Lord Huron: The Man Who Lives Forever

Lord Huron, says Wikipeida, are an American indie folk band based in Los Angeles. Their debut album, Lonesome Dreams, was released in 2012 and this is the opening track being performed at a Seattle radio station. I like the guitars entwining with the Eastern percussion.

The Lynton & Barnstaple Railway: "Perchance it is not dead, but sleepeth..."

The narrow-gauge Lynton & Barnstaple Railway opened in May 1898. It was taken over by the Southern Railway in 1922 and closed in 1935.

This video shows Lyd, a replica of one of the locomotives that worked the line, running on the small stretch of the line that has been opened near Woody Bay.

There are plans to reopen the line from there to Lynton and eventually to Barnstaple as well. You can read about them on the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway website.

Nigel Farage's difficulties in Scotland

I know this blog is chiefly concerned with Shropshire and railways and photographs of churches, but if you look hard enough there are some quite prophetic political posts here too.

Back in February I pointed out that UKIP's policy platform consist of a ragbag of issues designed to reflect the worldview of angry white men of a certain age.

I then went on to say:

But there is another issue that appeals to this demographic. 

Unionism used to be the Conservatives' trump card. It won them a majority of Scottish MPs in the 1950s, which is something that it is near impossible to believe now. 

Not only is Unionism less effective as a policy: the Conservatives are not that keen on it any more ... 

And if you ask an angry white man of a certain age what he thinks of the Union he will most likely tell you (if he lives in Southern England, as so many of them do) that he is fed up with paying for services in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales that are better than the ones he can use himself. 

If the Scots want independence, he will likely continue, let them have it and see how much they enjoy paying the full cost of those services themselves. 

Which makes me wonder how long the UK will stay in UKIP. Their target voters are not keen on it at all.

Billesdon Coplow

"Billesdon Coplow is a wooded knoll, 625 ft. high, and is a conspicuous landmark in east Leicestershire," says the Victoria County History. "To the south it is visible for 20 miles."

There is something the split in its centre that has always reminded me of a freshly baked loaf. And on Saturday, as I was trudging across the fields from Barkby to Beeby, it was certainly conspicuous to the South East, though not half as close as the zoom lens makes it appear.

Today's Commons debate on mental health

Last year the Commons held an historic backbench debate on mental health. Historic not just because it tackled what was once almost a taboo subject, but also because a number of MPs spoke about their own mental health problems.

The two most prominent were Charles Walker and Kevan Jones - so much so that in today's debate Jones said that they had become "the Eric and Ernie of the mental health conference circuit". (He added: "I leave it to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and the House to discern which of us is Eric and which is Ernie.")

Today Charles Walker again made a significant contribution:

I remain terribly concerned about psychosis and schizophrenia. I mentioned a few minutes ago that anyone with a diagnosis of psychosis or schizophrenia is likely to be unemployed. If one is not unemployed at the time, one will end up unemployed. Life expectancy, which has already been mentioned today, can be up to 20 years shorter than for someone who does not have that diagnosis. That is not acceptable in a civilised society and should not be tolerated. I have spoken about this before in an Adjournment debate and I want to revisit it because it is so important. 

My concern, having talked to people who care for loved ones with schizophrenia—sons, daughters, mothers or fathers - is that sometimes the NHS is more interested in managing the illness than with the overall health needs of the patient. Symptoms are managed down so that patients do not make a nuisance of themselves and take up time, but when one stands back and looks at them, they are desperately unhappy. It does not matter if they are smoking 70 or 80 cigarettes a day, because they are not making a nuisance of themselves. It does not matter if they weigh 20 to 25 stone, because they are not making a nuisance of themselves. It does matter, however, because that patient is slowly killing himself or herself and we have to address that.

Four Lib Dem MPs in top 14 of private members' bills ballot

Most of the publicity about today's private members bills' ballot has concerned James Wharton and his intention to promote the Conservative Party's Euro referendum bill.

But you may be interested to learn that four Liberal Democrat MPs came in the top 14 of the ballot:

9. Sir Robert Smith (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine)
11. Mike Crockart (Edinburgh West)
13. Mark Williams (Ceredigion)
14. Sir Malcom Bruce (Gordon)

Even Sir Robert is probably just too low in the list to have a realistic chance of getting a bill all the way to the statute book, but who knows?

Leicester summer season to celebrate Richard III

News reaches me from Leicester City Council of plans for a summer season of Richard III-themed events and activities in the city:

Leicester's Guildhall, which is home to the current exhibition Richard III: Leicester's Search for a King, will host talks from some of the key archaeologists and researchers involved in the astonishing discovery of King Richard's body. 

Visitors will also be able to relive the nail-biting televised press conference at which the discovery was confirmed, as well as savouring the two Channel 4 documentaries following the dig, at special screenings in the Guildhall. 

Younger visitors can make the most of a programme of half-term holiday activities, including making medieval helmets, swords, shields and clay castles. 

A specially-commissioned play will explore the rise and fall of Richard III in "Now is the Winter of our Discontent", while heritage re-enactment group Conflict 1485 Bosworth will thrill visitors with examples of the armour, weaponry and soldiers which would have fought at Bosworth Field itself. 

In the nearby cathedral, a series of Dean's Discussions will see some of the key academics and specialists in the discovery and identification of Richard's remains talking about their painstaking work. 

Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre and Country Park will host a series of guided walks and exhibitions over the summer, and Blue Badge guides will take visitors on walks through Leicester's most historic places. 

The University of Leicester will also open its doors for a day of Richard III-themed activities, ranging from lectures, displays and workshops, through to face-painting and magic shows for younger visitors. 

Events will culminate in August with a series of activities marking the anniversary of King Richard's death and burial. These include an annual battlefield re-enactment, family events in the cathedral grounds and a commemorative evensong concert at Leicester Cathedral on August 22 - the anniversary of the battle.

It all sounds great. Why not bring your nephews?

Six of the Best 353

"The Conservative party today is a puritanical beast, railing against the iniquities of the world but struggling to find solutions. Like 16th-century puritans, today’s Tories take comfort in purity and isolation and want nothing to do with the murky waters of compromise politics." Giles Marshall asks how many Conservatives truly want to resist UKIP on the Tory Reform Group's Egremont blog.

"Childhood trauma and abuse is the smoking of psychiatry. As a risk factor for mental illness it is comparable to how smoking a pack of cigarettes per day increases the risk of lung cancer and heart disease." So says psychiatrist Simon Hatcher in a guest post on The Mental Elf.

Stephen Tall enjoys "This House" at the National Theatre.

"An important clue to understanding what went wrong can found in the reaction of the museum and its architect to Wednesday’s decision. In a series of angry statements the blame was pinned on ‘naive’ councillors and rabid conservationists. There was no soul-searching, no self-analysis, no sense of mea culpa."  Campaign to Save the Marquis analyses its unexpected victory over developers in Hoxton.

Gabriel Byng argues on Huffington Post that the sale of Britain's churches should cause an international outcry.

Ken Loach's "The Spirit of '45" bad history and worse politics, says David Hayes on Inside Story.

Stiperstones and Corndon Hill Country Landscape Partnership

Good news from the Shropshire Hills AONB website:

The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has confirmed a grant of £1.35 million to the Stiperstones and Corndon Hill Country Landscape Partnership Scheme, which aims to safeguard the special qualities of the countryside. This is excellent news for the local area and for everyone, including the many volunteers, who helped to prepare the bid over the last twelve months. 

The Scheme, which will cover an area of just under 200sq km defined by a rich industrial heritage as well as earlier prehistoric and medieval history, aims to conserve and restore historic and wildlife sites, help communities take part and learn about the landscape and its heritage, and improve access and training opportunities in local heritage skills.

My photograph, taken at The Bog, shows Corndon Hill over the border in Wales.

The Village Sleeps Again (1962)

It's a while since we have had a Look at Life film, so hear is The Village Sleeps Again from 1962 on the building of bypasses.

As it turns out, the film is more about towns than villages and is notable for the cavalier attitude displayed towards urban clearance, the half-timbered house in Exeter and its mouse apart.

But there is some appealing footage of Markyate in Hertfordshire and Stilton in Huntingdonshire (as it then was) towards the end.

Sir Edward Garnier tries to shut down fake Twitter account

Harborough's own Sir Edward Garnier QC MP is trying to get Twitter to close a fake account being run in his name.

The existence of such a report must be irritating and could be politically damaging, though the most striking thing about @EdwardGarnier is how very dull it is. There is some justice in the MP's suggestion, quoted in the Leicester Mercury, that the hoaxer should "get a life and go and do something useful instead".

But I was disappointed by some other words of his quoted in the article:

"I have never had a Twitter account and have no intention of having one."

Why not? It's a great way of keeping in touch with constituents, explaining what you do as an MP and tapping into others' expertise.

Later. This tweeter, however, does not pretend to be Sir Edward.

Does the UK suffer by not taking part in Eurovision semi finals?

The first Eurovision semi final takes place this evening. As one of the major contributors to the European Broadcasting Union the United Kingdom is guaranteed a place in the final, but do we miss out by not taking part it the semis?

A paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society last month suggest we do, if only to a small extent.

Diarmuid Verrier from Sheffield Hallam University found that taking part in the semi-final stage of the contest can result in an entrant moving up the leaderboard by one place.

He pointed out all of the winners since 2004 - barring Germany - have appeared in the semi-finals, which indicates 'mere exposure' to something they have seen previously can result in more positive feelings towards it.

"Although political voting and, hopefully, a decent tune will always play a part in how Eurovision contests are decided, this research suggests a third influence in the contest," he added.

However, political voting probably plays a larger part in the final outcome, which is also bad news for the UK. As Terry Wogan once put it: "We've invaded too many countries and everyone hates us."

Jo Grimond and the Soviet invasion of Shetland

Chris Glew on Estonian World tells the story of Erich Teayn, a crewman on a Soviet factory ship who, on the night of 25 June 1958, commandeered a motor boat and made his bid for freedom in the West by landing on Shetland:

He had realised that his journey wouldn’t be easy and might even be dangerous, but he hadn’t counted on 30 of his Russian crew-mates giving chase, hoping to foil his escape. In choosing a faster boat, he managed to land slightly ahead of his pursuers, on the ragged coast near the small village of Walls, West Shetland. 

Teayn spent five hours trekking through bare and treeless terrain in the late daylight with the Russian crew scouring the area, looking for any trace of their former colleague. He eventually stumbled upon the cottage of a local crofter, David Fraser and his son.

The Soviets searched the island seeking Teayn and passed within 50 yards of the cottage where he was hiding:

he two police sergeants arrested Teayn under the Aliens Act (he was an illegal immigrant, after all) and took him back to Lerwick, where he was placed in custody. 

The next day, the three senior Russian commanders of the fishing fleet landed in Lerwick to demand Teayn’s transfer to their custody. The Provost and senior police officer were both on leave and despite their apparent politeness and friendly manner, the police refused them all access to Teayn.

The affair was raised in the Commons by Jo Grimond, the local MP and leader of the Liberal Party. And Erich Teayn was last heard of living with an Estonian family in Shipley and looking for work.

Rain stops play at Barkby

My favourite book at the moment - Country House Cricket Grounds of Leicestershire and Rutland by E.E. Snow - records that cricket has been played at Barkby Hall since at least 1846 and that the ground is still under the patronage of the Pochin family.

This probably explains the appealing mixture of the modern - the electronic scoreboard - and the quaint - two trees standing in the field of play.

Six of the Best 352

"The big questions I'd like to hear answers to from people in politics and/or the media is what the point of such strange venues is and whose idea was it to 'neutralise' the political speech - politicians, their advisors or the media? I'd also quite like to know why a supermarket chain (Morrisons) has become the venue of choice for leading Conservative politicians." Max Atkinson mourns the further decline of political oratory in Britain.

Disgruntled Radical has some good arguments against a referendum on our membership of the European Union.

"We need to say to people, 'Use Facebook yes… Try all of the channels of communication available to you, but it’s good old-fashioned communication on the doorstep that voters value the most'." Polichic... explains why Facebook won't win you an election.

Commander Chris Hadfield proves he is the coolest astronaut ever by singing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in space, says blastr.

Days after Hitler’s suicide a group of American soldiers, French prisoners and German soldiers defended an Austrian castle against an SS division - the only time Germans and Allies fought together in World War II. Andrew Roberts tells the story for The Daily Beast.

Richly Evocative enjoys the Parkland Walk, which occupies the trackbed of the old line from Finsbury Park to Highgate.

Conservative backbenchers are scribbling on the constitution

I have just watched Jacob Rees-Mogg trying to defend the absurdity of Conservative backbenchers voting to amend their own government's Queen's speech.

But then respect for the constitution, which used to be a hallmark of Conservatism, has pretty much been thrown out of the window. Forget Burke and representative democracy: the reaction of modern Conservative MPs when they find themselves part of a minority in the Commons, is to demand a referendum.

The latest example, reports the Guardian, is over the Coalition's plans to bring in equal marriage.

Political Animal reminded us on Twitter earlier today that Margaret Thatcher once quoted with approval Clement Attlee's argument that the referendums "a device of dictators and demagogues". He was right and so was she.

Tory backbenchers opposed AV and the reform of the Lords (even though the latter was in their own manifesto), but they are quite ready to trash the constitution if they think it is to their advantage.

Bryan Forbes: More than The Stepford Wives

When Bryan Forbes died last week the headlines described his as "Stepford Wives Director Bryan Forbes".

I found that odd, because I suspect he was more celebrated in Britain for two films he made here at the start of the 1960s.

I wrote about The League of Gentlemen from 1960 a few years ago:

We are supposed to think of the 1950s as an irredeemably dull decade. People sat around waiting for the 1960s, the Beatles and the invention of sexual intercourse. This film suggests that it was a lot more interesting than that. Yes, there is dissatisfaction with the contemporary scene, but it springs from a sense that the spivs have supplanted the men who won the war. 

Hyde is lost in the post-war world; the military virtues he exemplifies are no longer wanted. His recruits are doing worse, trapped in awful marriages, tied to failing businesses or disgraced. One is obviously gay, and that in a film released a year before another Basil Dearden film, Victim, which is supposed to be the first time the subject was broached in a British film. 

The League of Gentlemen works as a thriller - you become engrossed in the details of the bank job and hope the gang will get away with it but it is also very funny. 

As I went on to say, the cast is terrific and Jack Hawkins gives a superb performance. You are utterly convinced that he has commanded men in battle.

Bryan Forbes starred in The League of Gentlemen and also wrote the script. If anything, the film's trailer sells it short...



A year later Forbes directed Whistle Down the Wind. It could have been insufferably twee, particularly when you add in the point that the trailer below skips over - the children believe that Alan Bates' character is Jesus.

Yet, despite Haley Mills' usual studied wide-eyed innocence and intermittent Lancashire accent, it works and seems to have haunted a lot of people who were young in the 1960s.

So these two films have a lot more to interest the British viewer than did the later The Stepford Wives.

The Richard Jefferies Museum, Swindon

For more on Jefferies (about whom I wrote my MA dissertation) see this Liberal England guest post by Rebecca Welshman.

The siege of Weston-under-Redcastle

I look forward to Fridays because that is the day the Shropshire Star published a new selection of vintage photographs.

One of this week's selection shows Superintendent Bob Landers of Wellington Police holding a revolver and crouched behind a riot shield during what the caption describes as "the longest peacetime siege in British history". This took place at the Shropshire village of Weston-under-Redcastle in September and October 1968.

An old Birmingham Post & Mail story tells the full story:

Deranged farmer John James was holed up for 17 days with a rusty shotgun in a derelict cottage near Weston-under-Redcastle, a village in rural Shropshire, in 1968. 

His hostage, a woman, brought it to an end when she threw his gun out of a window as he slept - allowing the police and army to move in. 

But this was not before he had knocked out an army tank which had ventured too close. 

It was a huge humiliation for the military commander at the scene. 

He had sought refuge after being challenged by the police over the illegal possession of a firearm - and successfully held his besiegers at bay for more than two weeks. 

Reporters covering the event lived in an array of colourful tents, ran two football teams and produced a daily newspaper. 

Afterwards, an Arthur Daley type reporter on the scene arranged for a commemorative tie to be produced. It bore the figure 17 and the icon of a red castle. 

And, as this Glasgow Herald report of his trial shows, James was sent to Broadmoor hospital.

Just another one of those stories that must have been a sensation at the time but must have been long forgotten.

Night Beds: Ramona

When picking the Night Beds as their new band of the day last year, the Guardian explained the background to their first album. It explained that the band's singer Winston Yellen had

rented an isolated pre-civil war home – previously owned by Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash – in Hendersonville on the outskirts of Nashville. There, immersed in the history of the house and region, he spent 10 months writing songs and recording them at the local Brown Owl studio.

The paper also said (in so many words) that the result was the sort of album that would appeal to sad old gits like me.

Beeby Tub without a pub

This is All Saints, Beeby, or 'Beeby Tub', a few miles east of Leicester. Britain Express explains its strange vestigial spire as follows:

The story goes that two stone masons who were brothers were responsible for building the steeple. They quarrelled while at work, and both fell to their deaths from atop the tower. After that the spire was never finished, but was simply capped. The oddly shaped spire became known as 'Beeby's Tub'. An old rhyme tells the story of the legend:

Beeby Tub without a pub,
A church without a spire.
Two brothers fought and broke their backs
And so ‘twas built no higher.

The leaflet I picked up in the church offers a more prosaic explanation: the money ran out. And it is easy to imagine money being short at Beeby. The rhyme itself says there is no pub, Pevsner (who calls All Saints "an unfortunate church") talks of the scattered house near the church as the  "shrunken medieval village of Beeby and when the church's chancel was rebuilt in the late 19th century it was done in brick.

And Pevsner is rather harsh. The interior contains box pews and some remarkable corbels commissioned by the Revd George Calvert, who was here from 1818 to 1865. My leaflet suggests these represent Calvert's idea of what medieval corbels ought to look like. The skull and bones here is one of them.

All Saints is now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, but when I arrived it was unlocked. Two miles away across the fields Barksby church, still in the hands of the Church of England, was locked, barred and bolted when I tried the door.

While I was at Beeby a man arrived on a motorbike to tend one of the graves in the churchyard. He said he had grown up here and that he and some friends had found the key to the tower and would often climb to its battlements.

As I waited for the bus back to Leicester I read an ominous notice about a consultation over the withdrawal of little-used services.

David Cameron has lost control of the Conservative Party

If you want to know how much influence David Cameron still has over the Conservative Party, read this opening paragraph from tomorrow's Observer:

David Cameron has ordered his ministers to abstain in a pivotal Commons vote on a future EU referendum next week, in a blow to his Eurosceptic colleagues.

That's right: his ministers are going to abstain on an attempt to amend the Queen's speech and this is seen as a blow, not to Cameron, but to his critics because those ministers are not going even further.

I don't think anyone could give direction to the rabble the Conservative Party has become. David Cameron certainly can't.

Richard Bentall: Why society drives you mad

The clinical psychologist Professor Richard Bentall from the University of Bangor, author of Madness Explained and Doctoring the Mind, offers a critique of the medical model of mental distress.

A relic of Stamford's railway history

We have seen Stamford Water Street or Stamford East. When it was open, the town's other station was known as Stamford Town.

Stamford Town is still open today as plain Stamford - platform 1 for trains to Peterborough, platform 2 for trains to Leicester.

But when you are there it is obvious that there used to be a third platform, which must have served trains to Seaton. This was a station on the Market Harborough to Peterborough line which was also the junction for the branch to Uppingham. It stood almost beneath the mighty Welland viaduct.

The site of Seaton station is now occupied by a scrapyard, but at one time - out in the lush Welland valley - it must have been almost idyllic.

And the line to Stamford has its place in railway history.

R. Davies and M.D. Grant, in their Forgotten Railways: Chilterns and Cotwolds, write:

On 4 October [1965] the Seaton to Stamford shuttle changed from steam to diesel; for its last week it had been the sole-surviving steam push-and-pull train in Britain.

Trains between Stamford and Seaton ceased on 6 June 1966, but if you look in the undergrowth behind the lost platform at Stamford you will still find its name spelt out.

Michael Gove, Michael Rosen and grammar

There is a row going on between Michael Gove and Michael Rosen. Yet he idea of an opposition between good grammar is largely spurious: the writers I know who are most interested in grammar are also the most creative.

But I am haunted by a piece I read in, I think, the UK Press Gazette some years ago. A journalist described going into an inner-city comprehensive to run a journalism workshop. He found the children were all he hoped they would be: sparky and curious about the world around them.

All went well until he asked them to write a trial article.

The problem was not so much that their spelling and grammar was poor: it was they could not see this might be a problem if they wanted to pursue a career as a journalist.

Which must be one of the reasons why now just three per cent of junior journalists have working-class parents.

Six of the Best 351

"The key difference between conventional politicians and populists is not hatred - you don't have to hate to be a populist.  It is the understanding that our institutions are no longer effective." David Boyle, on The Real Blog, offers a six-point (well, five-point) plan for a Liberal populism.

Jon Wilkinson explains how to vote Liberal Democrat with a clear conscience.

The New Atlantis website tells us about the shameful treatment of the people of the Chagos Islands.

"Wyndham Colliery had closed at the beginning of that year – he had long retired. But despite the economic devastation, until he died he counted the day of the pit’s closure as one of the happiest in his life. ‘It was a filthy place. No man should spend his working life on his knees." Rowan Davies writes about her grandfather on her Nonsuch blog.

Ryan Gilbey marks the 50th anniversary of John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar on his New Statesman blog.

"Rock is above all a theatrical form. English rockers have been particularly good at this, partly because many of them, including Bowie himself, have drawn inspiration from the rich tradition of music hall theater. If Chuck Berry was a godfather of British rock, so was the vaudevillian Max Miller, the 'cheeky chappie', in his daisy-patterned suits." Ian Buruma discusses the career of David Bowie for the New York Review of Books.

Heritage lottery grant for the Richard Jefferies Museum

Good news from Swindon Link:

One of Swindon’s historic gems is about to get a boost after being told it is to receive a £30,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). 

The Richard Jefferies Museum, home of local Victorian writer and naturalist, has been given the grant to help develop a dedicated Trust and breathe new life into this important local landmark.

The report goes on to quote John Price, Chair of the Richard Jefferies Society, whom I met when I visited the museum in 2009:

"Society members is [sic] delighted to hear of the success of the HLF bid, and looks forward to working with the Trust to make the Museum at Coate more accessible to Swindonians and visitors to the Town. It is a most important literary jewel that we have done our best to make available to all, but have been limited by time, money, and availability of volunteers to take responsibility for opening the house more regularly."

Nottinghamshire Police cop Headline of the Day

For their splendidly poker faced:

Mr and Mrs Speed profited from amphetamines

Thanks to Alex Foster.

A new Eleanor Cross at Stamford

I have been to Geddington and Hardingstone in Northamptonshire to see two of the three surviving Eleanor Crosses - the third is at Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire.

Stamford is the site of one of the vanished crosses and a fragment of its cross used to be on show in the town museum. Now the museum has closed, the best place to try is the library.

But when I was in Stamford on Monday I found that it has a new Eleanor cross. The website Stonebtb explains:

It hasn't been the easiest of transitions from commission to construction but Wolfgang Buttress' Ketton limestone and bronze reinterpretation of the Eleanor Cross that once stood in Stamford has finally been unveiled as the centrepiece of the town's ￡1.3million Gateway project. 

The scheme has pedestrianised Red Lion Square and the Sheep Market parts of the East Midlands town. The areas were previously used for car parking. The narrow streets and lanes between the historic stone buildings of the town are one of its attractions, but they don't leave a lot of room for car parking, so losing some of the space that existed for it was not universally popular. 

However, those who wanted to see an Eleanor Cross return to a public area of the town have won the day and on a Saturday in May Wolfgang Buttress, who designed the cross and its associated Clipsham benches and milestone, the masons who produced them (Pierre Bidaud, Ana Ruiz Agüi and Regis Chaperon) and their guests celebrated with Champagne the fact that the cross was finally in place.

The site of the original Eleanor Cross at Stamford has been the subject of much debate, but the best theory seems to be that it stood on a hill by the Great North Road to the south of the town - much as the cross at Hardingstone stands in relation to Northampton.

Jo Swinson and Shirley Williams on what needs to change at Westminster

The House Magazine has a joint interview with these two leading Liberal Democrats on  the challenges of being a female politician, what has changed in the last 50 years, and what still needs to change:

Jo Swinson: Some things have changed for the better. Obviously we now have 146 women MPs – still nowhere near enough by the way, but we have significantly more. Women don’t feel they can’t attack other women in the chamber on a political basis. I don’t think that there are as many personal attacks and I often find that if you look at the environment at Women and Equalities questions, and debates on international development, you tend to get more women in the chamber. The committee I've just finished sitting on, the Children and Families Bill, was a majority of women which is the first time I've ever seen that. And it’s not that you always agree, but women disagree in a slightly different way ... 

Shirley Williams: I should add that the House of Lords is a much easier place to be a woman in. There’s a very fixed ethos of politeness. There’s a gentle hiss if people are rude to one another. They don’t like at all people that personally attack other people. That encourages women in particular and it may be why there are quite a few women from ethnic minorities in the Lords. That measures what is still wrong with some of the attitudes and approaches in the Commons.

I also like Shirley's comment on the old Lady Members' Room:

It had an ironing board in it, much used by Mrs Thatcher who was very keen on ironing. The funny thing was, that was about all it had. It had a sofa in case you felt faint and it had an ironing board.

An anthropologist looks at the Liberal Democrats

I am not the first to link to this article, but if you have not yet read the field study of the Liberal Democrats by Fred Carver on his blog Who Rules Where you should hurry over there now.

A taste:

If you want to be an MP it helps to be rich, charismatic, likeable, hard-working, lucky, good with the media, have a good back story, have a solid track record with the party, and good at campaigning. 

But you don’t need to be any of these things. The only thing you absolutely need is ridiculous, and I mean absolutely ridiculous, levels of self-belief. This is because no rational human being would ever want to do it. 

If you want to be an MP you must give up all semblance of a normal life for years, often decades, at a time. You must be unemployed, or have a very patient employer and a meaningless job, for about a year before the election. You must surrender all meaningful contact with friends and family. 

In the months before an election you must spend around twenty hours a day shaking hands, smiling, and making token purchases. And if you are not driven completely insane by this you also have to come to terms with the fact that there is a very very good chance that you are going to lose.

And:

Liberal Democrats also have formative rituals, or initiation ceremonies, known as 'by elections' to establish identification with the group. The by election ritual is much like the circumcision ritual of the Xhosa tribe: 

"During the time of the initiation, the young men live in special huts, secluded from the rest of the tribe and especially from any females. They undergo training and endurance tests, which require great discipline. All aspects of the initiation are kept very secret."

The only sad thing is that this article is by way of a resignation letter from the party.

My theory is that the more spectacular someone's resignation from the party, the more likely he or she is to come back one day. (It's the ones who are quietly walking away we should be worrying about.)

As resignations don't come much more spectacular - or entertaining - than this, there must be the hope that we shall see Fred again one day.