Martin T

“To all those of you, struggling with your own demons…” Martin Lewis’ acceptance speech as he received the Special Award on 10 May at this year's BAFTA TV awards.

If a foreign national is unable to speak English or is living off the British taxpayer, I see no reason to allow them to stay in our country. On benefits, in social housing, hating Britain or wishing us harm? A Restore Britain Government would remove them from our country.

If you're a golfer who wants to improve, this may be the most important thread you will ever read. Bookmark🧵 it. 👇👇👇👇

Sahith Theegala’s golf bag makes absolutely no sense to some. But that's exactly why it works. Driver. 4-wood. 3-iron. 9-wood. 5-iron. Two different 8-irons. A wedge bent from 62° to 59° because he wanted less bounce. A black gap wedge that’s in the bag strictly “for the vibes.” And somehow it all fits together perfectly for one of the most creative shot-makers on Tour. “A lot of players get locked into a certain way of doing things,” Ping Tour rep Kenton Oates told me. “He’s always willing to explore, always willing to test something new if he thinks it might give him a different shot.” He also barely needs testing sometimes to know if it works. He took three swings with the pitching wedge of his current set before he said he'd play the rest. Now he might even want that PW stamped with "11". In this week's Bag Spy, here’s a full breakdown of the weirdest bag setup on the PGA Tour and why every club is there:

For 28 years, Michael O'Leary ran Ryanair like a man who couldn't stand his own customers. People kept flying because the tickets were so cheap. Then in 2014 he tried being nice to them. Profits jumped 37 percent. The share price jumped 55. He told the whole story in a one-hour lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin in late 2015. It's the Carmichael Lecture, watch the full thing if you can, because there is more useful business teaching in that hour than in most full MBAs. On the third rewatch, these are the parts that stuck with me the most. The single biggest secret of Ryanair has nothing to do with marketing. It is a 25-minute turnaround. Once a Ryanair plane lands, the crew has it cleaned, refueled, reboarded, and back in the air in 25 minutes. Aer Lingus needs about an hour to do the same thing. After three flights in a day, Ryanair has banked two hours, which is enough time to fit in two extra flights. Every single Ryanair plane flies more flights per day than every single Aer Lingus plane. That gap is where the entire profit margin of European cheap flying comes from. Long flights to other continents don't work the same way. A faster turnaround at JFK doesn't let you squeeze another flight to America into the day, so the saved time gets wasted. This is why O'Leary thinks Ryanair will never fly across the Atlantic but will dominate short flights inside Europe for decades. The second thing he learned was that you can get unlimited free press by saying the opposite of whatever business school is teaching that year. Ryanair had no advertising budget through the 80s and 90s. So O'Leary went on television and said things like, "customers are always right? No, they're always wrong." And, "people are your most important asset? No, they're your biggest expense." Every interview produced more coverage than a paid campaign would have. The peak came in 2009 when The Sun newspaper asked if Ryanair would allow porn on the in-flight wifi. He said yes. Within 24 hours the website got 28 times its normal traffic, and bookings quadrupled for three days straight. The third lesson is the one he was slowest to learn, and it is the most painful. The shift to being polite to customers was led by his own staff. He was the bottleneck. A Dublin Airport survey found that when Ryanair gate agents pulled passengers out of the queue to size-check their carry-on bags, 77 percent of those bags ended up fitting just fine. His own gate agents had invented rules like "the bag must fit comfortably in the sizer" so they could reject bags that technically fit. Staff were exhausted from being forced into pointless fights with customers. They wanted permission to stop. Once O'Leary gave it, they started bringing him most of the new ideas. Lesson four is about admitting you were wrong, and treating that as a press strategy. After the change, O'Leary toured Ireland, the UK, and Germany telling journalists he had been wrong about customer service for 25 years. The coverage was endless because almost no executive ever does this in public. Owning a mistake loud enough becomes its own news cycle. Lesson five is the one I think every government should tape to the wall. Ireland brought in a tax on flights during the 2009 recession. It raised about 26 million euros a year. Visitor numbers fell from 30 million to 20 million over three years. The state lost roughly 250 million euros a year in sales tax it would have collected from the visitors who never came. So Ireland was earning a tenth of what it was losing. Once Michael Noonan repealed the tax in 2014, tourism boomed and Ryanair alone accounted for 74 percent of the new traffic to and from the island. The lesson goes way beyond Ireland. Tax visitors once they're inside your country. Don't tax them at the airport, because at the airport they'll just pick somewhere else to fly. The sixth lesson is the strangest one. The average Ryanair fare is about 35 euros. O'Leary's actual long-term goal is for the ticket to be free, paid for entirely by side revenue from bag fees, snacks, wifi, and on-board gambling. The cheaper the ticket, the more passengers fly. The more passengers fly, the more side money he makes. That side money lets him cut the ticket again next year. The wheel only turns one direction, and the gap between Ryanair and every other European airline gets wider every year. Lesson seven is about why public services keep failing. The Irish health service has a politics problem. Whenever the unions are unhappy, they bypass management and go straight to the Minister for Health, who has no real power to push back. American federal workers lost the right to strike in 1947, and the United States has functioning public services almost in spite of itself as a result. No government anywhere can run a real operation while its workforce can paralyze that operation on demand. The same logic explains almost every broken public bureaucracy. The eighth lesson is a pushback against doomsday thinking. O'Leary was openly skeptical of people warning that the world was running out of oil, and skeptical of climate-change politics. His reasoning was simple and pragmatic. People are extraordinarily good at working around shortages of energy and raw materials. He tells a story he half-remembers about General Motors commissioning a study in the early 1900s that concluded car demand would top out at 900,000 cars worldwide because there were not enough chauffeurs to drive them. Henry Ford solved that within a few years by making cars cheap enough for owners to drive themselves. Markets find new oil whenever the price climbs high enough to make new drilling profitable. American oil producers came online with new techniques, flooded the market, and replaced OPEC, the alliance of oil-exporting countries, as the force that sets global oil prices. Whatever the next bottleneck is, somebody will route around it. The trick is to never bet against human ingenuity over a long enough time horizon. The ninth lesson is about how leaders rot. O'Leary refuses awards, honorary doctorates, and invitations to the dinner circuit. His reasoning is that the moment you start believing you are irreplaceable, you stop listening to the people who actually run the business. Customers write to him every day complaining about Ryanair. Those daily complaints are the only thing keeping the company grounded. The deepest lesson in the talk is the one he drops almost in passing. He spent four years studying business at Trinity College in Dublin. At no point during those four years did anybody suggest that being nice to customers might be part of a winning strategy. The single most profitable change he ever made to Ryanair was something his entire formal education had trained him not to consider.

🚨🏌️⛳️ #GOLF TIP — How to strike your irons better and compress the golf ball 💯

Stevenage have sold over 4,500 home tickets for their match vs Wigan Athletic on Saturday 👏 #StevenageFC #wafc

Rape Gang Inquiry update. Our team is currently going through our draft report to ensure that all is legally sound for publication. The plan is straightforward. I intend to use parliamentary privilege in the chamber to name a number of the worst perpetrators/officials who we believe have escaped justice. We will then use private prosecutions to pursue those individuals through the courts, and eventually put them in prison. These are incredibly dangerous scumbags. It is an national network of organised crime - it is not simply disparate gangs. This is a comprehensive criminal network that is capable of the most evil acts. I will be informing the police, parliamentary security and the Home Office beforehand of who I intend to name and why - I also now have private security for the first time in my life. But do not underestimate the danger of these networks. It is organised crime of the very worst kind. We started this inquiry not to just talk, but to act. The report will be published after the elections as I want this to be a cross-party effort, and party politics should not interfere with any of our activity. Numerous Conservative MPs have been supportive, as have the Northern Irish and even a Labour MP attending the hearings. I want this to go beyond petty party politics. We still have a significant amount of money from the crowdfunder, and that is ready to privately prosecute. This is where we are. This is the plan. Thank you to everybody for your support.

I’d like to make something very clear, I have never asked LIV Golf to interview Bryson DeChambeau. A senior member of the LIV Golf communications team actually threatened my credential in Hong Kong in 2024, and limited my access. I’ve never been on a pre tournament player call, I don’t have inside the ropes access like most journalists, and my requests to speak to players I don’t have phone numbers for have been mostly ignored. All the conversations I have are from relationships built up directly with the player themselves. I’ve had 4 years of people trying to discredit me from all angles. But luckily the only thing that matters is what the players actually think and telling the story in their own words. Thanks for everyone who has been supportive over that time. I really appreciate it 👊

I have recently completed jury service - not ideal timing immediately after launching a national political party, but there we go. Having seen the system from the inside, I can see it needs a fundamental overhaul. The way jurors are treated by the staff and the process is appalling. Decent taxpaying men and women doing their civic duty are not properly compensated and are constantly messed around. Losing time and money. There one day, nothing happens. The next, nothing happens. It’s unclear, confusing and disrespectful to working men and women. I absolutely believe in the jury trial, and voted to defend it in Parliament. But like so much else wrong with the state, the system needs tearing apart and starting again - giving the jurors more respect and compensation. I don’t care, I don’t need the money. It’s the self-employed men and women losing thousands who I worry about. I spoke to several who were going to be significantly out of pocket. That is just wrong. Time wasted, badly planned, and put the accused at the centre of the process. Strong confirmation to me that the law is now half a cut above itself! I will be raising my experience in Parliament in the hope to improve the system. The judge’s name who demanded I attend? Rupert Lowe. You couldn’t make it up.

I've been pushing for information from the Home Office on how many Gazan migrants who were allowed into the country for free NHS treatment have now claimed 'asylum'. I am told by the minister 'the requested information on asylum claims from individuals who entered the UK under the Gaza medical evacuation scheme is not available from published statistics.' Key bit? 'Published statistics'. They know exactly how many Gazans have immediately claimed asylum, but are refusing to tell us. It's a scandal. It will be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Claim asylum, become refugees, live on benefits for the rest of their lives. Brilliant. What a great deal for us that is. Restore Britain's position is clear. We must not accept a single migrant from Gaza. Not one.

Wow 🔥🔥🔥 Mark Williams plays all colours into the green pocket in a match at Victoria’s Snooker Academy against Si Jiahui Amazing 😁

@Vics_Snooker That is very special 👏 👏 👏

💬“we threw Ibby on at right-back – I said ‘don’t worry about it mate just run forward we need to score anyway’”😂 🫡“I’m delighted for him because it was a brilliant finish” Steven Schumacher speaking to Derek Clark after the 3-3 draw vs. Huddersfield. #WanderersLive #bwfc

😁👊 #bwfc

THAT IS INCREDIBLE!!!! #bwfc

The Crucible rises to remember John Virgo 👏 ❤️

Struggling with pushes and possibly shanks? Here is why that is and what you need to do to clean that up.

🚨TOXIC : Green candidate Saiqa Ali’s toxic posts ENDORSING TERRORISM. Candidate for Streatham St Leonard’s Saiqa Ali posted: • Masked fighter: “Long live the Resistance. Free Palestine!” 
• “Cut the head of this snake” 
• Israeli 9/11 false flag 
• Holocaust survivors “repeating the sins of the Nazis” 
• “Resist by any and all means” post-Oct 7 • She even made a claim about Muslims arming themselves and to “Resist by any and all means” By fielding her, the Greens are endorsing terrorism apologism. Lambeth voters deserve the truth before 7 May. #GreenParty

🚨GREEN CANDIDATE: Dr Rima Hussein Newcastle Greens’ Benwell, Scotswood & Denton Burn candidate is Associate Professor & Faculty Director of Equality, Diversity & Inclusion at Northumbria University. On 13 Feb 2026 she posted on Instagram: “PALESTINE ACTION IS BACK” … while wearing their t-shirt and lecturing about pro-Palestine student camps. Palestine Action is still a proscribed terrorist organisation under UK law. She’s still their candidate for the 7 May 2026 locals. Green Party now openly platforming support for a banned terror group?