"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In his column for The Voice, Andrew George (Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives) writes:
The annual international campaign to end violence against women and girls kicks off on November 25 - “16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence” - running till December 10, Human Rights Day.
I’ve reflected on my (small) role supporting the early days of Penzance Women's Aid, and creation of first refuge, 33 years ago! It’s provided essential, lifesaving and enhancing protection for women and their families fleeing domestic violence ever since.
What caused me to reflect was the realisation that I had been wrong. Wrong, in that I had then naively believed we were on a progressive path where, in time, there’d be no need for such organisations. If anything, the problem is worse.
Little Bowden's River Jordan burst its banks last night. At one time it flowed past the village church and around the green, so perhaps it was looking for its old course. The roads affected were reopened this morning.
I live near the Jordan, but if my road floods it's because a little stream is unable to flow into the river and backs up until it spills over.
Later. After posting this, I went for a walk. The floods on Kettering Road, shown in the video above, had vanished, but the mud and debris on the pavement suggested that the stream beside my road had overflowed at some point in the night.
Coate Water in Swindon was formed by diverting the River Cole. It was originally a reservoir for the Wilts & Berks Canal, and when the canal was abandoned in 1914, it became a pleasure park for the people of the town.
It was the inspiration for the New Sea of Richard Jefferies' book Bevis: The Story of a Boy, which was published in 1882 and is the urtext of all children's holiday adventure stories. In a later book, the postapocalyptic fantasy After London, the New Sea has effectively expanded to cover much of Southern England.
Jefferies' birthplace was Coate Farm, which is close to the reservoir and is now a museum devoted to his life and writings.
Undiscovered "sea dragons" are lurking underneath the feet of Leicestershire and Rutland residents, an expert has said.
As readers of Lord Bonkers' Diary will know, they are lurking above ground too. Here's the old boy writing in September of last year:
Who should I spy on the lawn at breakfast but my old friend Ruttie, the Rutland Water Monster? Between you and me, I think she is getting jealous of all the attention being paid to Loch Ness. The next thing we know, she’ll be waddling across the Oakham road and pulling faces at the motorists to get in the papers herself.
Later I call at my Home for Well-Behaved Orphans as they are having a film show. The little inmates have voted amongst themselves to decide the main feature and chosen The Colditz Story.
The illustration above is what generative AI makes of the concept of a Rutland Water Monster. And it is very intelligent - there would have to be more than one.
SERGEANT: Today the professor is here to talk to us about Keats. I bet none of you ignorant bastards even knows what a Keat is.
Today, with the rise of podcasts, there's no excuse for such ignorance. Here are three good podcast episodes on 19th-century literature.
The first line of John Mullan's book The Artful Dickens asks: "What is so good about Dickens's novels?" This is just the sort of question that modern literary theory disapproves of, but they are wonderfully good. In an interview on the National Centre for Writing podcast, Mullan emphasises that Charles Dickens was not just an inventor of eccentric characters but also an endlessly innovative technician.
A recent edition of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time dealt with Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I am another of those men who haven't read it, actually, but the way this podcast explains its place in American culture and history makes me want to.
Dickens: A Brain on Fire has a great edition on Oliver Twist. Emily Bell reminds us what an astonishing book it is - far from the genteel Sunday afternoon entertainment it is sometimes in danger of becoming. Someone said that Oliver himself needed a song in the second half of Lionel Bart's Oliver! so he can tell us how he's feeling, and that's true of the novel too.
Finally, here's a tribute to Timothy West and a reminder that Dickens wrote the Four Yorkshiremen sketch.
Happy 90th birthday to the incredible Timothy West. I spent the best part of a year writing a book with Tim and his generosity knows no bounds. He can act a bit too. Here he is in full flow as Josiah Bounderby in Hard Times.
With the BBC holding a miniature Powell and Pressburger festival these past few days, there's no better choice than this.
It did feature here some years ago, but my excuse for choosing it again is that this version has Eric Portman's monologue at the start. (Besides, two tracks - Paint it Black and Bryan Ferry's version of A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall - have appeared here twice without my noticing at the time, and the world didn't end.)
A Canterbury Tale comes from Dreadzone's second album, Second Light, which was a favourite of John Peel's.
Reviewing it in the Independent, Phil Johnson wrote:
A scholarly regard for the treasures of the British film industry is not the first thing one associates with the British dance music scene, but Dreadzone's excellent album Second Light incorporates dialogue samples from Powell and Pressburger's classic A Canterbury Tale, as well as the song from Thief of Baghdad and the headmaster's spoken vision of the future from Lindsay Anderson's apocalyptic If.
There's even a spot of Derek Walcott's epic poetry and sundry ironic messages from the channel-hopping trawl of a stoned viewer's late-night television habit, like the opening track's ancient cheery documentary voice-over of This is Britain!, immediately subverted by the onset of a deep reggae bass-line.
Second Light is ... a big ideas album, deconstructing received notions of Britishness with the kind of multi-cultural perspective to be expected from two survivors of Big Audio Dynamite and the post-punk Notting Hill scene, plus their fiendishly clever knob-twiddling third partner, Tim Bran.
The effect is - largely because the music itself is so good - enthralling, and it runs counter to the current renaissance of guitar-driven bedroom angst posing as serious pop.
Reader's voice (resignedly): Haven't you written a post about A Canterbury Tale and why it's not a film to be taken lightly?
Madeleine Davies reports on the Makin Review of the Church of England's response to the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth: "Among the conclusions reached by Dr Elly Hanson, the clinical psychologist whose psychological analysis of Smyth is appended to the review, is that 'the beliefs and values of the Conservative Evangelical community in which John Smyth operated are critical to understanding how he manipulated his victims into it, how it went on for so long, and how he evaded justice.'"
"Though Farage has been forced to justify his past praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, there are much deeper questions beyond ideological support that he has to answer about his Kremlin connections, especially given the current war in Ukraine." Peter Jukes lists five questions journalists should ask the Reform UK leader.
Yvonne Jewkes argues that conditions in most prisons mean rehabilitation is impossible.
"Suddenly, the modern approach to children’s play, in which parents shuttle their kids to playgrounds or other structured activities, seemed both needlessly extravagant and wholly insufficient. Kids didn’t need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less reliant on their time-strapped parents to get outside." Stephanie H. Murray on the wonder of play streets.
Pamela Hutchinson explains why I Know Where I'm Going is her feelgood film: "Powell had been besotted with the Scottish islands ever since making The Edge of the World in 1937, and he shares that passion here – it’s a film that will make you fall head over heels in love with its landscape."
"Good antiquarian ghost stories emerge from an author’s unsettling experience of dwelling with and delving deeply into the tangled roots of the past." Francis Young reviews The Lammas Ghosts: Fifteen Norfolk Ghost Stories by Barendina Smedley.
Nestled between the craggy outcrops of the Stiperstones ridge, and the imposing plateau of the Long Mynd, is a piece of land, 50 hectares in size. It neighbours the ancient Portway, and descends gradually to meet the rolling fields of the lowlands.
Meadow pipits and skylarks flutter and parachute above, whilst a shy brown hare creeps through the grasses below, ears flat along its back, all as an unmistakable ‘cuckoo’ call drifts by on an upland breeze.
This is Betchcott Hill, a promising site, containing pockets of valuable habitat, and home to some specialist species, not least a breeding pair of curlew. But it is sadly in poor ecological condition, and in need of considered restoration and land management. And that is exactly what Shropshire Wildlife Trust is planning to do to...
The Shropshire Wildlife Trust is raising money to buy this valuable site. You can donate via its website.
Tom Freeland, the trust's head of nature reserves, told BBC News:
"Skylark and snipe, cuckoos and lapwing."
"I think the most exciting and probably the bird that needs the most protection is the curlew, a real icon of the Shropshire Hills. ...
"We know that they have bred on site, we know that they attempted to raise chicks on this site last year, we know they didn’t successfully do so."
"They are struggling as a species, they need that longish grass that they can safely raise their chicks in."
Jeremy Clarkson believes strikers should be shot in front of their families. Or so you will believe if you've been reading Twitter this week. The example above comes from a usually interesting left-wing account.
The truth is that Clarkson did say that, but for once someone really is being quoted out of context. Have a look at this video.
Yes, he was making fun of the BBC's insistence on 'balance'. Maybe the moral is that you shouldn't attempt irony on The One Show.
And Clarkson's politics are not always what people imagine. As I wrote here, he made the best case for Britain's membership of the EU that I have heard in referendum year, and Remain should have made more use of him during the referendum campaign.
I would have a go at Clarkson for taking up the role as spokesman for wealthy landowners, but my party's MPs seem happy to march shoulder to shoulder with him on that
So let me instead take issue with his strange ingratitude to the BBC.
I don't mean his disapproval of balance, but his "Typical BBC - you people" comment the other day when Victoria Derbyshire quoted his own words about buying land to avoid paying inheritance tax.
Because Clarkson and the BBC go back a long way. All the way back to 1973, when as a 13-year-old, be played Atkinson in BBC Radio 4 serialisations of the Jennings books.
Then he went to public school, his fees paid from his mother's business making Paddington Bear toys. And the BBC was Paddington-friendly even before the animations with Michael Hordern's voice, because Michael Bond was a cameraman with them. So you got exclusive Paddington stories in your Blue Peter annual.
And, then, of course, the BBC's Top Gear made Clarkson a millionaire. A little gratitude wouldn't come amiss.
In June 2023, Neal Lawson was served notice by the Labour party that his 44-year membership could be terminated over a retweet supporting cross-party progressive cooperation.
Almost 18 months later, he was informed by email that he had been found not guilty. In most ways I matter not a jot: "I was probably being used as a more high-profile example to warn others off such abhorrent behaviour."
Writing in the Guardian, he asks why this is happening - he is one of many Labour members to be 'tried' in this way - and what it says about Labour’s deep purpose and culture.
His answer?
Labour, and now the government, is run by people who lost control of “their” party to Corbynism and feared they could never win it back. Through audacity and cynicism, they did so. They now want to ensure it can never be lost again. They are fixated with control. Internally, “opponents” are excluded by the rulebook or are encouraged to self-exclude because of the party stance on Gaza or the winter fuel allowance.
Externally, the urge to control is pure managerial technocracy – a philosophy that says these are chosen people who have the skills and the insights to order, plan and deliver a better world for us, to us. We, so the thinking goes, will be grateful and will vote for them again. At a deeper level still, it’s a politics rooted in too much ego – and therefore reveals a lack of confidence in themselves and their project.
He notes that the Greens are now disciplining party members for cross-party cooperation, and says "the Liberal Democrats are hardly a shining example of pluralism". He doesn't give any examples to support the latter point.
His conclusion is surely right:
All this is at odds with an electorate shifting far beyond lifelong party loyalties. Voters have never been more volatile, while our party system has never been more tribal and rigid. Something is going to give.
"With the 'Tractor Tax' protests filling the news for several days, yesterday delivered an email from Lib Dem HQ informing me that our MPs are demanding that the tax be axed. I was both surprised and disappointed to see our MPs siding with some very wealthy vested interests on this issue." Nick Baird says Lib Dem MPs are wrong to campaign against the government's changes to inheritance tax.
Alexandra Hall Hall on the changes the Democrats must make: "They voted for [Trump} ... not because they approve of his character, but because he successfully managed to come across as more in-touch with them and their concerns than any of the Democrat policy wonks crafting Kamala Harris' campaign messages and strategy, or the celebrities who endorsed her."
"The Armenian genocide of 1915-1917 ... is still denied by its perpetrators; indeed, politicians praise the men responsible and even make scornful jibes about the victims. The issue for Armenians is not so much about 'closure' as a fear that the same undercurrents of hatred are still brewing and will inspire further violence, a fear in part realised last year when Azerbaijan, Turkey’s ally, carried out what human rights groups called the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of over 100,000 Armenians." Britain's energy policy is making us allies of the Armenians' enemies, argues Ed West.
Ruairí Cullen explains new British Academy interactive maps that reveal cold spots in social sciences, humanities and arts in UK higher education, especially affecting disadvantaged students.
Lawrence Buell goes in search of the Great American Novel and returns with some recommendations.
"There doesn’t seem to be an obvious reason to create the crescent-shaped street. Perhaps it was a creative whim or perhaps it was an attempt to maximise space; whatever Stuckey was thinking, he created a crescent which can supposedly boast the smallest radius in Europe." Look Up London takes us to Keystone Crescent near King's Cross station.
The summer of 1974 was enlivened by Jeremy Thorpe and other Liberal MPs touring the beaarty ches of Britain by hovercraft, in anticipation of a general election in the autumn. Harold Wilson duly called one for October.
Whether people enjoying a seaside holiday would be in the mood to meet politicians is a point you hope the party considered first. Anyway, here is a report from the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser (15 August 1974) looking forward to such a tour by Thorpe, John Pardoe and Paul Tyler. There's a mention too for Edward Sara, the Liberal candidate for Falmouth and Camborne.
In this era hovercraft were very much seen as a mode of transport of the future. There would be displays of miniature ones at top-end village fetes.
As it turned out, there's a lot to be said for the Jonathan Meades theory that in Britain the future happened briefly in 1969.
The Nottingham Suburban Railway opened in 1889 and had largely lost its passenger trains by 1916. These ceased altogether in 1931.
Goods workings continued until 1951 - the line's southern connection with the rest of the system at Trent Lane had been lost to enemy bombing in 1941.
Though it was only three and a half miles long, the Nottingham Suburban railway involved some substantial engineering. In this video, Trekking Exploration goes to look for what remains.
The drone footage is good, and a word too for some excellent period photographs of the line.
Linsey McGoey listened to Trump voters and suggests the Democrats will have to do the same if they are to win power again.
"The language of social justice - 'wokeness' if you will - is not about social justice at all but acts rather as an ideological glue binding together a section of the elite that want to keep climbing the ladder of privilege but don’t want to see themselves as part of the elite." Kenan Malik reads We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi.
Pam Jarvis fears many multi-academy trusts are putting copious amounts of public money into the pockets of non-teaching managers while giving the nation’s children less quality for more funding.
Alfie Steer asks if Caroline Lucas was really Britain's first Green MP: "One other former MP could plausibly claim this historic title: Cynog Dafis, Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion and North Pembrokeshire from 1992 to 2000. The reasons why reveal a unique, and largely forgotten moment in Welsh and British, political history."
"Despite there being no evidence to support their existence, ghosts have haunted humanity wherever they have settled across the planet. Every age and every culture has its own type of ghost and ghost stories, each shaped by its own peculiar context. And despite the rise of scientific thinking in the 20th and 21st centuries, the belief in unquiet spirits is still very much alive." Russell Moul on why we believe in ghosts.
"At St Mary de Castro ... the volunteer on duty is keen to assert that it is in a completely different league from the cathedral. Boasting elements of all eras of English architecture, from Norman to Gothic Revival, its highlight is the triple-arched Norman sedilia. It is really two churches in one, a collegiate and a parish church and thus has two naves." Iain Sharpe goes back to Leicester.
I've long been fascinated by the figure of Huey Long. The Governor of Louisiana and a US Senator, he was a left-wing populist who was planning to run for President in the 1936 election when he was assassinated.
He had a short way with the state constitution, but - unlike those of Donald Trump - his policies did help the poor. The Democrats saw him as posing a threat to Roosevelt in the Presidential election.
This is the most balanced video about him I can find on YouTube.
What should Lib Dem strategy be in this brave new world? Is there a policy you would like to see us adopt? Any heretical thoughts you want to confess?
You're welcome to share your ideas in a guest post for Liberal England.
I'm happy to entertain a wide variety of views, but I'd hate you to spend your time writing something I wouldn't want to publish. So do get in touch first.
And, as you may have noticed, I'm happy to cover topics far beyond the Lib Dems and British politics.
These are the last ten guest posts on Liberal England:
Robert Key, who died last year, was the Conservative MP for Salisbury between 1983 and 2010. On 17 March 2010 he gave his last Commons speech, and it was one of the most remarkable ever given there.
It was on the second reading of the Gordon Brown government's Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill, which passed into law before the general election of that year.
Early in Key's speech, he said:
The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) referred to the question of far-off lands, saying that if mines exploded around our shores or in our country there would be immediate public outrage and very swift action indeed. Well, I can tell the House that that has happened in our land. I was there, and I want to pass on, for those who will be here long after I have gone, what happens in those circumstances.
And that is just what he did:
On Friday 13 May 1955, when I was 10 years old, I was on Swanage beach in Dorset with some 20 other children of about the same age. We were doing what children on a beach on a Friday afternoon in May do-building sandcastles, digging holes in the sand, making dams and so on. I was building my castle with a chap called Richard Dunstan: five of my friends were digging holes, and then one of them found a tin. He thought that it was Spam, or something really exotic-yes, Spam was exotic in 1955. He was wrestling to move it, because it was lodged between two rocks. He got out a shoehorn but could not break the tin open. The boys stood back, and were seen throwing things at it.
My friend and I got bored. We turned round. We had our backs to our friends, and were about the same distance from them as I am from you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, when there was a huge explosion. We were blown into the sea, and lived. Five of my friends died. Five British children were blown up by a British mine on a British beach, within my living memory, and the living memory of many other people. It was an extraordinary thing. It happened in the middle of the 1955 general election. The front page of the following day's edition of The Daily Telegraph carried a story with the headline, "4 Boys Die, One Missing in Explosion". Below that, smaller headlines stated, "Big Crater Torn in Beach" and "Wartime Mine Theory".
There was not much theory involved for the five who were killed, or for the two of us who were the luckiest people alive. I still think that I am the luckiest person alive in this House. Of course, my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Milton Keynes has deliberately put himself in harm's way, and I salute him for it, but I was there as a child and got tangled up in what happened by mistake. So what was the response in Britain when a mine exploded around our shores? Many years later, I was a Minister in the Department of National Heritage, and the Imperial War Museum was one of my responsibilities. One day, I asked the staff there whether they had any records of something happening on Swanage beach on 13 May 1955. A couple of weeks later, a large box arrived, full of all the documentation relating to that horrible event.
I have here in my hand copies of the Dorset police documents entitled "Report to Coroner Concerning Death". They detail how, on 13 May at about 4.20 pm, four boys were reported dead. I also have a copy of the report from the police constable who found them, but the strange thing is that the fifth boy was never found. Within a day or two, a plimsoll that he had been wearing was found. Another was found a few days later. That meant that the then Home Secretary had to issue a document giving authority to the coroner to investigate the matter. The coroner simply declared that there was no conclusion to reach other than that the fifth boy had been a victim of the same mine explosion.
In the inquest, the coroner called for evidence from the officer responsible for de-mining the beach, who had issued a class IIA certificate in January 1950. The officer said:
"I am convinced that this mine had been in the sea and from evidence of marine growth I consider the mine had been washed ashore.
What the boys were seen to have been doing was quite sufficient to have exploded the mine...As an expert I would have allowed boys to walk across the beach."
I have read the mine clearance officer's reports, and have with me a copy of the plan of the mines that were laid on Swanage beach in 1940. A clearance operation was undertaken in 1945, which was repeated in 1947 and again 1949. Eventually, a clearance certificate was issued on 17 February 1950. The documents reveal that 117 mines had been laid, of which five were lifted in clearance. They also show that, although there was some evidence of the existence of 54 others, the remaining 58 are still unaccounted for. That was what I found so horrendous when I discovered all this as a Minister of the Crown so many years later.
The coroner concluded his remarkable summing up-in those days, of course, everything was handwritten, and I have a copy of his notes-by saying:
"I think the bomb was in all probability washed ashore.
I do not think any blame can be attached to any living persons in this matter. The boys were all playing among the rocks in a perfectly normal way so far as"
the master in charge
"could see and I do not consider he has any reason to reproach himself, and after the explosion he could not have done more nor acted more resolutely than he did."
I certainly concur with that. He was my favourite master. He was my French master, and a remarkable and good man. I think that he must have been through hell ever since.
One can imagine how horrified the staff at the school were by what had happened. They, too, were remarkable in the way in which they handled the incident, the enormity of which was overwhelming. The headmaster, John Strange, who was a wonderful man, managed to hold the whole community together. The retired headmaster, the Rev. Chadwick, also played his part. The master who had been at the heart of the incident and who had been taking his charges on the beach was wonderful.
The school could not have done more to look after the children, but the fact remained that the mine clearances had not been completed satisfactorily. The mine clearance officers had, in fact, refused a certificate of clearance on one occasion, but had been overruled.
In the final certificate of removal of dangerous military defence works, the officer concerned-who, ironically, was operating out of Southern Command in Salisbury in my constituency-stated:
"The whole area has been swept with a detector and those portions of the area which have been subject to disturbances have been explored thoroughly to the apparent depth of that disturbance".
Bulldozers were brought in, and the beach was removed down to the rock and put back again. The officer continued:
"Though no guarantee can be given the area may be considered safe except for the possibility of mines being washed up from other fields",
and that is what happened.
This is a horrendous story, and I repeat it to the House to point out that on the issue of mine clearance, whether it is cluster bombs, cluster munitions or mines of any kind, the impact is the same on a child of 10 at play, whether in Beirut or in Swanage. Personally, I would like to see the mystery of the missing mines of Swanage bay cleared up. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood), who also knows more about military matters than most of us, and who has first-hand experience in his military service, might be interested.
After the event, the coastguard swept the whole coast from St. Aldhelm's head right round past Poole harbour all the way to the Isle of Wight for any traces of that missing body. None were found.
More significant now is the fact that we have the technology to detect those mines. I would like to see minehunters of the Sandown class or equivalent brought in, perhaps in training, to sweep Swanage beach and the coast right round Bournemouth. We have the evidence in the 1950 statements of the officer who did the clearance and also from the 1955 inquest that the bomb which killed those children had probably been swept inshore by a gale. There is an opportunity for the Ministry of Defence, in the course of training our Royal Navy operatives, to have another go. That would be an opportunity worth taking.
I support the Bill - of course I do, after what I have been through in my life. I still think I am the luckiest Member to be alive. It motivated me in my politics, and it motivated me to be interested in defence once I came to the House. I have done that for 27 years.
I hope the lessons of Swanage beach will not be forgotten. I hope the Bill will be but one step on the road to realising that although war may have to be fought, we should always strive to do it honourably, morally, with integrity, and always and everywhere with the minimum impact on a civilian population that has not put itself in harm's way. That is my wish, and that is why I support the Bill.
I am blogging about this story today because I found an interview with Robert Key that he gave just after making the speech, in the folder of press cuttings I turned up the other day.
In it he gave some details of the boys' deaths which he didn't mention in the Commons (and which I shan't repeat here), and talked about the effect on him:
"I had just started making friends in my new school when the land mine went off. My mother came to see me, and my father prayed with the other parents, but I was desperately homesick and miserable. My back was badly injured. My friend was taking shrapnel out for years.
"We hated having to go back to the beach every Friday. The Army said they hadn't found any other mines. But we heard the explosions in our classroom, everyone went white. It was very stiff upper lip, pretending not to notice the spaces in the dormitory."
Reading the contemporary news reports of this tragedy and the inquest into it, I get the impression that the authorities seized too readily upon the explanation that the mine responsible had drifted ashore, because it meant that no one need be held responsible. That seems to be what Robert Key believed too.
Swanage was not the only tragedy involving wartime mines. A Sunday Mirror article from 28 June 1959 warned:
Death Hides in the Sands!
Killers, silent, corroded, rusty, lurk where the holiday families play this summer - on beaches and moors, in woods and fields.
The tides, or children with spades, will uncover-some 40 beach mines on Britain’s East and South Coasts.
These are the deadliest of all, warns Lieutenant-Colonel N. Barker, who commands the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Unit at Horsham, Sussex.
They can kill at 100 yards, And they have done frequently since World War II ended - fourteen years ago.
And the report goes on to remind readers:
Killers all - that, only recently, killed four men near Harrogate and five boys at Swanage, Dorset... and maimed six children in Yorkshire.
I now wonder if the danger of mines was something that every holidaying family was once aware of. Certainly, I can remember being told before a family caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967 that I shouldn't pick up anything metal I found on the shore. At the end of this post you can a public information film that was issued after the Swanage tragedy.
The five boys are remembered by a tablet on a building erected in their memory at what was Forres school, the prep school they attended. Forres later merged with another school and its buildings at Swanage are now occupied by a special school, which means the tablet is not generally open to public view.
So money is being raised to provide a more accessible memorial to the boys and one that is near the place where the tragedy took place.
The language was coded, but Ed Davey appeared to call on Jane Dodds to stand down as leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats when he appeared on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg this morning' .
Dodds' position was called into question when criticism of her in a 2021 report on the way the Church of England dealt with an abusive bishop was given new prominence by the resignation of Justin Welby.
The Guardian reprints the relevant passage of the interview:
Asked about the case, Davey told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuennsberg show: “I’ve spoken to Jane about this. She has apologised, and she has had a incredible career looking after children, but I’ve made it clear I think she needs to think about her responsibility on this.”
Asked if that meant she should consider resigning, Davey said: “I think she does need to reflect on this very carefully. I accept that she has apologised, but this is such a serious issue, so I think she does need to think about what else she may need to do.”
Asked if this was “code for she should resign”, the Lib Dem leader added: “I want Jane to reflect on this. I have spoken to her. I’ve made my feelings really clear to her about what I think she should do, and I think she’s reflecting. I hope she does.”
You can watch the whole interview, which is mostly about social care, on the BBC iPlayer. It begins at 19:10 and the exchange about Jane Dodds is at 27:30.
Jane Dodds was found to have committed a "grave error of judgement" by the report into the Church's handling of allegations against the late Bishop of Chester, Hubert Whitsey.
So far the Welsh Lib Dems have continued to back Jane Dodds' leadership, but Nation Cymru was able to find critical voices from within the party.
Published in 1965, the year before she died, The Mind Readers was the last complete novel by Margery Allingham. And she, along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, was considered one of the for 'Queens of Crime' for detective fiction's golden age.
So whatever I expected when I opened The Mind Readers, it wasn't this celebration of the London of the Sixties::
The Great City of London was once more her splendid self; mysterious as ever but bursting with new life.
In the tightly packed clusters of villagers with the ancient names - Hackney, Holborn, Shoreditch, Putney, Paddington, Bow - new towns were rising into the yellow sky; the open spaces if fewer, were neater, the old houses were painted, the monuments clean.
Best news of all, the people were regrown. The same savagely cheerful race, fresh mixed with more new blood than ever in its history, jostle together in costumes inspired by every romantic fashion known to television. While round its knees in a luxuriant crop the educated children shot up like the towers, full of the future.
It just goes to show you'll never know what you find when you open a second-hand book.
It's also a reminder that the golden age of detective fiction was still within touching distance when I was a teenager. Allingham was only 62 when she died, Agatha Christie, as we recently saw, lived to ponder the fate of Lord Lucan, and Ngaio Marsh wrote an episode of Crown Court.
Later. Shedunnit podcast has a good episode on Margery Allingham's career as a writer.
