Tony Blair meets Phil Harding in 2003

One was a universally loved and admired figure: the other had been Pri...

You can see where this is going.

Hallaton: A Leicestershire village that was once a town

Hallaton is only a village, but it once had markets and the status of a town. I suppose in the end it could not compete with the medieval economic behemoth that was Market Harborough.

And it has a High Street (not a Main Street like most Leicestershire villages), which retains a distinctly urban feel. The sad thing is that today it does not have a single shop on it.

Still, look on the bright side: Hallaton still has a castle, a recently discovered medieval chapel that was devoted to an obscure saint who had a cult here, was the scene of the discovery of an Iron Age horde, a museum, a conical market cross and is the site every Easter Monday of a traditional bottle kicking match (a form of folk football) and hare pie scrambling - more details of most of these on the Council for British Archaeology site.

If the incomers of The Notswolds are to perish in a folk-horror reckoning, it may well be here. Meanwhile, these are some pictures of the village I took yesterday.

Jamie Greene MSP joins the Lib Dems after quitting Tories over "Reform-lite agenda"

I wrote a short post about Jamie Greene leaving the Tories and then went shopping. As soon as I did, he joined the Lib Dems and it was announced at the Scottish party's conference. So I have rewritten the post and given it a joyous new headline.

Jamie Greene, the West Scotland region MSP who resigned from the Conservative group at Holyrood yesterday over its "Reform-lite agenda" and "Trumpesque narrative", has joined the Liberal Democrats.

His move was announced at the Scottish Lib Dems' conference in Inverness this afternoon.

The STV News report on Greene's resignation from the Tories  says he warned that the party is "deserting the middle ground" in an effort to "chase the votes of Reform Party supporters" and "fringe right-wing" Scottish voters:

"The party now rests its hopes on a Reform-lite agenda that appeals to the worst of our society, and not the best. ...

"I cannot be part of a narrative which has become Trumpesque in both style and substance."

"Instead of proudly leading on equality, we now run the very serious and immediate risk of becoming once again the party of social division and morality wars."

Greene has been a West Scotland region MSP since 2016. His resignation is confirmation that the liberal approach that brought the Scottish Tories some success under Ruth Davidson is no more.

The danger for the Tories now is that the far-right voters they are chasing will still prefer Reform, while disenchanted liberal Tories will look elsewhere. In Greene's case, to the Liberal Democrats.

A pilgrimage to a lost holy well in Muswell Hill

Another walk with John Rogers. His blurb on YouTube runs:

A north London walk in search of Muswell Hill's lost holy well - the Moss Well, or Mossy Well, Mouse Well that gave its name to the area. A chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Muswell became a resort of pilgrims after a King of the Scots had been divinely directed there and was miraculously healed by the waters of the well. It is recorded as early as 1112. 

Our walk starts on Crouch Hill, goes down Crouch End Broadway, Park Road, Muswell Hill, Muswell Hill Broadway, Colney Hatch Lane looking for the first Wetherspoons pub, then Muswell Hill Road via Highgate Woods.

John has a Patreon to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

Hallaton Museum is housed in a tin tabernacle

I went to Hallaton today and found a tin tabernacle. It houses Hallaton Museum, which will be open in the afternoon at weekends and bank holidays from 21 April to 6 October.

This tin tabernacle was purchased in 1894 by the new rector of Hallaton, Canon Chetwynd-Stapylton, to serve the village for recreation and as a reading-room.

An unidentified local history book tells us:

His generous gesture failed to secure him a seat on Hallaton Parish Council and he subsequently recorded his disappointment in the Parish Magazine:

"I thought that I have established a fair claim to be accounted a good citizen of Hallaton. I have stood entirely alone in the erection of a Parish Room, at considerable cost, in furnishing, heating and lighting it and supplying it with newspapers, etc. as a reading room for two winters…"

Never mind, Canon Chetwynd-Stapylton, you had a great name.

Sherlock Holmes, Raffles and our Trivial Fact of the Day

E.W. Hornung, the author of the Raffles stories, was married to Arthur Conan Doyle's sister.

I learnt this from the latest episode of Shedunnit - a podcast I would recommend to anyone who enjoys crime fiction.

Boris Johnson to speak at the model for Bonkers Hall - and opera singers are up in arms

Boris Johnson is to appear at the Nevill Holt Festival in conversation with Andrew Roberts on 14 June. 

And you will be aware that it's a rare scholar now who denies that Nevill Holt Hall is the inspiration for Bonkers Hall.*

Thanks to the great Solar Pilchard on Bluesky, I find that this news has gone down badly with the nation's opera singers.

A cutting from Van Magazine runs:

Sudden Holt

Opera professionals were already pretty angry with the country house opera company Nevill Holt, which a few years ago made the rather sudden switch from supporting opera to a wider festival of music and arts, leaving singers and other professionals in the lurch. 

So when former prime minister Boris Johnson was announced as a guest speaker at the Summer's Festival - someone who oversaw a rough Covid for the opera sector, to say the least - many were furious. Ashley Beauchamp, a former head of music at Nevill Holt. had the following to say in the Instagram comets section:

Nevill Holt 2023: "Championing emerging talent continues to lie at the heart of Nevil halts ambitions across all strands of the festival's work."

Nevill Holt 2025: 🙃🙃🙃

I shall leave the final words to my mother, who would have been 94 on the day of Johnson and Roberts's event:

"You can't have a prime minister called 'Boris'.  

* Though you can add Rockingham Castle and East Langton Grange at least to the mix.

Responsible Child: When the facts comes before the drama

The success of the Netflix series Adolescence, and my doubts as to how far it reflects reality, has put me in mind of the BBC television play Responsible Child from 2019. This showed how the legal system deals with a 12-year-boy who has helped his older brother murder their abusive stepfather.

Responsible Child was the first play directed by the BAFTA-winning documentary maker Nick Holt, who was interviewed at the time by Deadline:

Tell me how Responsible Child came about.

I was up in Scotland making The Murder Trial, probably for about 18 months in total, looking at various cases, and it was whilst I was up there that I saw a very young child, and I asked one of the lawyers, “Was that a witness?” She was incredibly young to be in a courtroom. And the sister of the accused, said, “No, actually that’s the accused.” 

I was quite taken aback by that. This child doesn’t look older than 10. And then I was told that actually, yes, there are trials for children of 10. And they’re put on trial as adults and they’re put on trial in front of juries, and they’re not part of the youth courts.

Then Holt came across the case of  Jerome and Joshua Ellis, who were 14 and 23 when they also killed their stepfather. The case was reported because the press overturned an injunction that banned them from naming either brother to protect the younger's anonymity:

And that’s what led me to being able to go to a trial and see one of these. It was extraordinary to see, and then I became very close to a legal team involved in that case, and started understanding all about what it’s like to work on these cases, what it’s like to work with young accused.

And he later says:

I’m no stranger to sitting through murder trials. I’ve sat through a great many in my time. But there was just something extraordinary seeing the focus of the entire room on a small child. There was just something so potent about the image of a child who could barely see over the witness stand, and subjected to examination, cross-examination.

And of course, you wonder about children, in general, is how much do they understand about what’s going on. How much of the case they understand, how much do they understand of what they’re saying, the consequences of what they’re saying, what’s being really asked for in what they’re saying? It’s an incredibly stressful situation and so, yes, it was extraordinary to see it first hand.

Holt also says that he told his story through a drama rather than a documentary because that's the only way you can bring one of these trials to the screen,

Responsible Child was screened just before Christmas 2019. It was widely praised and nominated for a BAFTA.

Then came the International Emmys. The play won its category and, remarkably, its young lead Billy Barratt* won Best Actor for a performance that was filmed just after this 12th birthday.  But even this was not enough to win Responsible Child a repeat.

* Trivia fans will be pleased to learn that Billy Barratt is the grandson of Shakin' Stevens (whose real name is Michael Barratt).

Prime minister's questions: Have the Tories given up?

Kemi Badenoch has a problem at prime minister's questions. Every time she attacks Labour on the economy, Keir Starmer simply has to hang the record of the last Conservative government round her neck to win the exchange.

But she has another, as the Guardian live politics blog pointed out. She lacks support from her own side of the House:

Towards the end of the session Greg Smith asked a question that backed up the Badenoch “jobs tax” critique. ... On its own, a single question like this is unlikely to make much impression. But half a dozen of them might.

(To be fair to the Tories, they did not get half a dozen backbench questions. They just got three, and the other two were devoted to Scunthorpe steelworks and the child killer Colin Pitchfork. There is a lottery to decide who gets called at PMQs, and maybe the Conservatives were just unlucky in their allocation this week. But maybe some of them are not bothering to bid for a question. In total just four Tory MPs spoke at PMQs today – exactly the same as the number of Liberal Democrats who got a question.)

You can get strange results from lotteries: the Tories did remarkably badly in the ballot for private member's bills held when the new parliament met after last year's general election.

But this lack of backbench questions may be a sign that the Tories have already written Kemi Badenoch off. Or it could be a sign they are simply demoralised. Or a sign they are too busy on Twitter reading the latest conspiracy theory from Elon Musk.

Whatever the reason for the Tories' lack of interest, it is telling that Josh Self chose to focus his piece about today's PMQs on the exchange between Starmer and Ed Davey on Trump and tariffs - and called it for Ed.

The Joy of Six 1342

"Part of this is down to the increasing centralisation of politics. The prime minister’s role has expanded dramatically over the decades, and cabinet government has been a fiction for a long time (Nigel Lawson claimed that cabinet meetings were the only time during the week that he got a rest). Even minor departmental decisions now have to be signed off by the centre and slotted into a communications grid." Sam Freedman on the rise and rise of political advisers.

Luke McGee suspects Putin is up against his biggest opponent yet - Trump's ego: "Trump clearly wants something that looks like a peace deal so he can show off what a great negator he is. If Trump now sees Putin as the block to a deal, that is a problem for Putin, as he has to make a choice between looking weak domestically or losing whatever goodwill he had with Trump’s White House."

"Yes, Pecksniff and Trump are bullshit artists of the highest order and neither ever experiences the least bit of remorse." Robin Bates argues that Charles Dickens, with Mr Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, anticipated Donald Trump.

Ray Newman watches Some People, which was made in Bristol in 1962 with a young cast including Ray Brooks and David Hemmings: "The church opened in 1956 and was typical of the space age houses of worship built on overspill estates all over the country in the post-war period. Unfortunately, though it looked astonishing, it was plagued with structural problems and was demolished in 1994, which only adds to the value Some People holds as a record of a time and place."

Benjamin Poore says that Shostakovich spoke truth to power - both Nazi and Communist - through his Babi Yar Symphony.

"Without any particular training, the animals - like human babies - appear to pick up basic human language skills just by listening to us talk. Indeed, cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do." Christa Lesté-Lasserre discusses a study that supports my view that cats are much cleverer than they choose to show us.

It's not teenage boys who form corrosive opinions because of social media: it's Kemi Badenoch

Embed from Getty Images

Kemi Badenoch doesn't have time to watch television, she told, Nick Ferrari this morning, but she does know one thing about Adolescence:

"The story which it is based on has been fundamentally changed, and so creating policy on a work of fiction rather than reality is the real issue."

She's referring to a story that has been spread widely by right-wingers on social media, which maintains that the Netflix series Adolescence is based on a real case where a black boy stabbed a white girl.

The race of the boy was changed, the story runs, because of wokeness - or perhaps a global conspiracy involving George Soros, Bill Gates and Gary Lineker.

But this story, like many you find on social media, isn't true.

Here's Jack Thorne, who wrote the screenplay for Adolescence, in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago:

At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn’t a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: "I think you should look into 'incel' culture."

So the series wasn't written to expose incel culture: it was used as a plot device to develop an intriguing situation.

This is the reason I've been a little worried by the impact that Adolescence has had. Do we know it presented a true picture? Or is there an element of moral panic about a new means young people have found of enjoying themselves?

In fact, this seems to be what Badenoch was trying to get over. But, as ever, her tone was petulant and unpleasant - as though she resented anyone questioning her at all. And she topped her comments with a big fat cherry of a baseless conspiracy theory.

So while I'm not sure whether we should worry so much about the way social media affects teenage boys, I'm certain we should worry about the way it has affected Kemi Badenoch.

The Nicotines: Mary Wana

This was on a Q Magazine sampler disc back in 1997 and I still think of it.