Lyra McKee's death at the hands of Remainers

The three-year long refusal by the losing Remain side in the referendum to accept the result has so far seen a bent Speaker and betrayer parliament of lying MPs using every effort to nullify the people's choice, the State media and all but one newspaper stoking the fires of anti-Brexit hatred and the illiberal metropolitan elites, who also think that 'chavs' and 'gammons' should be denied the vote, using every means to pervert, distort and disrupt our exit from the EU. Even the Deep State, a cabal of anti-democratic mandarins who will expect honours for their betrayal of a democracy that they should defend, have used all means both legal and unlawful to sabotage Britain's democratic outcome

Nowhere else in the world would such an unconscionable delay be tolerated. No advanced democracy in the world would permit this travesty of governance, this denial of a voice to the 17.4 million who won, to continue.

Tragically, the Remainers, in refusing so aggressively to accept a clear democratic majority, have inflamed weaker and more barbarous minds to violence. The death of Lyra McKee at the hands of a Remainer 'New IRA' gunman is a new low in our democracy.

We will catch and imprison the gunman, but make no mistake - it is the mass of bien-pensant Brexit Deniers, our betrayer MPs who have blocked Brexit, May's toxic Remainer government and our poisonous Remainer media who were equally responsible for pulling the trigger. For them there will be no forgiveness.

Toxic Theresa May election broadcast "cost us another million votes"

I was chatting on the phone last night to a London chum after I had accidentally caught the Conservative election broadcast transmitted just before the ITV evening news. I found it extraordinary that the thing had featured May at all - but half way through, there she was. There was no escaping the most loathed woman in Britain. I suspect about half the ITV audience flicked channels at this point. I mentioned this in passing on the phone later - to be told "Don't! The idiots have just cost us another million votes".

As the Telegraph reports today, Conservative canvassers out on the knock have been trying to pretend that Toxic May isn't the leader of the Conservative Party and that she hasn't completely screwed up Brexit. They have been met by angry shouty Tory voters either slamming the door in their faces or venting their anger over the parliamentary and government sabotage of Brexit. For anyone who missed it, the misjudged May broadcast is HERE. I won't embed it. There's some content for which we won't give blog-space. 

I think the difference between these local elections and the Euros is that for the former, Conservative voters are simply going on strike. They will not turn out to vote, far less to campaign or donate. Even if the Labour or LibDem loonies win Councils from us, who cares? Council tax has a legal ceiling (which most English Councils have hit this year) and stuff that Tory voters don't mind paying for - a decent school in their catchment area, pot-hole free roads and a local library - have either gone or can't be made worse by a Marxist administration. For the Euros, they will vote TBP. 

My guess is that an appalling local government result will galvanise final moves to oust May. I suspect many fellow Conservatives think the same. You really can't blame them.

Toxic May talks down to the nation - election broadcast

Reasons to be Cheerful ..

Ian Dury should be compulsory for all those suffering the Brexit Blues.

Today very briefly, I offer you Farage achieving top place in the pre-EP opinion polling (which as a loyal Conservative I should deprecate cough cough) and Boris achieving top place in an Express leadership opinion poll. Add to this the spectacle of the self-loving little Sadiq Khan making an utter arse of himself in London trying to get down wiv der yoof (actually most of them went to £45k a year public schools and live in Surrey with Mummy) who in turn are pretending to get down wiv der Man.

Enough to make one smile.

Macron's 'Five year' pledge is pure fantasy

Little Macron confirmed his status as a fantasist yesterday when he pledged that repairs to Notre Dame would be finished in five years. He featured on this blog previously for his vision of Europe based on the computer game Sim City, a teenage boy's pubescent make-believe fantasy world.

Using structural steel or reinforced concrete one can create large buildings quickly. Portland cement gains strength rapidly. Gypsum plasters set almost instantly. Off-site manufacturing of entire bathrooms and kitchens which are craned into place is increasingly common. Click-together polymeric components even avoid Tadeusz, his nailbag and hammer.

However, lime mortars and lime plasters mean slow building - as does ashlar or cut stone. Lime mortars cure by CO2, and this can take months. When cathedrals were first built, the building season halted in the Autumn, before the first frosts. Recent work was covered in straw and thatched and left to cure for several months. There are no accelerants for hydraulic lime.

The damage to cracked but uncollapsed rib-vaults at Notre Dame will be infinitely harder to repair than the collapsed ones. Those flying buttresses are presently pushing the roofless walls inwards, and a temporary but substantial steel structure will be needed to stabilise the nave - wind loadings could still collapse the fragile structure.

Not to mention finding sufficient European Oak timbers. As an aside, a Nelson-era frigate took about 600 oak trees to build - and we had a fleet of 900 ships. Those oaks were planted in the 17th century by Pepys expressly for that future purpose. We no longer have a reserve of large structural oaks. For the stone, old quarries must be re-opened, masons recruited from all over Europe and the cathedral close will be alive with the clink of stone on bankers.

My own guess is twenty years. At least between fifteen and twenty-five. Something in that scale. Notre Dame will be covered with a vast temporary roof and be encumbered within by a massive steel structural frame for a generation. Macron is a fool and away with the fairies.

And now for the first of my EP election memes - I return to Twitter for such events with all the enthusiasm of a plumber clearing a blocked toilet.  

Our cultural heritage is more important than foreign aid

I wept bitter tears of loss as I watched Notre Dame burn and in pain pleaded to God for his mercy.

It is early, but this morning the structure still stands, the photographs suggesting the rib-vaulted roof over the crossing had gone, and a further part of the stone vaulting over the Chancel. However, the roof over the Nave is still at great risk - the fire will have inflicted extremes of heat and streams of molten lead from the roof covering, the cold water used to extinguish the flames then likely to crack the stone. The timber roof structure dated from 1220 - 1240 and is alas now wholly gone.

Notre Dame's 13th century timber roof over the rib-vaulted Nave

When the Germans reduced the historic centre of Warsaw to rubble in the last war, the Poles swore to rebuild it exactly as it was, and even under a repressive and authoritarian Communist regime they did so. Every roof tile and window exactly as it was before the Teuton barbarians subjected it to HE. And this was exactly the right thing to do - for our European cultural heritage has a value above rubies; our nations and our peoples, our forbears and ancestors live in these stones and in this wood and in the craft and art and love with which they proclaimed for the world to see our being, our Sein.

Here's a clear message to government and to our pathetic failure of a Parliament, both antithetical to the interests of the People. Our cultural heritage is more important by a factor of magnitude than pissing away billions of our taxes to corrupt third-world tyrants in the name of modish liberalism. Notre Dame is a warning to you; you have a duty to use every effort, take every measure, spend whatever is needed, to secure our own cultural heritage from damage, neglect, negligence or malicious damage. Your failure will not be tolerated.

Mental derangement by Brexit

David Lammy isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. He's also what my old professor would have called an unlucky wight - a blundering ninny with the gift of making himself look foolish. So it's hardly surprising that Lammy should be one of those most publicly afflicted by an increasingly common condition - mental derangement by Brexit.

Boris Johnson writes with an amused tolererance in this morning's Telegraph about Lammy's uncontrolled outburst terming Johnson a 'Nazi'. In Britain this is not an offence. However, living in a country in which calling someone a National Socialist without justification in print or on screen is a criminal offence, it is instructive to contemplate that MP or not, if Lammy had said what he said here, he would find the handcuffs around his plump wrists.

And this in turn leads me to offer Remainers a crumb of comfort. Whilst the UK remains tied to the EU, calling me a Nazi in the comments will make a correspondent liable to detention and extradition using the European Arrest Warrant - if the offence includes an element of racism or xenophobia, which Lammy's jejune mud slinging appeared to have - and an appearance before a Napoleonic court of a sort unknown to British law. Brexit, my mentally deranged friends, will paradoxically free you from this risk.

And that is really exactly as it should be.