Lord Bonkers' Diary: The noted woman crime novelist Dame Agatha Mousetrap

I once asked the old boy about Agatha Mousetrap. His verdict: "An ingenious woman. She often wrote novels without a butler in them, so it was simply impossible to know who the murderer was."

Thursday

An advantage of owning a large Estate is that one has the odd cottage tucked away in a remote spot where someone can lie low if they have need – I once put up the noted woman crime novelist Dame Agatha Mousetrap while Fleet Street’s finest were looking for her, and Violent Bonham-Carter made use of the same cottage on more than one occasion. 

Would you believe that when the time came to leave, Violent’s boys wiped down every surface in the cottage? No wonder Violent was popular with my domestic staff! 

In the Sixties, there seemed an endless supply of pop groups wishing to ‘get it together in the country’ and I was happy to accommodate them too. Listening to their efforts, I sometimes thought privately that they would have done better to keep it apart.

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

Earlier this week...

• The former headquarters of the Association of Liberal Councillors
• “Ed doesn’t approve of thinking"
• The Cricklewood Crinkles and the Wolverhampton Wotsits