Thursday, December 05, 2024

Santa's Nark: The dark side of the Elf on the Shelf

It's now a Christmas tradition that I quote from the article Who’s the Boss? "The Elf on the Shelf" and the normalization of surveillance by Laura Pinto and Selena Nemorin:
Through play, children become aware about others’ perspectives: in other words, they cultivate understandings about social relationships. The Elf on the Shelf essentially teaches the child to accept an external form of non-familial surveillance in the home when the elf becomes the source of power and judgment, based on a set of rules attributable to Santa Claus. Children potentially cater to The Elf on the Shelf as the “other,” rather than engaging in and honing understandings of social relationships with peers, parents, teachers and “real life” others.

What is troubling is what The Elf on the Shelf represents and normalizes: anecdotal evidence reveals that children perform an identity that is not only for caretakers, but for an external authority (The Elf on the Shelf), similar to the dynamic between citizen and authority in the context of the surveillance state. Further to this, The Elf on the Shelf website offers teacher resources, integrating into both home and school not only the brand but also tacit acceptance of being monitored and always being on one’s best behaviour--without question.

By inviting The Elf on the Shelf simultaneously into their play-world and real lives, children are taught to accept or even seek out external observation of their actions outside of their caregivers and familial structures. Broadly speaking, The Elf on the Shelf serves functions that are aligned to the official functions of the panopticon. In doing so, it contributes to the shaping of children as governable subjects.
Last Christmas I noted the appearance of dummy CCTV cameras for your child's bedroom and asked:
The packaging says 'Shh! It's a dummy!' - presumably you're not meant to tell your children that. But how long before real cameras are sold under the Elf banner, linked to Ofsted HQ and hacked by the Russians and Chinese?

Sir Cliff Richard's Christmas gravy recipe branded 'absolutely vile' by celebrity chef

The Mirror wins our Headline of the Day Award, though the judges did point out that Cliff recorded Move it, which has a claim to be the great British rock record, and that celebrity chefs are ten a penny these days.

Wednesday, December 04, 2024

Call for Southwell's importance to Byron to be recognised

From BBC News:

Geoffrey Bond often imagines Lord Byron "looking down" as he sits in what was once the 19th Century poet's former bedroom.

The 85-year-old has lived in Burgage Manor in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, for 33 years - where Byron stayed with his mother between 1803 and 1808, before rising to fame in 1812.

While Newstead Abbey is more famously known as Byron's ancestral home, Mr Bond believes his beginnings in Southwell have been overlooked.

Mr Bond has dedicated decades to his fascination and love for Byron and his work and now says he wants Byron's beginnings in the town to get due recognition.

And here is Burgage Manor, one of many fine houses in a town that also boast England's least known cathedral.

The Lib Dems' briefing on the 'Family Farm Tax'

The Liberal Democrats have issued a briefing on what we are calling the 'Family Farm Tax'. I had not fully grasped before reading it that we are opposed to imposing Inheritance Tax (IHT) on any farmland, no matter how high the value of the estate. 

This means that the argument in the new Private Eye's farming column apply to the Lib Dems every bit as much as it does to the NFU:

The NFU has labelled Reeves's measure as "the family farm tax", but this smacks of thinly disguised special pleading for all landowners regardless of scale. And what constitutes a family farm? Should Sir James Dyson's 36,000 acres, for example, worth approximately £500m be described as one?

Farmers may not be able to see it, but making farmland taxable on death is a useful deterrent to ultra-high-net-worth individuals whose main motive for buying farmland is to pass on significant wealth to their heirs tax-free. Farmers complain that farming only returns 1 per cent on the capital invested, but this only shows how much the value of land has been inflated by non-farmers seeking refuge from IHT. ...

If the removal of farmland's exemption from IHT deters investors who are largely motivated by tax advantages then land prices may fall far enough that owning some can once more become an aspiration for family farmers.

In bringing in these changes to IHT, the government has made a genuine attempt to differentiate between family farms and land that is held purely because of the tax advantages it has hitherto offered.

I can see that it has all been done rather quickly, and it may be that the line has been drawn in the wrong place, but the Lib Dems' blanket opposition seems misjudged.

You can argue that one of the problems farmers face is the power of the supermarkets, but tackling that will be difficult for any government, because it will put up prices to consumers.

And while most voters instinctively support farmers - it's seen as a traditional and ethical occupation - it's possible to ask if it is desirable to farm every last acre, when overgrazing by sheep has left upland landscapes so bare in many places.

After all, as a party we also support the Climate and Nature Bill, which includes a target that will see:

the health, abundance, diversity and resilience of species, populations, habitats and ecosystems so that by 2030, and measured against a baseline of 2020, nature is visibly and measurably on the path of recovery.

There are few easy answers here. The questions are more complex than the party's briefing makes them appear.

Tuesday, December 03, 2024

Nick Cook: England's forgotten spinner of the Eighties

When a young England spinner makes an exceptional start to his career, his feat is compared with past performances. High among them is that of the Leicestershire slow left armer Nick Cook - you can see him here making his debut against New Zealand in 1983.

As Wikipedia says:

He picked up 32 wickets in his first four Tests, taking four five-fors, including one on debut (after he had been called up at short notice), and a best bowling match return of 11 for 83 against Pakistan at Karachi.

But it was not to last:

Cook's next 11 Tests, spread over a period of five years, fetched him 20 wickets at an average of 56.75. 

Cook's problem was not just England's chaotic selection policies in the Eighties, but also that he was competing with two established test-class spinners: Phil Edmonds and John Emburey.

Still, his overall test average was 32.48 (52 wickets), compares favourably with Phil Tufnell's average of 37.68 (121 wickets).

Like Edmonds, Cook flighted the ball and gave it a chance to turn. Slow left armers of the generation before - Derek Underwood, Norman Gifford, Don Wilson - bowled faster and flatter.

59 Labour MPs support Sarah Olney's electoral reform bill


Today the Commons voted to give Sarah Olney leave to introduce her 10-minute rule bill to bring in "a system of proportional representation for parliamentary elections and for local government elections in England". The vote was won with a majority of two - 138 to 136

The bill is unlikely to proceed further, as it does nor have government support. But the vote was still significant, because 59 Labour MPs voted in support of Sarah's bill. Sarah is the Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond Park.

Introducing her bill, she said:

We are also seeing record levels of disillusionment with the political process, with citizens becoming increasingly disengaged. This is reflected in the fact that turnout in the 2024 general election was the second lowest since 1918 at just under 60 per cent. 

Over 40 per cent of registered voters in the UK thought so little of the political process they did not think it worth expressing a preference for one candidate over another.

As seen on TV: Charles Dickens's short story The Signal-Man



After five M.R. James adaptations, in 1976 the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas turned to Dickens and an unforgettable version of The Signal-Man.

This story is the subject of a good episode of the podcast Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! Though it's only 10 or 11 pages long, Dominic Gerrard and John Bowen find it inexhaustible.

You can read it for yourself on Project Gutenberg. And for more on premotions, I strongly recommend Sam Knight's The Premonitions Bureau.

Monday, December 02, 2024

"Ooh, Your Eminence!": A short review of Conclave (2024)

If you enjoyed The Death of Stalin or the television adaptation of Tinker Tailor Solder Spy, you will enjoy Conclave - it's another film about power and hierarchy in a very male organisation. 

In this one, the cardinals meet to choose a new Pope, and politicking, corruption and violence ensue.

Conclave threatens to veer into Judge John Deed country when Ralph Fiennes, as Cardinal Lawrence, turns detective, but stops short of that line.

And Fiennes plays the scene where he is overcome with grief on finding the late Pope's glasses well, but Jean Alexander did it better when she found Stan's in Coronation Street.

I'm not proud of it, but I was often reminded of the finest double entendre in all the Carry On canon.

Matthew Taylor's great grandmother funded Aleister Crowley, 'The Wickedest Man in the World'


Liberal England takes a deep breath:
Matthew Taylor - that's Baron Taylor of Goss Moor, who was Liberal and then Liberal Democrat MP for Truro and then Truro and St Austell between 1987 and 2005 - was adopted as a baby. (His adoptive parents were the screenwriter Ken Taylor and his wife.)

In 2008 Matthew traced his he traced his birth mother, Margaret Harris. She was the daughter of the prominent New Zealand businessman Sir Jack Harris, and the granddaughter of the former Liberal chief whip Sir Percy Harris.

Sir Percy sat for Harborough between 1916 and 1918, and for Bethnal Green South West between 1922 and 1945.

His wife was an artist and, as I blogged long ago, she designed a Tarot pack for Aleister Crowley, who called himself "The Beast 666". The press preferred "The Wickedest Man in the World".

Reader's voice: Of course we remember all that. So what's new?

I've come across a review of a review of a biography of Crowley on the Lion & Unicorn blog. In it, Simon Matthews writes:

In the 1920s Crowley enjoyed an income of £10 a week, approximately £2,600 now, or £135,000 p.a. Declared bankrupt in 1934 (occupation: explorer) he still managed to keep up appearances, giving talks, including one at a literary luncheon at Foyles and being paid a weekly retainer of £2 (roughly £400 now) by book illustrator Freida Harris, wife of Percy Harris, Liberal MP for Bethnal Green South West. This allowed him to reside in a serviced flat in Hanover Square.

It's time to find out more about Frieda Harris.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Dominic Sandboy’s ‘What My Housemaster Told Me About The Seventies’

I love happy endings and I expect you do too. No doubt there will be more from Lord Bonkers in the new year.

Sunday

Over a post-service Amontillado, I try to persuade the Revd Hughes to stand for Archbishop of Canterbury. He’s never happier than when on his hind legs, and would look good in the frocks, but I fear my blandishments fall on stony ground. 

After the roast beef and Yorkshire p., I hunker down in my library. I can’t get on with Dominic Sandboy’s ‘What My Housemaster Told Me About the Seventies, but a telephone call brings good news. Sixteen of Danny Chambers’ penguins sailed from Oakham Quay this afternoon and will be home in the South Atlantic for Christmas. 

I say sixteen because one of them has discovered a vocation and chosen to stay at Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes. I feel sure he will prosper there.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.


Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

Sunday, December 01, 2024

jamine.4.t: Elephant

This is a track from jasmine.4.t’s debut album You Are The Morning, which will be out early next year.

She says:

I wrote “Elephant” very early in my transition about my first t4t love. It’s about when it hurts because you’re trying to be friends but you both want to be more. My life in Bristol fell apart when I came out, and having no safe place to live I was staying on queers’ sofas in Manchester, traumatized and in no place to start a relationship.

It was beyond healing recording this track in LA with Phoebe, Lucy, and Julien, along with my Manchester dolls Eden and Phoenix and with extra layers from local trans musicians Vixen, Bobby, Addy, and of course the incredible Trans Chorus Of Los Angeles.

I like the way Elephant starts simply and changes into something unexpected.

The Joy of Six 1295

"Any pleasure I may take in the distinction of the honour of an FRS is diminished by the fact it is shared with someone who appears to be modeling himself on a Bond villain, a man who has immeasurable wealth and power which he will use to threaten scientists who disagree with him." Dorothy Bishop explains her decision to resign as a Fellow of the Royal Society - she's talking about Elon Musk, of course.

Jim Sleeper uncovers the Classical roots of the US Constitution: "The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was hot off the presses in the 1770s. We should read Gibbon now, too, paying close attention to his account of how the Roman republic slipped into tyranny when powerful men had seduced or intimidated its citizens so that they became a stampeding mob, hungry for bread and circuses."

Amy-Jane Beer is excited by the rewilding project at Castle Howard: "While most authorised beaver reintroductions in the UK have been in small enclosures, here the plan is to give them 450 acres to work with, alongside pigs and large grazers that will churn and prune and trample and further invigorate ecological processes. I cannot wait to see it."

During the Cold War, philosophers worked together to aid dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. Cheryl Misak was part of a movement that included both Jacques Derrida and Roger Scruton.

 "Wicked makes its cinematic premiere at an awkward time, so soon after so many American voters acted against virtually every moral idea the production unsubtly espouses," says Luke Buckmaster.

Tim Rolls on the day in 1966 that Bobby Tambling scored five goals at Villa Park: "Looking at the TV footage a couple of things strike home. The quality of Chelsea’s accurate, incisive passing (particularly Osgood and Cooke) and speedy breaks, and the sheer inability of the home players to shut down their breaking opponents."

Lord Bonkers' Diary: “I’m not paying that for a corn pone”

Lord Bonkers laid out the history of New Rutland ('The Pork Pie State') in a diary entry some years ago. I hope the Democrats will study his remarks carefully, because he can be a wise old bird, and the career of John Burns is worthy of study too.

Saturday

I was not surprised by the evil Trump’s victory. Having spent some weeks in New Rutland during the campaign, I was well aware that the cost of living was foremost in voters’ minds. “Have you seen the price of hominy grits?” they said to one another, and “I’m not paying that for a corn pone.” 

Set against this, the news that the delightful Kamala Harris had been endorsed by Beyoncé Knowles (or was it Cyril Knowles?) fell a little flat. 

We should not allow our revulsion at Trump to lead us to think badly of the whole population over the pond: I remain convinced that there is no finer fellow to poke a cow with than Johnny American. And no good Liberal will run down the labouring classes: if you’d tried that in John Burns’s hearing, he’d have given you one up the snoot.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.


Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

Saturday, November 30, 2024

The old course of the River Jordan through Little Bowden


The flooding of the River Jordan earlier this week has had me looking at old Ordnance Survey maps. As I suspected, Rectory Lane has this long curve because it used to follow the river.

And the shot below, taken outside the old thatched house on Scotland Road below - I remember it as a shop in the 1980s and it may once have been Little Bowden Post Office - shows how high the pavement once is there. I suspect that's because the road used to flood regularly.

Little Bowden used to be two settlements. One was by the church and the other, called Scotland End, was at the Northampton Road end of Scotland Road. Presumably because of regular flooding, the old shop was about the only building between them.

As far as I can tell from the maps, the radical straightening of the Jordan took place about 1920 - this needs more research. And I've found an old newspaper report that says that, before the railways came to Harborough, the Jordan used to flow through the fields near Gores Lane and join the Welland further east than it does now.

Alan Robertshaw provides a brief history of blasphemy

They've often been declared dead, but laws against blasphemy haven't quite given up the ghost. Here Alan Robertshaw takes us through their history.

One interesting point is that, in recent centuries, they've been far more about keeping the peace than enforcing orthodoxy in belief. 

Unless you are Mary Whitehouse and John Smyth, of course.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: They have failed to seize control of Belvoir Castle

Don't tell Lord Bonkers, but I suspect you weren't worrying about those beavers. In fact, I suspect that you heard more than enough about them last time. 

At least the old brute is continuing the Bonkers' ancestral feud with the Dukes of Rutland by more subtle means these days, though I expect he still has that Wellington bomber stabled on an outlying farm.

Friday

His was a voice of calm, compassion and reason in this modern maelstrom of events, but now Gary Lineker is to stand down as presenter of Match of the Day. I also learn that Justin Welby has handed back his mitre after failing to ensure that awful confederate of Mary Whitehouse was hauled before the beak.

 You, however, will be wondering what’s happening with those beavers I steered towards the Duke of Rutland. To an extent, it has been a disappointment, in that they have failed to seize control of Belvoir Castle, but my agents tell me that a housemaid cannot open a linen cupboard there without finding a beaver inside – a beaver, moreover, that proceeds to lecture her on the philosophical theory of the state – with the result that the old boy can’t keep his staff. That should stop his gallop for a while!

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.


Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

Friday, November 29, 2024

Mike Brearley: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

A piece of unashamed hero worship from the JCPCP. You may recognise some of this from posts on this blog, but then I have always regarded one function of a blog as being acting as a writer's notebook.

Such was Mike Brearley standing in 1981, his last summer as captain of the England cricket team, that the writer of a letter to the Guardian claimed to have seen him set the field and then "look up at the sun and indicate that it should move a little squarer".

For me, it was a wonder to have a representative of liberal North London occupying the most prestigious position in what can be a very Tory game. It was as though Jonathan Miller or Michael Frayn were leading England out.

Of his 31 tests as England captain, Brearley won 18 and lost only 4; and in that summer of 1981, he resumed command when England were a test down to Australia. Under his leadership, the team reeled off three consecutive wins, with a previously despondent Ian Botham playing like a cricketing Superman.

His path to the England captaincy, despite his public school and Cambridge background, was not a conventional one. He made enough runs for the university and Middlesex to be picked for the 1964/5 England tour of South Africa at the age of 22, but after that – as a postgraduate student and then a lecturer – he played for Middlesex only in the university vacations, like at old-fashioned amateur.

Brearley showed his mettle in 1968 when the England selectors left the mixed-race Basil D’Oliveira out of their party to tour Apartheid South Africa to avoid a political row. He insisted on seconding the motion condemning the selectors at a meeting of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which was then the game’s effective governing body.

Soon afterwards, he became a lecture in philosophy at Newcastle University, in thrall to the later Wittgenstein like most young academic philosophers of his generation. I spent most of Brearley’s reign as England captain studying the subject at York, and we discovered that he had unsuccessfully applied for a lectureship there.

“I can’t escape the feeling that you’re slightly disappointed in me,” said the man who had got the job instead. We weren’t, but even liberals are allowed to have heroes.

******

By the time Brearley retired from cricket in 1982 he was already training as a psychoanalyst, and he was later to serve as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Fans and journalists were interested in how his psychoanalytic studies had informed his captaincy – the Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg famously said that Brearley had “a degree in people” – but Brearley himself has emphasised that there was an effect in the opposite direction.

In his latest book, Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, he writes:

Playing cricket, and captaining, taught me a lot about what makes players tick, both those on the same side and opponents, and it stimulated my interest in what others and I myself feel, how we respond to pressure, how we impinge on each other, and so on. 

There are of course two main features of the job of captaincy – one to do with tactics and strategy, the other to do with human relations. the latter calls for personal qualities of empathy, truthfulness and courage.

But not everyone was convinced. Brearley recalls one patient asking him: “How can a little boy like you, playing latency games with other little boys, have anything to offer a mature woman like me?”

Why an educated man should spend his time playing games is a question that clearly occupied Brearley even before he turned to psychoanalysis as a profession. His first cricket book The Ashes Regained, an account of his first series as England captain in 1977 written with the journalist Dudley Doust, includes a chapter on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, the author of Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element of Culture. 

This may have nonplussed readers more interested in how Brearley persuaded Derek Underwood to bowl over the wicket at Greg Chappell in the second innings at Old Trafford.

In Turning Over the Pebbles, Brearley discusses the writings of Wilfred Bion and his belief that a game must be played purely for its own sake. Bion wrote in his memoirs:

Games were in themselves enjoyable. I was fortunate not to have had them buried under a mass of subsidiary irrelevancies – such as winning matches, keeping my ghastly sexual impulses from obtruding, and keeping a fit body the for the habitation of a supposedly healthy mind.

 For Bion, unlike Brearley, even being captain detracted from the game.

******

One of the great things about Mike Brearley’s books are the indexes. His willingness to discuss psychoanalysis, philosophy and high culture alongside cricket produces some striking juxtapositions: 

  • Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
  • Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff; 
  • counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
  • Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
  • idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
  • Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
  • Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
  • Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil
  • Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris;

******

‘The best leaders are great teachers,’ says an article I’ve turned up in the Harvard Business Review, and there was always something of the teacher about Brearley. A photograph that shows him, perched on a windowsill, answering questions at a press conference as England captain could easily be of a friendly young academic leading a seminar.

As captain of Middlesex, he challenged the dressing-room ethos that young players should be seen and not heard. If the county was fielding and the game was in danger of drifting, he would start asking his players, the younger ones included, what they thought he should do.

Some youngsters welcomed this more than others, and I’ve recently heard two of them talk about Brearley’s approach. Simon Hughes, now a cricket journalist, had thought “Why’s the England captain asking me what we should do?” – he rather sounded as though he still thinks that – and felt vindicated when the bowling change he suggested failed to bring a wicket.

By contrast, Mike Gatting, who was a teenager when he made his Middlesex debut, remembered being flustered the first time Brearley turned to him – “But I made sure I had something sensible to say the next time he asked me.” Gatting went on to captain England himself.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The prime minister was having an affair with Stanley

The question of the Bonhams Carter* and their hyphens is not a simple one. Helena Bonham Carter doesn't have one, but her grandfather Sir Maurice 'Bongie' Bonham-Carter, Asquith's principal private secretary, did. I knew a member of the family when I lived in Kew in the Eighties, and he had one too.

* Lord Bonkers assures me this is the correct plural - cf. courts martial.

Thursday

To Bloomsbury for the launch party of Precipice – Robert Harris’s novel about those terrible days before the outbreak of the Great War. 

He proves chiefly interested in Mr Asquith’s dalliance with Venetia Stanley, but this tale is not new to those of us who were around at the time. Indeed, when I first heard that the prime minister was having an affair with Stanley, I feared things were worse than they turned out to be. 

I prick up my ears when Harris tells me he has drawn heavily upon papers held by the Bonham-Carter family. If Violent got his hands on juicy gossip, you can be sure he turned that knowledge into hard cash. 

Some correspondents, incidentally, ask why Violent Bonham Carter had no hyphen when the rest of the clan do. The answer is that his was stolen from him one evening at Esmeralda's Barn by Ronnie Kray, and this lack of respect led to the gang warfare that so disfigured our capital in the Sixties.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.


Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

Thursday, November 28, 2024

Layla Moran's Murphy robbed in vote to find Parliament's Top Cat


Disappointing news this evening: Layla Moran's cat Murphy ("The most Experienced, Character-filled and Determined cat in the race" - L. Moran) finished runner up in the contest to find Parliament's Top Cat.

According to a news report from the organisers, Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, the contest was won by Mr Speaker's cat Attlee by only 40 votes.

Now, I'm not saying that Attlee used his occupancy of Speaker's House to pull strings, but shouldn't he come forward and clear this up once and for all?

The Joy of Six 1294

"Al-Fayed died before he could face justice but imagine how many women’s lives would not have been ruined if anti-SLAPP legislation had been in place and journalists had been able to report freely on the case," Labour MP Joe Powell tells Gareth Davies et al. from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Aaron Rabinowitz says we need to talk about men: "Trump has doubled his share of Black male voters, and across all racial demographics his gains were highest among younger men. As always, problems like this are intersectional and multifaceted, but one of the crucial facets we need to discuss is clearly the persistent problem of disaffected men."

"For the last decade, the question of who gets to interrogate historical questions, and why they are motivated to do so, has become very fraught in Britain. And the topics that have become most central to this controversy are the British Empire, British imperialism, and ideas about race, identity and belonging in the British nation." Charlotte Lydia Riley reflects on recent controversies in history and the emotional register of the debate.

Octavia Randoph on slavery in Anglo-Saxon England.

"In The Secret Agent, you go from a shop in Soho into a space like Greenwich Park, where the bomb incident takes place – quite an interesting journey in itself – and then, at the end, there’s an extraordinary marching-away into the suburbs of one of the characters who walks through endless anonymous, curious areas." Iain Sinclair chooses five favourite London novels.

Tanya Lynch visits the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop's Castle: "From the moment I stepped inside this Aladdin’s Cave, I was immersed in a world where poetry and books are the ultimate remedy for the soul. Shelves lined with carefully selected publications, pages that invite you to lose yourself in their rhythm, and beautifully designed stationery, that makes you want to pick up and a pen and start journaling your heart out - honestly this store is a bibliophile’s paradise.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: I catch Jennie rolling her eyes and feel a little ashamed

Jennie, of course, is Steve Darling's guide dog. A sketchwriter suggested yesterday that hers is the best approach to prime minister's questions: "She has taken to wandering along the Lib Dem front bench, getting strokes from everyone, before curling up and going to sleep."

Wednesday

Despite my hiding behind a tree, I am accosted by Freddie and Fiona in Westminster. “Just the man!”, says one. “We need you to talk to the parliamentary party about our new campaigns: supporting private education and landowners,” says the other. 

I reply that if they’re after someone to say obliging things about schoolmasters then they’ve picked the wrong peer, but I do happen to have a talk ("A Ha-ha is No Laughing Matter”) on the burden of owning a country estate that I give to Women’s Institutes and the like here in Rutland. 

It goes down a storm with our MPs, though at one point I catch Jennie rolling her eyes and feel a little ashamed.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.


Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Ed Davey teams up with choir of young carers to record their song Love is Enough

From the Guardian this evening:

When already this year you’ve bungee-jumped, jetskied and led your party to its best election result for a century, how can you possibly top that as a politician? If you are Ed Davey, the answer is obvious: try for a Christmas No 1.

That, at least, is the ambition for the Liberal Democrat leader, who has teamed up with a choir of young carers to record an original song of theirs, complete with a Christmas-heavy video featuring festive jumpers and hats, tinsel, and baubles being hung on a tree.

As with Davey’s many stunts for the general election, there is a serious purpose: to generate awareness of the plight of carers, particularly younger ones, and to raise money for good causes.

The genesis of this latest move by 2024’s most consistently surprising MP came in the spring, when the widow of Davey’s former choirmaster sent a recording of him aged 13 singing a solo version of In The Deep Midwinter.

Peter Sellers as a villain: A podcast on Never Let Go (1960)

What strikes me about those top-of-the-bill films is how vividly the villains are painted. Dirk Bogarde in The Blue Lamp, for instance, remains sexy and dangerous more than 70 years on.

The good young character he is contrasted with, a trainee constable played by Jimmy Hanley, appears utterly insipid, but then I suspect he did when the film was released.

Other villains from this era to seek out are Peter Sellers (playing it utterly straight and with a Liverpool accent) in Never Let Go (1960) and Ronald Ward in Ealing's racing drama The Rainbow Jacket (1954):

"There's a certain gentleman I know - using the term in its widest sense - who wouldn't be at all pleased if you were to win the Leger on Fair Noon."

That was me blogging 14 years ago. This morning a good podcast about Never Let Go dropped - if that's what podcasts do. It's an edition of Goon Pod, which looks at the Goon Show and also at the careers of Sellers, Milligan et al. beyond and after it. This one is certainly worth a listen.

You can see a clip from Never Let Go above - and the whole film is on YouTube.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Pimped with underglow lights and belting out Hildegard of Bingen at full volume

With Lord Bonkers taking such an interest in the animal kingdom - whether it's farming it, conversing with it or eating it - it was inevitable that he would be drawn to the new MP for Winchester, who practised as a vet for 16 years before his election. 

And attentive readers of this blog will remember the story about the penguins at the Sea Life London Aquarium.

Tuesday

“No,” I told Danny Chambers on the phone. “It’s out of the question. I’ve only just got rid of a colony of Hegelian beavers. I’m not taking in seventeen penguins.” “But if you could only see their sad little faces,” Chambers returned. “They’re living with no daylight, no fresh air and a pitifully shallow pool.” 

I was about to say it was no good setting them lose in the Frozen North of Rutland – they would get confused, walk round in circles and annoy the polar bears – when I had a brainwave. Which is why your diarist, Chambers and the above-mentioned flightless seabirds are crouched in a ditch just off the Great North Road. 

Sure enough, a familiar minibus – pimped with underglow lights and belting out Hildegard of Bingen at full volume – hoves into view. In no time, the Mother Superior has the penguins on board and is speeding to the convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes. No one, as I observe to Chambers, will notice them among the nuns.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.


Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

Tuesday, November 26, 2024

Has Boris Johnson forgotten he's meant to be a Roman Catholic?

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You may have seen the story in the Times about Boris Johnson for the obesity crisis. Apparently
Boris Johnson has blamed the Church of England for Britain's obesity crisis because its failure to provide the "spiritual sustenance" that people need is leading them to gorge themselves.

And later in the story we're told:
He recounted a recent visit to church with his family, "It was all about how rich men can't go through the eye of a needle all that sort of pot," he said, adding that instead of the Archbishop of Canterbury going on about slavery reparations "he should ask himself why people in this country are so bloody fat".
Johnson was being interviewed by the nepo baby's nepo baby and fellow Old Etonian Henry Dimbleby, which probably explains why Johnson's persona was at its most exaggerated. But, and you may find this hard to believe, I don't think Johnson is telling the truth about going to a Church of England service.

Because he's meant to be a Roman Catholic.

And his conversion was a big deal at the time. Here's Mark Bowling writing for the Catholic Leader in July 2022:
After the dust has settled at Number 10 Downing Street, there’s time to consider what is the legacy of Boris Johnson – Britain’s first Catholic Prime Minister, now caretaker PM until a new leader is announced on September 5.

Baptised as an infant into the Catholic faith of his mother, Charlotte Johnson Wahl, young Boris later became an Anglican while at Eton and was confirmed into the Church of England.

Little is known of Johnson’s faith journey in the years that followed – he was not a churchgoing man – and no major questions about faith were asked when he became Prime Minister in 2019.

But his faith came under the spotlight in May last year when Johnson married his long-time girlfriend Carrie Symonds at Westminster Cathedral, the seat of English Catholicism.

According to The Tablet’s Rome correspondent, Christopher Lamb, Boris Johnson is Britain’s first Catholic prime minister since laws were changed barring Catholics from the role.
So if the Johnsons really did go to church en famille, it will surely have been a Roman Catholic church.

Anyway, Johnson has given me to an excuse to plug an old essay of mine on children and obesity.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’

The new issue of Liberator (no. 426) has been published. You can download it free-of-charge from the magazine's website.

And that means it's time to spend another week with Lord Bonkers. We begin with a visit to his famous charitable enterprise, the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans. An orchard doughty, incidentally, is rugged club whose name was inspired by Sue Doughty (or Orchard-Doughty), the Liberal Democrat MP for Guildford from 2001 to 2005.

Monday

A Well-Behaved if breathless Orphan arrives at the Hall. “Matron says it’s that Generic man off the television and he wants to paint over our murals and you’ve got to come,” is the burden of his message. Stopping only to summon a brace of stout gamekeepers with orchard doughties, I hurry to the Home.

The murals – some say they’re the work of our own Joshua Reynolds: others detect the hand of the Dutch Master van Mierlo – depict famous scenes from Liberal history for the edification of the young inmates. There’s ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’, ‘The Confusion of Andrew Newton’ (he has travelled to Dunstable in search of Norman Scott, but found no trace of him there) and ‘Tony Greaves Pretending to Have Lost the Line to London to Avoid Endorsing David Steel’s Leadership’. 

I burst in to find Robert Jenrick holding a pail of whitewash in one hand and wielding a brush with the other. “You don’t want to make this place too attractive,” he counsels me, “or children will get themselves orphaned so they’re sent here.” I have him driven from the place, and for the first time understand why the Tories plumped for that Badenough woman instead.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

The Joy of Six 1293

Kim Leadbeater explains why she tabled her bill on assisted dying: "“It’s been an extremely busy process, and it has been very emotional, because I’m spending probably 90 per cent of my time talking about death. That can be very emotionally draining. I’m hearing really harrowing stories from families who have lost loved ones under really traumatic circumstances, and that’s been really hard."

Young people need liberal listening, not authoritarian threats, argues Jack Nicholls: "Our approach, the approach we should push unrelentingly whenever we get a chance in any local legislature, should be about helping young people into the work or education situation that helps them develop, not by threatening them until they comply for the convenience of others."

"For the government’s missions to succeed, they require societal support. An effective government communications strategy is required to implement the level of change necessary to meet our energy and climate targets," says John Russell.

Giles Fraser takes to his pulpit: "I love the Church of England. I love its liturgy, I love its glorious parish churches, I love its lack of ideological fervour, I love the gentle and inclusive way that it is porous to those outside of the Church, I love the inheritance of faith that it preserves. But things have not been well with the Church for quite some time, and the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury is a fork in the road. Either it grasps this opportunity for radical reform, or it will continue its slide - if not vertiginous collapse - into irrelevance."

Radio Times catches up with Devin Stanfield, once the young star of The Box of Delights: "I don't think child stardom is a particularly healthy thing. In the end it probably did me more good than harm, but it could definitely be quite a difficult thing to live with to be recognised not just at school but in the street."

Athena Stavrou offers a guide to the best Christmas sandwiches.