Friday 14 February: Donald Trump’s plan for Ukraine exposes his blind spot on Russia

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its commenting facility (now reinstated, but we prefer ours),
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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here.

677 thoughts on “Friday 14 February: Donald Trump’s plan for Ukraine exposes his blind spot on Russia”

  2. Good morning, chums. And thanks, Geoff, for today's new NoTTLe site. Was hoping to be first, but Minty beat me to it.

    Wordle 1,336 5/6

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  5. Good morning all.
    Still dark but at least it's not raining.
    A bit over 2°C with yesterday's max and min being 4.1° and 2.1°C.
    Off to pick up an auction purchase and thence to Stoke to see Stepson, so will not be about much online.

    2. Oh dear! I've been living this cartoon with my 2CV I've ran for thirty years, which I took to the restorer in Hereford a fortnight ago. He stripped it down and then reported that there was hardly any of it that was not either worn out or rusty. Here's the bill so far. I now have to work out how to collect the bits, to scavenge for spares, and have made a provisional booking for a transporter, hoping that the restorer will at least put the wheels back.

        1. Indeed I have – another 2CV, five years older. I need my old one for spares that are going to get increasingly expensive and hard to get hold of. The last new 2CV was made in 1990, and most car factories of that era have either been demolished or are making horrible bloated battery SUVs to satisfy “America First” trading rules.

      2. At least, you do not have any Big Batteries to dispose of.

        Just think how it will be, when the EVs start to die

        1. They’ll work out a way of harnessing the energy generated through their spontaneous combustion systems.

  8. Donald Trump’s plan for Ukraine exposes his blind spot on Russia

    Trump appears to be on a mission to undo all the globalist insanity that has been unleashed upon us, quite magnificent, isn't it

    3. You could argue that the war was initially the consequence of the Ukrainians' massacre of Russian speakers in the Donbass in 2014 and the West and NATO's push eastwards – a push they said back in the 1990s that they would not do.

      Attempts were made to find a solution which averted the war and discussions were planned but Biden, Johnson and Zelensky were determined to have war and the death of a million people should firmly be laid at their door.

      Had Trump not been robbed in the 2020 presidential elections this war would never have happened.

  9. Morning all,

    Our Newfoundland, Nelson, lived for nearly 11 years..
    His was fathered by a dog whose kennel name was Love's a Risky Business.

      1. It must have been over 10 years ago when we were consigned to needing to have him put down.
        He developed the symptoms of Periodic Paralysis which presented as being fit enough to be seen normal but this was interspersed with intermittent periods of disabling muscular paralysis.
        I did everything I could to find a way of bringing him it out of it but vetinary treatment was beyond a solution.
        There are signs now that periodic paralysis may be an inherited condition and it was already known to exist in horses.

        Nelson knew himself that it was time to lie down for an indefinite period and it came to the stage where he refused to come out of his travelling bed in the back of the Isuzu Trooper. That is where the vet administered his Last Rites.

        We scattered his ashes on his walk through a local Woodland Trust and under a rose bush called Lady Hamilton.

        2. I had a similar scenario with Oscar last year. His front leg contracted so he had difficulty putting it down. We tried everything but it was no use. He had to be carried into the vets for the last time.

  10. Morning all,

    Our Newfoundland, Nelson, lived for nearly 11 years..
    His was fathered by a dog whose kennel name was Love's a Risky Business.

  11. Morning all,

    Our Newfoundland, Nelson, lived for nearly 11 years..
    His was fathered by a dog whose kennel name was Love's a Risky Business.

    3. Labour stronghold.

      “This election is so important as if we win this seat, and win it we will, it will be the first time a Reform candidate has won an election in Wales and this will be the domino that knocks everything else."

  17. Good Moaning.
    You will be glad to know that the Spirit of Romance is flourishing in the Dower House.
    I gave MB a bargain pack of Feed and Weed that was on special offer at Sainsbury's.

      1. :-). Tsk, tsk. I'm waiting to see his face when the lawn goes a diverse colour as the moss dies.

  18. Good morning, all. Grey and miserable day, again. Can't stop – the MR is about to cut my hair…

    1. Hang onto it until the warmer weather arrives.
      You can remove your brown paper chest protector at the same time. The goose fat has done its job.

  19. Will Ed Miliband see sense and drill British gas? 14 February 2025.

    Over the next few weeks, it is reported, a little-known oil and gas company, Egdon Resources, will announce that it has discovered 480 billion cubic metres worth of shale gas reserves in a large trough extending westwards of the Lincolnshire town of Gainsborough. Onshore oil and gas is Egdon’s business – it already operates small wells in the Midlands and Dorset. Its discovery in the Gainsborough trough, however, dwarfs all that. To put it into context, in 2023 the UK consumed 63.5 billion cubic metres of gas. This one field alone, in other words, could supply the UK with gas for nearly eight years.

    This has nothing whatsoever to do with sense. It’s about ideology. Milliband is a Marxist climate zealot. He would quite happily see you all freeze in your beds than send one therm of Gas to thaw you out.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/will-ed-miliband-see-sense-and-drill-british-gas/

      1. I think it's another obsession and again mental health issues.
        Seemingly it's not possible to fix stoopid.
        The Victorians had some nice buildings for people with these problems.

  22. Sturma thinks his precious International Law is above the Laws of Nature. It ain't.

    Starmer’s excuse for Chagos deal ‘blown out the water’ – by his own minister

    Sir Chris Bryant appears to undermine the PM’s case for the controversial move after saying a UN body could not close communication channels

    The PM says the ‘electromagnetic spectrum’ would cease to operate if Britain does not give the Chagos Islands to Mauritius

    Tony Diver Associate Political Editor.
    Jack Maidment
    13 February 2025 7:03pm GMT

    Sir Keir Starmer’s national security justification for the Chagos Islands deal has been “blown out of the water” by a minister who admitted it was impossible for an international body to shut down British communications in the Indian Ocean.

    Sir Chris Bryant, a science minister, appeared to undermine the Government’s case for its controversial Chagos deal, which involved a legal threat to military communications channels on the Diego Garcia military base.

    Downing Street has said Britain’s deal to give away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is required to protect communications at the base, which is jointly operated by the US and UK.

    A No 10 spokesman told reporters last week that “the electromagnetic spectrum at the Diego Garcia base would not be able to continue to operate without a deal”.

    It is understood that government lawyers are concerned that if the UK’s sovereignty was rejected by a UN court on maritime law, then Britain would be forced to give up its secure communications by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), another UN body.

    Such a move would effectively shutter a key military base used for Western security in the Indo-Pacific by stopping the British and American militaries from being able to communicate securely.

    However, Sir Chris confirmed on Wednesday that any action taken against the UK by the ITU would only involve arbitration and dispute resolution, and that communications channels cannot be closed by the ITU.

    “The ITU cannot challenge the UK’s use of civilian or military spectrum,” he said in response to a written parliamentary question.

    “It is possible that one country could challenge another’s spectrum use, for instance if it should cause harmful interference across borders, and if unresolved bilaterally could seek arbitration through an ITU body.”

    Under the constitution and conventions of the ITU, a communications dispute between Britain and Mauritius over the Chagos Islands would involve a protracted arbitration process.

    First, both countries would choose a national representative, before trying to agree on a third “single arbitrator” to decide their case.

    If no arbitrator could be agreed, then both countries would choose an arbitrator and the ITU’s secretary-general would “draw lots” to decide who should rule on the case.

    The rules mean that Britain’s use of communications technology on Diego Garcia would effectively be left to a 50-50 chance at an ITU tribunal.

    If the UK lost the arbitration, then the ITU’s decision would be “binding”, but there is no action the body could take to enforce the decision.

    It is not necessarily the case, as Downing Street argued last week, that “the electromagnetic spectrum” would cease to operate if Britain does not give the islands away.

    ‘Utter nonsense’
    Mark Francois, the shadow armed forces minister, said the Government’s new stance on the communications issue undermined the case for a deal.

    “This candid answer, from the telecommunications minister, Sir Chris Bryant, blows the Government’s latest rationale for their benighted Chagos deal clean out of the water,” he said.

    “If the ITU cannot actually dictate to the UK (or the US) over the use of military spectrum, how can the Government’s claim that this is about protecting military and satellite communications possibly stand? It’s utter nonsense.”

    The deal is already facing political opposition from some MPs and members of Donald Trump’s team, who are concerned that giving the islands to Mauritius would open the military base up to Chinese influence.

    The terms of the deal have not yet been published, but it is understood to involve Britain leasing the military base back from Mauritius at a cost of billions of pounds over 99 years.

    The Conservatives have called the deal a “surrender” to Mauritius, but the Government argues that the UK would be in breach of international law if it continues to operate the base as sovereign territory.

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

    Malcolm Brown
    14 hrs ago
    So Starmer is lying….there's a surprise!

    Geoffrey Coles
    12 min ago
    Reply to Malcolm Brown – view message
    Instinctive, like his scummy colleagues around the Cabinet table

    Alan Entwistle
    13 hrs ago
    Why does this Labour shower continually act against the interests of the UK? We are skint GDP wise, but they still send billions to foreign countries

    1. And this arrived in my inbox this morning:

      The Government has responded to the petition you signed – “Review decision to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius”.

      Government responded:

      We achieved our primary objective in negotiations with Mauritius: to protect the future of the UK-US military base on Diego Garcia. The treaty will be put before Parliament for scrutiny and debate.

      The previous government started negotiations in November 2022 with the government of Mauritius regarding sovereignty over Diego Garcia and the long-term use of the US base.

      On the basis of both legal advice and national security considerations, this Government continued those negotiations in order to secure the long-term future of the military base. On 3 October last year, the Government announced that that we had a reached agreement with Mauritius. The agreement will allow the base to continue its operations for 99 years, with a first refusal option to extend that time period. The UK will retain control over Diego Garcia, with full capability to restrict adversaries.

      The Government is confident that the agreement reached will protect UK security, secure the future of the US base on Diego Garcia and cement long-term UK and US presence in the Indo-Pacific for generations to come. When the details of the agreement have been finalised, the treaty will be presented to Parliament for scrutiny and debate.

      Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office

      2. More utter bolleaux! The "rationale" is unravelling more and more as time goes by – the excuses about international law and spectrum denial seems to be yet more lies – we're back to wondering why Two Tier, Hermer and their little friend in Mauritius are really doing this – what do they gain??

    2. Good morning Citroen, and everybody.
      "Why does this Labour LibLabConBlob shower continually act against the interests of the UK?"
      Remember Donald Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknowns'? I wonder if some foreign power might have the UK by the proverbial short hairs. It could be with a threat from conventional weaponry (bio or nuclear), some form of blackmail, or perhaps with something so futuristic that it is beyond our comprehension. Certainly the Chagos proposal would never have passed 'Go' twenty years ago.

      1. Under Blair? Yeah, he'd have given it away faster than anything.

        I think they're just spiteful, nasty idiots playing at global politics with public money. It could be part of the Chinese deal of course. Be funny if it is, and suddenly a Chinese drilling ship arrives in the middle and rams into the sea bed to mine.

    3. Labour don't care where the money they want coms from, as long as there's always more of it they can take. The damage that does to the UK is irrelevant. They'd far prefer to spaff it on foreigners.

      1. I find the open contradiction by a minister more interesting.
        What with that and the Beeb being unleashed on Rachel from Complaints.
        A pattern is emerging.

    5. starmer is clearly acting on a life long obsession, he's had his whole working life to have practiced his belligerence towards the British public taxpayers and culture. He is taking his obsession too far.
      He seems to have serious and long stored mental health issues. And needs to be relieved of his position.

  23. Good Morning!

    Today FSB publishes Mark Shaw’s plan for the mass repatriation of immigrants and their descendants that Mark believes is fair to all. Read his An immigrant Resettlement Scheme and let us know if you think its viable and necessary, or the opposite.

    If you missed it, go to China for a look at cultural phenomenon that is dividing the nation and causing the CCP a great deal of concern and which has already led to violence. Zhang YingYue explains in her China's Dancing Aunties – Heroines or Hooligans? Let us know what you think of them, and whether or not we need them here.

    Energy watch 07.30 Total generation: 42.375 GW from: Hydrocarbons 52.2%; Wind 25.1%; Imports 2.4%; Biomass 7.2% and Nuclear 10.87. Solar: 0. UK demand: 41.34GW, UK generation 39.96GW.

    freespeechbacklash.com

    1. Some wind today so got the clothes outside. They likely won't dry but if the worst of the moisture can be out there rather than inside…

  24. Fun fact for Friday..
    Emmanuel Macron: drama student.
    Justin Trudeau: drama student.
    Volodymyr Zelenskyy: drama student.

  26. Our AG gets around. Is there any shady brief he would ever turn down?

    Lord Hermer fought for compensation for al-Qaeda chief linked to July 7 bombings

    Attorney General acted on behalf of Rangzieb Ahmed, once described as Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2025/02/13/TELEMMGLPICT000002119061_17394729866420_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqfNr5KVv53sUEMxhGiCHISFzn65IovHxHL5xIs2OEADQ.jpeg?imwidth=680
    Rangzieb Ahmed was arrested by Pakistani security forces in 2006 before being deported to Britain a year later Credit: David Dyson
    Ethan Croft Political Correspondent
    13 February 2025 7:40pm GMT

    Lord Hermer sought compensation from the British government for an al-Qaeda chief linked to the July 7 terror attacks, it has emerged.

    The Attorney General acted for Rangzieb Ahmed, a convicted terrorist, when he tried to sue the government for alleged torture by Pakistan.

    The 2020 case centred on whether the police, security services and government departments in the UK should have “joint liability” for the alleged actions of Pakistan, an allied country in the war on terror.

    If “joint liability” had been established, Ahmed, now 49, might have been entitled to a payment of significant damages in his prison cell from the taxpayer.

    Once described as Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man and the head of al-Qaeda in Europe, Ahmed was the first person in Britain to be prosecuted for “directing” terrorist offences.

    He was sentenced in 2008 to a minimum of 10 years after being linked to terror plots including the London bombings of July 2005, which killed 52 people.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2025/02/13/TELEMMGLPICT000069171776_17394731453370_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqLoH7NlioJUgvNGxc7kNJh7QhCpsJmCWlSWt_yfzANGk.jpeg?imwidth=680
    The 7/7 bombings including a bus in Tavistock Square being targeted by a suicide bomber Credit: Peter MacDiarmid/PA
    Lord Hermer acted for Ahmed in a High Court case in 2020 when he was still in private practice at Matrix Chambers.

    The defendants in the case comprised the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service, the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Attorney General’s Office and Greater Manchester Police.

    The High Court dismissed the claim against all six defendants.

    Ahmed, a British citizen of Pakistani heritage, was arrested in Pakistan in 2006. He has maintained that he suffered torture and ill treatment at the hands of Pakistani forces.

    He also alleges that British government officials were aware of this treatment.

    He claimed to have been beaten and had three of his fingernails removed by members of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, and said his alleged torturers had been fed interrogation questions by British intelligence officers.

    In 2007, Pakistan deported him to Britain and in 2008 he was convicted of a series of terror offences and sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in prison.

    Ahmed launched an appeal in 2010 on the grounds that his conviction was “unsafe”. It was dismissed by the Court of Appeal on the basis of “no evidence”.

    In the 2020 case, it was argued that Lord Hermer was trying to “relitigate” elements of Ahmed’s criminal conviction through civil law.

    Lord Hermer argued that “there is nothing in the pleaded case which could cast doubt on the safety of the conviction”.

    He also claimed that more recent revelations about British complicity in the torture of terror suspects made it more likely that Ahmed’s claims were correct.

    The court found that claim unconvincing.

    Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said on Thursday: “The barristers cab-rank rule is long established. But what first attracted Gerry Adams, Shamima Begum, Phil Shiner and al-Qaeda terrorists to Lord Hermer’s cab?

    “Hermer has a long list of controversial clients and he still won’t reveal his financial interests. Meanwhile, his excessive legalistic caution is preventing decisions being made in the national interest. He’s unfit to be Attorney General.”

    ‘Extensive legal background’
    In September 2022, Ahmed was denied parole after officials decided he was too dangerous to be released.

    A year later, he was ordered to participate in a deradicalisation programme which would, in turn, open the possibility of a parole hearing.

    Another parole claim was blocked in 2024 after parole chiefs found that Ahmed was still a risk to the public.

    A spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office said: “Law officers such as the Attorney General will naturally have an extensive legal background, and may have previously been involved in a wide number of past cases.

    “It is a feature and cornerstone of our legal system that legal professionals operate the cab-rank rule when it comes to clients, and barristers do not associate themselves with their clients’ opinions.”

    1. “It is a feature and cornerstone of our legal system that legal professionals operate the cab-rank rule when it comes to clients, and barristers do not associate themselves with their clients’ opinions.”

      Isn't it strange that the cab rank seems to get the same high powered barristers whenever certain types of case and individuals come to trial?
      Isn't it funny how legal aid for certain types of individual is able to pay for the finest legal representation, far beyond the means of "Joe Public" and when the ordinary Joe actually does get legal aid it's the least capable lawyers they are allocated from the cab rank?
      And isn't it odd how certain cases appear almost by chance before certain judges who are oddly prejudiced in certain directions?

      Or is it all merely my over-active imagination?

  28. The surprising fall of Germany’s populist far-left party. 14 February 2025.

    For all the alarm about the instability of German politics, the results of this month’s federal election campaign seem – on the surface – largely baked in. The conservative CDU party, led by the bullish Friedrich Merz, is expected to win, with approximately 30 per cent of the vote. The far-right Elon Musk-loving Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is predicted to come second with around 21 per cent.

    I’m going to stick my neck out here as I did with Trump in his first election. I think the German Elites are in for a nasty shock with this election. The German people, like the British have learned that its all lies they are being told. The recent terrorist attacks have penetrated. I am expecting the AfD to do much better than this.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-surprising-fall-of-germanys-populist-far-left-party/

    1. I'm hoping, Minty.
      Are AfD the extreme far-Right wing Nazis that "everyone" makes them out to be? </sarc>

        1. I have made that comment frequently, so was being ironic here… the clue is in the name National Socialist German Workers Party.

    2. Every time someone takes action against appalling state waste, inefficiency and nonsense, or removes criminal foreigners they are labelled 'Far Right' as if this is somehow a bad thing.

      I think the majority of the population are 'far right' by that scale. Simply put, the entire state machine is Left wing. Far Right, right wing is a badge of pride, not abuse. The Nazis, Pol Pot, Stalin, Lenin, all evil is Left wing. Moving right is just a restoration of sanity.

    3. Its because the polls are fixed.in favour of the left just like they are here.When the true result comes its a shock.

  29. Yo and Good Moaning all from (a bit) brighter C d S.

    Things can only get better.

    I see that Mr Trump is not liked very much by the DT letters page Editors. (well, the letters that make the cut)

    1. Why the downvote, Minty?

      I don't know Trump so can't comment on the man. However his political actions are ardently pro USA. I don't agree with tariff walls but they're a viable weapon to encourage local business (sort of, as economies are global these days all you really do is make one element expensive pushing prices up everywhere).

  30. Latest rumours..
    Brigitte Macron is Emmanuel Macron's father.. protected by the Rothschild family.

    2. Starmer just wants to give waster foreigners houses on other people's taxes. The man is a worm. Get rid of the wasters, don't bring them here. Send them away.

  32. Nigel Farage is considering bringing criminal proceedings against NatWest over its debanking of him.

    Dame Alison Rose, its then chief executive, resigned in 2023 after it emerged that Mr Farage’s accounts with NatWest subsidiary Coutts had been closed because of his political views.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/13/nigel-farage-criminal-proceedings-natwest-debanking/

    However,

    Lord Hermer fought for compensation for al-Qaeda chief linked to July 7 bombings

    Attorney General acted on behalf of Rangzieb Ahmed, once described as Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/02/13/lord-hermer-fought-compensation-al-qaeda-bombings/

    Seems as though Brits have no rights in UK

    1. Hermer needs to be sacked – no one with an ounce of common sense would have appointed him in the first place, oh wait …
      More jobs for the old legal buddies!

        1. He is clearly a desperately Left wing individual which shows Starmer's political alignment that he doesn't see a problem with this.

        1. A valid point, although, to be fair, I didn't actually name TT/FG/NH himself – just inferred!

  33. Population Tintagel, Cornwall: 758.
    Quite nice there.. they have a proper castle with four-poster beds.

    Not so fast. Home Office offers owner of castle double rates with full occupancy on a rolling contract for 300 irregular tourists. oh btw sack all your staff.
    Four more years of lunacy.

    1. He turned them down flat. A good man who cares for his community. Unlike the creatures who tried to foist this upon him.

        1. Suitably….err…
          And not according to our useless political idiots Obs, jointly they have wrecked the whole country.

      2. Probably wants his property back in one piece. If you've invested in it the last thing you want is to come back to find the rooms wrecked, the plumbing smashed, having to replace all the showers, beds and to find practically everything stolen, defaced or otherwise damaged.

        Then you have to say once word gets around that the place has been used for the diversity the loss of business from folk thinking they might come back.

        1. A year or more on. Who would want to stay in such a place knowing that the illegal invaders had been there.

      3. Well done.
        He saved the local people and the local police from a harrowing time.
        I recently saw a clip of a hotel near Stevenage with the people using their phone cameras to film the foreign looking and speaking
        guards telling them to get off the 'private property and a view of around 30 plus stolen bicycles laying behind the shrubbery.

      3. Bill Gate was not a good man—
        He had his little ways.
        And only Pols spoke to him
        For days and days and days.
        And men who came across him,
        When walking in the town,
        Gave him a supercilious stare,
        Or passed with noses in the air—
        And bad Bill Gate stood dumbly there,
        Blushing beneath his frown.

        (With Apols to A A Milne)

  35. Valentine’s Day is for teenagers – shame on you if you’re celebrating
    The holiday is little more than the commercially choreographed equivalent of a Moonie wedding, best left to Gen Z
    Judith Woods : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/14/valentines-day-is-for-teenagers/

    She may well be right – but all the same our affectionate best wishes to all our friends on the Nottlers' Forum from Caroline and Rastus!
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bd50bac50d369ac9f2abb7589505e2e444f279020a8aa114abac87c2bc8b9416.png

    1. Since when was Valentine's Day a holiday?
      Have a great day, all Y'all! Much love from Norway!

    2. It's a silly daft day to say to celebrate one of the greatest forces in the universe: marketing to idiots.

      1. We got engaged on this day in 1982! I sent him a Valentine card on Ceefax. (remember that?) and he sent me a card with the word ‘fiancé’ on it! Never mind, we’re still together and going strong!❤️

          2. Ummmmmm ……. actually, that excuse is quite handy.
            Every so often MB mentions a missing article. I reply "box in attic". A panicked look crosses his face and suddenly the late Auntie Agnes' trinket box doesn't matter THAT much.

  37. Morning all 🙂😊
    And……hang on, is that sunshine back in our lives.
    Slept like a log, 11 hours. Obviously with a 'bathroom break'.
    I'm sure DT will be up to date on Vlad and his 'blind spot'. DT and his advisors have been paying much attention to all the goings-on up to date.
    I hear QT was a riot.

  39. Good morning, all. Little change in the overcast sky but possibility of the Sun peeking through the cloud later-on.

    I didn't know that Colchester was a hot-bed of 'Let Women Speak'…
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5b34073d6e6093ff0ee90eb55a4b5330232edbe225d053b998ce89b0130d6a2e.png
    Appears there have some goings-on in my home town re the 'trans' phenomenon. Allegations of assault and lack of action by the police. Similar reports from Nottingham.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c5bcfa8a36b0b7d11a0db563fcb667482b563a4b99b6667e1155db9a59ef9812.png https://x.com/ColchMum/status/1890175513681096794
    Some interesting stuff happening within the town with certain institutions and notables being mentioned.

    Oooh, er, missus.

      1. On this occasion, I can plead "not guilty" with a clear conscience.
        All this going on round me and I know the square root of bu88er all.

    2. And let's have a definition of girls as

      child human females

      as they are in particular danger from one particular group of people.

      1. Neither did I. Do you visit the Mercury at all? If you can get to X there you will find much more info, including pictures.

    4. They all carry the smirk that says.. I have four more years to play the system. I can gain access to all the women's spaces I like.. get aroused, violate them.. then play the victim and get compo.

      Here, Tranny Dr "Beth" Upton plays the victim superbly.. messaged line manager Dr Kate Searle on Christmas Day saying, "I don't feel safe using the changing rooms when she's there", and then contacted the British Medical Association about the incident for compo.
      .
      Four more years of looney lunacy.
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1b0186b4169b6193736e47be933b57666c6b82883ba8bd4136dd4af7200d189d.jpg

  40. Made a mistake on second line and too many choices after:
    Wordle 1,336 5/6
    ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
    🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨
    ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
    ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. I did similarly.
      Wordle 1,336 5/6

      ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
      🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨
      ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
      ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  41. I hear from BBC radio news that the utter cretin, Two Tier Keir, has said to Zelensky that Ukraine is on an irreversible path to NATO membership – the man is a complete feckwit!

    2. I'm sure that Ukraine guaranteeing not to join NATO will be part of the peace deal insisted on by Putin.

        1. They had that with the Minsk agreement. Angela Merkel said they never had any thought of honouring it. It was just a delaying tactic.

    1. Careful to not mention Trans..
      Careful to not mention sentence about same as social media hurty words in built up area after hours..

      1. It's like posting in Soviet Russia.
        Anyone with any facility for the English language can get round the literal minded bots.

    2. You have a very catholic choice in reading matter…

      BTL:
      Aiders
      London, United Kingdom
      10 hours ago

      I think the press think we are not paying attention..

      2K

      aperson12345
      Somewhere, American Samoa
      10 hours ago

      should have gone to specsavers !!

      1.1K

    3. The picture of the protagonist in this story tells us all we need to know about the person's pronouns and I agree the DM skilfully avoids being explicit while at the same time making things abundantly clear.

  46. As I have mentioned before, once YouGov realised I was of a right disposition, my questionnaires were limited to men's toiletries and tooth rotting 'orange' juice.

  47. Perhaps, with help of an alliance with wet Tories.. Labour can split the right vote and have 8 years of lunacy.

  48. There are some amusing Valentine's Day stories in today's DT

     https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/relationships/valentines-day-disasters/

    I doubt if all of them are completely true as I am sure we all remember things 'with advantages' when embroidering our stories.

    This one may not be true but it is certainly quite funny.

    The pink bath picnic massacre

    “We’d only been married a year – still in that so in love phase, before mortgages, before kids. We were renting a tiny terrace house in Nottingham with a huge, weird pink corner bath, which, unbeknownst to me, was about to take centre stage in the most disastrous Valentine’s Day of all time. I came home from work to find my husband had strewn pink rose petals up the stairs and was lying naked in the bath, proudly presenting what he called a “Pink Bath Picnic.”

    He’d surrounded himself with an array of pink foods – marshmallows, prawns, strawberry yogurt… He handed me a glass of pink champagne, but in my excitement, I dropped it. The glass shattered. Suddenly, there was blood. A lot of blood. Then, because my darling husband cannot handle the sight of blood, he fainted, smacked his head on the side of the sink and collapsed, naked, onto the floor. Cue me, also naked, frantically calling an ambulance. The paramedics arrived to find: rose petals, blood everywhere, marshmallows and prawns floating ominously in the bath, and my unconscious, stark-naked husband sprawled on the floor.”

    2. Yes, the Pakistani flag did fly over Westminster Abbey, but only for a short period. Other Commonwealth countries' flags also fly over Westminster Abbey for a short period, for the same reason:-

      The Pakistani flag was hoisted above the Abbey for the day on March 22 because a representative of the country’s High Commission attended Evensong that day, having been invited to commemorate Pakistan Day, according to the Westminster Abbey spokesperson.
      It’s a tradition dating back more than 50 years to invite High Commission representatives of Commonwealth states to Evensong on or around their national days, the spokesperson added. Should a representative attend, the state’s respective flag will be hoisted above the Abbey.
      The tradition is mentioned on Westminster Abbey’s official website, and various countries’ High Commissions have noted the occurrence, including Jamaica, in August 2011, Bangladesh, in March 2017, Singapore, in August 2013 and 2018, Sri Lanka, in February 2022 and 2023, and Trinidad and Tobago, in August 2022.

    3. Yes, the Pakistani flag did fly over Westminster Abbey, but only for a short period. Other Commonwealth countries' flags also fly over Westminster Abbey for a short period, for the same reason:-

      The Pakistani flag was hoisted above the Abbey for the day on March 22 because a representative of the country’s High Commission attended Evensong that day, having been invited to commemorate Pakistan Day, according to the Westminster Abbey spokesperson.
      It’s a tradition dating back more than 50 years to invite High Commission representatives of Commonwealth states to Evensong on or around their national days, the spokesperson added. Should a representative attend, the state’s respective flag will be hoisted above the Abbey.
      The tradition is mentioned on Westminster Abbey’s official website, and various countries’ High Commissions have noted the occurrence, including Jamaica, in August 2011, Bangladesh, in March 2017, Singapore, in August 2013 and 2018, Sri Lanka, in February 2022 and 2023, and Trinidad and Tobago, in August 2022.

    4. I thought they had sacked the leader of the clergy. It seems there are still influences in the wrong places.

    5. The Church of England is not entitled to fly the Union Jack, since it doesn't represent the rest of the Union.

    2. Unfortunately this situation simply underlines the problem our politicians have understanding our social structure. As the London may-or pointed out not long ago, that due to the large amount of shops in the capital, shop lifting was on the rise. Similarly It's not a housing shortage, it's too many people. It seems that most of our political morons are far too thick to understand this. Just Far Too Thick.

      1. This has been going on for years. When I used to go to meetings about planning it was always “we have a housing crisis because people are living longer and marriages are breaking up “. In vain did I point out that we were increasing the population by the equivalent of a small city every year so we actually had a population crisis.

    3. I doubt that many of them, particularly the women, have English at all, never mind as a second language.

    1. Aeneas has given an explanation, which if accurate I don't object to.
      It's a sign of respect of the individual's position as his country's representative. If it is only flown for the duration of his/her official attendance I think it is a reasonable gesture.
      I utterly despise Khan's approval of the Trump blimp, he may hate Trump but at the time Trump was POTUS and that disrespect to a President was utterly unforgiveable.

  57. The photo is a bit of a giveaway. Presumably that's why the DM published it.
    A ploy also used if the name Winston or Abdul isn't explicit enough in crime reports.

      1. I have a blond Anglo Saxon great nephew called Winston. His dad is a fan of the great man and they live in a part of the US where it probably is quite a common name for the reason Anne implies.

  66. 401656+up ticks,

    "The british people need to be told that" WRONG, the british peoples in the main have known and witnessed via 20/20 vision the odious change countrywide that has taking place daily, NOT coming shortly, but in YOUR TOWN and every other town near YOU, NOW.

    As seen they are in their multitudes condemning their
    children and those unborn to domestic foreign bondage, worse still the playthings of foreign pedophiles.

    Make or break, the ECONOMY is NOT our main concern
    the protection of the children and WOMEN are.

    https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1890336561469837333

    1. I think Jacqui Smith is going to celebrate St. Valentine's Day by asking her ex-husband to come round with his good collection of porn videos (which were paid for from her expense account) so that they can have a cosy evening together.

    2. I think Jacqui Smith is going to celebrate St. Valentine's Day by asking her ex-husband to come round with his good collection of porn videos (which were paid for from her expense account) so that they can have a cosy evening together.

    3. I suspect the Beeb have been given the nod by No.10.
      Let's face it, the BBC doesn't normally admit to failings by Labour politicians.

      1. I'm sure nod given directly to Tim Davie. Subtlety never 2Teir's ("I'm only a toolmaker's son") strong point. John 2 Jags Prescott was more subtle.

      2. I'm sure nod given directly to Tim Davie. Subtlety never 2Teir's ("I'm only a toolmaker's son") strong point. John 2 Jags Prescott was more subtle.

    4. Thank goodness he does not have a vote!

      Mind you, if he does support Labour it will show that it is the party which is naturally backed by Idiots.

      1. Well, actually he does, Rastus. But it is traditionally not cast. The King or Queen waits to see which party (or party in coalition) has the most MPs and then asks the leader of that party to form His or Her Majesty's government.

  70. The Telegraph has dropped into barefaced rubbish as the globalist paymasters drop into panic mode. Starmer's pronouncement on Ukraine and NATO is positively laughable given the views coming from the Trump team, and then Lo! ex-intelligence chiefs suggest Trump is an agent of Putin….a reprise of their earlier Clintonesque tripe. Telegraph or CNN – take your pick!!

    1. I remember some advice i was given when i was young was not to look desperate at the dance if you wanted a date.

      They look desperate.

  71. I despair. What is Starmer up to? Does he want to prolong the war, the killing and the further destruction of the infrastructure? Stirring the threat of Ukraine becoming a member of NATO is about as crass a statement as anyone could make.

    Is this statement his opening gambit for involving the British military?

    https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1890333049289584785

    2. The man's a complete idiot, taking the UK towards a pointless and very expensive war with a nation with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the British Isles several times. Why are we burdened with a continuous stream of pathetic politicians and their sycophantic supporters and civil servants?

    3. I think Victoria Nuland told them that Russia can be destroyed a la the European Union. Islamified, corrupted, cut off from her roots, net zeroed and broken up for conquest. The globalists are ideologues not historians. They have limited understanding. Even Germany and the UK haven't actually fallen as easily as Schwab, Soros et al would have predicted. There's a clip of Schwab being interviewed just before the Brexit vote. He states that the murder of Jo Cox is a shame because "she was one of ours" but it will, he said, secure the vote for Remain because the common people don't think, they act purely on emotion. They really believe that. They are the intelligent all knowing people and we are the idiots who will fall for any scam they throw at us.

    4. I think Sir Kier is offering to provide British Troops as part of a NATO peacekeeping force for the greens and existing bunkers of a planned marvellous POTUS demilitarized golf course. 🤔

    5. I have noticed when out walking Spartie, that people with whom I chat will sometimes venture into politics – as in "what the f ….."
      In all my years of dog walking, I've never had this happen before. Straw in the wind?

      1. My young neighbour asked me what I thought of Trump this morning . He doesn’t normally talk politics.

  72. 401656+ up ticks,

    Very good,
    Hospital waiting lists have fallen from an unacceptable level.

    Not so very good ,
    Hospital waiting lists have fallen from one unacceptable level to yet another unacceptable level.

    The dover morally illegal invasion daily numbers are potential patients, and as with indigenous social housing waiting list WILL receive secondary consideration when both issues are to be considered,

    https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1890378425958875162

      2. If that 'chap' from Hartlepool stood in Wales, he (or she, or it) would be electedI

        a monkey was hanged after he was mistaken for a French spy.

      1. Don't know, Phizz, it's all very low key coverage when Reform gets in.

        BBC 4 years down the line;
        "Last night an extreme right wing fly-by-night party won the General Election by a tiny margin, and now we take you to Strictly Come Dancing to watch the all Trans final!"

  74. Here is today's Good News,

    A huge gas field has been discovered in Lincolnshire.

    Here is tomorrow's Bad News,

    Labour will build a new town on top of it instead.

  75. Gosh – an extraordinary thing. The SUN has just come out. Haven't seen it for weeks. Won't last, of course, but it makes one feel – briefly – better.

    May be forced to do a bit of gardening.

  77. I don't remember who posted but the video of the Army guy not wanting migrants in the valleys who was acquitted in court by the jury.

    Does anyone still have the video link please.

  78. 2h
    People are missing what is, to me, the bigger question.
    How did someone with a supposedly glittering career at the bank of England end up in customer complaints for a third tier bank in Leeds?

    The natural career progression from the Bank of England would be to a top flight investment bank in the City, or to the World Bank or IMF, or into academia, or into a major think tank.

    Why did Rachel not follow those obvious career paths? Why did she take a huge step down in terms of career?

    The only likely explanation is that she was actually fired from the Bank of England for something smelly enough that she had to flee London (where she was born and brought up) as nobody would employ her here. That in turn would mean that she was fired from every job she had outside politics.

    Pookie
    1h
    Didn’t she claim that she was offered a job by some company such as GS and she turned it down. Perhaps that’s another claim that needs to be investigated.

    Pookie
    1h
    Indeed. There are a few things here I have observed too:
    Firstly, there are two routes of entry into the BoE.

    The first is for Research Economists – which is what Reeves would have us believe she was – but this is an entry level for PhD's. It's these people that have their photo's, profiles and credentials plastered over the BoE website. The onward career path for these individuals is as you describe

    The second route of entry is a more ordinary graduate recruitment programme, where new recruits are placed all over the bank on an as needed basis. This is actually the programme that Reeves was on.

    Secondly, all published research papers are stored in the BoE archives for anyone to read. In those archives there is only one publication that Reeves has her name on – and even then it's co-authored with some other bloke. For someone who has claimed to be a high-flying Economist at the BoE, is it not odd that she is not published more – even taking into account her short tenure.

    Pookie
    1h
    Even when at the BoE she was running for election, which she lost twice. I don't think her role there was even remotely high ranking.

    1. 1h
      Seems, according to Kyle, that the HBOS head of HR has the same desk that Keir Starmer had at the CPS. More passes that Ronaldo.

      1. Entirely agree, sos, and I doubt if she made it out of the Basic Training module of the programme for interns. For sure, she was never allowed to use live ammunition.

  80. Phew! back from the dental appointment – six monthly check up and descale – 20 minutes of torture with the hygenist…. anyway I survived. Why it was booked for a Friday morning I don't know – it completely threw me off my normal schedule.

    2. It doesn't need to be torture. They have different grades of tools they can use. Some are quite harsh but if you have sensitive teeth there are other options. They can also spread a mild anaesthetic gel across your teeth and gums.

      1. It's all torture – just having that whining machine in my mouth with the water coming out. Then there's the crochet hook. At least when she starts on the rubber buzzer with the orange flavour polish it's nearly over. I only choked once when the water went down my throat.

        1. You have my sumpathy. (see what i did there ? )

          My biggest problem is jaw ache and then spikes of pain in my temples. But they will stop and allow a rest. I am paying after all.

          5. In places, where they employ graduates fresh from dental schools. Who then move on to bigger things a year later.

      2. I think it depends on the hygienist, Phizzee. In the dental practice I attend there are two. One called Amy is very gentle, the other called Lorna is like Attila the Hun, totally insensitive. Even though my first class dentist doesn't work the same days as Amy I alway make two bookings to ensure I see them both on consecutive days.

  81. Top Notch speech just delivered by J D Vance at the Munich Security Conference. No current European 'leader' could come close to speaking as effectively. Well done Donny for selecting him.

  82. Anyone else getting "avatar" instead of the faceless person on posters with no image to their name?

    1. Nightmare existence and it's what they have planned for us. Of course, people can opt out by choosing MAID.

      3. Not sure what MAID is Ellie. 😊
        But where does that leave all of our grandchildren.
        When we pass on and leave our savings for them it will be taxed. We just need to get this mob out.

        1. Medical Assistance in Dying – what they call it in Canada. Soon to be available in the UK. Euthanasia.

          We certainly do need to boot this mob out as soon as possible.

      1. Never fear dear heart. The pendulum is swinging back to the right.

        We are seeing it all across Europe.

        There have been some holdouts like Hungary and now we have Donald Trump reinforcing that against the insane Left wing narrative.

        Anyone who has had their local elections cancelled should give their councillors hell.

          1. We are in the pits and the pendulum will swing and those who have that gas/elec/council tax massively increased should start sharpening their blades.

            Don't buy them fro Amazon though. Pointless.

    3. Not too long ago in China people who had been self dependant for decades on medium size plots of land were forced off and moved into newly built apartment block's, some of which would have been built on the land they had been living on previously.
      Anyone might be mistaken for thinking that could be what this bloody awful mob in Wastemonster and W(s)hitehall are trying to achieve.
      Especially with their current rumpus with the farming communities.

  87. ‘Rachel Reeves is picking on normal people’: The 144-year-old store killed off by Labour’s tax hike
    The last remaining branch of a retail institution is about to close for good – and those affected are deeply resentful of the Chancellor
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/13/rachel-reeves-tax-rises-beales-closing/

    My mother used to shop at Beales when she went to Bournemouth.

    BTL

    Instead of lying on her CV and fiddling her expenses Rachel Reeves could have been a far better chancellor if she had had some experience running a small or medium sized-business and sorting out its budgeting and cash flow.

    I feel that her incompetence would never have allowed her to rise to any position of real responsibility in the private sector.

      1. She, together with Hermer, Rayner, Lammy, Miliband, Mrs Balls, Phillipson and Mahmood [to name but a few] should never have been appointed to positions of responsibility and power. I can't remember the programme, but I think it was a sitcom, where one character cries out "Spare me this catalogue of mediocrity" – seems to adequately describe the whole Cabinet!

  88. That's why she joined the Labour Party.

    I think that Total Failure is one of the essential qualifications for being selected as a Labour Parliamentary candidate.

      1. I have seen the same in local Labour Social clubs. They will continue to support each other even when in my local, the treasurer helped himself to £20,000. The committee decided not to call the police because his wife was unwell.

        I also believe i was being set up for a fall or some other mug as when i knocked on his open door (he was at the Bar) there were trays of neatly folded notes on his desk.

        I backed up and shut the door.

    3. The newly elected Labour MP for Colchester, Pam Cox, is the guest speaker at the local Roman Circus "Colchester Recalled" group on Monday next, the 17th of February. I am a member and shall be attending, and am told that I can bring a friend or two – would Anne Allan and Korky the Kat like to join me? When we reach any questions, I shall be asking her in public why she voted for cancelling the Winter Fuel Payments (most of the membership are of an older generation). I need to research what else she has voted for, to use as follow-up questions. Will report on this later on this site.

        1. Not sure Conners, but there was more than one unconscionable decision, hence the need to do some research over the weekend.

  89. I just fed Dolly and Harry their roast chicken mixed with biscuits. They scoffed that and then can back to me with the 'i haven't had my dinner eyes'.

    I waved at them and shouted bugger off !

    They both went and are now spooning in their heated doggy house.

    Not quite Barbara Woodhouse but they do seem to understand swear words. (can't for the life of me imagine why).

  90. Got back from Stoke at 14:00 after having an hour and a half in Hanley.
    Bloody cold wind at Jodrell and in Stoke though.
    During the short walk from where I parked up I passed a lady giving assistance to a homeless lass in the doorway of the Victoria Hall in Hanley. I offered assistance, but she was already in touch with the Ambulance Service, then, within another 200 yards, passed two groups of people who were giving assistance to older pensioners who'd fallen over.
    Again both groups did not need extra assistance.

  93. You can call in the search party. My five week internet blackout has just ended. Off to the shops in a few minutes to 'get some in'!

    I'll leave the full report for later…

    2. Rastus has probably already mentioned this, but we now have internet via satellite. Much more stable and allows us to have video calls with cameras on for both parties; we have never been able to do that before for more than a couple of minutes at a time.

      The cherry on the cake is that it cost us nothing to set up. The French government is rolling out fibre optics across the country, and people who live too remotely, with bad internet provision and where the fibre optic cables will not be installed are entitled to a free kit and free installation. We prepared the base over Christmas with our son and the photo shows Rastus filling in the gully where the cable runs.
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/db7de376953b6b39c5a17a645b4c2a84e88cc3ffa16c26367cb0121c26ae82f7.jpg

      1. We have had cable (fibre optics) here for the past seven/eight years now and our internet service is impeccable.

  94. JD Vance: Demise of free speech in Britain is bigger threat than Russia. 14. February 2025.

    JD Vance, the US vice president, has said that free speech is on the retreat in Britain in his landmark address to the Munich Security Conference.

    The summit was intended to focus on European security and how to end the war in Ukraine but Mr Vance told allies that the main threat was from within – and not from the likes of Russia and China.

    I find this rather heartening. First Musk now Vance. These people know the truth about the UK.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/14/russia-ukraine-zelensky-putin-war-latest-news-munich/

    1. The Donald, Elon / Vance seem to be a team.

      Our government isn't a team and couldn't win an egg and spoon race. While they are trying to ban eggs!

          1. Looks like a tiny spade, if I'm allowed to say that. Handy at the WI perhaps on dessert night when things turn ugly.

          5. As you are aware i am a foodie. Which particular giant octopus do you think this would keep on your plate before it devoured you?

            Askin' for a friend several thousand miles away.

      1. I didn't even know Northerners were aware of such cutlery.

        I obviously missed the mark when i gave my Northern guests prongs and knives.

        Was rather funny though seeing them attempt to eat panna cotta.

        1. I bet you're one of those Southern Poofters who owns (and uses) fish knives. The worst piece of engineering design in history and most pointless implement ever made.

          1. I have no fish knives. Though i have plenty of fish (thanks to Garlands).

            Of course all that smoked fish makes me smell like a docker.

    1. I could see what I thought was your hairless cat (and I use that word carefully) and its shadow, but I zoomed in to see it was a black cat.

  99. Don't be fooled by the Sun – it is still jolly cold out. I spent two hours cutting back an overgrown Rosa Banksia and my hands have lost all feeling…

    Still – it was nice to be out in the FRESH air..despite the setbacks.

    1. Same with all the roads and Hammersmith (?) bridge.

      I do like your beard though, Katie. Very becoming.

      (that will teach you to beat me 2/1 at Scrabble !)

    2. As a Geordie, whose Grandmother photographed the link up of the two sides of the Tyne bridge in a series of black and white pictures, I am very sad to see the state of the bridge, and even the much unloved flyover in Gateshead! I remember it being built!

      1. My ex-wife is a plastic Geordie (a Wearsider) and she thought that the Tyne Bridge was the Redheugh ("Redyuff") Bridge!🤨

      2. I spent several days in Newcastle on several occasions a few years ago and stayed in the large hotel on the riverside with views of theTyne Bridge. It is a beautifully crafted and detailed edifice.

        I was surveying a former bank on Gray Street for Carluccio’s and designing a shopfront reconstruction.

        I went in search of the University Theatre which we had designed in the early seventies. I did not recognise the University as I remembered it but instead found our formerly beautiful building subsumed by various later accretions of a rather brutal nature.

        Eldon Square was gone and seemingly replaced by the most rebarbative concrete jungle posing as a shopping mall.

        I despaired.

        1. Me too! When they built Eldon Square shopping centre, my fathers beautiful office which was actually on the Square, was demolished! It was heartbreaking. The old University Theatre and the square there, have, as you say, subsumed by concrete.

    3. It's in the American press, and also certain UK outlets (Vance is in Munich (sorry posted London earlier)). I don't expect any improvement until we have a different shade of government (would have to be Reform for me, I like Rupert Lowe). Anyhow, personally some brighter news – dog, companion for last 15 years been sick and I was thinking is this the end …nope, vet assures me he has some problems due to age but otherwise can go on costing me £££ for some time yet….good news eh 🐶😆

      1. Would be better if your doggy friend was propely well, but much better than his being on the way out.

        1. I’m just glad to have him back, now snoring, on his back, 4 legs akimbo. Guessing more hoops to jump through, but for now very happy 😍

        1. You’re either a cat person or a dog person, Hugh…firmly latter category. First dog when I was three or four. This one is a ratter, if he gets chance. In my youth, I worked in a dyeing factory, rats different colours. one chap used to fetch in his JRT for field day, every so often. One day, sitting at my desk, no-one else present, heard a rustling…huge rat climbing out of waste paper basket, complete with milk bottle top between his teeth. Those were the days eh…inches away from a rat, now more than a few feet…😂🐀

        1. Thanks, Kathie…that’s one thing I can probably be sure of, the so-and-so. Was relieved nothing worse, dreading the C word. I went to look at a litter of pups almost 15 years ago, owned by a couple in their 60s…the man had emphysema could barely breath let alone walk, on crutches, his wife was on holiday with a friend – the litter was I think seven strong and it was a case of ‘how many will you take’, they were driving him mad. I sat on the floor, pups fighting/rolling around, then saw one just sitting to the side. He looked straight at me for a few seconds, came over, sat on my knee. Been with me ever since. You can call me a sucker…😂😂😂 I’ve had a dog since I was pre-school, three or four years old, majority were rescues, all great dogs. Hope you’re having a fab time, singing and enjoying the warmth x lovely to hear from you 🥰

          1. Sucker… 😉🤣🤣

            (All the best people are, when it comes to animals.)

            Currently dancing in the rain… 🤣🤣 x

          2. aaaah…and you’re going to tell me the rain is warm, aren’t you…great to think of you having a fab time, please tell me you’re ‘singin’ in the rain’, too!

          3. Worse than warm, I’m afraid; the rain is cool and *welcome* as such… 🤣🤣

            Sing in it I shall, especially for you. 🙂

            (PS Mistyped that as ‘sin in it’ and… am tempted! 😈🤣🤣

          4. Dear Kathie, thank you for ‘singing it in’, a video would be cool!…. Sin it in…we’re only here once 😉…have the best day xxx

    4. I wonder if the principal engineer, Alistair Swan is a descendent of Sir Joseph Wilson Swan. I am certain that JWS is spinning in his grave at the state of this country.

      1. The first residence to be lit by Swans lightbulbs was later turned into a school and my mother and aunt attended it in Low Fell.

          1. That’s the one! Both my sets of grandparents lived in Kells Lane! In fact they lived nest door to each other!

          3. Ooh yes! I remember you saying! It’s down at the far end of Kells Lane opposite what used to be the Birds Laundry!

  102. Afternoon all. Had a fraught day. I was running late due to walking farther and meeting up with a neighbour who wanted to fuss Winston. I didn’t have time to change so I set off in my dog walking kit, got to the end of the road and had to wait ages to get out. Turned the corner to be held up at four way traffic lights on red. Once I finally got going I was about to turn right when there was a pedestrian in the middle of the road. As per the Highway Code I stopped to let him cross. Eventually he realised and went. I was still just about on track to make it in the nick of time when I got a quarter of a mile from my destination and the road was closed! I had no map couldn’t remember the post code or what three words and didn’t have a phone number to call. Undaunted I sent an email and headed for the manege. Eventually we met up and all went well. When I got home I found a pile of shredded paper by the door. My agenda was in bits. Fortunately although the edges are chewed there’s enough to use. Two guilty dogs got a severe telling off. Who started it and who joined in enthusiastically I don’t know. I strongly suspect Winston was guilty of knocking the stuff off the table. Kadi’s legs are too short. The email was still in my outbox so that didn’t help.

    2. On one occasion my late hound ate a WHOLE loaf. I was unloading the shopping bag by bag – and left the loaf on the kitchen table. When I had completed the chores I couldn't find the loaf. Under the table was some torn plastic wrapping. When Robinson stood up – there was a loaf shaped bulge in his underneath. For 24 hours we were treated to yeasty farts….

      1. Our lovely boxer, Rumpole, once ate all the cubed beef I had prepared for our end-of-dinner fondue with our students. It was in the middle of the kitchen table, and I just popped into the larder for a few minutes: when I came back it was all gone – two pounds of top quality beef. We were so furious with him that he never stole again in his life!

        1. After I had rated them, Winston crawled along the floor and Kadi ran off and wouldn't come to me. Even after I'd said I've forgiven you, come back in, he wouldn't come near me. When I finally got him in, he wouldn't go near the back door, that being scene of the crime! He was told off when he first came for shredding things (including an expensive pair of kid gloves) and he had stopped. I suspect temptation, led astray by Winston, got the better of him and then he felt really guilty because he KNEW he shouldn't have done it.

          1. More likely he's got his arse out that Winston has appeared and he's worried that he's no longer Top Dog. I suspect that Winston will have dome the damage, too, and Kadi will resent being told off for it. I know how he feels.

          2. No, I don't think so. Kadi is still top dog; he gets lots of strokes and cuddles – more than W – and he's fed first (after me, of course). Winston doesn't seem to be an alpha male. I know Winston has taken tissues out of the wastepaper basket and started to chew them because I've caught him and told him off. Clearly not sufficiently. I was equal in my telling off for this misdemeanour (I started with Winston). I have no doubt Kadi was involved – he looked very guilty!

          1. Hold your nose farts! Sometimes I wonder that he manages to curl up with his nose near his tail! SBD = Silent But Deadly.

      1. Skimming the comments, they have the aroma of a co-ordinated attack by Dems who were lying in wait to ambush. The BTL comments on the DT article are very different.

      1. Call me vindictive, Kate……thanks……but I hope and pray that the Hillary creature lives just long enough to see Tulsi inaugurated as the first female President of the United States.

        1. Thanks Sue. These posts don't seem to play straight away now but i know enough to get them.

          I would love to see Vance and K Harris with both their spokespersons to go head to head.

          It is the only thing that will save CNN if they go back to being journalists.

    8. Brilliant speech, it dumbfounded politicos and military there. There's hope for the world yet. He must be another bloke that they'll be looking to silence.

  106. Wordle No. 1,336 4/6

    🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
    ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    Wordle 14 Feb 2025

    A tuneful Par Four?

    1. Silly mistake in my fourth guess. Had already ruled out that letter.

      Wordle 1,336 5/6

      ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
      ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨
      ⬜🟩⬜🟨🟩
      🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. Same here – pretty fortunate guess to get there, though!
      Wordle 1,336 4/6

      🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
      ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    5. Well done, bogie today.

      Wordle 1,336 5/6

      ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
      🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨
      ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
      ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  107. Today's immigration scam…

    Won't he face hostility if he remains here in UK?

    Zimbabwean paedophile allowed to stay in UK because he would face ‘hostility’ back home

    Deportation of man jailed for more than five years for child sex offences blocked by immigration tribunal judge

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/14/zimbabwean-paedophile-allowed-to-stay-in-uk/

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

    Andy Green
    1 hr ago
    Come to the UK and do whatever you like to our women and children , safe in the knowledge we will never deport you for your depravities s quite rightly that sort of thing is frowned upon but do please carry on as you please in the UK.

    What a completely warped sense of morals our left leaning judges have.

    Paul Marshall
    26 min ago
    Reply to Andy Green
    At this point it’s looking deliberate.

    John Harrison
    1 hr ago
    Vance is right . Our politicians do not respect the British people.

    1. This farce is getting more ridiculous [and annoying] by the day. Sack the judges and appoint some with common sense!

  108. Poppy Coburn
    JD Vance is right: the anti-democratic West is no longer worth defending

    Europe is the birthplace of liberalism; it seems only right that it dies here, too

    14 February 2025 4:12pm

    Yesterday a car was deliberately driven into a crowd of bystanders, injuring 30. Attacks of this nature – violent, random, nihilistic – have become commonplace, even mundane, in Europe; the identity of the alleged perpetrator (reported as a Afghan failed asylum seeker) grimly predictable even as the motive remains obscure.

    That this particular attack received so much coverage reflected less the scale of the violence and more the location and timing: in the centre of Munich, a day before the Security Conference.

    Perhaps it may have given some pause to the delegates of the liberal Western order, travelling to the city to discuss Europe’s external security threats, to be reminded in such a brutal fashion that the greatest danger to our civilisation operates within our borders. Or perhaps not: much easier to offer thoughts and prayers, and turn our eyes to the undoubtedly urgent questions of the future of Ukraine and Nato.

    But one attendant – arguably the most important, and certainly the most closely-watched – did pay attention to the chaos on the intersection of Seidlstrasse.

    As attendants waited for clarity on America’s new position on Russia, JD Vance railed against European complacency of a different kind: “why did this [attack] happen in the first place?” How much more blood must be spilt before “we change course, and take our shared civilisation in a new direction?”

    It is hard to underestimate the significance of a US Vice President attacking the suicidal immigration policy favoured by his country’s European allies. But Vance would go further: EU commissioners were rebuked as “commissars” unable or unwilling to recognise the importance of “democratic mandate”.

    What little strained applause Vance had so far garnered from the audience retreated into a stunned silence. He went on. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within”.

    In a phrase, Vance flipped the attention from abroad to home, laying the blame for our increasingly unstable and fractious world solely at the feet of our governing class.

    European leaders responded to America’s populist turn with revulsion, accusing Trump of a form of democratic backsliding. What this meant, however, was always uncertain. Europe is no stranger to attempts to subvert or outright overrule democratic decision making: the success of the AfD in Thuringia provoked the co-chief of a rival political party to push to ban it, while a constitutional court in Romania recently cancelled a presidential election to prevent the expected victory of the hard-Right Calin Georgescu.

    Our own country is no better. We shared a populist moment with the US in 2016 with the success of the Brexit referendum. Our political class, like their Atlantic counterparts, responded not with introspection but in the spirit of shameless reaction, demanding a second referendum in order to obtain a better result.

    Each social ill – and the subsequent reaction from voters – can be dismissed by invoking the magic word of “disinformation”. Feverish conspiracism over foreign intervention, be that Kremlin-controlled “bots” or Elon Musk’s dastardly algorithms, can be engaged with in polite company with hardly a raised eyebrow. We have wilfully blinded ourselves to our own insanity.

    JD Vance is perfectly clear on what America really thinks about us. We are no longer the continent of Shakespeare or Goethe, Churchill or Metternich – not even of JK Rowling. What interest international observers still take in our affairs revolves not around our constitutional or cultural strengths but our imminent collapse.

    We are a continent that jails protestors for praying outside of abortion clinics, systemically downplays the mass rape of women and children for the sake of upholding “community relations”, and terrorises our own citizens for daring to insult politicians on the internet. Europe is the birthplace of liberalism; it seems only right that it dies here, too.

    Our reactionary order does not understand that nations that have betrayed their own people are not worth defending. Expecting Europeans to fight against Putin’s tyrannical regime as our own civil liberties are wantonly cut away is as delusional as demanding that America continue to play the role of global policeman against the wishes of its voters. JD Vance has given our leaders a brutal wake-up call: change now, or be replaced.

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

    Peter Parker
    25 min ago
    JD Vance is right: Europe’s biggest threat isn’t Russia or China, but its own suicidal policies and failed elites.

    We’re crumbling under violence, censorship, and betrayal from within. Change course now!

    Peter Brown
    24 min ago
    JDV is welcome to replace 2TK anytime!

    Liz Mayee
    29 min ago
    The common thread is of course Islam.

    It is not compatible with Western values.

    Just say it as it is fgs.

    1. Of course it they tried to build consensus rather than attacking everyone, they might achieve even more.

    1. Both are essential for life, so pollute them, and thigs get much more miserable.
      Evening, Grizz.

        1. Colder than a witches' this weekend. Warming up to next weekend – allegedly.
          I'm done with winter this year.

        2. Colder than a witches' this weekend. Warming up to next weekend – allegedly.
          I'm done with winter this year.

    2. Life on Earth is amazing, as well as precarious when looking at it like that. Then consider that CO₂ makes up just 400 or 450 ppm of the atmosphere and things get even more weird. Then consider that there could be billions of planets similar to ours, and our human irrelevance is plain to see.

  110. Watching a TV programme on TVN about a famous-in-his-own-lunchtime presenter has bought an arable farm and is making TV about actually farming it.
    Just on ploughing just now – forgot to lower the plough… and why does everybody have John Deere machinery? Is it 'cos it's green?

    1. Energy costs: John Deere enjoy American low cost energy; Massey-Ferguson is being strangled by Miliband, I guess.

  111. That's me for today. Just having two hours of sunshine has bucked me up (yes – Bucked) no end. Tomorrow will be cold and miserable – again. Yawn.

    However, the Wet Office (trying no doubt to get its global boil statistics up to the mar) claims that it will be warmer from Tues onwards – and SIXTEEN (= 61ºF) on Thursday. I doubt that….

    Have a spiffing evening – those of you who like history – and missed the 197772 British Museum exhibition of items from Tutankhamun's tomb – might enjoy: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027787 Not only is the filming impeccable – but so is the commentary by a man in a suit and tie, who knows whereof he speaks, does not treat you as an imbecile and NEVER says: "Wow!!" To my delight, there are 13 instalments…..
    (I did not go to that expo as I had seen all the stuff twice at the Cairo Museum in 1949 and 1950…!!)

    I'll be up betimes as I have to bake a loaf tomorrow.

    A demain.

  112. Typical.
    PTPH 'Plea and Trial Preparation Hearing' for alleged offences of innocent Airport brothers moved to Liverpool Crown Court where Sharia Law doesn't apply.
    Ridiculous waste of time..
    Anyhow, they've now pleaded Not Guilty.

  113. Typical.
    PTPH 'Plea and Trial Preparation Hearing' for alleged offences of innocent Airport brothers moved to Liverpool Crown Court where Sharia Law doesn't apply.
    Ridiculous waste of time..
    Anyhow, they've now pleaded Not Guilty.

  114. Typical.
    PTPH 'Plea and Trial Preparation Hearing' for alleged offences of innocent Airport brothers moved to Liverpool Crown Court where Sharia Law doesn't apply.
    Ridiculous waste of time..
    Anyhow, they've now pleaded Not Guilty.

  115. UK running a gnats over 50% on gas, 9% on nuclear – the latter made me think: For a country that basically invented nuclear power generation, I started in the nuclear power generation industr (CEGB) after my Ph.D, working on Hinckley Point C safety case… and yet, they haven't generated a single watt there – since 1987! What fuckwittery is this?

    1. Why the F should the UK go to war with Russia? What fuckwit thinks that's a good idea?
      Let that person, personally, tool up and go fight Russia.

      1. 401656+ up ticks,

        Evening O,
        The war department of the scamming brigade, play them at their own game, make their domestic assets (hotel inmates) work to our ( the tax payers) advantage.

        For my money, nothing wrong with Ivan Kutnetzov that could not be settled with a vodka or two.

    2. Why the F should the UK go to war with Russia? What fuckwit thinks that's a good idea?
      Let that person, personally, tool up and go fight Russia.

  118. In a weird mood this evening. Not been like this since I can remember.
    Rapidly getting pi$$ed on nasty cheap red wine.
    Have a premonition of seriously bad news, and unfortunately, my premonitions are often right.
    So, what I can expect is maybe a call from Mother's care home tomorrow… meanwhile, more wine…

    2. Oh Paul! Try not to think the worst! Premonitions, like odd dreams, are disturbing but normal.

          1. 3 litre box. It's awful – but all I've got that's not spirits, and those I can't handle in volume.

      1. Yes, remember him very well. A sad end, so it was.
        I developed the sense of doom yesterday before a couple of glasses of nasty red… it hasn’t helped. Just got to hope I’m wrong.

          1. Indeed.
            I am knowing that now, but it is in a box labelled Sicily, and I love Sicilian wines.
            I also have good quality Italian wine, but that's for tasing, not glugging.
            TBH, moonshine with lemon would do – I'm a bit freaked out just now.

    1. Dear God, what fcukwittery.
      Did the USS Harry S Truman just expect the rest of the world to get outa the fucking way, and expect the tanker to dodge? Those things sail like Cyprus would!

  127. Just back from a Valentine's supper with HG.

    A superb menu, we licked every plate.

    She's not happy that I ate the rose…

          3. Actually, it's totally fair.

            I can be, when riled.

            Generally I try not to be, and given that tonight was our 55th Valentine's celebration, I suspect that she errs on the side of accepting my quirks.

          6. Well done to you two too.
            We'll still be under 80 if we hit your milestone, so I suspect you're roughly 5 years older than us.

          7. We met in 1962, started courting in October 64 and married in March ‘68. 57 years next month.

          8. Fabulous, Alf!
            So may congratulations! A whole lifetime worth of luck all used in getting the woman of your dreams to marry you!

          12. Wow , snap Alf, we are also reaching 57 years this year.

            Time has gone by so quickly , there are 10months between us in age .. Moh a 1946 baby and me 1947 .

            What an adventure .

    3. Ridiculous. Our police, our rules. FFS stop pandering to these people. Why should she have her face covered.

  131. 401656+ up ticks,

    Pillow Ponder,

    There can be no argument against this comment,

    It really needs crudity to get through to a great many folk ,these political overseers and many of their employees will not be satisfied until there is not a CHILD remaining a virgin due to foreign paedophile actions within the British borders.

    https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1890498820288479723

  132. Thought for the day:
    If RFK Jr stops vaccinations will the lack of herd immunity for so many of the diseases come back to bite him?
    I hope not, but there must be a genuine risk that a mass ban might be very harmful.

      1. Difficult to tell.
        I think his comment regarding those who voted against his appointment having to have all 72 suggests he's against most, if not all!

          1. I’m hoping Vance will continue as he’s started.
            8 years of Vance, after Trump, might well destroy the Clinton Obama Biden crapocracy, which has harmed the US as much as Blair Brown did the UK.

        1. Good God!
          I had Yellow Fever, Cholera, Tetanus, Diptheria, Whoping cough, TB, and Rubella. What else?
          But then, I grew up in Nigeria.

          1. I'm certain that many of the vaccinations of our era were vital, I'm less sure about many of the more recent.

          2. Au Contraire, they are vital for Big Pharma profits! Over on ZH a while back someone compiled a list of all the big Pharma CEOs. If the list is verifiable it makes for an interesting read….

          3. Vaccinations that stop one ever getting the disease I can accept, Polio, TB etc.

            Those that don't,, I'm wary.

          6. I had Yellow Fever, Cholera, Tetanus, Diptheria, Whoping cough, TB, and Rubella.

            Blimey, I’m surprised you’re still with us!
            }:-O

          7. Rabies, Hepatitis (for travel abroad). I caught Whooping Cough in hospital and didn't need the TB one. Haven't had Yellow Fever or Cholera jabs, but I've had the rest.

        2. Good God!
          I had Yellow Fever, Cholera, Tetanus, Diptheria, Whoping cough, TB, and Rubella. What else?
          But then, I grew up in Nigeria.

        3. What JFK jnr wants to find out is why Autism has gone from 1/10,000 to 1 /46 children over the past 3-4 decades…..

    3. Born in ‘46 when vaccination was compulsory, during and after the war, unless parents got a letter from a JP excusing us. Mum did that for all 5 of us born between ‘34 and ‘46. All had healthy lives.

  133. Moh made a very passable Beef Strog. Delicious and very welcome , he used rump steak,masses of mushrooms to pad things out , accompanied by rice and loads of vegetables .

    Followed by fruit salad ..

      2. I was. The cry for help from the people was answered by Vance not the politicians in Europe.. to their shame.

  135. After watching two episodes of a 2015 mini series I recommend it to Nottlers it's called Capitol. On Netflix. Apparently then on bbc.
    Lots of familiar faces excellent acting and current events.
    Good night all 😴

  141. Well chums, that's me off to bed now. Good Night, sleep well, and see you all tomorrow morning.

    1. Achieving the impossible – adopted as Scotland's national anthem and attaining the status of being even more boring than 'God Save the King'.

  145. Goodnight, all. The Rayburn is stoked and the hot water bottles are warming the bed. Dogs are asleep and will have to be woken up to go out for their last wee before we go to bed.

  147. From Coffee House the Spectator

    15 Feb 2025
    Spectator Life
    Mark McGinness
    The perfect genius of P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘never-never land’

    Pelham Grenville (PG – or Plum) Wodehouse breathed his last on Valentine’s Day fifty years ago. As Evelyn Waugh saw it, Wodehouse inhabited a world as timeless as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland. Wodehouse himself said it was as though he was forever in his last year at school. It was, Waugh said, ‘as if the Fall of Man had never happened’.

    In a letter to some admirers, Wodehouse wrote:

    The world I write about, always a small one – one of the smallest I ever met, as Bertie… would say – is now not even small, it is non-existent. It has gone with the wind… In a word, it has had it. But I have not altogether lost hope of a revival.

    Of course, that revival never came, and Plum died aged 93, just six weeks after he was so belatedly knighted.

    Although they came to life in 1915, Bertie and Jeeves were – and remained – men of an earlier age

    Born in Guildford in 1881, the son of a Hong Kong magistrate, he was the scion of one of Britain’s oldest baronetcies and the Earldom of Kimberley (he was also a great-nephew of the great Victorian, Saint John Henry, Cardinal Newman). Two-year-old Plum was soon back in England with relatives – clergymen uncles and ‘a surging sea of aunts’ (among them Aunt Mary – Mary Bathurst Deane – his least favourite and his inspiration for the ferocious Aunt Agatha), accompanying them on visits to country houses where he often ended up in the servants’ hall.

    Then, having pleaded to go, he spent ‘six years of unbroken bliss’ as a border at Dulwich College – popular, clever, and good at games. He was at heart forever the schoolboy.

    Family finances denied him a place at Oxford so his father found him a job in the London office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. He was, in his words, ‘the most inefficient clerk whose trouser-seat ever polished the surface of a high stool’. Writing – journalism and school stories – became an escape and, in 1904, allowed him to go to New York : ‘like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying.’ He stayed there throughout the first world war, refused enlistment due to poor eyesight.

    In 1914, he fell instantly in love – rather like Bingo Little throughout The Inimitable Jeeves but only once. He wed a fellow expat, the twice-widowed, former chorus girl Ethel Rowley, who had an eleven-year-old daughter, Leonora, whom Plum adopted and adored. Ethel was described by the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge as ‘a mixture of Mistress Quickly and Florence Nightingale with a touch of Lady Macbeth thrown in’. In reviewing Robert McCrum’s consummate biography for this magazine, Michael Vestey added, ‘She was everything Wodehouse wasn’t: highly sexed, sociable, extravagant with money and yet it was an extremely successful partnership that lasted sixty years.’

    Interestingly, his own domestic contentment, supported by an endless succession of pets, mainly Pekinese, allowed him to write and was as enduring as that of Bertie and Jeeves’ six-decades together.

    He reserved his wit and conversation for the page. When an uncharacteristically starry-eyed Waugh met Wodehouse for the first time, he was disappointed to find their exchanges did not get beyond the inequities of income tax. And when Plum was invited to join the Round Table gang at the Algonquin hotel in New york, he complained, ‘All those three-hour lunches. When did these slackers ever get any work done?’

    Although they came to life in 1915, Bertie and Jeeves were – and remained – men of an earlier age. Another Wodehouse devotee, Hugh Massingberd put it, ‘I like to believe that Wodehouse’s Edwardian never-never land was not so far removed from what England might have been like in the 1920s if the apocalyptic Great War had never taken place.’

    And all those plots – with all those winning ingredients – a country house, its peppery owner, an icy consort, a glacial Grande Dame, the odd aunt and an odder uncle or two, perhaps a clergyman, and of course a butler; a series of breakfasts, lunches, teas and dinners, a few chums, a fiancée and, of course, the requisite luckless, love-struck young couple. Add a cricket match, a game of golf, or a horse race, a break-in, a concert or fete. And, with Jeeves and Bertie perhaps in disguise, the flawless formula is plumb in place.

    But what makes the novels sing is the Master’s musical prose. The love interest with a laugh ‘like a squadron of cavalry galloping over a tin bridge’; the oft-quoted, ‘I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled’; and ‘It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a complete food well in advance of medical thought.’ Vintage Bertie.

    The same Bertie who never utters a biblical or literary quote that he can get right. Leaving it, of course, to Jeeves to correct him but never quite finish it. And yet, though ‘mentally negligible’, an unselfconsciously brilliant narrator. Wodehouse wrote in Bertie’s voice more than any other and, although he would say that the absent-minded, hen-pecked, all-for-a-quiet life, Lord Emsworth (of Blandings fame) was his nearest alter ego, one must agree with the Wodehousean scholar, Richard Usborne, that there is much of Plum in Bertie.

    Plum’s only brush with scandal was certainly the result of a Bertie moment. In 1940 he was taken prisoner at Le Touquet by the invading Germans. Ethel recalled his arrest. He had ten minutes to pack. ‘I was nearly insane; couldn’t find the keys to the room for the suitcase, and Plum went off with a copy of Shakespeare, a pair of pyjamas and a mutton chop.’ He was interned for nearly a year, finally in Upper Silesia. (‘If this is Upper Silesia,’ he wrote, ‘what must Lower be like?’).

    After his release, he made, at the request of the Nazis, six amusing, apolitical radio broadcasts from Berlin to the United States, which had not yet entered the war. To the British under siege across the Channel this was either treason or collaboration. Enquiries by the British and later the French found no evidence to prosecute Plum; while scholarly examination since has established nothing more than foolish naivety. As his biographer, McCrum, put it, ‘Jeevesian in his professional life, it was his fate to be Woosterish in Berlin.’ Wodehouse would never again set foot on English soil.

    Incursions into the real world are rare in Plum’s books. Like politics – and parents, death, dates, and sex are alien. Beds are for nothing but sleeping, convalescing, or short-sheeting. Bertie is stirred of course, but by nothing more carnal than Madeline Bassett’s ‘blonde hair with all the trimmings’ and Florence Craye’s ‘wonderful profile’. Love is a different thing. His fellow Drones were stricken all the time: in the Mating Season (1949), the Master juggled no less than four infatuated couples.

    True, Bertie was not as susceptible as Bingo Little, but he fell in love – with Cynthia Wickhammersley, Angelica Briscoe, Pauline Stoker. Although, in Bertie’s case, the state of betrothal does not always (or even usually) equal devotion and he never makes it to the altar. His Aunt Dahlia quipped, if the girls Bertie has been engaged to were placed end to end, they would reach from Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner.

    The arcane marks of a gentleman are taken as read. ‘Never trust a man who keeps billiard chalk in his waistcoat pocket.’ And in cricket, ‘a gentleman should not score more than half his team’s total.’ There are, of course, weightier tropes. In The Code of the Woosters, Wodehouse lays down the two commandments upon which most of his Bertie plots hinge: Thou shalt not let down a pal; and Thou shalt not scorn a woman’s love

    Meeting his Maker on Valentine’s Day 1975 – the timing as perfect as his prose – it was invariably love that underpinned his fiction. As Bertie reflected (a rare phenomenon), ‘I wonder if you have observed a rather rummy thing about it – viz. that it is everywhere. You can’t get away from it. Love, I mean. Wherever you go, there it is, buzzing along in every class of life.’

    Written by
    Mark McGinness

  149. From Coffee House the Spectator

    It is easy to forget how popular Neville Chamberlain was in the autumn of 1938. Proclaiming ‘peace in our time’ after signing the Munich Agreement, he was heralded as the deal-maker supreme. A leader who’d averted needless bloodshed and whose critics were merely warmongering naysayers. You don’t need me to tell you the rest of the story, but you might have thought its lessons wouldn’t be so easily forgotten.

    Today it is Donald Trump casting himself as the bringer of peace to continental Europe. Posting on his Truth Social platform, the president said he’d spoken with Vladimir Putin, and that they two men had ‘agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately’ over ending the war in Ukraine. He continued ‘It is time to stop this ridiculous War, where there has been massive, and totally, unnecessary, DEATH and DESTRUCTION.’

    Trump is not wrong that the death toll, on both sides, has been horrific. Civilians in Ukraine’s major cities live under the constant threat of drone and missile strikes, families have been separated, and Ukraine requires rebuilding and repair. The desire to end this war, and quickly, is entirely legitimate. You won’t find a single person in Kyiv, or Kharkiv, who doesn’t yearn for the fighting to stop.

    Yet the lesson from Munich is that if invading tyrants are not defeated, or at the very least punished, they will strike again. This week, Trump’s new Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, said there was no likelihood of Ukraine joining Nato, giving in to one of Vladimir Putin’s key demands before negotiations have even begun. Both Hegseth and Trump also poured cold water on the notion that Ukraine should return to its pre-2014 borders, effectively meaning Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea is now accepted by the US.

    Given the concessions the White House has already made to Russia before peace talks have even begun, it is hard to imagine Ukraine will be allowed to return to its pre-2022 borders either. Perhaps a small slice of occupied territory will be ceded by the Kremlin in return for Ukrainian troops withdrawing from Kursk, but that’s about it. Putin will inevitably declare his ‘special military operation’ a success and bask in the glory of having expanded the Russian Federation through force.

    Doubtless Trump will offer Ukraine some form of security ‘guarantee’, designed to deter future Russian aggression. It won’t be worth the paper it’s written on. Ukrainians have never forgotten the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which the US, UK and Russia pressured Ukraine into giving up its nuclear weapons, in exchange for assurances that the country would never be subjected to military force or economic coercion. It is to our eternal shame that when, just 20 years later, Ukraine faced such aggression, both Britain and America stood by.

    Vladimir Putin has been clear about his long-term goals. In his 2021 essay, ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, he asserted his view that the two peoples are essentially one. He described modern-day Ukraine as an ‘anti-Russian project’. He compared the country’s formation to the use of weapons of mass destruction against Russia. Let’s be clear – Putin isn’t just talking about the Donbass, or Crimea, or Kherson – he means the entire Ukrainian nation. He wants it gone.

    Much has been made of the underlying weakness of Russia’s economy. The Ruble is weak, inflation is soaring, and labour shortages are so severe that North Korea is now sending workers to fill jobs in Russia’s construction industry. Nonetheless, Putin has managed to maintain growth by shifting his country’s economy onto a war-time footing. Russia’s military industrial base is rapidly expanding, and will continue to do so – and with Putin able to exploit rare earth minerals in newly annexed Ukrainian territory, he won’t have trouble funding it.

    Russian forces will be grateful for the respite of a peace agreement, but rest assured, they will be back. The man who described the break-up of the Soviet Union as the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’ is not about to give up on his dreams of expanding mother Russia further. Tragically for Ukraine, it seems the US is ready to sell the country out. Vice-President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have been dispatched to meet Volodomyr Zelensky this week. The irony won’t be lost on the Ukrainian president that the meeting will take place in Munich. Donald Trump is the Neville Chamberlain of our time.
    Written by
    James Hanson
    James Hanson presents Times Radio's Frontline series on the war in Ukraine.

    1. " Tragically for Ukraine, it seems the US is ready to sell the country out. "

      If it's true that they bought it, I presume it's theirs to sell.

    2. So plunging Europe into war in 1938 instead of 1939 would somehow have been better? I don't think so. This article is full of lazy assumptions!

      1. My grandfather, an engineer who worked on the design of the engines for the Lancaster bomber in the 1940s, always maintained that Chamberlain was buying time, Britain being hopelessly unprepared for war in1938

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