Flying on wings of desire with the RAF is the only way to fly says FREDERICK FORSYTH
WE are now well into 2018 so forgive me for mentioning that this year is the 100th birthday of the RAF. The actual birth date was April 1, 1918. I recall with great clarity the 40th birthday on that date in 1958.
MoD Lyneham was the home of all the Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft
I was a hitchhiking free passenger on a Bristol Beverley from RAF Lyneham to Luqa, Malta, looking for a sunny break.
The Beverley was a lumbering freighter that flew like a sick hippo. This one had in the hold a huge jet engine whose weight, if we had gone down in the sea, would have speedily taken us to the bottom.
There were six passengers crouching in the tail boom.
We refuelled at the French air base at Salons outside Marseilles and flew on.
A hundred miles over the Med the starboard inner engine just blew up – it literally disintegrated. Up front Sgt Pilot Farmer performed miracles, bringing us down to 100ft in case another engine went, and we limped back at wave-top height to Salons, landing with a huge sigh of relief.
The senior passenger, an Air Vice Marshal, confiscated the French franc reserve of the tiny RAF liaison unit and we went off into Salons town to celebrate the 40th anniversary and being alive. It was 13 years after the war.
The French remembered the liberation and on seeing our pale blue uniforms and wings we were in clover. We dined excellently with much wine and sauntered off to a friendly bordello.
There the youngest of us, a schoolboy heading to Luqa for Easter hols with mum and dad, lost his virginity to a sympathetic French girl. We rolled back to base in the small hours singing bawdy songs.
The AVM was being supported by Sergeant Farmer to the surprise of the French air force guards on main gate. They thought that they had "égalité" but not like that.
The next day a replacement Beverley arrived and we flew on to join the hangovers at Luqa. I don't think we could get away with that nowadays. Political correctness and all that. Still, we had some fun.
Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
Tony Blair seems to be going on forever
Power and fury...
“Men may come and men may go," said Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "but I go on for ever.”
And so it appears does Tony Blair with yet another blueprint for frustrating the majority wish of the British people on Brexit.
In any analysis of the government of the EU, this at least stands out.
It has no official opposition. As another sage remarked, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Power without opposition is absolute.
So is the EU government corrupt? Don't listen to me, listen to the European Parliament itself. It estimates the cost of direct and indirect fraud and corruption at £782billion (yes, billion) a year.
A 10th of that would bring any British government crashing down. So what will Brussels do when British money is no longer there to fill the hole? No wonder they are panicking. And the panic is coming out in rage.
It seems that the anti-flu jab is not necessary for the over-75s.
No explanation why not.
But at the risk of appearing seriously big-headed I have not had flu for 10 years and have never had the jab.
The CO insists I have a top-to-toe medical check-up early in every year.
My medic, 10 years my junior, grinds his teeth with envy when the results come in and surmises that somewhere inside there are the genes of an old Kentish carthorse.
I just tell him it's a clear conscience and walk out.
Alex Wong/Getty
Speaker Paul Ryan whispers to Vice President Pence
Vice president with a trump card?
As the White House becomes more and more chaotic so rises in volume the speculation that this presidency may have to end in impeachment. But this recourse is far harder and more complicated than simply bandying the word about would suggest.
Much more feasible might be the invocation of the 25th Amendment of the US constitution.
This provides for removal from office in favour of the replacement by the vice president when the president is medically unable to fulfil his function. It has been used three times since the war, in each case very temporarily when the president was under general anaesthetic.
Remember when Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest? He was unconscious for several hours while surgeons removed the bullet and Amendment 25 was invoked.
Entertaining though Michael Wolff's book Fire And Fury may be, are the actual alarm bells the revelations – if true – of Donald Trump's alleged absent-mindedness, verging on amnesia?
Wolff claims he repeats himself and cannot recognise friends he has known for life.
Could this be a progressive deterioration?
It takes only 14 signatures to activate Section IV of Amendment 25 - the vice president and 13 out of 24 (a majority) of the members of the cabinet.
A palace coup? Not unheard-of. Perhaps Vice President Mike Pence is the man to watch.
Getty
Donald Trump has been subjected to all sorts of rumours in Michael Wolff's new book
Nursing NHS back to health
Hardly a day goes by without yet another media warning about the state of our NHS and how it hovers on the brink of collapse.
It was well within my life that our NHS was the envy of the world and something to be copied by our friends across the Channel. So they did. Now in the league tables of efficiency and solvency we are way down the chart, stumbling along while NHS equivalents in Europe are praised to the skies.
Perhaps we should reverse the roles. We may have been the pioneers but something has gone wrong.
Too many patients (especially OAPs as we just live longer and longer), saintly but overworked staff, doctors and nurses quitting in droves, wards crammed, vast bureaucracy (half superfluous) and permanent shortage of funds despite constant increases (yes, there really are).
Because the NHS is the most sacred of sacred cows no politician dares propose what has to happen sooner or later: a complete reformation. And that after a long, hard study of the systems of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Germany.
It is practically forbidden to point out what happens to be true: that founder and Labour demigod Nye Bevan never envisaged what we have today.
He thought his new system would only be a safety net for the poor who could not afford private cover. He would be horrified at the thought of the well-to-do battening on the public purse when a modest premium will acquire a good family-size sickness/accident cover. But in Labour ranks that's treason.
The trouble is, the Scandinavians use mixed-source funding and it seems to work. Maybe we should abandon idealism and go for pragmatism. But surely we cannot go on stumbling from crisis to crisis until final, humiliating implosion?
Dan Kitwood/Getty
It was well within my life that our NHS was the envy of the world
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen...
It is impossible to recall how many incarnations there have been of Robin Hood, surely the most represented outlaw ever.
Anyway, there is another RH film in the making with the lovely Irish girl Eve Hewson as Maid Marion.
The surname ring a bell? She is the daughter of pop singer Bono and easier on the eye.
Applysense
The Commonwealth has replaced the British Empire
If the Empire was so terrible, why do we still have the Commonwealth?
A group of snowflake academics at Oxford, with support from elsewhere, have excoriated one of their number for suggesting the long-gone British Empire was not all bad. In their wittering complaint they would have it the empire was one vast concentration camp.
As it happens I have travelled widely throughout today's Commonwealth, formerly the Empire. Just about everywhere I met goodwill towards the British and especially among the elderly who recall colonial days. There was no such feeling towards the French, Germans or Portuguese in their ex-possessions.
The fact is the Empire was not run by ambassadors and ministers but by a sprawling chain of lowly district commissioners who administered their county-sized territories as best they could. They retired at the end of empire, back to Britain most of them, to settle in brick boxes to eke out their lives on tiny pensions.
Why so poor? They did not steal or embezzle, to the bewilderment of the local people. An elderly Ghanaian told me: "We have not had an incorrupt judge since you left. Here you do not argue for a verdict, you buy one. If you cannot, you lose." In Nigeria a chief told me: "If we had to be colonised at all, thank God it was you lot."
This prevailed from Guyana in the West across to Singapore in the East and especially in Africa where no office-holder has retired on state pensions since we left. After public "service" they all have personal fortunes.
Running down this country seems to be the new conceit as our institutions swerve to the trendy Left. Considering the staggering salaries university vice-chancellors pay themselves they are in no place to lecture on integrity. The empire made its mistakes and had its bad eggs but it left behind the UK-friendly Commonwealth, which is absolutely unique in world history.
The anti-British voices are very young, very privileged or pseudo-intellectual like the Oxford dons.
Flying on wings of desire with the RAF is the only way to fly says FREDERICK FORSYTH
WE are now well into 2018 so forgive me for mentioning that this year is the 100th birthday of the RAF. The actual birth date was April 1, 1918. I recall with great clarity the 40th birthday on that date in 1958.
MoD Lyneham was the home of all the Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft
I was a hitchhiking free passenger on a Bristol Beverley from RAF Lyneham to Luqa, Malta, looking for a sunny break.
The Beverley was a lumbering freighter that flew like a sick hippo. This one had in the hold a huge jet engine whose weight, if we had gone down in the sea, would have speedily taken us to the bottom.
There were six passengers crouching in the tail boom.
We refuelled at the French air base at Salons outside Marseilles and flew on.
A hundred miles over the Med the starboard inner engine just blew up – it literally disintegrated. Up front Sgt Pilot Farmer performed miracles, bringing us down to 100ft in case another engine went, and we limped back at wave-top height to Salons, landing with a huge sigh of relief.
The senior passenger, an Air Vice Marshal, confiscated the French franc reserve of the tiny RAF liaison unit and we went off into Salons town to celebrate the 40th anniversary and being alive. It was 13 years after the war.
The French remembered the liberation and on seeing our pale blue uniforms and wings we were in clover. We dined excellently with much wine and sauntered off to a friendly bordello.
There the youngest of us, a schoolboy heading to Luqa for Easter hols with mum and dad, lost his virginity to a sympathetic French girl. We rolled back to base in the small hours singing bawdy songs.
The AVM was being supported by Sergeant Farmer to the surprise of the French air force guards on main gate. They thought that they had "égalité" but not like that.
The next day a replacement Beverley arrived and we flew on to join the hangovers at Luqa. I don't think we could get away with that nowadays. Political correctness and all that. Still, we had some fun.
Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
Tony Blair seems to be going on forever
Power and fury...
“Men may come and men may go," said Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "but I go on for ever.”
And so it appears does Tony Blair with yet another blueprint for frustrating the majority wish of the British people on Brexit.
In any analysis of the government of the EU, this at least stands out.
It has no official opposition. As another sage remarked, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Power without opposition is absolute.
So is the EU government corrupt? Don't listen to me, listen to the European Parliament itself. It estimates the cost of direct and indirect fraud and corruption at £782billion (yes, billion) a year.
A 10th of that would bring any British government crashing down. So what will Brussels do when British money is no longer there to fill the hole? No wonder they are panicking. And the panic is coming out in rage.
It seems that the anti-flu jab is not necessary for the over-75s.
No explanation why not.
But at the risk of appearing seriously big-headed I have not had flu for 10 years and have never had the jab.
The CO insists I have a top-to-toe medical check-up early in every year.
My medic, 10 years my junior, grinds his teeth with envy when the results come in and surmises that somewhere inside there are the genes of an old Kentish carthorse.
I just tell him it's a clear conscience and walk out.
Alex Wong/Getty
Speaker Paul Ryan whispers to Vice President Pence
Vice president with a trump card?
As the White House becomes more and more chaotic so rises in volume the speculation that this presidency may have to end in impeachment. But this recourse is far harder and more complicated than simply bandying the word about would suggest.
Much more feasible might be the invocation of the 25th Amendment of the US constitution.
This provides for removal from office in favour of the replacement by the vice president when the president is medically unable to fulfil his function. It has been used three times since the war, in each case very temporarily when the president was under general anaesthetic.
Remember when Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest? He was unconscious for several hours while surgeons removed the bullet and Amendment 25 was invoked.
Entertaining though Michael Wolff's book Fire And Fury may be, are the actual alarm bells the revelations – if true – of Donald Trump's alleged absent-mindedness, verging on amnesia?
Wolff claims he repeats himself and cannot recognise friends he has known for life.
Could this be a progressive deterioration?
It takes only 14 signatures to activate Section IV of Amendment 25 - the vice president and 13 out of 24 (a majority) of the members of the cabinet.
A palace coup? Not unheard-of. Perhaps Vice President Mike Pence is the man to watch.
Getty
Donald Trump has been subjected to all sorts of rumours in Michael Wolff's new book
Nursing NHS back to health
Hardly a day goes by without yet another media warning about the state of our NHS and how it hovers on the brink of collapse.
It was well within my life that our NHS was the envy of the world and something to be copied by our friends across the Channel. So they did. Now in the league tables of efficiency and solvency we are way down the chart, stumbling along while NHS equivalents in Europe are praised to the skies.
Perhaps we should reverse the roles. We may have been the pioneers but something has gone wrong.
Too many patients (especially OAPs as we just live longer and longer), saintly but overworked staff, doctors and nurses quitting in droves, wards crammed, vast bureaucracy (half superfluous) and permanent shortage of funds despite constant increases (yes, there really are).
Because the NHS is the most sacred of sacred cows no politician dares propose what has to happen sooner or later: a complete reformation. And that after a long, hard study of the systems of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Germany.
It is practically forbidden to point out what happens to be true: that founder and Labour demigod Nye Bevan never envisaged what we have today.
He thought his new system would only be a safety net for the poor who could not afford private cover. He would be horrified at the thought of the well-to-do battening on the public purse when a modest premium will acquire a good family-size sickness/accident cover. But in Labour ranks that's treason.
The trouble is, the Scandinavians use mixed-source funding and it seems to work. Maybe we should abandon idealism and go for pragmatism. But surely we cannot go on stumbling from crisis to crisis until final, humiliating implosion?
Dan Kitwood/Getty
It was well within my life that our NHS was the envy of the world
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen...
It is impossible to recall how many incarnations there have been of Robin Hood, surely the most represented outlaw ever.
Anyway, there is another RH film in the making with the lovely Irish girl Eve Hewson as Maid Marion.
The surname ring a bell? She is the daughter of pop singer Bono and easier on the eye.
Applysense
The Commonwealth has replaced the British Empire
If the Empire was so terrible, why do we still have the Commonwealth?
A group of snowflake academics at Oxford, with support from elsewhere, have excoriated one of their number for suggesting the long-gone British Empire was not all bad. In their wittering complaint they would have it the empire was one vast concentration camp.
As it happens I have travelled widely throughout today's Commonwealth, formerly the Empire. Just about everywhere I met goodwill towards the British and especially among the elderly who recall colonial days. There was no such feeling towards the French, Germans or Portuguese in their ex-possessions.
The fact is the Empire was not run by ambassadors and ministers but by a sprawling chain of lowly district commissioners who administered their county-sized territories as best they could. They retired at the end of empire, back to Britain most of them, to settle in brick boxes to eke out their lives on tiny pensions.
Why so poor? They did not steal or embezzle, to the bewilderment of the local people. An elderly Ghanaian told me: "We have not had an incorrupt judge since you left. Here you do not argue for a verdict, you buy one. If you cannot, you lose." In Nigeria a chief told me: "If we had to be colonised at all, thank God it was you lot."
This prevailed from Guyana in the West across to Singapore in the East and especially in Africa where no office-holder has retired on state pensions since we left. After public "service" they all have personal fortunes.
Running down this country seems to be the new conceit as our institutions swerve to the trendy Left. Considering the staggering salaries university vice-chancellors pay themselves they are in no place to lecture on integrity. The empire made its mistakes and had its bad eggs but it left behind the UK-friendly Commonwealth, which is absolutely unique in world history.
The anti-British voices are very young, very privileged or pseudo-intellectual like the Oxford dons.
Flying on wings of desire with the RAF is the only way to fly says FREDERICK FORSYTH
WE are now well into 2018 so forgive me for mentioning that this year is the 100th birthday of the RAF. The actual birth date was April 1, 1918. I recall with great clarity the 40th birthday on that date in 1958.
MoD Lyneham was the home of all the Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft
I was a hitchhiking free passenger on a Bristol Beverley from RAF Lyneham to Luqa, Malta, looking for a sunny break.
The Beverley was a lumbering freighter that flew like a sick hippo. This one had in the hold a huge jet engine whose weight, if we had gone down in the sea, would have speedily taken us to the bottom.
There were six passengers crouching in the tail boom.
We refuelled at the French air base at Salons outside Marseilles and flew on.
A hundred miles over the Med the starboard inner engine just blew up – it literally disintegrated. Up front Sgt Pilot Farmer performed miracles, bringing us down to 100ft in case another engine went, and we limped back at wave-top height to Salons, landing with a huge sigh of relief.
The senior passenger, an Air Vice Marshal, confiscated the French franc reserve of the tiny RAF liaison unit and we went off into Salons town to celebrate the 40th anniversary and being alive. It was 13 years after the war.
The French remembered the liberation and on seeing our pale blue uniforms and wings we were in clover. We dined excellently with much wine and sauntered off to a friendly bordello.
There the youngest of us, a schoolboy heading to Luqa for Easter hols with mum and dad, lost his virginity to a sympathetic French girl. We rolled back to base in the small hours singing bawdy songs.
The AVM was being supported by Sergeant Farmer to the surprise of the French air force guards on main gate. They thought that they had "égalité" but not like that.
The next day a replacement Beverley arrived and we flew on to join the hangovers at Luqa. I don't think we could get away with that nowadays. Political correctness and all that. Still, we had some fun.
Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
Tony Blair seems to be going on forever
Power and fury...
“Men may come and men may go," said Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "but I go on for ever.”
And so it appears does Tony Blair with yet another blueprint for frustrating the majority wish of the British people on Brexit.
In any analysis of the government of the EU, this at least stands out.
It has no official opposition. As another sage remarked, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Power without opposition is absolute.
So is the EU government corrupt? Don't listen to me, listen to the European Parliament itself. It estimates the cost of direct and indirect fraud and corruption at £782billion (yes, billion) a year.
A 10th of that would bring any British government crashing down. So what will Brussels do when British money is no longer there to fill the hole? No wonder they are panicking. And the panic is coming out in rage.
It seems that the anti-flu jab is not necessary for the over-75s.
No explanation why not.
But at the risk of appearing seriously big-headed I have not had flu for 10 years and have never had the jab.
The CO insists I have a top-to-toe medical check-up early in every year.
My medic, 10 years my junior, grinds his teeth with envy when the results come in and surmises that somewhere inside there are the genes of an old Kentish carthorse.
I just tell him it's a clear conscience and walk out.
Alex Wong/Getty
Speaker Paul Ryan whispers to Vice President Pence
Vice president with a trump card?
As the White House becomes more and more chaotic so rises in volume the speculation that this presidency may have to end in impeachment. But this recourse is far harder and more complicated than simply bandying the word about would suggest.
Much more feasible might be the invocation of the 25th Amendment of the US constitution.
This provides for removal from office in favour of the replacement by the vice president when the president is medically unable to fulfil his function. It has been used three times since the war, in each case very temporarily when the president was under general anaesthetic.
Remember when Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest? He was unconscious for several hours while surgeons removed the bullet and Amendment 25 was invoked.
Entertaining though Michael Wolff's book Fire And Fury may be, are the actual alarm bells the revelations – if true – of Donald Trump's alleged absent-mindedness, verging on amnesia?
Wolff claims he repeats himself and cannot recognise friends he has known for life.
Could this be a progressive deterioration?
It takes only 14 signatures to activate Section IV of Amendment 25 - the vice president and 13 out of 24 (a majority) of the members of the cabinet.
A palace coup? Not unheard-of. Perhaps Vice President Mike Pence is the man to watch.
Getty
Donald Trump has been subjected to all sorts of rumours in Michael Wolff's new book
Nursing NHS back to health
Hardly a day goes by without yet another media warning about the state of our NHS and how it hovers on the brink of collapse.
It was well within my life that our NHS was the envy of the world and something to be copied by our friends across the Channel. So they did. Now in the league tables of efficiency and solvency we are way down the chart, stumbling along while NHS equivalents in Europe are praised to the skies.
Perhaps we should reverse the roles. We may have been the pioneers but something has gone wrong.
Too many patients (especially OAPs as we just live longer and longer), saintly but overworked staff, doctors and nurses quitting in droves, wards crammed, vast bureaucracy (half superfluous) and permanent shortage of funds despite constant increases (yes, there really are).
Because the NHS is the most sacred of sacred cows no politician dares propose what has to happen sooner or later: a complete reformation. And that after a long, hard study of the systems of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Germany.
It is practically forbidden to point out what happens to be true: that founder and Labour demigod Nye Bevan never envisaged what we have today.
He thought his new system would only be a safety net for the poor who could not afford private cover. He would be horrified at the thought of the well-to-do battening on the public purse when a modest premium will acquire a good family-size sickness/accident cover. But in Labour ranks that's treason.
The trouble is, the Scandinavians use mixed-source funding and it seems to work. Maybe we should abandon idealism and go for pragmatism. But surely we cannot go on stumbling from crisis to crisis until final, humiliating implosion?
Dan Kitwood/Getty
It was well within my life that our NHS was the envy of the world
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen...
It is impossible to recall how many incarnations there have been of Robin Hood, surely the most represented outlaw ever.
Anyway, there is another RH film in the making with the lovely Irish girl Eve Hewson as Maid Marion.
The surname ring a bell? She is the daughter of pop singer Bono and easier on the eye.
Applysense
The Commonwealth has replaced the British Empire
If the Empire was so terrible, why do we still have the Commonwealth?
A group of snowflake academics at Oxford, with support from elsewhere, have excoriated one of their number for suggesting the long-gone British Empire was not all bad. In their wittering complaint they would have it the empire was one vast concentration camp.
As it happens I have travelled widely throughout today's Commonwealth, formerly the Empire. Just about everywhere I met goodwill towards the British and especially among the elderly who recall colonial days. There was no such feeling towards the French, Germans or Portuguese in their ex-possessions.
The fact is the Empire was not run by ambassadors and ministers but by a sprawling chain of lowly district commissioners who administered their county-sized territories as best they could. They retired at the end of empire, back to Britain most of them, to settle in brick boxes to eke out their lives on tiny pensions.
Why so poor? They did not steal or embezzle, to the bewilderment of the local people. An elderly Ghanaian told me: "We have not had an incorrupt judge since you left. Here you do not argue for a verdict, you buy one. If you cannot, you lose." In Nigeria a chief told me: "If we had to be colonised at all, thank God it was you lot."
This prevailed from Guyana in the West across to Singapore in the East and especially in Africa where no office-holder has retired on state pensions since we left. After public "service" they all have personal fortunes.
Running down this country seems to be the new conceit as our institutions swerve to the trendy Left. Considering the staggering salaries university vice-chancellors pay themselves they are in no place to lecture on integrity. The empire made its mistakes and had its bad eggs but it left behind the UK-friendly Commonwealth, which is absolutely unique in world history.
The anti-British voices are very young, very privileged or pseudo-intellectual like the Oxford dons.
David Goddard/Getty
Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
Alex Wong/Getty
Getty
Dan Kitwood/Getty
Applysense