Dressing To Win!
I am not being sexist in this post, as I think it applies just as much to men as women.
My late wife, C was always immaculately dressed for her appearances as a barrister in Court. I know too, from a lunch I had with a retired judge, who she regularly appeared in front of, that she would dress appropriately for the case and those in Court.
The judge also said, she made sure she was the centre of attention and as the judge said, she dressed to win.
C was considered by her peers to be a very competent lawyer, but several times she expressed doubts about her skills to me, so I do wonder, if she used clothes to give herself confidence.
I think that both Theresa May and Hillary Clinton don’t dress to win and both of them have lost!
How many times in their campaigns were they seen in plain bog-standard clothes, that made them look ordinary?
I can hear the words of C, in my ears, as she criticises their dress sense.
Incidentally, she always made sure, I was well-turned out!
Where Is The Next Tory Leader?
When Theresa May resigns, as she surely will, if not today, in the next few days, where is the safe pair of hands to sort out the mess that the Brexit Referendum has dumped the country?
- Kenneth Clarke and others of his generation are too old and too pro-Remain.
- Boris Johnson is too volatile.
- Ruth Davidson is not in Parliament.
I suspect many others will pass on the poisoned chalice.
John Major was the surprise to follow Margaret Thatcher and went on to win an election. Is there another like him? I don’t think so!
I Said It Was A Strange Election!
In A Strange Election, I said it was just that. But then, a political journalist friend said to me, that the posters told a different tale South of London, as they did in the capital, before the Brexit Referendum.
Theresa May made the same mistake as Harold Wilson in 1970 and Ted Heath in 1974, when they both called an early election and ended up covered in egg.
She fought a terrible election and certainly made major mistakes.
- In a short campaign, you must get your manifesto right and this allowed the sound-bite of Dementia Tax to take hold.
- The manifesto had little for the average Tory voter.
- She ignored Newton’s Third Law!
- Her circle of advisers was too small and close!
- She ignored the lessons of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
- She came over as cold, with all the charisma of a dead fish.
- There was no infrastructure policy except vague statements in the manifesto.
- There wasn’t much to attract those who voted Brexit, except a stop to immigration.
- Where was the pit-bull to take Corbyn’s fantasy tax and spend policies apart?
- Only Boris Johnson delivered any passion!
But most importantly, where do the Tories stand on Brexit?
The Tories are pfaffing about, like a Personnel Manager, who has just been sent by the Chairman to close a factory they know nothing about, in a strange area of the country.
The Tories were all planning to Remain in the EU, even if they were against it and the surprise result in the Brexit Referendum left the Party up the creek without a paddle.
A Strange Election
In 2015, when you walked through the local area, you saw lots of posters, saying Vote for Me! etc.
Today, I walked to Haggerston station and I saw just three posters; one Liberal, one Green and one for an Independent.
Now that the forecast doesn’t agree with opinion polls in The Times and The Standard, I am led to the conclusion, that much of the data is all over the place.
I have a feeling as with 2015 and the Bexit vote, the pollsters will have to look hard at their methods.
Putin: I Never Have Off-Days, I’m Not A Woman
This is the title of an article in The Times.
Any suggestions, as to who else might say the same thing?
Terror In Tehran
This is the title of a leading article in The imes today.
It is subtitled.
The Isis attack on Iran is part of a desperate endgame that threatens us all
Islamic State are being pushed back and the newspaper thinks that attacks like London, Manchester, Paris and Teheran will increase.
Let’s hope they are wrong. But I suspect they aren’t!
The Sun Does It Again!
You can always rely on The Sun to be funny on Election Day.
They sum him up like this.
- Terrorists’ Friend
- Useless On Brexit
- Destroyer Of Jobs
- Enemy Of Business
- Massive Tax Hikes
- Puppet Of Unions
- Nuclear Surrender
- Ruinous Spending
- Open Immigration
- Marxist Extremist
The front page is very much in the tradition of the notorious It’s The Sun Wot Won It front page of 1992.
Incidentally, if Jeremy Corbyn were to become Prime Minister, he would be only the second one, who’d divorced. The first was the Duke of Grafton in 1769. But the Duke was only divorced once.
Let’s Get Fracking
In Fracked Or Fiction, I talked about my attitude to fracking. These two paragraphs, were my conclusion.
My overwhelming conclusion after the lecture was that before we can embrace fracking in earnest, we must collect a lot more information. For example, we don’t know the background levels ofearthquakes and natural gas seepage in this country. So if say it is thought, that fracking had caused a small earthquake, can we be sure that that isn’t one that we habitually get in this country.
A secondary conclusion, is that my engineering knowledge indicated that there are several very fruitful areas for the development of new technological solutions to mitigate some of the possible problems of fracking.
But things have changed a bit in the over three years, since I attended the lecture at the London Geological Society.
We still get gas from the North Sea and a few smaller fields, but we have to buy in gas from places like Algeria, Russia and Qatar.
I suspect too, that we can always ship liquefied natural gas from the United States.
The Green Party would say that we shouldn’t burn natural gas, but what do we do about?
- People do with gas boilers who keep themselves warm in winter?
- Businesses that use gas as part of their industrial processes.
- In 2015, thirty percent of our electricity was produced from gas.
Renewables such as solar and wind are increasing, but for the forseeable future, we wil still need gas.
But how would you feel, if the Government said, that you must change your boiler for an electric one, as you can’t have any more gas?
We can continue to get our gas from those shining democracies of Algeria, Russia and Qatar or buy it from Trumpland, which would probably not be acceptable to everybody.
There is also the problem, that countries like Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland and The Netherlands are also short of gas and are relying increasingly on the Russians.
Surely, the best solution to avoid the cold and loss of employment in industries reliant on gas, is to extract the gas from our own fields, using fracking in a professional and engineeringly-sound manner.
We have form in the extraction of hydrocarbons in this way from land in the UK. The is the first paragraph, from the Wikipedia entry for Wytch Farm.
Wytch Farm is an oil field and processing facility in the Purbeck district of Dorset, England. It is the largest onshore oil field in western Europe. The facility, recently taken over by Perenco was previously operated by BP. It is hidden in a coniferous forest on Wytch Heath on the southern shore of Poole Harbour, two miles (3.2 km) north of Corfe Castle. Oil and natural gas (methane) are both exported by pipeline; liquefied petroleum gas is exported by road tanker.
Is there is an onshore oil-field in a more sensitive environment? Wikipedia says this under Environment.
Most of the field is protected by various conservation laws, including the Jurassic Coast world heritage site, Purbeck Heritage Coast and a number of sites of special scientific interest, areas of outstanding natural beauty and nature reserves (including Studland and Brownsea Island), so the gathering centre and most of the well sites are small and well screened by trees. Directional drilling has also contributed to reducing the impact on the local environment, with extended reach drilling from the Goathorn Peninsula attaining distances in excess of 10 km.
Note the reference to directional drilling, which according to a friend, who was associated with the development of the project, was very much pioneered at Wytch Farm.
Directional drilling is often very much part of the fracking process, prior to the actual hydraulic fracturing. I’m very much of the opinion, that to be a successful fracker, you need to have very good directional drilling capabilities.
I’ve heard it on good authority, that fracking is used in the Highlands of Scotland to extract drinking water. But the F-word is so sensitive, there is nothing about it on the Internet. I did find this web page from a company called Clearwater Drilling Company in Tennessee, which is entitled Hydrofracturing -A procedure designed to increase the amount of water in existing dry and low yield water wells.
Would you prefer to give money to dodgy regimes or build on the Wytch Farm experience and develop the World’s best fracking industry to keep us warm in winter and preserve jobs?
It may seem a stark choice to some, but I believe in the competence of engineers, as demonstrated at Wytch Farm!
Let’s get fracking!
Overdoses Kill As Many As Vietnam
This is the headline on an article in The Times.
This is the first paragraph.
The US suffered its largest ever increase in drug overdose deaths last year, with as many Americans dying because of illegal drugs as were killed in the entire Vietnam War.
59,200 Americans died in the twenty years of the Vietnam War.
The Anonymous Widower 