[Tubby Isaacs]

[Youngian]

Not just any laser, minister, these fire at the speed of light.

[Spoonman]

Not just any laser, minister, these fire at the speed of light.

And I bet you the power knob goes up to 11.

[Bones McCoy]

I, for one, expect patriotic British lasers to comfortably exceed the speed of light.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

And I bet you the power knob goes up to 11.

I've never seen Shapps called a power knob before, but I like it.

[Andy McDandy]

I've noticed he's getting a lot of ink in the Express lately, and oddly, always called by his name rather than his position. So you get headlines like "Grant Shapps warns Iran", "Red Sea: Grant Shapps flies in", "Grant Shapps thanks Navy", and so on.

I guess they see him as a potential future Tory leader. But trying to make him sound like a hard, uncompromising maverick detective ("We're hitting a brick wall on this case. Get me Shapps! He'll bust it wide open in 24 hours!") just feels really shitty.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Political LARPers.

[Youngian]

Shapps will be excited that Mr Sulu has seen his laser gun.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Here he is back on more famiiar territory. Making up shit.

[Youngian]

Good to see ministers out and about at the coalface

[Bones McCoy]

I hope we aren't buying our missiles through the VIP lane.

I'm not sure we can rule it our with four names Shapps running the show.

[Bones McCoy]

That Penny Mordant's a proper navy gal.
Get her on deck with her big sword.

Are we attempting to make the Russian Navy complacent - or something?

[satnav]

Shapps has been grabbibg headlines again after a recent trip to Poland. For some reason Shapps thought it was a good idea to fly in a military aircraft from Britain to Poland even though there are plenty of commercial planes flying from London to Poland. The Russian's allegedly jammed the GPS system on the plane. I wonder how Britain would react if a senior Russian politician flew close to British airspace.

Shapps then had to cancel his planned trip to Odessa because if was worried about a Russian missile attack after news of his trip was leaked.

He really does appear to be a bit of a liability in the role of Defence secretary.

[Bones McCoy]

I think that sort of "push your luck in international airspace" stuff happens frequently.

It only gets airplay when fighters get scrambled, or when politics has descended to performative sabre rattling.

Doing a "full on camera" tour of the warzones is classic Shapps, and extremely un-Churchillian.
Winnie (Sir ... Churchill) flew a lot during WW2, criss crossing the Med in an adapted American Liberator Bomber.
It frequently flew below 60ft, and as fast as possible becaue bandits were about.
Little advance publicity, but he would pop up and have a chat with the troops before doing a bit of diplomacy, and catching up with the in-theatre Brass.
It also wasn't featured in the national press, because - Y'know Nazi spies can read.

Current day, nobody pulls that shit on Air Force One, because to do so invites being shat on from a great height.
Having it happen to Shapps suggests
a) The Russians didn't know he was aboard, and treated it like any other military flight.,
b) The Russians did know he was aboard, but UK is so disrespected that they didn't care.

[davidjay]

I'll go for b).

[Youngian]

I'll go for b).

How dare you talk down our country

[Watchman]

Brandon Lewis, standing down at next GE; looks like we now know where his next job is coming from