The Grumpies met for Friday lunch and to consider contemporary issues.

We discussed candidates to be “put on the bus.”  We chose the thirty-one out of sixty-six executives and directors at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust who refused to cooperate with the review into maternity care which resulted in more than 2500 mothers and babies who had died or been harmed between 2012- 2025.

Topics for discussion included:

1. A magistrate who allowed a drug dealer to run his operation while in gaol has been given a sentence of seven years.
2. A property in Lincolnshire has been removed from Right-move after a virtual tour showed rooms filled with Nazi memorabilia.
3. Baroness Mone and her husband are being sued in a legal action brought by liquidators of their collapsed company PPE Medpro. The government has already won a separate case [£122 million plus interest] but the company had put itself into administration the day before the judgement and had less than £1,000,000 in assets.
4. Michael Gove has finally got a taste of being Prime Minister in Sky's forthcoming The War Game, which simulates a Russian attack on the UK. “I began with unwarranted overconfidence moving to fumbling crisis after crisis and ended up with me almost alone in a bunker wondering how disaster had come so quickly,” His cabinet was a coalition but there was no one from Reform UK. “One colleague suggested that sky couldn't afford the £5,000,000 fee required.”
5. The British museum's online booking system for tickets to view the Bayer tapestry has crashed amid unprecedented demand with queues of more than 16,000 people some waiting up to 10 hours to reach the booking page.
6. The Home Office identified more than 400,000 illegal migrants in the UK but nearly half of them could not be removed because of outstanding asylum and human rights claims.
7. In Iran, a female singer has been sentenced to seventy-four lashes and a two-year ban because a woman singing on her own in public is an offence of “vulgar and immoral content.”

As always, the conversation was genial, informative, varied and amusing.