John Tripp

Swimming and Formula 1. Unlikely bedfellows 🏊‍♀️🏎 Life President of Hart Swimming Club; Past President Swim England South East and Hampshire County ASA

[John Tripp @HartTrippy]

@ThatEricAlper You can check out any time you like but you can never leave

[John Tripp @HartTrippy]

@JSS779 @Qantas Absolutely. Flew staff travel with my son on QF end of 24 from MEL to LAX on the way home. I’m old and don’t normally go Y but their 380 was fine and the crew superb. The 350ULR LOPA will be spacious in comparison 😀

[Analytic Flying @analyticflying]

🌞Qantas A350-1000ULR Vega Star VH-OJA

She carries the name from a Catalina and rego from Qantas's first B747-400 City of Canberra! They love nostalgia!!

MSN814 will be aircraft #1, while test aircraft MSN707 F-WULR will be #2! Thanks @LachlanB_ for picking up rego on the gear doors! 📷@BlakeJohnson

[Looking for Growth @lfg_uk]

Britain is in an Energy Emergency.

But the Government is FAILING TO ACT. They have no plan, no idea what to do, and they’re leaving us exposed.

So today we’re launching The LFG Emergency Energy Bill to SAVE OUR INDUSTRIES and GET BILLS DOWN

Here’s how it would get bills down IMMEDIATELY:

1️⃣ SCRAP all levies on energy bills. These stealth taxes on the British people are unnecessarily hiking up their bills by hundreds of pounds.

2️⃣ REOPEN THE NORTH SEA, and directly deploy the tax revenue generated to GET BILLS DOWN.

3️⃣ Stop new CfD contracts and launch an investigation into the system that signed them off. Last year, billpayers paid £1.5 billion for big renewable corporations to THROW ENERGY AWAY. By 2030, it’ll be £8 billion. The existing settlement is a national scandal.

4️⃣ Scrap Clean Power 2030 targets. These needless constraints have pushed civil servants to procure wind at any cost – and at huge expense to the British people.

5️⃣ DITCH the duties of energy regulators, NESO and Ofgem, towards Net Zero goals, so their only focus is to MINIMISE ENERGY COSTS, subject to security of supply.

6️⃣ Hold auctions for connecting to the grid, and directly deploy the revenue generated to GET BILLS DOWN

Our Emergency Energy Bill has cross-party support. It is ready to PASS IMMEDIATELY. It does what governments for the past 20 years didn’t – it takes RADICAL ACTION to SAVE OUR INDUSTRIES and GET BILLS DOWN.

There’s no excuse. Last week, the US suspended access to some of the world’s leading frontier AI models. Britain is vulnerable - and our energy prices are strangling our national security. We cannot afford to be at the mercy of other countries or events beyond our control any longer.

The Government needs to GET BILLS DOWN NOW or explain why they’re still letting this emergency destroy our future.

Force Westminster to ACT. Send our Bill to your local MP and sign our letter to the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband. GET BILLS DOWN, NOW!

[John Tripp @HartTrippy]

@ChrisMedlandF1 Better now with this generation of cars, track layout and a step softer compounds.

[Scuderia Ferrari HP @ScuderiaFerrari]

Lewis 🗣️"This is a day I'll never forget, and I hope it's the first of many wins that we can celebrate together."

First victory in red for Lewis 🇪🇸

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

Peter Kyle: the plan is great

Naga Munchetty: have you seen the plan?

Kyle: no

Munchetty: So how do you know its great?

Peter Kyle: "Because I have faith in a PM.. to fund the plan & design a plan & lead a plan, of course & he is the PM that is fit for the moment we're in"

[John Tripp @HartTrippy]

@n194at @zrh_airport Such an elegant aircraft ☺️

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

This is an outrageous, disgraceful smear on John Healey — and an outright lie. There are a ton of ways to finance more for defence — starting with net zero — without taking a penny from schools or hospitals. Reeves should be ashamed of herself for allowing this nonsense. Suggests she’s really desperate.

[Moving Home with Charlie @moving_charlie]

The destruction of prosperity for the young.

They were warned this would happen. GCSE maths is enough to understand why.

They ignored the warnings.
What I don’t understand is how they still have any supporters.

[The Prostate Project @_ProstateProjec]

Our Prostate Project Man Van will be at Acton Market tomorrow 11th June, offering FREE PSA blood tests to eligible men.
📍 The Mount, King Street, Acton, W3 9NW
🕚 11am–3pm
Early prostate cancer is often symptomless, which is why testing is so important.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

That bread you're tossing to the ducks malnourishes the adults and can leave the babies unable to fly for the rest of their lives.

Bread is junk food for a duck. It fills them up so they quit foraging for the bugs, plants, and seeds that actually feed them.

In a growing duckling, a diet that heavy in empty carbs makes the wing grow too fast and twist at the joint. The feathers jut out sideways, the wing never works right, and the bird is grounded for good. It's called angel wing, and in an adult it can't be undone.

It doesn't stop at the birds. A pond where people dump bread gets crowded and aggressive, ducklings never learn to find their own food, and the soggy leftovers rot into algae blooms and draw rats.

If you want to feed them, give them food, not filler: cracked corn, oats, halved grapes, chopped lettuce, a handful of thawed peas.

Better yet, just watch them. A healthy pond already feeds its ducks. They were doing fine before the bread showed up.

[Liam Halligan @LiamHalligan]

Labour risks being forced to seek emergency help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as Britain lurches toward a debt crisis, leading economists are now warning.

Former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff says, in a new interview, that there is “more than 50:50 chance” of a major UK debt crisis before the end of this decade.

He is joined by Sir Charlie Bean, a former senior official at both the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility, who says the need for an IMF bail-out is now a “material risk” for the British economy.

I not only firmly agree with Ken Rogoff and Sir Charlie Bean – but have been repeatedly issuing the very same warnings for a very long time.

Because the grave risk of a major fiscal meltdown has been apparent for at least the last two years – to anyone who combines serious knowledge of UK economics and politics and global debt markets with an open mind.

The UK's public finances were already fragile when Labour took office back in July 2024.

But this government's misguided, ideologically-driven statist policies have made a bad situation much worse, seriously increasing the danger of a deep fiscal crisis - which would cause a disastrous state funding shortfall and a very nasty inflation spike.

That would result in Downing Street being forced to follow the orders of unelected technocrats flown in from Washington and elsewhere.

It would be a very major national humiliation combined with a deep economic slump and an even more intense cost-of-living crisis – in which low-income households, as ever, would suffer the most.

Yet those of us that have shown the brains and courage to point out these inconvenient truths over recent months and years have long been dismissed and derided for our trouble - not only by ignorant politicians and approval-seeking journalists but also the overwhelming majority of "leading economists".

Ahead of the general election in mid-2024, with Labour on course to win, the conventional wisdom among the great sages of broadsheet journalism and the economics establishment was that "the adults would soon be back in charge" ... Labour would "get lucky with the economy" ... and "Britain would now enjoy an extended period of political and fiscal stability".

I thought that was total nonsense – not least as I was well aware Labour's plans irresponsibly to increase borrowing and spending would be met with deep scepticism by the global pensions funds, insurance companies and other institutional investors that lend governments serious money.

My weekly @Telegraph "Economic Agenda" column of 23rd June 2024, a fortnight ahead of the general election, was a total outlier. I recounted the disaster of 1976 – when Britain was forced to go "cap in hand" to the IMF for a bailout – and warned that "The Ghosts of the 1970s" would haunt Labour's (so-called) economic resurrection".

Six months later, after the October 2024 "Hallowen" budget in which Chancellor Rachel Reeves did indeed sharply hike borrowing and spending, I assessed the market reaction then doubled-down – warning more assertively in my column of 12th January 2025 that "The UK risks a return to 1976 unless Reeves changes course".

And then again on 20th July 2025, as Labour's policies raised the costs of doing business, translating into price pressures which pushed up government borrowing costs even more, I again cautioned that "Inflation risks are taking Britain to the debt-crisis cliff edge".

"It’s now screamingly obvious that Labour’s crude Keynesianism – “pump priming” the economy by upping state borrowing and spending – isn’t working," I wrote in that column last July.

"Worse than that, this Government’s actions are pushing Britain towards a budgetary crisis every bit as serious as that in 1976 – when the UK was forced to go “cap in hand” to the IMF for a bail-out".

It's been a lonely task issuing these warnings. I've been hounded in public debates, slagged off by senior civil servants and often dismissed by "leading economists" as "alarmist".

So what do these same "leading economists" now say to Rogoff (Harvard Professor, Former IMF Chief Economist) and Bean (LSE Professor and Former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England)?

The "economics establishment" – with very few honourable exceptions, the brilliant @jagjit_chadha among them – has been and remains extremely reluctant to point out the deeply unsustainable nature of this government's addiction to ever more borrowing.

The systemic fiscal dangers of evermore "tax and spend" – and the prospect of a serious spike in gilt yields and related fiscal meltdown – are now so real and present as to be completely undeniable.

Yet the UK government is about to shift even further to the left, pushing up borrowing and spending even more under a new leader, in a bid to appease the massed ranks of economic illiterates among Labour's Parliamentary party and activist base – making those dangers even more acute.

Yet, still, the silence among "public intellectual" economists is deafening.

I'm glad the likes of Ken Rogoff and Charlie Bean are now issuing clear warnings. So where is the rest of the "economics establishment" - those who purport to understand fiscal management and financial markets, and often funded by taxpayers' money?

Britain is now clearly in the crosshairs of a very serious danger. The government's creditors are increasingly fickle and based overseas – with no regulatory or cultural obligations to lend money to the UK government.

Those holding UK gilts are increasingly "speculative" rather than "strategic" long-term investors – looking for quick returns, financing their government bond purchases with "leverage" (money borrowed from elsewhere), which will quickly be withdrawn when senitment decisively shifts, causing a plunge in gilt prices and a sharp additional surge in government borrowing costs, setting up a vicious circle.

The UK government is very heavily indebted – and the global investors we rely on to bankroll a huge slice of our state spending are alarmed that of the £132bn the government borrowed last year, no less than £110bn was spent on debt interest – as I wrote in a column on 17th May 2026, "As Labour lurches further left, the markets are calling time".

Global investors are alarmed the UK has consistently had the highest inflation in the G7 (which pushes up borrowing costs) and has easily the highest share of index-linked debt (which magnifies the burden of inflation on the state's balance sheet).

And they are deeply, deeply alarmed that when Labour came to power in mid-2024, the Office for Budget Responsibility was forecasting additional state borrowing of £323bn by 2029, the scheduled end of this Parliament.

But Labour’s runaway spending and growth-crushing tax rises mean that the same five-year borrowing forecast is now £583bn – 80pc higher. And still, the trade unions, MPs and Labour activists who will choose Starmer’s successor now want even more.

It is not too late to pull the UK back from the fiscal brink, to avoid the extremely painful and deep, lingering damage of being forced to go to the IMF and perhaps other multi-lateral creditors for a bailout.

It is not too late to avoid the inflation surge, the currency crash, the shocking blow to consumer and business confidence alongside the sky-high interest rates that will seriously whack our economy – or the perhaps even deeper damage of yet more of the British electorate losing faith in the ability of our establishment to manage the country in a manner that avoids imposing serious hardship on so many hard-working people simply trying to make their way.

But our political and media class needs to start acknowledging the economic and financial truth – that the UK government is borrowing and spending too much, taxation is now so high that it's hammering growth and employment, and that trying to finally get the economy moving by "moving further left", borrowing and spending even more, will result in a fiscal collapse.

Smart, experienced, high-profile economists need to start speaking out – as Rogoff and Bean just have – raising the alarm in a bid to force the broader establishment to face reality. Before it's too late.

If you've read this far, you clearly think this analysis is worthwhile and important. So please like and share.

And for more, read my "Economic Agenda" column in The Sunday Telegraph each week – and subscribe to "When The Facts Change: Economics and Politics in a fast-moving world, with Liam Halligan"

[Moving Home with Charlie @moving_charlie]

The inefficiency of the state causes increasing tax burden on people and businesses, extracting disposable income and capital, both needed to grow the economy.

The inefficiency of the state is THE reason the economy and jobs are suffering.

This isn’t a matter of opinion.

[John Tripp @HartTrippy]

@YesterdaysBrit1 My father-in-law had one in that colour 😀

[Trev Clark's Obscure Aviation History 🚁 @clark_aviation]

Lovely view of the restaurant of the (much missed) Queen's Building at London Heathrow in the late 1950s. About the only item on view to survive today is probably the Heinz tomato ketchup! The dining tables also each had a glass ash tray, as smoking during meals was normal.

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

Treat drowning as public health disaster, say water safety experts. We have got to stop closing swimming pools & get all 11yr olds swimming before they leave primary. It’s where we catch everyone & include life saving water hazard training & skills

https://t.co/CRarmYJ1h1

[J Stewart @triffic_stuff_]

Clueless Policing Minister Sarah Jones completely falls apart under Nick Ferrari’s questioning 🤦‍♂️

In a painful LBC interview, Sarah Jones was asked a straightforward question about the Hampshire officers who handcuffed dying 18-year-old Henry Nowak as he bled out from multiple stab wounds, after wrongly treating the stabbed student as the aggressor.

Nick Ferrari: “It’s reported the officers involved won’t be referred for misconduct. Why is that?”

Jones immediately stammers and hides behind the IOPC investigation.

Ferrari presses: “As of now they haven’t been referred for misconduct? Are they still serving on frontline duties?”

Again, nothing. Just more IOPC deflection.

Ferrari: “Why can’t you tell me whether they’re still on the frontline? Don’t the people of Southampton have a right to know?”

Jones keeps parroting the same line about the IOPC “looking at footage, talking to officers, talking to the family…”

Ferrari, clearly fed up: “Minister, I asked whether they’re still serving frontline duties. Do you know whether they are or not?”

Jones starts the IOPC script again. Ferrari cuts her off:

“But do you know whether they’re still on the frontline, Minister?!”

Flustered and stuttering, she mumbles something about speaking to the chief constable.

Ferrari: “Have you asked the chief constable? It’s causing concern. You don’t know, do you?”

Then comes the most ridiculous line of all: Jones admits she does know the answer… but she won’t tell the public because “an investigation is ongoing.”

What the actual f*ck?

This has nothing to do with prejudicing an investigation. It’s a basic yes or no: Are these officers still out on the streets policing the public right now? The people of Hampshire and Southampton deserve to know.

This is what we get from this government, a Policing Minister who either doesn’t know what’s happening in her own brief or is too scared to say it. Pathetic.

[Airways Magazine @airwaysmagazine]

🔴 First Airbus A350-1000ULR (Qantas) takes off from Toulouse on its first test flight.

📸: @cliper31

#qantas #airbus #avgeek

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

All next week London temperatures won’t get above the late teens and it’s forecast to rain everyday.
It’s called the British Summer. ☔️
But at least we can expect some respite from the London-based media’s climate hysteria.