Will Iredale

Really excited to share the news that @penguinrandom will be publishing my next book —  entitled "Churchill's Pirates" — about the incredible bravery and sacrifice of the thousands of small boats and their crews throughout the Second World War. 1/5

Terrifying video of Russian glide bomb striking right next to a typical café in Kramatorsk yesterday. No military purpose, pure terrorism. Please watch this video and listen to the sound. This is the daily life of ordinary Ukrainian civilians in towns and cities, not only in Kramatorsk, but in dozens of places, from small villages to big cities. Russia must be stopped, and Ukraine needs all possible help to get it done.

This weekend Julian and Caroline Owen were generous enough to share their daughter Georgina’s story after a B12 deficiency in her diet caused her death aged 21 Read here 👇 thetimes.com/article/a2c9bb…

A farmer dies in April 2026. His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847. The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle. On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify. In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable. The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft. The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let. A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up. The Treasury collects £140,000. The land never produces British food again.

Love the fact that @hoyer_kat, @almurray + @James1940, Max Hastings and 105-year-old @ColinBellsrt are all in the The Sunday Times top ten bestsellers list today. History is alive and well, and being read!

@almurray @James1940 @PenguinUKBooks Bravo @almurray @James1940 !

YEAH BABY NUMBER ONE I'd like to thank you, my agent, Jesus, my incredible god given talent, @james1940, the Independent Coy, JR, @PenguinUKBooks, Monty etc etc

@hoyer_kat Congratulations, Katja!

So glad I made it back to Old Blighty in time to buy a paper from my village shop today because... WEIMAR is a SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 🥳🥳🥳

My thoughts on the @EHRC guidance laid yesterday; this is not about non-existent "rights". It is about the safety of women - mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. We men need to hear their voices. Virginia Woolf : "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes". My intro on @TimesRadio yesterday: Where I live there are two different routes to and from the tube station. One, let’s call it Acacia Avenue, is quiet and residential. The other, London Road, is a busy major route with lots of traffic. At all times of the day, I automatically head for Acacia Road. It’s just much nicer. The women in my family, on the other hand, will never willingly make that walk after dark. They live with an anxiety that most men find it hard to imagine, and frankly, rarely think about unprompted. Last year 739,000 women were sexually assaulted in Britain. Virtually all such assaults - nine out of ten - are perpetrated by men. One in four women have been attacked at some time in their lives. Acacia Avenue is exactly the sort of place in which most women fear that they become vulnerable, and they are right. As the author Virginia Woolf once wrote " Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes". I think this is the right context in which to understand the furore over the guidance being laid today by the government, over the meaning of the words man and woman when it comes to providing services and facilities in workplaces. Many men think this is about a rather arcane dispute about who gets to use what loo. For their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, it isn’t. In a previous life, as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I had a hand in writing this country’s equality laws, in particular the 2010 Equality Act. It never occurred to any of us that there could be any confusion or dispute over the meaning of the words man and woman. But it has taken a decade of campaigning, a Supreme Court judgement and now hundreds of pages of guidance to settle the issue. This is not about so called trans rights, which are completely unaffected by this guidance, since no-one has ever had the right to walk into a changing room reserved for teenage girls. What it does mean is that women and girls are guaranteed the protection they deserve, and that their safety, which we spent half a decade drafting law to ensure, is protected. But the whole business illuminates some serious issues in our politics. First that many of our institutions, in spite of the fact that they always knew what the right thing to do was, decided to ignore the fears of their women customers and employees, under pressure from noisy pressure groups. Instead, the people who were supposed to be the grown ups behaved as though the law said what campaigners wanted it to say, rather than what it actually said. They settled for what they hoped would be a quiet life. In a democracy, there’s little point in Parliament deciding anything if the law is then made an ass by activists intimidating bosses in companies, schools, universities and the media into doing something different. Second, at the heart of the campaign to undermine the Equality Act is an idea that we specifically rejected in 2010, so called self-identification. That is to say, that it should be up to the individual to decide whether they have what’s called a protected characteristic - are you male or female, are you black or white. The problem is that self-ID would destroy the operation of any law against discrimination. Look, it would almost certainly have been to my advantage as a young man to self-identify as a handsome, white public schoolboy. None of those things is true of me. And at various points I am pretty sure it’s been to my disadvantage. It is certainly statistically likely to have been to my disadvantage. But according to the logic of those who say that self-ID should be the rule and that anyone should be able to decide for themselves whether they are male or female, black or white or Asian, were I to complain about racial discrimination, it would be difficult for anyone prove that I’d been discriminated against because of my race since anybody to whom I’d lost out could just tell the courts that they too were black. I know that sounds like Alice in Wonderland but you can google the case where a chap, both of whose parents are white, insisted he should get money from the Arts Council because he so identified with the black struggle that he considered himself black, and everyone should accept his point of view. In the United States and Brazil exactly such outlandish claims have been made and people rewarded to the disadvantage of people actually born into minority families. I have even been told about firms who, when reporting their gender pay gaps have put men who just happen to like wearing dresses at weekends - nothing wrong with that, let me be clear - into the female column and told their women employees that they really haven’t got anything to moan about because statistically they are paid equally, and they should get back in their box. So today’s guidance isn’t just another tiresome chapter in culture wars. It is , I hope, a halt to the efforts to undermine one of the most important pieces of legislation on the statute book, by people who, for their own reasons, would prefer us to be living in the 1950s world of Mad Men.

@Mr_Andrew_Fox It's much more complicated than that... 'The *worst* Government ever!' by @almurray is the best comic evisceration of our 'leaders' ever. youtube.com/watch?v=8IOO-x…

@SarahDuggers My dear old mother wore Poison in the mid-1980s...I remember swimming in the pool on our summer hols in Vale do Lobo...she was paddling up the other end and I could practically smell it underwater!

I’ve just walked by a woman wearing Poison and I’ve been instantly transported back to Kingston riverside circa 2001 and all the cool girls whose parents bought them UFO jeans smelling of half a bottle of it. A simpler time.

Reflecting on my career so far for #WomenInMaritimeDay & it's been a busy decade. PMSC deployments, maritime intelligence, container imports, vessel based armoury ops, race yacht chartering, yacht shipping & now offshore renewables 🌊⚓️ 🇬🇧 🇴🇲 🇲🇹 🇬🇮 🇦🇪 🇪🇸 🇳🇱 🇮🇹 🇸🇪 🇩🇰

Amazing interview by my Big Bro @holland_tom with Sir Paul McCartney. Can’t believe it - we’ve been OBSESSED with The Beatles since we were knee-high. Bought my first album when I was 7! And now this! Nuts! open.spotify.com/episode/2dHQjO…

A Labour source texts: ‘That might be believable if he hadn’t already asked 26 other MPs first’

No advance notice but within a few minutes, word spreads and the King brings Golders Green to a jubilant standstill - just yards from the scene of the April 28 attack. #kc3 #goldersgreen

@philmcraig @PrivateEyeNews Yep...their best cover for a long time.

That’s more like it @PrivateEyeNews

The Westminster blood lust of the past decade has not conjured any meaningful benefit for Britain. None of the leaders are willing to do the hard political work to take the big decisions on growth, welfare, defence. So we just waste precious time, and damage our global standing.

Office at Night - 1940 #artbots #hopper

Gosh this is good. Thank you @spectator

@Iain_MacGregor1 @guywalters @WeHaveWaysPod Yes, agreed. V cool.

@WIredale @guywalters @WeHaveWaysPod I do love illustrated endpapers.

Metaphorically JUST landed in the office. Stunning production and design, too. Congratulations @guywalters @WeHaveWaysPod @WeAreTripsSmiths