Damian King

@themeopoli @afneil Stop with the deification of the armed forces, it’s already ruined the NHS. Our brave service personnel have been undermined by successive waves of blundering Ministers and inept top brass. Our troops were woefully under equipped for Afghanistan and suffered as a result.

@afneil People like you... true 'patriots'... love to slag off our armed forces, usually whilst posting from their second homes abroad. Yes, our forces have been decimated, but our adversaries don't need people like you doing their PR work for them. Our navy is manned by the finest.

French TV tonight - "C'est une honte nationale": dépassée par la France, suppléée par l'Allemagne, qualifiée de "jouet" par Trump... Le déclin de la marine britannique embarrasse les Anglais

@eatmychuddies @afneil The budget isn’t the problem, it’s what the money is spent on and the people in charge that are the issue.

@afneil My living room tonight - "It's a national disgrace": Andrew Neil quoting the opinion of a French TV station as evidence of the decline of the British navy. Apart from Trump calling it a "toy" did they offer any reason why we need to pay for a more powerful navy?

@Arron_banks Does it really take 5000 people to administer an offshore wind farm? - smells fishy to me!

Must be election time, the Welsh public can’t be bribed.

@SecScottBessent @john4brexit @FT With very, very few exceptions, the entire UK media landscape is utter trash and completely captured by the globalist open borders mass immigration top-down government socialist movement. Nobody in their right mind should take their fake news propaganda seriously.

By publishing this explicitly false story, the @FT has officially become tabloid trash for market participants. Despite my direct, on-the-record denial of ever having advocated, explored, or espoused the idea that Chancellor-Bank of England statute serving as a prototype for a Treasury-Federal Reserve relationship, FT journalists manufactured a story with the headline, “Scott Bessent praised Bank of England as model for tighter oversight of the Federal Reserve.” These pathetic journalists have clearly fabricated a story to give the impression that both I and the Trump Administration are setting “about restructuring the relationship… at a time when President Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented assault on the world’s most important central bank.” Their mendacious assertion is based on vague statements from unnamed “financial industry executives familiar with the matter.” In short, FT has literally manufactured an entirely fake policy position for me and the Administration. Other than furthering a maliciously false narrative of dysfunction and divisiveness, it baffles the mind as to why they would shred their already diminished journalistic credibility. Over the past 10 years, I have written more than 20,000 words opining on the Federal Reserve decisions, personnel, structure, and modifications. Nowhere have I ever mentioned this ridiculous notion. The Governor’s letters to the Chancellor have proven to be a useless and perfunctory device. There is much to be said about the storied Bank of England, but any recreation of its operating framework on this side of the Atlantic has never been contemplated. The shameful journalists and editors at the FT are shocking in their meretriciousness, lack of standards, and general intellectual libertinism. It is the worst tradition of Fleet Street to manufacture news rather than report on it. They have brought irredeemable shame to their parent organization, Nikkei Inc., with whom I had previously held excellent relations. In 2025, I laid out a comprehensive 6,000+ word review of each and every policy reform that I believe should be adopted by the Federal Reserve. Read my actual, real thoughts on and proposals for Federal Reserve reform at the International Economy: international-economy.com/TIE_Sp25_Besse…

@kaya85kaya @KathrynPorter26 @Marblechops79 @Ed_Miliband Yes, gas comes to the rescue at short notice and because of that the net zero fanatics claim it’s causing bills to rise. A fairer system for consumers would be to award generation in order of cheapest bidder first.

@RealGreenAcres @KathrynPorter26 @Marblechops79 @Ed_Miliband Every commodity has clearing price 100 million barrels oil trade daily. We don't get Saudi oil cheaper because it costs less to produce than Canadian Sand Oil Gas doesn't 'set the price' The marginal unit does That is often gas because it can actually turn on when you need it

Decoupling wholesale electricity prices from gas will not lower bills because renewables are guaranteed a price HIGHER than the cost of generating electricity with gas except when gas prices reach very high levels eg 2022 We are no-where near such levels now And @Ed_Miliband should ask... If renewables are so cheap, why are the green tariffs offered by his friend @DaleVince HIGHER than the price cap which is based on the current wholesale price ie linked to gas? news.sky.com/story/ed-milib…

@DPJHodges Except, he’s supposed to keep a record of all government business and forward to his office so that an official can store them. So no excuse.

For those asking, the reason why McSweeney's messages have been lost is because it was his official government phone, and they are not backed up because doing do would rely on using a third party server.

@Marblechops79 I have invested in a renewables ETF a few years back that’s currently trading at approx 50% NAV so I know what you mean 😢

Yeah, I read about that a few yrs ago There are so many fiscal outages that nobody even thinks about We’ve sunk £800 bn of pension fund money into shit renewable companies over the past decade too for example The share prices have all collapsed meaning reduced returns, reduced future consumer spending power. Here’s Orsted over past 5 years 90% loss actual but over 100 if you consider markets going uo over that time. That’s likely over £12 billion out of our wallets 😢

@zatzi @d5_rss They don’t care either way. They see themselves as the ‘good guys’. Every dodgy deal they do, every corrupt appointment, is justified because they are ‘doing good’. Everyone else is ‘bad’. We don’t have a 2-tier justice system we have a system that preserves ‘good’ over ‘bad’.

Does the Labour government think: A) we were all born yesterday Or B) we’ve all had frontal lobotomies?

@Marblechops79 @KathrynPorter26 @Ed_Miliband My understanding is that it’s even worse with renewables. When the strike price is high, they get paid at the strike price. When the strike price is low, their cfd’s provide top up payments. The entire system is designed to make renewables appear cheap and gas appear expensive.

For someone who is a former investment banker, I feel like shoving my head into the wall at this economic crass Damian It is utterly insane You can only surmise that the renewable vested interests have got him firmly embraced - since they are the only ones who get any benefit out of that system

One Missing Phone. One Very Convenient Gap in the Evidence. There is an old principle in the law of evidence that individual facts, each innocent in isolation, can combine to form proof. No single thread condemns. But weave enough of them together and the picture becomes impossible to deny. Keir Starmer spent years applying that principle to other people. He is about to have it applied to him. Morgan McSweeney's phone went missing in October last year, one month after Lord Mandelson was removed from his post as ambassador to Washington, and shortly after Downing Street officials had begun interviewing witnesses as part of an internal inquiry into how that appointment came to be made. The Metropolitan Police, we now learn, closed the investigation without speaking to McSweeney. They had written down the wrong address. The case has since been reopened after a journalist asked the right question. The phone matters because of what it almost certainly contained. McSweeney and Mandelson were close. McSweeney drove the appointment. The messages between them would have constituted, as lawyers sometimes say, the best evidence: direct, contemporaneous, unmediated by retrospective account. Those messages are gone. This would be less troubling if WhatsApp messages vanished when phones were stolen. They do not. They are stored. They can be recovered. Their disappearance is not a technical inevitability. It is a choice, or a failure, and nobody has yet explained which. One missing phone. One very convenient gap in the evidence. There is more. McSweeney was bound by guidance requiring him to preserve significant government information onto official systems. The Cabinet Office holds some of his messages. Not all. The remainder have not been accounted for. Meanwhile the documents that have been released tell their own story. Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, described the appointment process as weirdly rushed. He had raised concerns about Mandelson's reputation with McSweeney directly, and was told the issues had been addressed. Sir Philip Barton, a senior foreign policy official, raised concerns too. Both men were overridden. The appointment proceeded. Months later Mandelson was sacked, the internal inquiry began, and then, with a timing that strains credulity, the phone disappeared. Then the police misfiled the report and closed the case. History offers us a word for this kind of sequence. Not conspiracy, which implies coordination and intent that cannot here be proved. The word is omerta: the closing of ranks, the convenient forgetting, the institutional instinct to protect itself from the reckoning it has earned. It does not require a villain. It requires only a culture in which the right questions are not asked, the right addresses are not recorded, and the right messages are not preserved. Keir Starmer came to office promising a different kind of politics. Transparency. Accountability. The rules applying to everyone. What his government has produced instead is a missing phone, a botched police report, unrecovered backups, a rushed appointment, a severance payment made to stop a disgraced peer talking, and a paper trail with a hole in it exactly where the most important evidence should be. That is not bad luck. That is a pattern. And patterns, as this Prime Minister knows better than most, are evidence. "The messages between them would have constituted, as lawyers sometimes say, the best evidence: direct, contemporaneous, unmediated by retrospective account. Those messages are gone."

@tomhfh I was under the impression that the PM was not allowed to prorogue parliament when it suited him?

This makes a leadership challenge immediately after 7th May local elections somewhat challenging.

@clim8resistance In fairness, RV and Caravan owners have been using these systems for a few years now, without government involvement. I’m not convinced that one single 200w or 400w panel scales up well to an entire house though.

Cheap crap, made to extremely low standards, not fit for purpose, with almost instant buyer's remorse. The Labour government green agenda is just one gimmick after another. But at least you can take stuff from Lidl's middle aisle back for a full refund.

@energygovuk What a fantastic business model. You have guaranteed the price you pay your supplier and then you give the product away for free. How has nobody tried that before!

Sometimes there is too much wind for our outdated grid to handle, especially in Scotland and the East of England. Rather than paying wind farms to switch off we’re trialling a new system where people who live near these constrained areas get cheaper - or even free - electricity.

@wattagit184683 @clim8resistance That won’t be the same for everyone though. I have a 5.2kw system with battery and a cheap early morning rate. This month we’ve had a few nice days but a lot of cloudy dull days.

@clim8resistance No system cost was £8500 my electric bills are over 30% down Dec Jan in Feb exported more than used same this month Most use at 9p kw on EV tariff charge battery export during the day at 15p Kw already earned £40 this month and used £32 incl stand charge So break even under 8yrs

This is such bullshit. What's the payback period on a £500 panel that may not even produce 2% of its rated capacity? Even well-positioned solar PV cells in well-engineered farms have a capacity factor averaging just 10%. If you're not south-facing, you lose 50% of that. If your panel is facing the horizon, you lose 30%. Michael Shanks and his boss should be laughed out of News studios, not be allowed to mislead millions of people.

@clim8resistance @Marblechops79 Why is the Government spending taxpayers money telling supermarkets what products they should stock?

@andrew_lilico That’s assuming that the Eurocrats are more competent than our lot - which is a bit of a stretch to say the least!

The best argument that Brexit was a mistake is the claim that it's turned out that the British political & governing class is too rubbish to run Britain properly without the EU's help. The counter-hope would be that that's only temporary, & they'll improve as they get used to it.

@Deserter909 @energygovuk It can still work on an east-west facing as you have twice the roof area and panels are cheap. You need a battery though to make the most of them, and those are expensive. My experience was that the cost of the battery was twice the price of the panels (6kw for 5kw of panels)

@energygovuk This is a relatively new housing estate. Why aren't the houses oriented towards the south? When they are, why are obstructions allowed on the roofs preventing their full use for solar generation? Change the planning rules so new homes can exploit solar better.

We're driving forward the rollout of “plug-in" solar panels to be available in shops within months, saving people money on their bills. This comes alongside new rules to ensure the majority of new homes are built cheaper to run, with solar panels & clean heating as standard.

@energygovuk I’m speaking from experience when I tell you that they do naff all when demand for electricity is highest. You need home battery storage, which is a lot more expensive.

@oatesch @redditchrache The golden rule in tech. Never put anything live on a Friday!

@redditchrache The chief exec has a right to be pissed at working on the weekend when the site could have been opened on a Monday. Who launches anything on a Friday?

Very good piece and chimes with many of us who have been ministers. A little story. One Friday night as we were emerging from the pandemic I got a call from my private secretary. I was a junior transport minister. He said that the driving test site which had just re-opened had crashed. If you remember, driving tests couldn't happen during Covid, meaning that people couldn't drive at all - including those who had to get re-tested (older people, HGV drivers etc). There was a huge backlog of people desparate to get tests. Well obviously once it opened, so many people logged on it couldn't cope. The transport secretary had been dealing with it all day but by 10pm he had enough and as the most junior minister I was asked to take over. MPs were shouting at us because their constituents couldn't get tests, couldn't take up jobs, were losing income, etc. I said to my private secretary, get me the Chief Exec of the Driving Test agency on the phone to brief me and tell me what he's doing to fix the problem. "Minister, I can't do that" "Why not?" "Its 10pm on a Friday night". Silence. More silence. "Can you ask him to get on a call with me?" "Minister, we have asked, and he's not minded to" Gentle expostulation on my part. "But I'm working at 10pm on a Friday night. I am certainly not minded to, but it is his agency that is causing us the problem?" "I know minister. But I still can't get him on the call". Cut to the end, I pushed through. He came on the call an hour later. I got him to brief me with regular updates starting at 7am Saturday. We got the thing open and working by lunch time. But really! Without being rude to many of my former colleagues, I know many of them wouldn't have bothered. But more to the point, as a minister, why should you have to! If people were doing their jobs as they should, they should take ownership of precisely these problems. Small story, but repeated time and again. Side note - its not just the core civil service that are the problem but the myriad of ALBs (arms length bodies) and NGAs (non governmental agencies) that are even harder. Civil servants themselves have no control over what those guys are doing let alone ministers.