,bed baths. (Anne Allan) :o)

  69. I watched ‘The Chase’ tonight

    One question, which food is synonymous with the Labour Party

    Quiche Quavers Quinoa

    Contestant Quiche

    Correct Answer Quinoa

  70. Time to pack poor hubby off across to our M and S for some shopping. He is bigger, stronger and twice my weight so will not get blown away…..see you in a bit as it takes a while to explain the shopping list to him now that he is nearly 81!!!!….lol. See you later…

      1. Unless he heads to Iraq he is unlikely to get blown away. Remember to give him a shopping bag, as they delight in adding them on to the bill.

        1. He is home safe and we have used hessian shoppers for years…..always hated those plastic ones. Shopping can be packed much better in a rectangle-shaped sturdy hessian bag and they last ages before getting a little tatty and needing replaced.

          1. Sounds like the significant other talking about me….. “……they last ages before getting a little tatty and needing replaced.”

    2. Well, he should be safe from the multi-tasking women with overloaded shopping carts now that Xmas is over… or reasonably safe, any way. Just so long as it isn’t another of those Blackfriday (what is that) events or some kind of sale to get rid of all the stock no one wanted to buy over Xmas.

      1. He was very safe, thank you. Our local M and S is food only and only 7 mins from our cottage by car. It is a lovely store and one I hope doesn’t get closed – I would be very upset about that. I rely on it so much.

  71. Earlier today I posted my reply to John Redwood’s Diary: here is another response to JR’s article, the really interesting part is the penultimate paragraph. Planning? Many of these people couldn’t plan the proverbial piss-up in a brewery; they’d forget the bottle opener and have to try and organise an away day to discuss how it happened.

    Alan Jutson
    Posted January 13, 2020 at 9:43 am | Permalink

    Agree Wokingham has been overloaded with housing during the last 20 years, with new estates at too higher density, roads too narrow, car parking too little on each plot, so the narrow roads get clogged and pavements parked on.
    Meanwhile the huge increase in the local population has caused congestion both on the roads and infrastructure in general.
    Houses were planned and built before any new roads were installed (the complete opposite to abroad), old roads do not seem to have any maintenance programme and so are breaking up under the volume of traffic, not helped by the whole host of emergency repairs being put in place all over the borough, again causing chaos.
    4 way traffic lights installed at many junctions slows traffic to a crawl, even late at night when the roads could flow.
    The existing planning gained for another 836 new houses a year for the next 10 years is already too much, locally we need to completely stop and rethink, are we Urban or Rural ?

    I see the large newly constructed Tesla charging centre for electric cars (built on a floodplain area) was underwater for a week a couple of weeks ago, just about sums up the local thoughts of Planning.
    No wonder the Conservative Council lost 10 seats at the last local elections given their absolute arrogance and management of the borough for the last decade.

    .

      1. I thought Mr Rashid was in charge of brown envelopes, paper clips etc? I have to admit he appears to have his finger in a number of pies, except those from Melton Mowbray, of course.

        2. Yet every Council puts councillors on courses for drop down menu power points such as negotiating a better outcome in planning.

          Government easy speak persuasions and County councils are all in this together.. Barren landscapes are turned into thoughtless planning horrors that consist of dull soulless homes , with suffocatingly tiny windows .

          Rural life is now under threat , fields that hosted sheep and lambs, trees and ponds , and years old hedgerows .. will become homes for people with no connection to the area , no interest , and miles away from family support and jobs … thus another van driving small business commuter belt is created!

          1. Which is also how we know the “climate catastrophe emergency change” is blx. The government can’t tell us we have to protect the environment, use less fossil fuel, etc, whilst trashing the same environment with housing estates everywhere.

          2. Exactly..

            Makes you want to weep , doesn’t it ..

            They just don’t listen .. how many more tonnes of rubbish , sewerage, water, tarmac, bricks, pipes for utilities, traffic noise.. all for whom .. where are these people coming from, social housing is on the menu.. landowners are now becoming landlords.. traditional farm workers are being turfed out of country properties which are being renovated into holiday cottages and second homes .

            People like that do not contribute to the local economy .. they bring their food, wine and bicycles with them , and leave their rubbish behind .. Areas down here are like ghost villages during the long winter months.. there are no volunteers to sweep the mouse droppings from village churches .. but many villages are conservation areas whereas larger villages take the full whack and lose their identity .. rural roads are quite congested .. sand and gravel lorries, tractors , commuter traffic etc etc and the blues and twos screaming along because that Golden hour matters most of all .. as ambulances race to which ever hospital they are tasked to !

            Gawd , the countryside is very muddy at the moment.. but there are green shoots of optimism in the hedgerows .. could be an early spring!

          3. I’ve spotted some bulb shoots coming up already, and have geraniums still surviving happily outside, with one even trying to flower. A proper cold snap will put a stop to that.

            I’m lucky because I live in a conservation area, so the council is very strict on any development, and we won’t be swamped with new housing.

          4. Yes, but how far does your conservation extend and what might happen outside its bounds? My village is a coservation area, but it looks as though 230 acres of the parish is going to get a solar power installation dumped on it. Better than housing some might say, but what’s to say when it’s decomissioned in 40yrs time that they claim it is no longer rural agricultural land. Still I won’t be around to see what follows.

          6. My geraniums are still alive but they’re just stumps after the predations by the deer. He hasn’t had the bulb shoots yet.

          7. Remember my beautiful clematis?……the workmen had to chop it down to make way for my ramp. I was very upset.

          8. What sort was it? We had to cut down a montana alba a few years ago to install a new oil tank, and it revived with even more vigour than before. The large flowered ones are less vigourous though.

          13. Nope – but have other plans. It took a good ten years to get that one to that size.

          14. I have noticed bulbs poking through the soil and the clematis have strong buds on them. The roses are well into leaf.

          18. Hello Peddy, I think that must be the same variety as ours .

            We have a white climber in our hedge which takes such a lot of punishment , and another climbing up the southwall of the house , always fresh green glossy leaves .. and a few flowers at the moment.. also afew Masquerade flowers that are mingling amongst the ivy that makes our telegraph pole in the garden , look like a giant lollipop

          19. I’m sure I read somewhere cement accounts for a large proportion of the CO(subscript for the pedants)2 – time to tell the new arrivals they’ll have to make do with mud huts.

          22. I remember as a child an aunt coming to visit us in the country from London. her first outing from the capitol as she looked at all the woods, greenfields etc all she could say in disgust was “What a waste of space”

          23. I had a visit from a young chap from north London to pick up a keyboard i was selling. As i took him through the garden to the workshop he asked me what a particular plant was. I chose not to make a rude comment and just told him…it’s an apple tree. I found it strange because the tree was in full fruit.

          24. Councillors seem utterly irrelevant and pointless.

            I told one to sort out yellow lines near a school when I sat on a housing association board. I said ‘well, it’s public land, thus the obvious solution is to add traffic calming methods. After all, this is what council tax is for – local services. See to it and report next week?

            Councillor woman sat there utterly dumbfounded, as if tax should just be used for her trough. She gaped, uselessly. I doubt anyone had simply given her an order and a timescale to achieve it in before. Local government is pointless. That said, central government is as well.

    2. For once, something we cannot blame on Bliar, (or we can, of course, because it was he who allowed Prescott out without a minder or anyone to check his homework). It was, of course, Prescotts grand idea to help the environment by preventing councils imposing strict guidelines on the number of car parking spots in developments. In the modern two car family he though that by restricting developments to one car space per property that somehow that would help.
      Well it did help…. the developers because they could then squeeze in extra properties but the consequence is the increase in street parking.

    3. It’s the same everywhere. My route to work used to have the tarmac around every drain collapsing into a pit, so much so you often just drove on the other side of the road.

      The council filled them in nice and diligently. Then it rained.

      The potholes returned immediately.

      Then there’s the massive housing estate built on an already compressed main route to the motorway. A mass of traffic forced through two, yes, two sets of traffic lights – even before getting to the traffic lights at the main roundabout. What was a busy route is now a car park. You can sit there for over half an hour, not moving. They just lump these things on people thoughtlessly.

      Thanks, Labour.

    1. In those days they would have been regarded as “extra-large”, now they are positively sylph-like

      1. She only wants to live somewhere that has a socialist regime. So that rules out America and Britain for the foreseeable future. What does she do when Trudeau gets the bums rush? Cuba or Venezuela would be good.

        2. And Trudeau only has a minority government.

          When the Tories select an electable charismatic leader, Canada might not be so hospitable.

          Make that If the Tories select an electable leader, until then she can have our blackface dress up PM.

    2. If Harry wants US citizenship, he will have to get rid of his titles. It’s a condition of obtaining citizenship.

    3. So not only has Her Majesty to run her life to suit these two, but the President of the USA.

      How do I find the right words?

      1. Yo TP/PT

        It never sounded right to me but I have disregarded their antics until the past few days – am now angry.

        Interlaced in this DM piece about Doria are damning revelations, if true, that should have set off a five-alarm bell. Harry is thick.

        EXCLUSIVE: Meghan Markle has the ‘full support’ of mom Doria Ragland after being ‘miserable, having anxiety attacks and struggling after Archie’s birth, as Duchess confides she has no intention of ever returning to the UK to live’

        *Meghan Markle has the ‘full support’ of her mother Doria Ragland, as she and Prince Harry quit as senior royals, a friend exclusively told DailyMail.com
        *Ragland has been ‘really worried about Meghan… and is relieved that her daughter is putting her mental health and well being first’
        *Meghan, 38, admitted to struggling after the birth of the couple’s son Archie
        *She said in an interview that aired in October: ‘Not many people have asked if I’m okay. It’s a very real thing to be going through behind the scenes’
        *The friend explained Meghan was ‘miserable in the UK’ and ‘wasn’t sleeping well and started having anxiety attacks about her future’
        *They also said Meghan has no ‘intention’ to return to the UK to live permanently, saying: ‘She doesn’t want to raise Archie there and she doesn’t want to schlep back and forth’
        *Prince Harry is set to follow Meghan across the Atlantic later this week with no clue of when he will be returning
        *Now across the pond, the friend said of Meghan: ‘This was her plan all along, to eventually leave the UK and build her own empire with Harry’
        *On Monday, the Queen said the royals had ‘very constructive discussions’ and it was agreed that Prince Harry and Meghan will split their time between the UK and Canada
        https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7881909/Meghan-Markle-support-mom-Doria-Ragland-miserable-UK.html

  78. Evening, all. It isn’t the matter of the Sussex pair doing things differently I object to, it’s not doing any work (or at least doing only those bits they feel like doing), but expecting to get the pay and all the perks for doing the full whack.

    1. Can they be only a little bit Royal anymore than anyone can be a little bit pregnant? They should either do the full whack or nothing, and get paid nothing.

    2. Unfortunately the die was cast when Meghan made derogatory comments about President Trump. It was also obvious that the Sussex’s were smitten by their ability to associate with the current Hollywood A-Listers and the repulsive Obamas.

      Needless to say their ventures abroad smacked of the utter hypocrisy of Harry’s mother who followed the example of Jackie Kennedy who had also posed on the white marble bench in front of the avenue leading to the Taj Mahal. In reality either side of that marble bench are scenes of abject poverty.

      Expect the Sussex couple to pose ostentatiously walking through cleared minefields next, to further promote black superiority (ignoring centuries of black Ineptitude and inferiority) and to stick their ugly mugs in front of cameras for years to come for a fee.

      It all makes us feel yet more gratitude to our Queen for keeping her horrendous dysfunctional brood together for so long.

      1. I’m afraid you are right – her lack of manners was embarrassing when The President and Mrs Trump visited – Melania has more class than Meghan, for sure. And dresses better.

      2. I can just imagine them appearing on chat shows – where they will be expected to “dish the dirt” on the Royal Family. I can only think their appearances will be sought after for maybe a couple of years, if they eke out things but it’s going to be horrible.

        I always wondered – they supposedly wanted to have privacy when Archie was born but promptly put him in the front of their Christmas cards.

    1. Meghan is the perpetrator of coercive and controlling behaviour over Harry, of that I am certain .

      He could be a victim of psychological domestic abuse .

  82. A sign of things to come.(or not)

    On BBC2 now is ‘Exposed: The Church’s Darkest Secrets’

    Synopsis

    Part one of two.

    The story of the decades-long pursuit of former bishop Peter Ball by those brave individuals determined to bring him to justice for sexual abuse, and the cover-up that went to the highest levels of the Church of England. Using powerful testimony from victims, police and church officials, and dramatic reconstruction, this programme charts the story of those who fought for many years to bring a prosecution against Ball.

    How about doing the same, for the groomers of children in our towns by paedophiles, who get a lesser punishment than the person who identifies them

    https://www.radiotimes.com/tv-programme/e/kvjb7x/exposed-the-churchs-darkest-secret–series-1-episode-1/

  83. A plea from a Luddite

    Will those who have changed their on line persona PLEASE say

    A Who you were

    B How you didid it

    Fanx

    3. I can return to my original persona but I changed to confuse the bot after it zeroed my account. Comic characters are my thing.

    4. A. Not that hard!

      B. Log out from your old “persona” – set up a new Disqus ID using a separate name and email address, try to log back in (use the same browser that you used to set up the new name and password [in my case Firefox] – it should give you a choice of which ID to use) – log in as new ID. Simples (it must be if I did it!)

        2. Oh for heaven’s sake – look at the name! Think friend of weasels! (I still am what I was)

      1. I am still the same name – different pic because I got confused as to which account I was using.

      2. A lot of us have been reduced to zero upvotes and loss of “High rep” which could mean we are unable to comment elsewhere, though we are all safe here as “trusted users”. Hence the new accounts. I haven’t closed the old one so I have a back-up one.

  84. Who’s been hiding this (brilliant) statement?:

    “Blair claimed that we needed more immigrants to fill 600,000 vacancies. Four million immigrants later there are still over 700,000 vacancies.”

    From this article.

      1. How many are not ‘unemployed’ but are on disability benefits? If the figures of a certain culture’s employed rates are true then there’s something wrong with the system – 50% males and 75+% females not economically active?

        1. That’s what happens when living on benefits is regarded as a career choice – and apparently a valid and socially acceptable one at that.

        2. About 90% of those claiming disability benefit are fully capable of doing work particularly as few jobs involve physical work. It is more a case of they dont want to work and the system allows it

          What I find beyond comprehension is when a couple both claim to be so disable they need a career and guess what the claim to be the career for each other. If they can care for each other than neither needs a career

      2. This constant reiteration that there’s full employment. There can’t be. It’s just bonkers.

  85. On a par, wiv ‘Arry and Meg’

    Who remembers Maggie and Captain Peter Townsend: and what happened next

    1. I remember that he was a Group Captain (RAF) and not a Captain (RN) or a Captain (Army or RM).

      1. An upcoming BBC documentary will show that HRH Margaret could have married Townsend. The only proviso was that she give up her titles because of marrying a divorcee. After the abdication crisis she was not prepared to do such a thing.

    1. Logout and go back in with a new account – no need to change names as long as you have a different email address. Seems to solve the vote gobbling.

      Night night and come back soon!

    3. I was unaware there was a problem until I looked at mine .

      Does it really matter anyway ?

      Don’t dash off , hang on in here , and contribute your usual pithy view on things.

  91. Firefighters battle to save building in Camden

    An LFB spokesman said the drone footage, which pans across the roof of the venue, gave crews “situational awareness”.
    It also provided information about which areas remained unsafe for firefighters.

    Station Commander Jon Lewis said: “Firefighters’ quick action and hard work in the early stages meant the fire was contained to the roof and saved the rest of the building.”

    Around 30 per cent of the ceiling was damaged by fire and the venue’s owner, Olly Bengough, praised the “quick response” of firefighters

    I should imagine smoke and water damage has wrecked the rest of the building although it is probably structurally sound
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5e9447234a381405f5439b7791a6ef7f4c04a1e4dbf2226b52687f78a9562bf2.jpg

  92. Scientists have just announced the the world is entering a new geological period

    The Meghorrific

        3. Oh dear, did someone just tell her it was a fossil fuel powered microphone?
          Is that jacket synthetic? A quite human reaction there, by the way, to being handed a microphone by Harvey Wienstein. “Don’t give me that, I don’t know where its been.”

  94. Oh damn. Word is that Trudeau has said that the Canadian
    taxpayer will pick up the tab for those two.

    Obviously the big deficit has no meaning in his woke world.

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