Rafael Benitez will be in charge for Saturday’s game against West Brom but Chelsea are considering replacing him with Avram Grant until the end of the season before bringing Jose Mourinho back as manager in the summer.The Evening Standard sounds remarkably confident of its "exclusive".
Private Eye co-founder Richard Ingrams believes Ian Hislop has been editor of the magazine for “too long”.
This was Ingrams’ response when asked how long his successor had been in the editor’s chair at the title.
Ingrams, who appointed a 26-year-old Hislop as editor when he stepped down in 1986, told Press Gazette he admires what Hislop has done at the Eye but that he is a “great believer in retiring”.
“I think the danger of him staying on is that the options become less and less and less,” he said. “He should at least now be thinking, ‘who is going to take over?’”...
He also suggested that it might be time for Hislop to start looking elsewhere on television.“I can’t understand how anyone can go on being on Have I Got News For You for so long,” he said.
“I would be sick of it after about ten years. I’d get up and do something else. But he can do it. He can remain fresh on that. I couldn’t do it at all.”Is he right?
Ian Hislop took over a magazine that reflected the prejudices of its previous editor. Richard Ingrams was essentially a Tory Anarchist with a few left-wing notions that he got from his great friend Paul Foot thrown in. ...
The Ingrams mixture worked and produced a popular magazine, though quite why it worked was always a bit of a mystery. It was certainly a mystery to Hislop, who seems wary of tampering with the Ingrams formula. with the result that Private Eye now appears increasingly, er, formulaic.Perhaps part of the Eye's appeal is precisely that it is the same every time. But while I still value its reporting and gossip, its humour pages do seem stale. Perhaps it needs some new contributors, if not a new editor?
Meades’s work is so generous, so rich and so obviously contentious that to mount a critique of it seems churlish. No one else could combine all of the aesthetic and political positions he flexes so aggressively.
The enemy of populism and the taste of the ‘masses’ who nonetheless shows a scrupulous respect for their intelligence; the magic-mushroom-guzzling rationalist; the passionate hater of Blair and Blairism who has a place in his heart for the Fabians and the white heat of technology; the enthusiast for Portsmouth’s Tricorn Centre (above), demolished in 2004, who dotes on Lutyens; the proud insulter of Islam who loves the multiculturalism of Birmingham; the critic of colonialism who relates the horrors of the Opium Wars and the Highland Clearances, then pauses to excoriate De Gaulle for betraying the pieds noirs; the sympathiser with the nouveaux philosophes who quotes Trotsky approvingly but pictures the ‘future mass murderer Lenin’ pottering around Letchworth.
Above all, Meades is a scourge of all forms of belief, faith and ideology, of everything that he regards as childish and credulous – yet the architecture that shakes him most is created by people crazed with dogmatism and righteous fervour.
Whether or not he is aware of the contradiction, it charges his prose as he grapples with his own horror and fascination: at Victoriana, at the Arts and Crafts movement, at modernism, at Stalinist architecture – most of which he loves, and most of which are based on values, theories and opinions he finds either silly or repugnant.
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| Photo borrowed from The Cheese Grater |
During the Second World War the City suffered appalling damage and loss of life. The Cripplegate area was virtually demolished and by 1951 the resident population stood at only 48, with 5,324 in the whole City. Discussions started in 1952 on what sort of redevelopment should take place on the devastated site. Many people involved with the City of London voiced their concern at the dwindling number of residents living within the Square Mile and plans were considered for returning a stable population. A report was presented and the Court of Common Council, of 19 September 1957, accepted as a matter of policy that there should be a genuine residential area created on the site.
One of the many good things about Boxmoor Primary School - in my day it was housed in a long-demolished Victorian building - was that we got read stories at the end of the day.Last night, Moggach talked publicly about the ensuing family scandal for the first time for 25 years. The Old Bailey trial, the gossip, the furore. The clanging of doors as her mother, sentenced to nine months for attempted murder, "disappeared into the underworld, like Orpheus." Then the relentless bullying by inmates.
She believes her mother acted bravely, out of deep compassion, and that the mental torment she suffered during her incarceration – revealed in a sequence of mordant letters – points up the inhumanity of the law, then as now, towards so-called mercy killings.It is hard to disagree with that.
"Our party is the only one on the up," the UKIP leader Nigel Farage told our cameras in Eastleigh today.
And yet by the end of the day, UKIP was absorbing the news that one of its most prominent MEPs had defected to the Conservatives
Marta Andreasen is not a name well known to those outside Westminster or Brussels. But if you were to name a UKIP member other than Mr Farage - she might be the one you would choose.
It reinforces UKIP's main problem: that the party is nothing without Nigel Farage.
It was almost 44 years ago, yet the passage of time has done nothing to erode the memories Don Rogers and John Trollope have of the part they played in one of football's greatest giant-killings. From the surreal sight of hoof marks on the Wembley pitch to the abiding image of Bob Wilson being left hopelessly exposed in the dying seconds, pictures are ingrained in the mind from the day that Swindon Town – then a Third Division side – defeated Arsenal to win the League Cup.It turns out that Rogers, whom we last saw scoring the Goal of the Season in 1973, now runs a sports shop in Swindon.
1. Can we rely on the readings of chicken entrails by the juror who sacrificed a chicken on the third day of deliberations?
2. If we believe that the accused had an identical twin who is wholly evil and may have committed the crime can we use this in reaching our decision?
3. Is the episode of The Tweenies featuring Max dressed as Jimmy Savile something we can take into account in reaching our decision?Read all 12 on Love and Garbage.
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.I fear that job sharing would accelerate the retreat from that approach. Perhaps our problem is precisely that we now see being an MP as a 'job'.
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| Photo by Sabine J Hutchinson www.virtual-shropshire.co.uk |
"I thought Tom was a very selfish person. Poor old Barbara never got any dresses, and presents, any treats. He was so obsessed. It was always about him...his ideas, his plans."
And he said that Tom's green credentials were seriously undermined by the way he relied on wealthy neighbours Margo and Jerry when things went wrong.
He added: "Tom had a parasitical side to his nature. He would always be popping over to Margo's for a handout."And though The Good Life appears to have established itself as a timeless classic, it has its roots in a very particular time and place: Britain after the oil crisis of 1973 and before the advent of Margaret Thatcher.
riven by conflict, indifferent to the needs of customers, held back by shoddy workmanship. Interestingly, perhaps, the only person who could make the hotel work was Basil's gorgon of a wife, Sybil. Like another woman coming to prominence in the mid-1970s, she was middle-aged, blonde, shrill, philistine and utterly ruthless.And here is their take on The Good Life:
The Good Life showed that even those who would have considered themselves to be part of the progressive wing of the bourgeoisie, the Guardian-reading supports of the Welfare State and redistribution, had lost faith in the ability of the Government to deliver. ...
The edge to The Good Life's humour was provided by the contrast between Tom and Barbara and their next-door neighbours, Jerry and Margo, who remained committed to their traditional bourgeois values of class superiority, keeping up appearances, the quest for promotion, comfort, security.
The sympathy of the viewer was intended to be with Tom and Barbara as they mucked out the pigs and milked the goats, but many would have instinctively felt for Jerry and Margo as their suburban lifestyle was squeezed between the nutcracker jaws of high inflation and militant trade unionism.They go on to suggest that The Good Life is the one classic sitcom from the 1970s that could be transplanted to 1998. I am not so sure about that: the seventies had power cuts and retired generals raising private armies, but the nineties were tame by comparison.
The new Jerry and Margo would be much like the old Jerry and Margo, but with rather more reason to be worried. In the 1970s there was really not much threat to Jerry's comfortable perch on the corporate ladder ... But in the 1990s he would be forever looking over his shoulder to see whether the management consultants called in by his new Japanese or American owners were about to downsize him.As to Tom Good's ideas, Davie Philip once suggested in Scottish Left Review that they were based on the writings of John Seymour, "the father of self-sufficiency":
Surprisingly John once told me that he was actually wrong about self-sufficiency. On a visit to his small-holding in Wexford, John shared with me his conclusion that it would be too difficult to sustain the noble effort of living off-grid and providing for all your own needs on your own land. Self sufficiency wasn’t enough. His new thinking was co-sufficiency, self-reliant local communities that could provide the social relationships essential for facing an uncertain future. Seymour predicted that we would need strong connected communities that could work together to meet their needs and make the transition to a post-industrial economy not dependent on fossil fuel.
If Tom and Margo of The Good Life were striving to be self-sufficient now, they would probably have started a community garden or joined their local Transition group and be engaged in the building of food and energy security with their neighbours. That’s The Good Life 2.0, a community approach to building local resilience because, as Richard Heinberg writes in his book ‘Powerdown’, “personal survival depends on community survival”.I think Richard Briers was right: Tom Good would have been too selfish for The Good Life 2.0.
Former I’m a Celebrity star Lembit Opik is behind a plot to topple his Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg.
The ex-MP delivered a motion to party bosses to make it easier to trigger a leadership fight.
The move must now be voted on at the spring party conference in Brighton in March – one week after the Eastleigh by-election.The report goes on to explain that under the current system it takes 75 local parties have to call a leadership contest, the Opik amendment, if passed, would mean it would take only 10 delegates.
Mr Clegg is said to be furious Mr Opik’s move poses such a serious threat to his position.But that is obviously nonsense.
That night, the area between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square was being strafed with bombs.
But inside the Caf̩ de Paris, West Indian-born band leader Ken Johnson Рknown as 'Snakehips' because of his silky dancing style Рrevved up his swing band into the opening bars of the Andrews Sisters' hit, Oh, Johnny, Oh, Johnny, Oh!
The floor was heaving with couples. Suddenly, there was an immense blue flash. Two bombs had hit the building, hurtled down a ventilation shaft from the roof and exploded right in front of the band.
Snakehips' head was blown from his shoulders. Dancers' legs were sheered off. The blast, magnified in the confined space, burst the lungs of diners as they sat at their tables and killed them instantly.
At least 34 staff, guests and band members died that night.Snakehips Johnson was buried at his old school in Marlow. He was 26.
Whistleblowing legislation is to be overhauled and a government consultation held to investigate whether the Public Interest Disclosure Act... 1998 is failing to protect those who speak out from being victimised, harassed and even sacked by their employers.
In a private letter sent on Wednesday to MPs and peers campaigning for the Act to be changed, employment relations minister Jo Swinson promised a series of amendments to the legislation, followed by "a call for evidence" by the government to examine whether the Act is, as campaigners claim, not "fit for purpose".The report also contains new claims that Sir David Nicholson, the chief executive of the NHS, ignored warnings that patients could die there because managers were being forced to meet unrealistic targets.
The village of Bringewood Chase, on the borders of Hereford and Shropshire, had been there a long time. The straight road running due north after crossing the river was built above the foundations of one made by the Romas of the use of their legions. The church a white-walled inn, a tiny post office and a few shops all faced the village street.I don't suppose there are so many facilities there today, but I hope to visit Leintwardine this summer.
On my 80th birthday, I said I am never going to retire and I have stuck to that. It would have been a great disadvantage if I didn't have work. People who don't do anything after a certain age decline – the lack of mental stimulation has a bearing on your physical side too.And he demonstrated his continuing activity by writing a piece for Liberal Democrat Voice on the plight of gay asylum seekers.
In 1842 Charles Darwin moved in to Down House near to the Lubbock family home of High Elms. Despite his initial disappointment (Lubbock later recalled that when his father came home with the promise of ‘great news,’ he had rather hoped his father was going to announce that he was getting a pony rather than hailing the arrival in the neighbourhood of an eminent scientist), young John soon found a mentor and comrade in his dyspeptic neighbour and became a regular visitor to Down, applying his burgeoning work ethic to the study of natural history and biology.The Royal Society is holding an event to honour Sir John Lubbock - Avebury's Circle: the Science of John Lubbock FRS (1834-1913) - on 23 March.
Further cuts to the welfare budget are not needed, chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has said.
The senior Liberal Democrat Cabinet minister said that no more additional savings from the benefits budget were required in the next spending round.
The comments will be sure to infuriate the Tory right, with some suggesting that defence and policing should be protected in the next spending round.I wouldn't take too much notice of that last point: the Tory right is permanently infuriated. In fact, being infuriated is the sole reason for its existence.
Plans for a £3.6m transformation of an 850-year-old abbey in Northampton have been revealed.
Delapre Abbey could undergo the restoration if the borough council's plans and bid for lottery funding are approved in the summer.
It is hoped parts of the main abbey would be restored for tours and events, and two stable blocks turned into visitor areas and small business units.
The work would be completed in phases and should take three years.No doubt this is for the best, and it would be good to be able to look round the main building. But I liked the slightly ramshackle atmosphere at Delapre and I suggest you visit it before things are improved too much.
The Jesuits say 'Give me the boy at seven and I will give you the man'.
Chris Huhne wasn't seven when I first met him, he was 11.
It was 1965, I was nine and my family had just moved to London. Chris and his arty lively clever family lived in our new road. When his mother took her children to the Mermaid theatre to see some mime, she took me along too - my first ever theatre visit -and I saw my first comedy film, Peter Sellers' Two Way Stretch, with them as well. While my own mother said I was strange, Mrs Paul Huhne said I was interesting. She and her family were beacons of light and fun in the lonely claustrophobic urban catastrophe that I knew only as South Kensington.
Like all boys, Chris was an annoying squirt who was sometimes allowed to play 'Julip Horses' with me, his sister and our friend Jessamy. Then one summer hols, now 14 and back from my convent boarding school, I dropped round to his house to find him disconcertingly yet excitingly transformed. It was a different species that opened the familiar door; deep voiced, with shining layered black hair and eyes as brown and round and alive as my guinea pig Truffles'. What's more, he now sported a black beret, broke spontaneously into French at will, had unpredictable fits of piano playing mid-conversation and had become a Communist.Anyway, Charmian Hughes is appearing in Leicester tomorrow night as part of the Comedy Festival. If you go along you could ask her yourself.
You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - what do you get? The sum of their fears.We had better award the old boy Quote of the Day while we are at it.
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| "I am not a number: I am a free dog." |
This is a reminder that I welcome guest posts on Liberal England. So far 31 have appeared.A Shropshire road which was closed in November by rockfalls is expected to remain shut for three more months.
An emergency closure of Jiggers Bank in Ironbridge took place after rocks fell onto the road following heavy rain. It was followed by further rock falls.
Telford and Wrekin Council said the "scale of works" needed to stabilise the area meant Jiggers Bank would be closed until June.It will be little comfort to those affected, but Jiggers Bank has won this blog's prestigious Road of the Day award.
"At the moment we know the names of fewer than 20 per cent of those killed in Pakistan’s tribal areas. At least 2,000 deaths still remain publicly anonymous."
"Our aim will be to identify by name many hundreds more of those killed. A significant number of those identities will be known by local communities, by US and Pakistani officials, and by militant groups. We hope to convince them to share that information."I am reminded of the war in Iraq, where the British and US governments refused to publish figures for civilian deaths and the task had to be undertaken by volunteers.
Nick Clegg has said he is "off the ciggies", but has admitted he fears he may take up smoking again.
The deputy prime minister, who has tried several times previously to give up the habit, told Sky News he could not "make bold predictions" about staying the course.Perhaps that is wise. Nick also gave up smoking in November 2011.
"When applying for an archaeological exhumation licence, the applicant must state that the remains will be laid to rest at a suitable location.
"The licence we issued states that the applicant (the University of Leicester) would, no later than August 31, 2014, deposit the remains at Jewry Wall Museum or have them reinterred at St Martin's Cathedral or in a burial ground in which interments may legally take place.
"The precise location of reburial is now for the University of Leicester.
"This means that no one except the licence holder, i.e. the University of Leicester, can decide where the remains end up."Not only that. As a magnanimous statement from the Chapter of York, published on the York Minster site, says:
the recent verification of the identity of his remains follows a significant period in which Leicester and Leicestershire gained a sense of Richard belonging there, at least in death. It was Leicester Franciscans who gave him burial, and the cathedral has a major memorial to his memory at its heart.That statement goes on to declare:
The Chapter supports the terms of the Ministry of Justice licence and the wish of Chapter of Leicester that Richard should be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral. The Chapter of York commends Richard to Leicester's care and to the cathedral community's prayers.The photograph above shows the memorial to Richard (complete with white roses) you will currently find in the choir of Leicester Cathedral. I hope that when he is laid to rest there his tomb or stone will be similarly tasteful, and someone I spoke to there today who has seen some of the suggested designs was confident it would be.
At the end of a long, relatively uneventful Edwardian summer, the papers were suddenly full of dire news about the 21-year-old daughter of the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith.
The headlines were shocking: ‘Premier’s daughter missing’, said one; ‘Miss Asquith’s peril’, warned another. She had been reported missing at Cruden Bay on the Scottish coast, where the family had been spending their holiday in September 1908 at a rented fortress with the ominous name of Slains Castle.
After a dangerous search lasting half the night, Violet Asquith was finally discovered lying in wet grass on a rocky ledge above the sea - uninjured but apparently barely conscious.
A doctor was summoned and she quickly revived. But rumours continued to swirl: had she fallen by accident or had there been foul play? Some even whispered that she might have been intentionally trying to harm herself.
The Prime Minister moved swiftly to quiet any speculation by offering an innocent tale about his daughter stumbling in the dark. But no one could explain why Violet had remained missing for so many hours. It took several days of determined stonewalling before the Press stopped asking questions.
What happened that night has long remained a mystery - but buried in the Asquith family papers, now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I have discovered an astonishing revelation: the story of Violet Asquith’s brush with death is inextricably linked with her doomed love for a rising young star in her father’s Liberal cabinet - Winston Churchill.Well, I suppose it was bound to come out sooner or later. As one who was also staying at Cruden Bay that summer, I can confirm that Violet Asquith did indeed carry a torch for Churchill and threw herself off the cliff when he made it clear that he preferred his darling Clementine.
"Bring it on. Give these murderers the option of the noose, the electric chair or lethal injection. I think the vast majority would back this campaign."The Labour group whip was back in the news today. According to the Leicester Mercury she has been banned from a Leicester primary school (Humberstone Junior School) after falling out with teachers and governors.
Confusion over similar names led to a laughable blunder by vote counters that saw a Tory candidate handed a council seat in Labour's north Wales heartland.
Labour stalwart, Paul Penlington, turned red when his true blue rival, Allan Pennington, was declared the winner of the May 2012 poll in Prestatyn North.
It cost tens of thousands of pounds and required the attention of no less than three High Court judges before the muddle was today finally sorted, with Mr Pennington being ousted and Mr Penlington handed the seat that should have been his in the first place.However, news comes that Allan Pennington is refusing to go quietly. He has told the Daily Post:
"I’ve been as much a victim of this as Mr Penlington and I don’t dispute the fact that there has been a mix-up," he said.
"My concern is that the difference in votes was so tantamount it makes me wonder why Mr Penlington didn’t speak up about it on the day of the election count if the mistake was so obvious to him. The first I got to know about it all was three days later.
"From what I understood about electoral law, I thought that once you’ve been sworn in, that’s it – like a referee in a football match – that decision stands.
"If I lose my seat, I lose money – my livelihood is at stake and I am 60 at the end of the month. Not only will I lose my position within the community but I also stand to lose my home and so I will fight tooth and nail."It seems that Mr Pennington's understanding of electoral law is at fault. But the more fundamental point is that local councillors should not be reliant upon their allowances for a livelihood.
