Christian-Marc

There is a devastating scandal brewing in Wales... a teenage boy is among 21 people being tested for HIV and hepatitis after unsterilised surgical tools and equipment were used on patients at an NHS hospital. The boy was only told about the error three weeks after a procedure at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport. Hospital bosses knew about the mistake days after it happened, but the family weren't informed until a whistleblower dressed in medical scrubs and a surgical mask delivered a letter to the family home urging them to get in touch. The 15-year-old now faces six months of tests for HIV and hepatitis until he is given the all-clear. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…

A clear and present danger.

To those saying it will take years to get new oil & gas out the North Sea… It won’t. 👉 Jackdaw - can be producing gas in 3 months. 👉 Rosebank - can be producing oil in the autumn. Miliband just needs to approve them. Everyday he waits, the further away this supply gets.

I think the silence has now ended, and that’s good. We have taken our cultural norms for granted a long time and as a result, at times we struggle to articulate them. This opening of discussion may help make sense of why they are important to us.

When I raised with the Dean the naming of Mohammed in the ‘succession of prophets’ during a service at Westminster Abbey, he was a little taken aback. It was in Arabic, and I'm not sure he'd realised or thought through the theological implications (/heresy). To his credit, he agreed that it went too far, and wouldn't happen again.

@fugitiveink I love those links between family and place. It’s a rootedness that so many in busy urban areas don’t enjoy, and sometimes, understand.

I love the hand-rests on these choir stalls at St Margaret's, Cley-next-the-Sea. (Apart from anything else, my 13 x great uncle John Wyatt was rector at Cley in the 1520s, and so it always seems wonderful to me to think that he, too, might have known them and indeed rested his hands on them.)

@GreyManUK23 @KieraDiss Yes, exactly! Mind you - I do think the polling figures are wildly inaccurate. Fingers crossed…

@KieraDiss @DrMusicale The fact people are taking the idea of a Green government seriously is sobering to think about. Think the current Labour government is bad you ain't seen nothing yet if the Greens get into No.10!

LEAKED GREEN PARTY DOSSIER The Daily Express reports a leaked document suggesting the Green Party wants children taught they have a “moral obligation” to accept immigration. This isn’t just politics. It shows how dangerous the Greens will be if elected. That can’t happen.

Criminally Negligent. Andrew Neil's Words. Britain's Reality. Andrew Neil does not use language carelessly. Writing in the Daily Mail this morning, he describes Britain as stuck in an energy emergency with an oil and gas policy bordering on the criminally negligent, delivered by a bunch of clueless inadequates at the tiller. He is not reaching for effect. He is delivering a verdict. And the evidence he marshals is unanswerable. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for the first time in history. Oil is heading toward two hundred dollars a barrel. Britain is facing the worst energy crisis since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The International Energy Agency has described the supply disruption as the largest in history. And the government overseeing this catastrophe has spent the past year doing everything in its power to ensure Britain would be maximally exposed when it arrived. It closed North Sea oil and gas production. It borrowed against already strained public finances. It built an economic strategy on OBR forecasts that the energy crisis has already rendered obsolete. And it put the man most responsible for Britain's energy vulnerability, Ed Miliband, in charge of the response. The Miliband contradiction has been hiding in plain sight for months. He stood at the despatch box during the energy debate last year and warned that Britain was a price taker not a price maker in international fossil fuel markets, leaving it exposed to their volatility. He was right. He was also the man who ensured that exposure would be as severe as possible by closing down the domestic production that could have cushioned the blow. The North Sea fields that could have been producing. The coal beds that remain untouched. The nuclear capacity that was decommissioned in pursuit of net zero targets that now look like a luxury policy designed for a world that no longer exists. Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences. The fiscal headroom she has been defending against every request for defence spending, every demand from the Treasury and every warning from military chiefs, is being wiped out not by defence costs alone but by the energy price shock her own government's choices made inevitable. Her foundations, as Neil puts it, are built on quicksand. The borrowing costs are rising at the fastest pace since the Liz Truss mini-budget. Foreign creditors are watching. The bond markets are watching. And the Chancellor is discovering that the numbers she has been citing as proof of fiscal responsibility were always dependent on a stable world that this government's foreign policy paralysis helped to destabilise. Neil makes one observation that connects the economic catastrophe to the political one with surgical precision. A stronger Prime Minister would have fired Miliband. He is right. The man who led the Cabinet revolt against supporting America, who blocked the use of Diego Garcia, who has spent a year dismantling Britain's energy independence and who stood at the despatch box admitting British households would pay the price, is still in his post. Still in the Cabinet. Still in the room. The reason Starmer has not fired him is the same reason he needed a drone on his own runway before he would act, the same reason he consulted his team on minesweepers and the same reason Britain is now a diminished, exposed and strategically paralysed country being described in its own press as a nation of clueless inadequates. He cannot afford to. The coalition that put him in power will not allow it. And so the inadequates remain at the tiller while Britain heads for the rocks. "Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. [...]. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences."

Police find it inconvenient to pursue crime shocker…

Hopefully Iran’s missile threat to UK will be eradicated by US & Israel — without our support. But we know other potential enemies have missiles able to hit us. We also know drones are prolific. The threat from both will increase. Britain lacks adequate air defences, which must obviously be addressed. Worth noting also that the majority of missile & drone casualties in Israel have been inflicted by people not getting to shelters in time. Last time UK mainland came under missile & drone attack was in 1945 (V1 and V2), when we had bomb shelters. Has our government addressed a shelter system, together with associated warning system?

This govt is a danger to the public. Now - more than at any time in recent years - is not the moment to dither and prevaricate on such important strategic defence issues.

Timely piece on the Prince which is very welcome indeed.

I cook the sperghetti for the evening repast.

@amwilson_opera @GMcCor 😫

When students know so little about classical civilisation, because of failings in the school system, it would be helpful if one of our leading universities helped them understand it. Instead, it puts on a lecture in which an individual explains why he doesn't "like it". 😕

Unfortunately she is out of her depth, in fact the whole front bench seems to be, and at a moment of acute international tension. This interview shows the govt to be spineless with a woefully insufficient policy position.

According to sources, mullah president Masoud Pezeshkian has asked for asylum in India. #IranRevolution2026‌

Why - when British forces are facing possible attack from Iranian missiles - is this crap tolerated on the streets of London? They should be quickly dealt with by the police and govt should be calling out this stuff.

Happy 341st Birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach

Iran is attacking British territory. Starmer wants to hand that territory to a country that backs Iran in the current conflict. telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…