4 days ago
My cousin Alex unearthed this gem at the weekend. The old man is Uncle Chris reading a paper perhaps ten years ago. On the front is a photo from 1963 of Richard Ingrams, Uncle Chris at the typewriter, and Willie Rushton working on an early edition of Private Eye. The quote, in these dark times for free speech, is very apposite.
47 days ago
The last tomatoes were literally rotting on the vines. So the kids and I gathered what was not rotten and ripped up the plants putting them in the bulging compost heap. All together we had 2.5 kg of green tomatoes. At this point I apologise to my late uncle Christopher Booker whose birthday it would have been on Monday. I am sorry but the scales here are metric.
217 days ago
It was only a couple of weeks ago when the hapless Tory MP William Wragg was exposed for exposing himself on Grindr and then being blackmailed that I made reference to Uncle Chris, the late Christopher Booker HERE. The image from Private Eye of the Court of SuperMac dressed as if for the fall of Rome, which hangs in the downstairs loo at The Old Rectory, is again in my mind. It is as if Tory MP’s get an automatic account with the gay dating app Grindr when they are elected. Again, another Private Eye joke springs to mind.
230 days ago
In the house of my late uncle Christopher Booker the walls feature a number of original cartoons from the publication he co-founded, Private Eye. Yes kids… the professional celeb and media tart Ian Hislop did NOT found Private Eye. My favourite is one that is very much in my mind today amid news of the latest Tory sex scandal, one from the Profumo era of 1963, drawn by Willie Rushden.
299 days ago
The Mrs keeps saying that buying any more books is what she terms GFD (Grounds For Divorce) as both the Welsh and Greek Hovels are now jam packed with my books, her books, and the books of my late father and Aunty Cly. But I reckon that she is bluffing as I’m a pretty hot catch and so three more books arrived this week as you can see below.
532 days ago
I have read a couple of books about Harold Wilson and I remember my late Uncle Christopher Booker and my late father agreeing that there were some good reasons to regard the former Prime Minister dimly. The pound in your pocket is worth the same today as it was yesterday said Wilson having just devalued the pound so it was patently worth less. The White Heat of Technology was the sort of vapid nothingness that served as a blue print for Blair’s Cool Britannia. But I was just two when Wilsonwas evicted from office the first time, by the even more useless Heath. The second time around I was eight. But i still have no real memories of what he did and I certainly never had cause to hate the man.
584 days ago
In years gone by, almost my first phone call when arriving at the Greek Hovel in spring was to my late uncle, Christopher Booker, to discuss the state of global warming in the area. This year my uncle and godfather would have been especially delighted as you can see below.
696 days ago
One of the many things that those inside the global warming GroupThink cult are unable to explain is why we should believe 30-50 year forecasts about climate change when the ones made 20 years ago have already been proved to be utterly wrong. It is as if we based our response to covid on the work of Professor Ferguson whose forecasts of hundreds of thousands of deaths from avian bird flu, swine fever, etc had proved so completely bogus. Oh, we did because“experts” inside the GroupThink are always right… but back to global warming.
772 days ago
A kind reader sent Joshua some old fashioned postcards of railway trains. Half of them are now framed and sit at the top of the landing. Beneath them are just some of the books written by family members. One has a very famous pair of pants.
773 days ago
My late uncle had a facebook page, thanks to his eldest son and, though he died more than three years ago, I wake up to a reminder to wish him Happy Birthday. He would have been 85 today and would, no doubt, have thought the world had become an even sillier place since his death. For starters there have been massive advances in the numbers of women with penises ands facial hair over the past three years. And our Universities have made great strides in purging Shakespeare and other dead white authors from the curriculum and eradicating folks with any link, however obscure to the evils of colonialism from the history books. All hail progress!
949 days ago
When he was alive, this was an annual ritual. Now Christopher Booker is in a better place, there is no reason for this to stop. The photo is of climate change, or rather, the lack of it, here in Southern Greece.
1063 days ago
My anger at the hypocrisy of those who rule us is mounting as I prepare for our first full family meet up since the funeral. After a rant on that count which will have Matthew’s dog in delirious joy I move onto Parsley Box (MEAL) where things are even worse than the trading statement suggests, Good Energy (GOOD) whose profits warning would have delighted Uncle Christopher Booker, the wrong sort of wind FFS, and Bens Creek (BEN) where more red flags emerge.
1066 days ago
My late uncle Chris loved the Mani having been there on his first honeymoon and later with his family. Every year, when I arrived for olive harvesting we’d have a chat about matters including the state of the global warming. As you can see on the two photos below, if you look carefully up into the high taygettos you can see that the first snows have already fallen. In a year when the hottest summer in Greece since 1987 was wheeled out by the BBC and others as evidence of man made climate change, more global warming seems to have fallen at this stage then it has for several years.
1082 days ago
The husband of our great leader, Carrie Antoinette, has said that he will tell us all on December 18 whether he is going to cancel Christmas or not. He says this on a day when the WHO, normally bedwetters and scaremongers themselves, confirm that across this planet nobody at all has died from the Omicron variant of Covid. In contrast 1.8 people per second die from all other causes.
1087 days ago
I thought that Dr Elliot Bulmer was a parody account but I have checked himout and he really exists. He is a Scottish academic and thus far cleverer than smelly oiks like you and I who might have voted for Brexit or voted Tory and really don’t have any idea of what we are doing. He remainds e of my wife’s friends and an email round robin ahead of the Euros a few years ago.They are all lefty academics in the liberal arts.
1114 days ago
Like, I suspect, many couples The Mrs and I stare at our fuel bills with horror. We discuss what the financial impact of higher mortgage rates will be when our current deal expires in 18 months time. I present the latest Tesco bill for her to see and it is shocking. These are the grim financial realities we dirty plebs face in Britain 2021. And then we see our leaders, and other 1%ers, flying in private jets to Glasgow to lecture us on how we should not take an Easyjet trip to Greece next summer. It is nauseating. COP26 may well be seen as yet another sign of how it is them and us. The murder of Tory MP David Amess was another.
1127 days ago
As I have discussed openly, I have in the past considered suicide. Thankfully those dark days are long gone but 125 folks a week do kill themselves in the UK each week. If my mother’s own suicide taught me anything it is a tragedy for the person who ends their life but, perhaps, an even greater one for those left behind. I know that both my father and my mother’s brother, Christopher Booker, were haunted to the end by the idea they could have stopped it. The pain and guilt they felt were all too obvious.
1184 days ago
Kept awake by the sort of irritating, minor and temporary but painful condition that a gentlemen does not discuss on the internet, I find myself, as is often the case, considering the idea of my last day at work.
1187 days ago
So we start with the corporate demise of sleazy ex Tory MP Tim Yeo. Here’s hoping that bankruptcy and complete humiliation follow on soon. It seems our resident in-house cheerleader for the establishment, PL, thinks that sleazy Tim should hang onto his shares in Powerhouse Energy (PHE). I explain exactly why he should not.
1201 days ago
The soon to be ex wife of Michel Gove, Sarah Vine, is – for reasons I have never been able to fathom – paid vast sums to serve up a weekly diet of complete bilge in the Mail on Sunday. If Mr Gove is looking for an excuse for his historic drug use, I’d suggest that having his Mrs read her column to him each week is one that would gain the sympathy of many. Today, Vine deals with Thatcher, coal and global warming prompted by Boris Johnson telling an unfunny and factually inaccurate joke last week.
1216 days ago
Provoked by the sheer silliness of some of my neighbours back in the last village in Wales, I signalled my opposition to mask wearing on the village Facebook site last night. The response, as you’d imagine, has been Orwellian. And as such, I have a modest proposal for the face nappy jihadists…
1219 days ago
Dawn Foster was a young journalist who has died aged just 34. Surely we can all feel some understanding for someone dying so young? Not Giles Coren of the Times but he is not really the villain of this piece.
1301 days ago
Gosh I miss my late uncle Chris and our hour long, weekly, chats that would just go on and on skipping from topic to topic almost seamlessly. He may have founded Private Eye but we both did the jokes. We both have a history of falling out with folks and made sure that we had no such bust ups so if we disagreed as we did just now and again there was always a workaround. So we disagreed on Brexit as he regarded me as a “no deal” hard line fruitcake and I wore that badge with honour. But rather than debate it we just agreed that Theresa May was the worst Prime Minister in history, laughed and moved on. Back in the nineties those chats would see us spending some time on Tory sleaze. You remember that MP who shared a bed with another chap and said he was doing it to save money? The jokes wrote themselves back then.
1333 days ago
I sometimes find myself searching my emails for something or other and stumble on something completely unexpected. Tonight I stumble on the raw text of what my uncle, the late Christopher Booker, submitted to the Sunday Telegraph for January 16 2015 after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. I am not sure if the Torygraph tweaked it but here is the original and in exposing the pious hypocrisy of the great and good back then, we might all reflect on matters such as the drowning silence of the left in defence of free speech in Bradford today. But also, as Chris notes, on why certain sections of the Moslem community do feel so justifiably angry and that can vent in various ways. I commend to you a great piece of journalism.
1369 days ago
I must be the least well known person ever to record a podcast with the celebrated conservative journalist James Delingpole. I doubt his regular listeners will ever have heard someone count to ten in Vlach before. To say our discussions were wide ranging is an understatement. Delingpole was a great friend and ally of my late uncle Christopher Booker and we start and end with him. In between, it’s Neil Woodford, fraud fighting, the corruption of the MSM, death threats, lockdown madness, Wales madness and a disagreement on the enrichment of Ireland. And much more. You can judge for yourselves HERE.
1373 days ago
My late uncle Christopher Booker had the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, aka Moonbat, down as the maddest of the nest of vipers penning piffle for the loss-making rag owned by tax dodgers. Today Mr Moonbat takes aim at Dominic Cummings. His “crime”?
1375 days ago
The BBC’s Panorama recognised which journalist exposed the disgraced fund manager Neil Woodford from 2015 onwards with more than 1000 articles, podcasts and videos. When I confronted Woodford at his AGM in May 2019, he signalled me out as the journalist who had been most “wrong” about him. Within 3 weeks his funds had been gated – as I predicted. Woodford made £40 million from the venture, tens of thousands of ordinary savers lost billions. I had been right while Fleet Street blew Woodford off almost to the end. The FCA is now looking into Woodford but 20 months later the disgraced fund manager is plotting a comeback. How do we know? The Sunday Telegraph had the scoop. This is corrupt journalism that shames our profession.
1391 days ago
My late Uncle Christopher Booker wrote for the Sunday Telegraph for almost half of his life and almost to the bitter end. But in his last years, he and my aunt V cancelled their subscription to the Daily Torygraph because it had become such a lightweight rag. If I read it, which I do not for many of the same reasons as Chris, I would be cancelling my sub today in protest at this vile headline about new laws in Poland restricting the right of folks to murder unborn babies.
1401 days ago
Private Eye was co-founded by my late uncle Christopher Booker. At his funeral, there were a few folk from the Eye led by the current Editor and professional celebrity Ian Hislop and also Chris’s great pal Peter Hitchens. Today the latter takes on the former, rebutting an appalling hatchet job on himself in the Eye. Once upon a time, Private Eye challenged the establishment. Today it is part of the establishment and thus lockdown sceptics like Hitchens who dare to question the mask & lockdown GroupThink gripping the political and media classes are “the enemy.” I am in no doubt at all that Uncle Chris would be in the barricades with Hitchens on this one. He would also be appalled by the casual way that Private Eye just distorts facts in its attack on his good friend. This is not the journalism which Christopher Booker would have recognised as worthy of praise.
1403 days ago
My late uncle, Christopher Booker, had a column in the Sunday Telegraph. But well before his death he cancelled his subscription to the Daily Torygraph as it had become such a low grade rag, incapable of addressing any serious issue or showing a shred of gravitas. And thus I bring you the big breaking news in today’s edition…
1411 days ago
I wrote before Christmas of the joy when a cheddar cheese arrived from the wife and son of my late Uncle Chris Booker. Something that has happened for all my life continues. In return, I sent a Yarg as I always do. That Cheddar was about eight inches high and, as you can see below, is now almost all gone. About a week ago, four things I know Chris despised, combined to make me think of him and that Christmas present.
1420 days ago
We are good Europeans, the Mrs and I. We live in Greece as much as we can and love the place. The Mrs is a fluent Swedish speaker and she would, I suspect, live there again. We speak to each other in French when we do not want Joshua to understand and we happily toasted our freedom at 11 PM on December 31 with Metaxa, greek brandy. We love Europe, we detest the EU. The toast was to three great Eurosceptics not there to witness this great day: Ronald Bell, father of my friend despite the day’s earlier humiliation Andrew*, my uncle Christopher Booker and my Grandfather Sir John Winnifrith.
1420 days ago
A bit of history for woke morons and a lot of lockdown scepticism based on hard facts, feature often in my 10 most listened to podcasts from the year just ended.
1421 days ago
We burned a home-made EU flag on a bonfire here at the Welsh Hovel on January 31 to celebrate the first stage of Brexit. Tonight at 11 PM we fully and finally leave the Evil Empire and after 45 years of family pain it would be wrong not to celebrate again.
1421 days ago
This rather surprises me. I was convinced that the top 30 would be packed full of waspish, libertarian or anti-woke articles. But it seems that many of the most read pieces on this website are the ones the Mrs thinks no-one reads, about life at the hovels here in Wales but also in Greece. Anyhow, here are my top 30 non financial articles of 2020.
1426 days ago
I have not read the full 1500 pages of the Trade treaty between the UK and the Evil Empire. I am sure that buried in the detail are a few dastardly measures from inserted by stormtroopers from the Death Star. I don’t need to fall asleep reading it; I just look at the reactions of those who have.
1431 days ago
I note that Matt Hancock has a First Class degree in PPE from Oxford and admit that I cannot match his Geoff. I only achieved a Desmond from the same place in the same subject and, at the time, I remember thinking that I was jolly lucky not to have racked up a Douglas. I am pretty sure that my late uncle Christopher Booker had the same feeling after coming away with a second from Cambridge where he read history.
1434 days ago
This will be our second Christmas without my Godfather and Uncle, Christopher Booker. Every other Christmas in my life, Chris sent first my parents, then my father, then my father and myself a cheese from Cheddar: a real organic product from the county in which he lived and loved, Somerset. Last year, much to my surprise, a cheese arrived as normal. Knowing that he was dying he had, two years ago, placed orders for both 2018 and 2019. But this year I was rather resigned to that tradition ending. This morning a large box arrived at the Welsh Hovel.
1453 days ago
The last sixteen months have seen three enormous deaths for me, the passing of the three most important men in my life. And there was a fourth.
1491 days ago
Last month, Ramsha Khan tweeted that having graduated from City University’s journalism course she was “now a professional journalist”. That prompted me to write an article saying how after 30 years of writing for a living, getting lawyers’ letters, death threats, buckets of online trolling and harassment etc, I guess with no degree I was not by this definition a “professional journalist”. Nor was my late uncle Christopher Booker. His Cambridge degree was in history, mine something worthless from Oxford. Neither of us was taught how to be a journalist in a degree course. It seems Ramsha is upset and has sent a threatening email this morning which, naturally, I publish in full below:
1523 days ago
My late Uncle Christopher Booker did not believe in the idea of passive smoking. It was one of the few areas where we disagreed. I cannot see that inhaling other folks’ smoke can be good for you although, as an ex-smoker, I really do rather enjoy the smell of forbidden pleasure and the evidence that it causes massive harm if done in limited amounts is far from compelling. However, the two reasons to ban smoking in the workplace are a) that you may make the working environment of your colleagues less pleasant and b) that you might just be damaging their health.
1604 days ago
The Mrs has just phoned in from an eighteen-week scan in Chester that I cannot attend because of the lockdown fanatics who run this country. All looks to be fine and young Joshua should, fingers crossed, have a sibling in early November. I can sense that sniggering at the back is starting in some quarters…
1646 days ago
I outlined at the weekend how the Government will now lie about Covid 19 in a most brazen fashion and will make appalling policy decisions which only compound previous blunders, simply to cover up those initial blunders. The media and oposition almost all went along with the GroupThink response to Coronavirus so find it hard to offer questions now, other than on minor issues of implementation. But some in the media go further spinning outright lies on behalf of the Government in its hour of need. Today’s Daily Telegraph serves up a real shocker as you can see below.
1655 days ago
Britain’s largest funeral services provider Dignity (DTY) has served up a trading statement on Covid-19 which contains both the quote of the day but also the stats which show just how disastrously Boris, but also everyone else in the political and media GroupThink bubble, have created this crisis.
1673 days ago
We were told by ALL the politicians, nearly all the media, by many scientists, including the world famous virologist Piers Morgan, that we had no choice but to respond to Coronavirus with a draconian lockdown that has smashed our civil liberties and hurled us into the worst recession since the 1930s. Sweden is the one Western country to have gone down a different route despite immense media pressure and threats from the World Health Organisation. But the bodies are not piling up in mass graves in Malmo, they are not running out of death carts in Stockholm or Gothenburg. And that exposes the GroupThink driven calamity we are now all suffering for what it is. The media still thinks the scandal is that we did not lockdown earlier or provide enough PPE. But data analysis or logic is not something anyone at the BBC seems to understand – they don’t teach that sort of thing on liberal arts courses at Oxbridge. The real scandal is that we have blundered into a policy which will, in the end, show that the “cure” was not a cure at all but was in fact worse than the ailment. Time once again for our leaders to read the last work by my late uncle, Christopher Booker, on GroupThink (available here).
1681 days ago
The mob is now suffering industrial scale GroupThink when it comes to Coronavirus and especially when it comes to the NHS. We must all line up once a week to applaud NHS staff, we must accept how hard they are working and how the NHS is uber-efficient, and we must lambast Government for failings of testing and providing PPE to staff which has caused too many of them to die. This is the line and any dissenter is attacked as despising NHS staff or wanting old folks or doctors to die. But the hard data justifies nothing that the mob insists and the Mainstream Media and Government in a craven way just go along with it all. Please do listen to what I actually say before lambasting me for what you think I might say. Then perhaps read GroupThink (available here) by my late uncle Christopher Booker to place this insanity in context.
1702 days ago
Yesterday I discussed what my late Uncle Christopher Booker, the author of two very relevant works you really should read during the lockdown, , Scared to Death (available here) and GroupThink (available here) would have macde of the pandemic. I am not sure that my Uncle’s long term collaborator Richard North appreciates the irony of his response to that podcast which I discuss here.
1703 days ago
As the author of two seminal works which are ideal reading while we self-isolate, Scared to Death (available here) and GroupThink (available here) Chris would have been a perfect commentator. Some of his friends like Peter Hitchens and James Delingpole seem to suggest that the cure may be worse than the disease or at least ask the question. I, though self isolating for reasons I explain, tend to agree with them. Oddly the executors of my uncle’s literary estate my cousin Nick and Booker’s long time collaborator Richard North think Covid-19 is the real deal. I start my discussion in a small Somerset village chatting to my Aunt.
1755 days ago
The 12 EU flags I had bought to burn on Brexit day seem to have disappeared. I have my suspicions. The Mrs may have voted the right way but has still not dared to admit as much to her lefty pals who, being public sector workers, have nothing better to do than post comments on facebook about how 17.4 million of us are stupid, ill educated racists and how they are considering a permanent move to Tuscany. She does not wear her beliefs, on this one, on her sleeve. That is probably wise as it cannot be long before University lecturers who are found to have voted for Brexit are no platformed and accused of being members of the alt right. But I am not a man to give up easily as you can see below.
1780 days ago
as someone who believes that sun spot activity is critical to the earth’s temperature I rather fear that we should all be stocking up on our thermal underwaer. But that is not what is taught in Geography GCSE or what the BBC lectures with us as “settled science.” The global warmists like Greta Thunberg believe that increased carbon levels caused by many’s activity will lead to higher temperatures. This is a prediction ( ie what will happen) but is stated as a fact (what has happened). Anyone who challenges this world view is slated as akin to a holocaust denier. Indeed I remember some Guardian reading fanatatic screaming those exact words to myself and uncle Christopher Booker as we did a presentation many years ago. But there is a little inconvenient truth, i.e the facts.
1780 days ago
My late uncle Chris would have loved this. It is one of those moments when I really want to chat to him as we would both have been laughing within seconds. It is not the fact that the UK is getting cooler but the way that in utterly Orwellian fashion the BBC and the high priests of the global warming cult, the Met Office, spin cooling as warming.
1788 days ago
Some of you have suffered only three years of being branded thick, ignorant, xenophobic, narrow minded and racist since you voted to leave the EU. For my family there is 45 years of hurt. But on January 31 it is all over and so I have today invested a few quid for my own personal celebration, which I will – of course – record though it will probably be classed as a hate crime.
1798 days ago
There are times when I feel just why isn’t Uncle Chris here to chat. He would have loved the Panorama show in October as he generously shared in my minor triumphs. The death of Bob Willis, the General Election farce. The ghastly Greta Thunberg show. The joke that is the Impeachment of Donald Trump. Anna Soubry losing her deposit. I should have been chatting to him. When I arrived at the Greek Hovel for the olive harvest in late November I would always report to him on how much global warming already lay on the high Taygetos behind us. Those were mountains he knew well and which we had planned to climb together.
1968 days ago
A true giant of post war journalism died the night before last with his two sons at his bed side. Much will written elsewhere about his achievements: Co-founder of Private Eye, scriptwriter at TW3, Campaigning Journalist of the Year (opposing awful inner City redevelopment), Telegraph columnist for 60 years, the Godfather of Euroscepticism. The Guardian, if true to form, will have nasty words about that and about his exposing the global warming hoax.
2794 days ago
In 1975 it was my paternal grandfather Sir John Winnifrith who went into battle against the EU, or the Common Market as it then was. His view of those who wanted a European superstate had not really changed from his time spent thirty years earlier in Churchill's war rooms although his main objection, as a Bennite, was that the EEC would screw the working classes. It did.
2884 days ago
My mother killed herself in 1976. I did not write about the incident until a couple of years ago when her brother, Christopher Booker, wrote about it in the Daily Mail so pushing me to publish my thoughts. I have photos of mum at home on the wall and there is one of her holding me as a baby. But I'd lie if I said that I thought about her every day or even an awful lot.
2924 days ago
Life on Britain's campuses is meant to be all about protecting freedoms and as the proud home to one of the UK's finest journalism courses you would have thought that City University in London would stand full square behind a free press.
3117 days ago
I am no late arrival on the Eurosceptic ship. Euroscepticism is hard wired into my DNA. My father's father, the Bennite Sir John Winnifrith spoke for the "out" side in 1975. My mother's brother is Christopher Booker. How could I be anything other than an "outer"?
And so three years ago I designed a T-shirt which I have worn happily in Greece & England ever since. It's Time to Leave. The imposition of a Soviet hammer & sickle on the EU stars says it all about this most undemocratic of establishments.
As hatred of the EU has grown not only in Britain but
3280 days ago
Once again sincere apologies to Jabba The Hutt groupies for failing to pick up David Lenigas on anything in yesterday's podcast. Before you all get cold turkey, I have a few observations about Octagonal (OCT) nonsense today.I start with a look at React Energy (REAC) a trainwreck involved in green energy shite. I suggest that anyone who believes in this hocus pocus nonsense should read "The Real Global Warming Disaster" by uncle Chris. Then it is onto Anglesey Mining (ATM), Golden Saint Resources (GSR), Slater & Gordon (TOAST) and Northern Petroleum (NOP). See you all tomorrow at Gold & Bears in London.
3427 days ago
I had a long chat last night with my Eurosceptic Uncle and godfather Christopher Booker and who like me is hoping that Greece votes Oxi. But he knows that we have some strange bedfellows in the Oxi camp.
British Eurosceptics are usually on the right. We want the Euro to fail. As I noted on Friday the Oxi camp here want to have their cake and eat it: they want no austerity, debt write-offs and to stay in the Euro. They are lefties. Hearing the message of support to the Oxi rally from the old murderer Gerry Adams makes both Chris and I wonder about our bedfellows. Oh…as an added bonus the Nazis of Golden Dawn are also strong supporters of Oxi! Truly we travel in strange company.
But there is a third way: Kappa Kappa, the hard-line commies. They are today urging folks to vote Oxi but then to spoil their ballot paper. Kappa Kappa got 5% in the General Election and if half its supporters toe the party line that could well be enough to deliver victory to the Nai camp.
My NBF the KKE precinct captain
3763 days ago
My weekly video postcard finds me sitting on my newly constructed eco-loo. More on that in a later photo article.
The main theme of this postcard is the folly of Western meddling abroad. It was the great Dr Ron Paul (pictured) who coined the term blowback. The theme runs through Iraq, Afghanistan and is now playing out in Syria, Libya and the Ukraine.
When will our leaders learn and stop lying?
The Christopher Booker article I refer to is HERE
My weekly financial video postcard covers the uncertainty of earnings where margins are apparently supra-normal. Yes this means Quindell & ASOS. I also look at why the market mood has changed. It can be viewed HERE
Tom Winnifrith has just published his new e-book, The 49 Golden Rules of Making Money from oil, gas and mining shares. You can buy it on Amazon for £6.25 or you can order a FREE copy HERE
3980 days ago
And so it was a day or so after Christmas and my daughter was down in Bristol for Christmas Number 2. How about we pop along to the Conservative club for a quick drink I suggested, keen to lead young people along a path of virtue and righteousness.
But Daddy I have to tell you something about me first, she answered.
Oh Cripes thought I. “Will I be upset?” She responded honestly: “Daddy, you won’t like it.”
Oh double cripes.
What could it be? Might she have a boyfriend? Tried a touch of Nigella with her schoolmates? Could she be “coming out” already? After all she does live in Islington. Surely she cannot be pregnant? My mind raced through all these dreadful scenarios.
But it was worse.
4077 days ago
I do not normally read The Independent as it is a dire newspaper pandering to deluded lefties like my entire family (bar step sister Flea and Chris Booker) by printing utter bilge. But, for your sake dear readers, I prepared the sick bag to read one stormer of an article today. It defies belief.
The headline reads: Aid groups warn of growing hunger and disease as planet warms
Fantastic, maybe those Scottish moors I bought to grow vines on will prove a stunning investment after all?
Greatly encouraged I read on as the Indescribablyboring newspaper continued:
4083 days ago
My 12 year old daughter Olivia has to write an essay for school arguing the pros and cons of the Euro for Europe. Showing a greater grasp of economics than 90% of the bien pensants political and media elite she concludes that there are no material pros and argues forcefully and coherently that there are lots of cons. For myself and her Great Uncle Christopher Booker, as well as her Farage admiring mother, Pinsent Masons partner Big Nose, this essay is a triumph.
For the rest of my family who are true deluded lefties and thus take the view that whatever Uncle Chris and I write, they automatically support the other side, this will be a watershed. A third Eurosceptic writer in the family...great news.
4113 days ago
My immediate family, bar uber-enlightened step sister Flea, are all deluded lefties and thus take the view that if Uncle Chris (Chris Booker) holds one view they should naturally take the opposite line. I tend to take an alternative view. Other than his one little blind spot (a failure to support the only democracy in the Middle East), Booker’s judgement is never wrong. On issues such as the global warming scandal, the EU and inner City development he has for decades been way ahead of the curve.
Today my mother’s brother writes in his Sunday Telegraph column about the West’s failure to appreciate the Islamofascist threat from Iran. Again he is bang on the money. Perhaps we should all have listened to the Israelis a bit more?
But he also picks up on my piece last week about the National Trust and how it is losing the plot. In that snippet he observes correctly why my father’s father, Sir John Winnifrith, would today have been disqualified from being head of the National Trust. It is a good and fair comment which my immediate family will find it hard to disagree with. But on (misguided) principle they probably will do so anyway.
To read my piece on the National Trust’s failure click here
To read Christopher’s column today click here
4113 days ago
In 1976 my family was living in a small village on the borders of Northants, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire called Byfield. Buy a mile one way and a mile and a half the other way we were just inside Northants. And one day I was told by my Uncle Chris (who was staying) and my father that we must all listen to the radio as something historic was happening.
4188 days ago
My old pal Dan Levi named the Downing Street shaggers on his website last night and so since we are both being sued elsewhere (by a cesspit oil company Sefton) for libel I am happy to stand in the dock with him again and also name them. As it happens numerous other websites and folks on twitter have done the same so it will be a packed Court.
I am Spartacus and I hope others will today be Spartacus forcing Cameron to come clean and admit what vast numbers of people already know.
The Government has bullied the mainstream media into silence by suggesting that revealing this may prejudice the forthcoming trials of Brooks and Coulson. Both face separate charges in relation to phone hacking. I fail to see why allegations that the two were shagging is relevant to that.
The reason the Government and David Cameron personally is terrified about this appearing is that he appointed Coulson as his spin doctor in chief instead of a safer pair of hands from the BBC on the advice of….the charming Rebekah. Rebekah was a good pal of his, lending him her horse to ride as they partied together in rural Oxfordshire. LOL.
And of course Rebekah’s lawyer is….David Cameron’s big brother Alex.
Cameron looks like a buffoon with incredibly poor judgment. Chatting to Christopher Booker about this yesterday we remarked how this seemed eerily reminiscent of the last days of the MacMillan Government. An out of touch elite just cannot help but make itself look dirty and shabby as well as incompetent. While the Country faces appalling problems, Tory MPs like Patrick Mercer take bribes and then “do the honourable thing” and stay in Westminster trousering salary + expenses for another two years and Call Me Dave tries to hush up an episode which makes his judgment look incredibly poor.
The honourable thing for Call Me Dave to do is to make a personal statement: “these are the facts, I made an error of judgment for which I apologise – I was hoodwinked, and regret it all.”
If he did that I suspect many of us might almost feel sorry for him. Trying to hush up something that, by the weekend, even crofters married to their cousins on otherwise uninhabited Scottish islands will know, arouses only contempt.
Parliament works for us not the other way round...or had you forgotten that Dave?
4197 days ago
As we all know Call Me Dave is keen on appealing to core Conservatives voters. Hence welfare spending is up, the deficit is out of control, we have no vote on the EU, gay marriage is a core issue, etc. But at least we know one thing. The Conservatives are the party of law & order. In Call Me Dave’s Britain we are tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. Not trivial issues but the sorts of crime that really has us all worried.
As such I bring you a picture this week of one hardened villain caught red handed with the weapon of intent. If you are at this stage lost read more here.
Tough cheese there is no prize for the wittiest caption for the picture below just glory.
For what it’s worth my entry is:
4225 days ago
Christopher Booker founded Private Eye, was campaigning journalist of the year several times in the 1970s and as a columnist on the Sunday Telegraph and ( sometimes) on the Daily Mail he is a scourge of global warming nutters, the EU and all things that right thinking folks despise. He is also my uncle and godfather. And he knew the late Margaret Thatcher well. His speech at UK Investor Show on April 13 reflects on that and on Maggie’s U-Turns on Europe and on global warming as well as setting the record straight on her attitude to apartheid. It is a stormer.
4226 days ago
It seems like just yesterday that Easyjet dropped us off at the one airport on this Island. We were the only plane on the Tarmac and the terminal was 75 yards away. Naturally we waited 5 minutes for a bus to arrive to take us to the terminal. All must have non jobs.
I will offer a few more thoughts up on Greece but the flagpole is on the sea about fifty yards from where we are staying. It is not a bad view to wake up to. But this has been an all too brief stay and today we wend our way back towards the airport and tomorrow it is back to Britain. Farewell to the oil lake, to the wild dill, to Greek salads every meal, to the terrapins in the stream nearby and to Marlboro Lights at 3.90 Euro a packet. Farewell to a life of getting up at 4 AM your time to write on my PC on the balcony overlooking the sea while my partner snoozes.
Normal writing services resume as of Sunday evening. The Tomograph will be back next Wednesday. Meanwhile Darren will continue to load videos from the UK Investor Show onto both ADVFN and to Shareprophets.com - next up is Christopher Booker.
This has been a good place to think. An announcement is pending. Ho. Ho. Ho.
4237 days ago
I had planned to leave London on Sunday but that all changed. I will be heading down to the Strand to mark my respects to Britain’s greatest ever Prime Minister – a woman who saved this country. A woman of principle. I am not sure how many folks will line the route nor if it will be disrupted by unkempt lefties, ignorant young people or worse but I shall be there anyway.
Lucian Miers is trekking up from the boonies to join me. I guess the crowds will build early so I shall work late at Real Man and then head off well before the crack of dawn to bag a place for Lucian and myself.
Uncle Chris (Booker) says that his wife queued to pay her respects at Churchill’s coffin and so this time I am there for the Booker’s who cannot make it. My own family of deluded lefties have rather different feelings but I guess I am also there for little step sister Flea who, to her credit, is a true child of Thatcher.
Afterwards I shall return to Real Man, feeling – I suspect – rather tired so it may be a light blogging day ahead.
4244 days ago
We are lucky to have a speaker already lined up at the UK’s top investor show which takes place this Saturday April 13th who knew Margaret Thatcher well. In fact we have several but in light of the sad demise of Britain’s greatest Prime Minister we have moved Christopher Booker, the founder of Private Eye and celebrated Sunday Telegraph columnist to the main stage during the afternoon to talk about “The Margaret Thatcher I knew – nearly always right in the end.”
I chatted to Booker – who is my uncle and godfather - this morning and our reflections on the Iron Lady covered her Euro scepticism, the treachery of her colleagues, the lie that she supported apartheid, her conversion from a supporter of global warming theory to becoming an ardent global warming sceptic and many other issues. Booker will cover how and why her views changed on these and other topics and how our leaders today might perhaps reflect on this.
The revised speaker line-up on our main stage is now:
10 AM Opening Remarks
10.10-11 AM Nigel Wray & Nick Leslau
11.00 – 11.45 AM – Tom Winnifrith with bear raider Lucian Miers
11.45-11.55 – the short debate: Is AIM doomed Tom Winnifrith vs Richard Poulden
11.55-12.40 – Comedian and gold guru Dominic Frisbey on gold
1.40-2.35 PM – The Traders session: Clem Chambers, Alpesh Patel, Zak Mir, Evil Knievil and John Piper
2.35-3.15 – Christopher Booker
3.45 – 4.30 Mark Slater
4.30-5.15 Nigel Farage MEP ( who will I am sure also mention the Iron Lady)
We still have a handful of tickets going for the show due to late cancellations. If you wish to attend email your postal address with postcode and how many tickets you require to [email protected] and the tickets will be despatched first class at once.
I look forward to seeing you on Saturday 13th April at Excel.
Tom Winnifrith
4252 days ago
If I wish to read more than 20 articles a month on the Telegraph website I now have to pay £1.99 a month. And so the Telegraph loses another reader and an active one. I am not sure how much it makes in online revenue but if we say that it is £4 per 1000 Page impressions I think that the paper is now about £1 a month worse off.
I read that paper out of habit not because it offers that much. My most visited page was the Premiership table which I seem to check far too often. But I can get that data elsewhere for free as I can also get for free West Ham team news and forthcoming fixtures. I read the odd news story but it is a commodity so I can get that elsewhere.
I do like reading Christopher Booker’s column but Richard North always reprints that on his blog. And so I am left with Jeremy Warner (who is occasionally good), Ambrose E-P and Tom Stevenson. And that probably comes to about 15 columns a month which I may bother to read. Because I was drawn in by the columnists and the league table I inevitably ended up reading a few more articles but I did not need to. They were junk food. So I was responsible for a good slug of Page Impressions.
This is the problem that newspapers have. They have high fixed costs (staff, printing presses, lavish offices) and 98% of their content is commodity content. Why should anyone pay a fee to cover all those fixed costs when all they want is the odd bit of unique content? Start charging me 2p a go to read a given column and I might well play ball and then read all that junk food material and give the paper advertising income as well. As things stand I, will like many others, just turn away.
I used to read the Times online. I thought I’d miss Matthew Parris
4306 days ago
That is the news as of tonight. On a day when two more PLCs signed up to present (Ariana Resources and The Innovation Group) we did our sums and there are now just 50 seats out of 2,500 left unallocated for what is clearly the UK’s leading investment show.
It is hardly surprising that two months before the event, nearly all the seats are allocated given the all star speaker line up:
Nigel Wray, Nigel Farage, Mark Slater, Evil Knievil, Lucian Miers, Nick Leslau, Richard Poulden, myself, Dominic Frisbey, Clem Chambers, Amanda Van Dyke, Christopher Booker, Mike Hall, Roger Lawson, Simon Denham, John Piper, David Buik, Steve Moore, Robert Sutherland Smith, Paul Atherley, Jan Nelson, Ronald Duncan, Craig Brown and the list goes on and on…
And with companies booking in at a rate of one a day almost 50 of the 80 PLC stands are now reserved and you can check out a list of some of the big name exhibitors HERE.
And so what are you doing on April 13th? At some stage tomorrow we will close the lists and start running a “reserve” ticket list for folks who MIGHT get a seat if we have a cancellation. That is a MIGHT.
We have just 50 seats left to allocate. You can still grab one of them if you book now HERE.
I hope to see you all on April 13.
Tom Winnifrith
4336 days ago
We can always learn more about how to be better investors by learning from the experts. If your New Year Resolution is to do that then you need to book a ticket today to meet real Master Investors on April 13th in London at the UKInvestor Show, organised by ADVFN. The speakers are not career stockbrokers or rent a quote journalists but men who have actually made hundreds of millions of pounds by buying and selling the right assets. True master investors.
You can book your free ticket HERE
Leading the line-up are Nick Leslau and Nigel Wray. Nick was one of TV’s secret millionaires and is probably the most successful property investor of his generation. The firm he runs owns Madame Tussauds, thousands of pubs and much else. Over many years he has worked closely with Nigel Wray, aka Britain’s Buffet , the master of small cap investing. Nigel is the biggest shareholder in Domino’s Pizzza (LSE:DOM), having bought in at 36p – the shares are now c£5 – and is also a big holder of Alliance Pharma (LSE:APH) another stock worth watching.
Next up is Mark Slater, son of Jim and an extraordinarily successful fund manager in his own right. For detailed bottom up analysis of smaller growth plays you just cannot beat Mark and his detailed stock specific presentations are always packed with ideas. He is followed by Dominic Frisbey, comedian and gold guru. Have you ever seen his debt bomb video? If not watch it http://tomwinnifrith.com/articles/204/debt-bomb-great-video-well-done-dominic-frisby as it is a classic. Dominic is not only someone who writes about gold but he has made more than a million quid from more or less zero capital buying and selling the stuff. His theme: gold.
We have the UK’s two best known bear raiders in conversation (with me). That is to say Evil Knievil and Lucien Miers (profiled HERE). In what is promised to be a structured presentation they will outline their market views but also specifically a top ten shorts for 2013.
Moving on we also have a keynote presentation from another Nigel. That is Nigel Farage MEP the leader of UKIP on why the UK should save itself billions and quit the Evil Empire. Farage is funny and articulate and he has a good point don’t you think?
If you want a free ticket book NOW HERE, as the 2,500 seats will go on a first come first served basis
But it does not end there. During the afternoon we have two alternatives for you.
Choice One is the Traders Session. Lead by Clem Chambers of ADVFN, half a dozen of the UK’s best known traders will discuss strategies, charts and ideas to make money in 2013. On stage are Zak Mir, John Piper, Simon Denham of London Capital and Alpesh Patel.
Choice two are the breakout rooms where you can hear presentations on how to make money in mining stocks by Amanda Van Dyke a partner at Dundee Securities and chair of Women in Mining, on turfing out useless boards and shareholder activism by Roger Lawson of ShareSoc, on how climate change laws will cost you dear by Christopher Booker and on making money from alternative investments by Mike Hall of Stanley Gibbons. Each speaker will do two presentations.
That knockout line-up is surely enough. To book free tickets which will be allocated on a first come first served basis click HERE
Not enough? Well how about the companies attending giving you a unique chance to chat to the CEOs of companies you may be invested in or thinking about backing. Among those already lined up are: EMED, Minoan, Vatukoula, Stanley Gibbons, Ortac, Intandem, Leyshon Resources, ReThink Group, Northern Petroleum, 1Spatial, Wishbone Gold, PGC Entertainment, Anglesey Mining, Red Rock Resources, Regency Mines, Sharescope, Mechan Controls, Symphony Environmental, K3 Business Technology, @UK, Alexander Mining, London Capital Group and the list goes on and on. There will be around 80 stands on the day.
The venue is Excel in London and the fun starts at 9.30 AM on April 13th. There are 2,500 tickets available and they will go on a first come first served basis. But hurry. Already the show is one third booked out!
If you want more details or to book a seat go HERE to the UKInvestor Show website.
I look forward to seeing you in April
Tom Winnifrith
4360 days ago
UKInvestor Show is an event about making money but I have always thought such a show needs one non investment speaker and I am delighted to say that Nigel Farage MEP emailed this morning and he is up for it. The leader of UKIP will talk about how staying in the EU costs all of us so much and why we should leave now.
And so on April 13th at Excel we now have a main stage line up of Nigel Wray (Britain’s Buffett), Nick Leslau (property legend and secret millionaire), bear raiders Evil Knievil and Lucian Miers and Dominic Frisbey, Mr Gold and Nigel Farage. And there is one other surprise for you on the main stage.
The traders session ( also a main stage event) is chaired by Steve Moore and stars Clem Chambers, Alpesh Patel, Simon Denham, John Piper and Zak Mir ( plus one name to reveal shortly)
In the breakout rooms we have the Goddess, Amanda VanDyke on making money from mining stocks, Stanley Gibbons boss Mike Hall on alternative investments, Roger Lawson on shareholder activism and Christopher Booker on how global warming costs you so much.
There is the Poulden v Winnifrith debate (10 minutes of main stage comedy) and 80 companies presenting at CEO level.
You have to admit that is a cracking line-up. No other show even comes close. If you want to hear a master investor speak this is the only show worth attending. To register for your free ticket on a first come first served basis go HERE.
4380 days ago
I invite you to hold your nose and watch the BBC video below of Joyce Thacker, head of Rotherham’s Social Services defending the removal of three kids from loving foster parents because the parents belong to UKIP. Can anyone say that they are not appalled? This sour faced old bag should be sacked at once. She admits that the decision was made by her.
4397 days ago
The Tory paedophile scandal (with Labour to follow) will dwarf that of the Savile affair if it is shown that senior political nonces were let off the hook as part of an establishment cover up. There has been no sign from senior Tories, as they express their faux outrage and shock, (having known all the stories for years) that they will deal with this. The grim truth will have to be dragged out from them.
As I pointed out yesterday the media and political establishment have known for years about the rumours now spread widely across the internet and have at best turned a blind eye to protect “their own” or at worst actively engaged in a cover up. You can read that piece HERE.
4409 days ago
My half hour taste of the BBC yesterday, via the Today programme, still hurts. The episode in question concerns the EU’s plan to increase its budget by 6.8% this year, David Cameron’s faux outrage, the lies told by an EU spokesman on the show and the dismal lack of balance provided by a biased BBC. I have discussed the matter with Christopher Booker and the whole business is a disgrace.
