I heard a lovely anecdote today about Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, who has died at the age of 62.
Around the time the James Bond film “Spectre” was coming out, there was a private viewing at MI6’s HQ in Vauxhall with some of the production team and actors, including Ralph Fiennes.
Alex Younger compared the event, which included an opportunity for members of the audience (who were largely real life spies) to quiz the actors and producers.
One person asked Ralph Fiennes: Who was your favourite Bond?
He gave an answer about how they were all good, but his favourite was Daniel Craig. The rest of the team said similar.
Then Alex threw the question back to the person in the audience who had posed it, asking them who their favourite Bond was.
But before this person had time to give an answer, someone else in the audience shouted out: “You, sir!”
The individual (a former diplomat) who shared this story with me said it was one of so many examples of how admired, liked and respected Alex was by his colleagues.
“He was one of the best chiefs”.
1/ Thought experiment doing the rounds in my head this morning. Burnham replaces Starmer. He walks into Number 10 with the Manchester accent and the real Labour framing. He announces the renationalisation of water, energy, rail, and grid. All of it. Funded by, well, vibes mostly.
Here’s how the next twelve months actually play out. 👇🧵
The Tories have crowned Rishi Sunak without him saying a word about what he would do as PM. He has no mandate, no answers and no ideas. Nobody voted for this.
The public deserve their say on Britain’s future through a General Election. It’s time for a fresh start with Labour.
In 2014 Paul Hayward ,Telegraph, wrote that Scotland should be kicked out of the Six nations. Short sighted and with no understanding of the history and growth of the tournament.Maybe England and Wales should go now or He should, never forget.
It’s called Question Time. The format is supposed to be that the audience ask questions and the panel answers. Fiona is meant to moderate. Week after week, she interrupts, talks over people and aggressively pushes her own agenda. It’s becoming almost unwatchable. #bbcqt
These are the words of the first 16 scientists of 46 that have left the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) due to the corruption of science within the organisation.
Dr Robert Balling: The IPCC notes that “No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected.” This did not appear in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.
Dr Lucka Bogataj: “Rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide don’t cause global temperatures to rise…. temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed.”
Dr John Christy: “Little known to the public is the fact that most of the scientists involved with the IPCC do not agree that global warming is occurring. Its findings have been consistently misrepresented and/or politicized with each succeeding report.”
Dr Rosa Compagnucci: “Humans have only contributed a few tenths of a degree to warming on Earth. Solar activity is a key driver of climate.”
Dr Richard Courtney: “The empirical evidence strongly indicates that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong.”
Dr Judith Curry: “I’m not going to just spout off and endorse the IPCC because I don’t have confidence in the process.”
Dr Robert Davis: “Global temperatures have not been changing as state of the art climate models predicted they would. Not a single mention of satellite temperature observations appears in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.”
Dr Willem de Lange: “In 1996 the IPCC listed me as one of approximately 3000 “scientists” who agreed that there was a discernible human influence on climate. I didn’t. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that runaway catastrophic climate change is due to human activities.”
Dr Chris de Freitas: “Government decision-makers should have heard by now that the basis for the long-standing claim that carbon dioxide is a major driver of global climate is being questioned; along with it the hitherto assumed need for costly measures to restrict carbon dioxide emissions. If they have not heard, it is because of the din of global warming hysteria that relies on the logical fallacy of ‘argument from ignorance’ and predictions of computer models.”
Dr Oliver Frauenfeld: “Much more progress is necessary regarding our current understanding of climate and our abilities to model it.”
Dr Peter Dietze: “Using a flawed eddy diffusion model, the IPCC has grossly underestimated the future oceanic carbon dioxide uptake.”
Dr John Everett: “It is time for a reality check. The oceans and coastal zones have been far warmer and colder than is projected in the present scenarios of climate change. I have reviewed the IPCC and more recent scientific literature and believe that there is not a problem with increased acidification, even up to the unlikely levels in the most-used IPCC scenarios.”
Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen: “The IPCC refused to consider the sun’s effect on the Earth’s climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change.”
Dr Lee Gerhard: “I never fully accepted or denied the anthropogenic global warming concept until the furore started after NASA’s James Hansen’s wild claims in the late 1980s. I went to the [scientific] literature to study the basis of the claim, starting with first principles. My studies then led me to believe that the claims were false.”
Dr Indur Goklany: “Climate change is unlikely to be the world’s most important environmental problem of the 21st century. There is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk.”
Dr Vincent Gray: “The [IPCC] climate change statement is an orchestrated litany of lies.”
BREAKING: Thousands of BRAVE IRANIANS are once again taking to the streets tonight in the heart of Tehran in their uprising against the Islamic regime.
14th night in a ROW.
The media is ignoring this - MAKE IT GO VIRAL.
Share this EVERYWHERE.
While global media attention has switched to Venezuela, worth pointing this out;
Iran enters tenth day of protests with 29 killed, 1,203 civilians detained so far.
BBC Verify call the uprising in Iran “cost of living protests”.
I swear a circle of Hell is reserved for those “journalists”.
Over 50 Iranian women have been hanged by the mullahs in the past year.
Women. Hanged.
Verify that.