Chair of Private, Public and Charitable Boards. Former Member of Parliament for Daventry and former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Now enjoying life!

Don’t think in the 40 plus years I’ve been a ref I ever dropped to my knees - but I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my time.
Referee drops to his knees after failing to play advantage
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Chris Heaton-Harris retweeted
We wouldn't give much weight to the OECD's new GDP forecasts, but still interesting that... 1⃣ "Brexit Britain" is expected to grow as fast or faster than the euro area again in both 2026 and 2027 (France has now replaced Germany as Europe's "sick man") 2⃣ the euro area is expected to grow about half as fast as the US - why should the UK want to realign more closely with a failing economic bloc? 🤷‍♂️ oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en…
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???!!!???
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Yes, surely no one would argue with a democratic result of nearly 52% to 48%, especially not a left bloc…
Based on exit polls seat projections are 183 for Left bloc, 166 for Right bloc. That’s a decent working majority by Swedish standards. The Social Democrats would be biggest party with 101 seats — down 6. Big losers would be right-wing Sweden Democrats with 61 seats — down 12. Big gainers would be Greens with 26 (+8), Left party 29 (+5). All based on exit poll. We await actual results.
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Rick Rescorla’s story was beautifully told in the book “Unthinkable” by Amanda Ripley - which pretty much everyone who has ever worked for me has had to read…
Twenty five years ago today, a 62 year old man with cancer in his bones walked 2,687 people out of the South Tower, and then he went back inside. Rick Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall in 1939. British Parachute Regiment in Cyprus at 18. Colonial police in Northern Rhodesia. Then he came to America, enlisted in the US Army in 1963, and in November 1965 he went into the Ia Drang Valley as a platoon leader with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry. Hal Moore called him the best platoon leader he ever saw. His men called him Hard Core. He sang to them in the dark, Wild Colonial Boy in an Australian accent, because he had worked out that men who are singing are not men who are panicking. That is Rescorla on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once and Young, bayonet fixed. Thirty five years later he was head of security for Dean Witter, later Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. In 1990 he brought in his old friend Dan Hill and the two of them walked the basement. He warned the Port Authority that the parking garage was wide open, that somebody could drive in a truck full of explosives, walk out and light it off. Nothing was done. Three years later the 1993 bomb went off about thirty feet from the spot he had flagged. After that he told Morgan Stanley the towers were still a target and the next attack would come out of the sky. He wanted the firm to leave Manhattan. The lease ran to 2006, so they stayed. Twenty two floors of the South Tower, roughly 2,700 people. So he drilled them. Every three months, everyone, no exceptions, down the stairwells two abreast while he stood there with a stopwatch. Traders pulling seven figures resented being marched down concrete stairs by a Cornishman with a clipboard. He kept doing it anyway. 8:46 a.m. The North Tower is hit. Port Authority comes over the South Tower loudspeakers and tells everyone the building is secure and to go back to their desks. Rescorla picks up a bullhorn and tells his people to get out. He phones Dan Hill. "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate. They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people out of here." 9:03 a.m. The second plane hits the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. His people are already in the stairwells, moving exactly the way they had been drilled, and Rescorla is on the bullhorn singing to them. Cornish songs. A version of Men of Harlech he had rewritten for Cornwall. Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming, can't you see their spearpoints gleaming. He called his wife Susan from the stairs. They had been married two and a half years, met jogging in New Jersey. He told her to stop crying, that he had to get these people out safely, and that if something happened to him he wanted her to know he had never been happier, that she made his life. Someone told him to get out. He said, as soon as I make sure everyone else is out. 2,687 Morgan Stanley employees went home that day. Thirteen did not, and four of those were Rescorla and the men who stayed in the building with him: Wesley Mercer, Jorge Velazquez, Godwin Forde. He was last seen on the 10th floor, walking up. The South Tower fell at 9:59. They never found him.
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Well that should see the end of talk about an early General Election at least…
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Chris Heaton-Harris retweeted
People said "how can the Lords reject/delay something the Commons wants: isn't that un-democratic?" But the Commons, presented with the same bill, and having heard the Lords, thought again and voted it down. Ours is a deliberative democracy: argument, reason, checks & balance.
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Anybody else think that Billionaire Chris Rokos isn’t off to Greece to pay less tax - he’s happily paid £100s of Millions here? Or could it be he’s had enough of being sniped at for his success and going to a place where wealth creation is welcomed?
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Chris Heaton-Harris retweeted
🎙️ Saturday's football results read by the recreated voice of the legendary radio broadcaster James Alexander Gordon.
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Chris Heaton-Harris retweeted
Exciting day for NVIDIA and @huggingface. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI. Thank you @ClementDelangue for coming to me. NVIDIA is going to be a great home for Hugging Face, its community and the future of open models. 🤗 blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia…
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Congratulations!!!
Super happy to share our intention to join forces with NVIDIA in a $12,930,300,000 acquisition 💛💚 10 years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point. Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs. But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us. In addition to doubling down on NVIDIA’s massive contributions to open-source AI (I called them the “King of American open-source AI” earlier this year), they’ve committed to strongly supporting Hugging Face and our mission while keeping the platform open, independent and compute agnostic. The founders and the team are all staying to keep pushing this mission forward. Together, we think we can make open source the default way to build AI, with the goal of empowering 100 million AI builders to own their intelligence rather than rent it. Excited about the next 10 years! 🤗🤗🤗
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If @nvidia do what they say they will - and I’m confident they will - this is great news for Open AI and therefore good for businesses and universities across the globe who use it. And fair play to the French who’ve made Paris the centre of it all!
Breaking news: Nvidia has agreed to buy AI model platform Hugging Face for $13bn, in the latest step by the $5.4tn chip giant to use its financial might to accelerate the technology’s boom while exerting greater control over the industry ft.trib.al/rScLh5e
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We watched China invest heavily to secure a strategic advantage in AI. Europe and the West should respond by backing open tech which could give our businesses the tools to compete. The NVIDIA-Hugging Face deal is an opportunity in this space.
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The investment into Hugging Face will, I’m sure, take it and @Nvidia to the next level! And fair play to the founders of Hugging Face - every founder dreams of a deal like this & it’s what being an entrepreneur is all about!
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Who’d have thought the first beneficiary of Burnham’s early release scheme would be Keir Starmer…
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Chris Heaton-Harris retweeted
Interesting from Sir Anthony Seldon’s new book “Sunak at 10” (and also “Truss at 10”) that I was TWICE almost made Chief Whip in Autumn 2022. I would have been pleased to serve. But one thing’s for sure - I wouldn’t have published a tell-all memoir about it! #WhipsOmerta
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Awesome!
The Spitfire is on DISPLAY! ✈️
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This is exactly what X if for…!
نسي سائق الباص الكلومبي باب الباص مفتوح ولم يعلم انه هذا سيكون اغرب سبب في انقاذ حياة هذا الشخص عند التقاطع كان قائد الدراجة النارية يقود بسرعة عندما تفاجئ بباص امامه وحدث كل هذا
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