97 days ago
The sad demise of Michael Mosley in Greece and of Jay Slater in Tenerife this summer naturally made me think of my great Uncle David Cochrane, not just the manner of his death in 1931 but also of the waiting that all three families endured. With Cochrane there is also a villain of the story, his uncle by marriage, and this is, in a way, a precursor to a very long article I am preparing on Operation Mincemeat, the underpants and my family. It all starts with the four young girls pictured below in, I suspect, the late 1890s.
1247 days ago
Despite all the huffing and puffing about how the Tories care for what they might term “ordinary” people in so called Red Wall seats, places like Wrexham where I live, if you scratch the surface of a Tory MP you usually find an unashamed snob who secretly despises those he or she views as the peasantry. Sometimes the guard slips. Media minister John Whittingdale today said:
1415 days ago
At what point will the Government and MPs wake up to how useless is the FCA. I first warned a leading figure, Sir George Young (now Lord Young), that it was asleep at the wheel – with regard to the £3 billion Quindell fraud – back in 2013. The complacent old fool assured his errant step nephew and second cousin that the regulator knew what it was doing and I had no need to do anything more. Of course it did not. Belatedly MPs are waking up to the failings of the FCA with regard to London & Capital Finance but there have been a stream of other mini-bond disasters where I have issued explicit warnings over two years and the FCA has done BUGGER ALL to stop them from continuing to raise funds. Some have already gone tits up so losing vulnerable savers hundreds of millions of pounds. Others are car crashes in waiting. I am so angry at the FCA for letting down those who are most vulnerable.