Will Iredale

Author of Sunday Times top ten bestsellers The Kamikaze Hunters and The Pathfinders. My next book — Churchill's Pirates — will be published by Penguin in 2026

[Will Iredale @WIredale]

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

[Special Ops Magazine @specialopsmag]

Lieutenant Lily-Mae Fisher, 31, from Virginia Water, Surrey. Britain’s only serving female Royal Navy Commando.

Killed in training on 3 June 2026 when a Merlin Mk4 from 846 Naval Air Squadron crashed at Sourton Down, Devon.

The career arc was extraordinary. An MSc in Geology from Imperial College London in 2016. Junior international representative for England in lacrosse and pole vault. Two years as a geologist with British Petroleum before commissioning in 2019 into the Royal Navy.

During a break in flying training she completed the 16 week All Arms Commando Course, earning the green beret as one of only seven women in British military history to do so, and becoming the UK’s only serving female Royal Navy Commando.

She was killed on her final assessment of flying training. Her Pilot’s Wings were to be awarded in June 2026. She died alongside Lieutenant Commander Chris Gayson, 42, and Petty Officer Owen Green, 24.

[Skint Eastwood @Skint_Eastwood1]

😭 Absolute classic sketch from Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse’s BAFTA-winning BBC series.

Harry and Paul do a brilliant parody of BBC Question Time: the clichéd audience questions, the sweaty nervous bloke in the jumper, the host’s withering put-downs, panelists waffling absolute nonsense… and all the timeless British political b*llocks in one perfect sketch. 😂

Still painfully accurate years later.

[Will Iredale @WIredale]

@guywalters Congratulations Guy!

[Will Iredale @WIredale]

This is just so terribly sad. RIP.

[Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 @DefenceHQ]

It is with great sadness that we can confirm the deaths of Lieutenant Commander Chris Gayson and Lieutenant Lily-Mae Fisher of 846 Naval Air Squadron, and Petty Officer Owen Green of 845 Naval Air Squadron, who died in Devon during routine training activity on 3 June.

[Guy Walters 🇺🇦 🇻🇪 🇮🇷🇧🇾 @guywalters]

Can't wait for the publication of my book, Stealing Hitler's Rocket next week! When I first heard about this extraordinary story of clandestine bravery with a cast of amazing characters, I just knew it had to be my next book. Thank you, @HoZ_Books, for making it look so handsome!

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Commander of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps Elviss: Russian soldiers don't scare me pound for pound against a Western army.

What scares me is that they've been living this war for four years. Battle-hardened, battle-tested — that's the threat.

1/

[Will Iredale @WIredale]

They are fucking mad.

https://t.co/8TqFEtgK5P

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions:

- welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap
- defence spending is too low
- the triple lock is unsustainable
- without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution
- we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea
- migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state
- any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement
- we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable
- Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly

Blair basically says all that.

The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind:

- judges and quangos have too much power, are unaccountable and without redressing the balance in favour of parliament it is very difficult to do anything big fast
- the bare minimum that needs to change in this regard is to reform judicial review and planning law so we can put building and economic growth ahead of newts and NIMBYs

None of that above really ought to be up for discussion. It is all common sense but not one of our politicians will publicly say all of it

Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement.

Over to Andy and Keir and Kemi and Nigel and Zack and all the others

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

My word. This is incredible. A real-life version of that scene from The Life of Brian: "Stan, you haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!"

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

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.

[Lottie Hayton @lottiemayhayton]

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 👇
https://t.co/tx0bgw8ZvK

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

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.

[Will Iredale @WIredale]

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!

[Will Iredale @WIredale]

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

[Will Iredale @WIredale]

@hoyer_kat Congratulations, Katja!

[Trevor Phillips @TrevorPTweets]

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.

[John Pollock @JohnPollock]

@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.

https://t.co/2xy3paObhO

[Will Iredale @WIredale]

@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!

[Kate ✨️ @kejamieson_]

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 🌊⚓️

🇬🇧 🇴🇲 🇲🇹 🇬🇮 🇦🇪 🇪🇸 🇳🇱 🇮🇹 🇸🇪 🇩🇰

[James Holland @James1940]

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! https://t.co/QoEPYrHtsR