J.W. Logan left an estate worth £13m in today's money

My hero J.W. Logan – nicknamed "Paddy Logan" for his strong support for Irish home rule – died in 1925. He had been Liberal MP for Harborough from 1891 to 1904 and from 1910 to 1916.

He left, reported the London Daily Chronicle (Monday 21 September 1925), an estate of £167,159.

According to an online inflation calculator, £100 in 1925 is worth £7,769.23 today. So, after consulting the University of Rutland's celebrated Department of Hard Sums, I can reveal that Logan left an estate worth almost £13m.

No wonder he was able to provide Market Harborough with swimming baths and sports and recreation grounds. He also bought the local paper to ensure good coverage for the Liberals - what Nick Gibb would call "impartial" coverage.

The Daily Chronicle report lists some annuities that Logan bequeathed to his staff, among them his gardener.

My suspicion is that Lord Bonkers has made similarly generous provision for Meadowcroft in his will, but is determined to become immortal – all those trips to Hebden Bridge to bathe in the spring of immortal life that bursts from the ground below the former headquarters of the Association of Liberal Councillors and all those bottle of cordial he buys from the Elves of Rockingham Forest – so it is never paid out.

Magistrate Dr Delicate censured for swearing

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The good doctor's response was a bit "I'm sorry if you feel you've been sworn at":

Dr Delicate, who hitherto had a five-year unblemished record, apologised "if such behaviour occurred", and said some of her actions may have been misinterpreted.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: He should ask an eagle to do it

On Friday it was Peter the Painter: today it's Gandalf the Grey. You meet all sorts in Rutland.

It sounds as though Meadowcroft would have seen eye-to-eye with Hugo Dyson. Legend has it that he responded to Tolkien reading something from Lord of the Rings at a meeting of the Inklings in an Oxford pub by groaning "Oh fuck, not another elf."

Saturday

On Bonfire Night I was accosted at the village firework display by a white-bearded fellow who claimed to be a wizard. He said they were looking for a couple of chaps to trek into eastern Rutland and drop a ring into a crack that led to the earth’s molten core. Did, he asked, yours truly and my gardener fancy the job? He could guarantee that the gardener would get to meet an elf. 

I’m afraid I gave him both barrels, pointing out that the existence of a pothole that deep reflected poorly on the ward councillor. I added that I had tried taking a holiday with Meadowcroft, but he had done nothing but complain that he had to sit at the rear of the tandem and I wasn’t going to repeat the experiment. As to meeting elves, Meadowcroft was often be found chasing them out his herbaceous borders with a broom. 

My advice was that, if he was so keen to have a ring dropped down the dashed hole, he should ask an eagle to do it.

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

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys
• A phone number for the Overton-Window twins
• "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket"
• A young Marines officer called Ashdown
• A strange episode

Marianne Faithfull: Sunny Goodge Street

This is beautiful. Sunny Goodge street is a cover of a Donovan song and appeared on Marianne Faithfull's album 1966 North Country Maid. 

The Marianne Faithfull site says of it:

Marianne’s two folk albums from the 60's were conceived as a pair. Where her first folk album Come My Way, had largely been compiled from music of the American folk revival, Marianne’s second, released in April 1966 was built around songs from the British Isles. 

Rightly hailed as her finest LP of the 60s, North Country Maid conclusively established her as an artist with a unique stylistic approach, and many of its songs (such as Scarborough Fair) were not yet the established folk/pop standards they would soon become.

I recently learnt that Donovan lived in St Albans before fame came calling, and was part of the city's music scene along with the youthful Zombies and Maddy Prior.

You can hear Maddy Prior talking about those days on a recent Word in Your Ear podcast.

A portrait of Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)

Embed from Getty Images

The playwright Tom Stoppard died today. There will be plenty of obituaries, but there is a good portrait of him in this Guardian interview from two years ago (to the day) by Claire Armitstead:

Tom Stoppard is chatting in the theatre bar when I arrive to interview him about a revival of his play Rock ’n’ Roll. He was comparing ailments with an elderly director friend, he says cheerfully, as he heads up the stairs, having declined an offer of the lift. At 86 he has the nonchalant elegance of a spy in a cold war thriller, lean and mop-haired in a discreetly expensive-looking coat.

Though Stoppard is feted around the world for some of the cleverest plays of the last 60 years, as well as the Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, he is more gossipy than grand. “I said to him,” he reports of the conversation from which he has just been dragged away, “I’m being interviewed by the Guardian in half an hour and it’s supposed to be about Rock ’n’ Roll, but I’m going to have to have an opinion about Gaza, aren’t I?”

Being canvassed for opinions comes with the territory for a playwright whose identity straddles two of the biggest faultlines of 20th century history. His most recent play, Leopoldstadt, was a monumental reckoning with a Jewish heritage of which he only became aware in middle age. It ended with Leo, one of three survivors of a mighty dynasty, returning after the war to a Vienna of which he had no memory, having adopted his stepfather’s surname and lived in England since infancy.

Stoppard himself settled in England and adopted his stepfather’s name when he was eight, though his early childhood was spent not in Austria but Czechoslovakia. Rock ’n’ Roll, which premiered at the Royal Court in 2006, contains a different reckoning: what if, instead of getting remarried to an Englishman after the death of Stoppard’s doctor father in the war against Japan, his mother had returned to Soviet Czechoslovakia with him and his brother? 

“I thought I could write a play which was about myself as I imagined my life might have been from the age of eight,” he says. “And then I would find out whether I was brave enough to be a dissenter, or just somebody who would keep his head down and his nose clean. And I have a terrible feeling that it would have been the latter.”

In 2020 the same paper published a review by Stefan Collini of Hermione Lee's biography of Stoppard:

Although Stoppard’s plays can seem like the distillation of several course-loads of reading lists, he didn’t go to university. Instead, at 17 he started work as a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol. 

What he lacked in experience he seems to have made up for in chutzpah: he got himself made the paper’s motoring correspondent without revealing that he couldn’t drive. Increasingly, he wrote theatre reviews, and then followed his dream by giving up his job, moving to London, and writing plays.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A strange episode

Was Peter the Painter at the Siege of Sydney Street? Did he survive it? Was he still alive in Rutland this summer? It's possible, if he stumped up for the potion the Elves of Rockingham Forest sell.

Anyway, as the old boy says, it was a strange episode.

Friday

When I heard a few months ago that they had an “artist in residence” at Belvoir Castle, I determined at once that no Duke of Rutland was going to outdo the Bonkers. I telephoned Joshua Reynolds and Freddie van Mierlo to see if they were interested in the gig, but both told me they were too busy. Then, or so I thought, fate dealt me an ace. 

I was putting the world to rights in the Bonkers Arms that very evening, when someone introduced me to a foreign fellow by the name of “Peter the Painter”. Naturally, I engaged him on the spot and told him to turn up at the hall with his brushes the next morning. 

When he did, I was disappointed to find that he was a house painter. Nevertheless, he proved useful, tackling various jobs about the Estate. He had Advanced Views, but I’ve always found anarchists to be good company – unlike the average Labour MP – so I was happy to discuss politics with him over dinner. And then one morning he was gone, leaving a barn half painted. A strange episode.

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

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys
• A phone number for the Overton-Window twins
• "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket"
• A young Marines officer called Ashdown

Susan Stranks on appearing in the 1949 film of The Blue Lagoon

Talking Pictures screened the 1980 film The Blue Lagoon the other evening. It was an adaptation of the 1908 novel of the same name by Henry De Vere Stacpoole, which tells the story of a boy and girl marooned on a desert island. Nature takes its course, as nature will, and they grow up to have a baby.

The Talking Pictures screening reminded me that The Blue Lagoon was previously adapted for the screen in 1949. This was a British production, and the girl (played as a young adult by Jean Simmons) was played by Susan Stranks, who grew up to be a presenter of Magpie, ITV's would-be rival to Blue Peter.

And Susan Stranks can been seen talking about her experience of making the film in this British Film Institute video from 2021.

I was going to make a joke about the British children never taking their school uniforms off, but in fact our films were noticeably more relaxed about That Sort of Thing than was Hollywood in the Forties. In the Fifties, not so much.

Oh no! Here comes a minor celeb from a Channel 4 clips show of 20 years ago.

Minor celeb from a Channel 4 clips show of 20 years ago: We watched Magpie. Blue Peter was for posh kids.

Liberal England replies: Clear off.

The Joy of Six 1442

"The costed tax rises at £26bn are remarkably similar to the £27bn tax increases proposed in the Lib Dems manifesto last year. ... This would suggest that the macro management of the economy is broadly going in the direction we would want, although the methods aren’t necessarily of our choosing (insert gag about Morecambe & Wise and André Previn here)." Matthew Pennell gives a Liberal verdict on the budget.

Diane Ray reveals the chronic miseducation of working-class children: 'As one Head of English in an academy told me in 2023: “if you are working class and in the lower sets for English you have no access to books, novels, poetry or plays, but rather a daily grind of basic literacy worksheets'."

Waterlooville was labelled a "dystopian zombie drama" in 2024, but the Liberal Democrats have turned it around, says the Local Government Association Lib Dem group.

"Researchers from the Museum of London Archaeology are tracing the history of human habitation on the banks of the River Thames through strategic trial pits and boreholes. As evidenced by the flints, the land today occupied by the Palace of Westminster was once a gravelly island called Thorney Island that prehistoric communities used to fish, hunt, and gather food." Richard Whiddington reports from beneath the Palace of Westminster.

Tim Pelan on John Huston's 1975 film The Man Who Would be King: "The pleasure of the film is the old-fashioned exotic-seeming sensibility of the setting, harking back to classic old adventures like Lives of the Bengal Lancers and Gunga Din, but with the acerbic undercutting of white colonial arrogance."

Oxford Clarion presents an invaluable guide to the university's college cats. (I like cats because they don't use unnecessary commas or award themselves unearned MAs.)

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A young Marines officer called Ashdown

It's hard to imagine Emlyn Hooson or Nancy Seear playing the shots that led to England's demise in the Perth test. Perhaps they should abandon Bazball and turn to Jezball instead.

Thursday

Talking of cricket, as we were, I remember the early years of the limited-overs game when the Liberal Party XI turned the world upside down by scoring at the then-unthinkable rate of three runs an over. The lobby correspondents dubbed our approach "Jezball" in tribute to our new leader Jeremy Thorpe. 

Our outstanding results owed much to a young Marines officer called Ashdown who proved equally adept at illicitly obtaining the opposition’s batting order before the toss and, if they threatened a successful run chase, at kidnapping their lower middle order. I often wonder what became of him.

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

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys
• A phone number for the Overton-Window twins
• "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket"

GUEST POST Understanding the views and worries of the city of Oxford Lib Dem

William Lane has discovered a new political category: the Oxford Liberal Democrat. Who is she and what does she want from us?

It was with great interest that I read the latest piece from Rose Runswick over at the New Model Liberal blog, as it made an excellent case that the Lib Dems have exhausted their potential pool of Tory–Lib crossover voters. This is a point I have also made in the past, but I refrained then from recommending a subsequent shift in the party’s approach as I am not a Lib Dem member. 

Things have changed, however, and it’s clear from rumblings online that many Lib Dem members are not happy with being stuck on 15 per cent of the vote, and are looking with slightly jealous eyes at the Greens' current poll surge. There seems to be an appetite among Britain’s liberals for a change in direction. 

So how do I suggest the Lib Dems expand their appeal? Well, to be clear I don;t think that lies in a populist turn à la Polanski. For one thing the existing Lib Dem voter base would hate it, and for another I’m unconvinced this new populist direction will actually benefit the Greens in the long term.

Personally, I think the answer to that question lies in analysing their existing voter base. It was @Amrk on Bluesky who introduced me the concepts of "Devon Lib Dems" and "Twickenham Lib Dems", terms which immediately gelled with me as someone who grew up in the liberalising South East from 1996–2014, and has met liberal voters in both camps. For those unfamiliar with these terms, I will loosely define them now:

Devon Lib Dems: Independently minded small l liberal voters, of the type that used to be called "nonconformist". They usually live in villages or rural towns, and work in small, domestic-facing businesses or agriculture. These liberals tend towards localism, often take an interest in local history and folklore, and tend to identify heavily with their region.

These voters were the backbone of the 20th-century Liberal Party. They are often found in rural areas of the UK, including the South West of England, the Scottish Highlands and the Welsh countryside (although there they tend to vote for Plaid Cymru).

Twickenham Lib Dems: Successful, liberally minded voters who 40 years ago would have been liberal Tories. Instinctively liberal and internationalist, but focused on economic issues, these voters are often current or former business owners or well-paid private sector workers. They tend towards being well-off homeowners, although this category is increasingly including middle-income, frustrated private renters.

These voters are the spiritual successors to the prosperous middle class that made the 19th century Liberal Party such a dominant force, and whose move to the Tories in the 1920s sealed its fate as a major party. Their move back towards liberalism has been a major (and underdiscussed) feature of British politics since the early 1990s.

So, if these are the two main types of existing Lib Dem voter, how can the party move beyond them? The clue is in the increasing numbers of frustrated middle-income voters turning to the Lib Dems.

Here I will introduce my own concept, the "Oxford Lib Dem".

The Oxford Lib Dem is a white-collar private sector worker, living in a prosperous area of the country but struggling with stagnant wages and high rent. She may have a background in the upper working/lower middle class, but through education has gained a place in the solidly middle classes, either through traditional service industries (law, consulting) or Britain’s new growth industries (biosciences, tech). 

Probably somewhere between 27 and 45, she is staunchly anti-Conservative but either suspicious of or despondent with Labour, while being too business-minded to be tempted by the Greens. She shares the internationalist focus of the Twickenham Lib Dem, but lacks their wealth and background. Similarly, she agrees with the Devon Lib Dem on the importance of place and local area, but values her life in a prosperous urban town or small city.

As you may have guessed reading this, this voter is an amalgamation of people I know personally from my experiences living and travelling in prosperous parts of the country like York, Surrey, Clapham and Oxford. Although lovely places to live in, these areas combine a high cost of living with often stagnant wages for early-to-middle white-collar workers, leading to a constant drumbeat of anxiety around inflation and the prospect of job loss. 

This quite possibly led our voter to opt for Labour in 2024, but she will have been disappointed since then. Given that she will never vote Conservative or Reform, and will be put off by the overtly left politics of Polanski, she is a prime target  for Lib Dem strategists. Winning her over could be the key to finally breaking out of the 15 per cent vote ceiling the Lib Dems seem stuck under, and finally getting up to 20 per cent of the vote.

However, I must inject a note of caution here. One of the greatest desires of our Oxford Lib Dem is to get out of the hated private renting market, and into her own home. This sets her apart from our other two kinds of Lib Dem, for whom housing is less of a concern. While our Oxford Lib Dem is probably not a YIMBY in the political sense, she does support housebuilding, bringing down house prices and greater infrastructure development. 

Appealing to this voter would mean taking the Young Liberal approach to development, which could anger some existing Lib Dem voters. To be clear, this wouldn’t mean totally abandoning existing Lib Dem policy or outsourcing it to housing developers, but it would require a rethink of the national Lib Dem approach to development. 

William Lane is an independent political analyst, who writes at the Party Animal Substack. You can also find him on Bluesky.

A Very Private School by Charles Spencer

A Very Private School: A Memoir

Charles Spencer

William Collins, 2025, £10.99

There used to be two prestigious prep schools near Market Harborough. Nevill Holt closed in 1999, shortly after the police arrived to talk to the deputy head about allegations of sexual abuse and he fled the building and hanged himself in some nearby woods. A former member of staff was later jailed for ten years for 33 sexual offences against boys aged between eight and twelve.

The second school was Maidwell Hall, which closed earlier this year and is the subject of Charles Spencer’s book. He was a pupil there from 1972 to 1977, and reveals it to have been a nest of physical and sexual abuse. 

The headmaster was skilled at keeping parents and even governors away from the school, which he had to be because his regime was geared to providing him, each evening, with half a dozen boys to beat. Some of Spencer’s fellow pupils still bear the scars 50 years later.

Life was no better at Nevill Holt. In the school’s last years, its sporting teams had to travel up to 50 miles to find other schools prepared to play them. Visiting teams had noticed that the facilities for showering and changing at Nevill Holt were designed to maximise masters’ opportunities to ogle naked boys and declined to return.

Charles Spencer writes beautifully – this is no run-of-the-mill celebrity memoir – and what he brings out is the misery of being sent to board at the age of eight, even if the school is more benign than Maidwell Hall and Nevill Holt were. The child loses his parents, his home, his bedroom, his pets and his toys and is instead looked after by strangers those parents know little about. 

Psychologists liken the experience to bereavement and some children never get over it. Others learn to dissociate themselves from their feelings, building a false personality that will please the school authorities. If you are reminded of some of our recent political leaders, I recommend Richard Beard’s book Sad Little Men, which explores this idea further.

When A Very Private School came out, Maidwell Hall issued a statement saying that “almost every facet of school life has evolved significantly since the 1970s”. No doubt that’s true, but it still comes as a shock to find that a group of parents who opposed the closure of the school lodged a formal complaint about it with the Charity Commission. 

What kind of country has charities that exist to send children away from home at the age of eight? After reading Charles Spencer’s book, you will feel we ought to have ones that campaign against the practice instead.

This review appears in issue 432 of Liberator magazine.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket"

Yes, what did happen to Liberal Democrat High Command to make it do a reverse ferret on ID cards? Whatever it was, the delightful Hazel Grove got a very sideways move soon afterwards. There's more about this in the Radical Bulletin section of the new Liberator (issue 432).

The derivation of Clarence "Frogman" Willcock was discussed on this blog last year, while "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket" sounds very much the sort of thing Sid James would have said in Hancock's Half Hour.

Wednesday

I don’t know about you, but I find myself increasingly confused over this identity card business. Just before Conference the usually delightful Hazel Grove told us that we should all move with the times and get one of the things; and, though an unadvertised consultation held at four in the morning in a locked church hall in Branksome came out against them, Ed Davey was very keen on the idea at his question-and-answer session at Bournemouth too. 

There, a tame journalist called for a show of hands and claimed that 110 per cent of those present had voted in favour of cards – and that despite my running round the room to vote against from at least five different seats. (This new tonic the Wise Woman of Wing mixed for me is the cat’s pyjamas!) 

Yet as soon as we got back to Westminster, everyone was launching petitions against the aforementioned cards. Faced with this confusion, I cleave to the words of the great Clarence 'Frogman' Wilcock: "I am a Liberal and if you ask to see my card again I’ll fetch you one up the bracket."

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

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys
• A phone number for the Overton-Window twins

Llyn Dulyn: The Ghosts of the Black Lake (Nationwide, 1973)

Another Fortean report from Nationwide, the BBC early-evening magazine programme that offered an unrivalled portrait of Britain in the Seventies:

Llyn Dulyn ("Black Lake" in Welsh) lies nestled in the Carneddau range of mountains in Snowdonia. 

A quiet, eerie place, it’s steeped not only in an ancient folklore of evil spirits and witches, but also a more modern variety of ghost story. It was the site of multiple airplane crashes during WWII, and became infamous across North Wales. 

In this clip, the locals speak in hushed tones to reporter John Swinfield of collecting debris from the plane wrecks, catching strange-looking fish and hearing disembodied voices calling out to them.

This report was broadcast on 17 October 1973.

The Joy of Six 1441

"His central idea, as he has written before, is that people should own their data. Personal data is any data that can be linked to us, such as our purchasing habits, health information and political opinions." Alex Zarifis on Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the future of the internet.

Sarah Lyons on the ubiquity of violence towards women: "The one man present was in total shock, he had never heard women talk so candidly like this before, the way we talk amongst ourselves, and he genuinely could not comprehend how much violence we had all collectively endured He left that night visibly shaken, changed."

Niamh Gallagher reviews a history of the Great Famine: "There is no doubt that food was available in Ireland throughout the crisis – just not to those who needed it most. The year 1845 was a vintage one for oats; in 1846, 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs, most of which were exported to Britain." 

"For a man who said he hated politics, it is exactly his uncompromising sense of right and his engagement with the world that will make his legacy everlasting." Kenny Monrose pays tribute to Jimmy Cliff.

Jude Rogers says the Eighties television series Edge of Darkness speaks to the Britain of 2025: "As well as trusting its viewers with the complexity of its plot, much of the making of Edge Of Darkness was also audacious. It pioneered the use of Steadicam in its first episode, following Peck from his hotel room in the lift, through the foyer, down the stairs to a basement garage to meet shadowy government attaché Pendleton."

"Early 1645 Parliamentary forces seized Shrewsbury. In June 800 Parliamentarian men pushed south towards Ludlow, attacking Stokesay en route. The garrison were heavily outnumbered and defending what was now essentially an ornamental castle. A bit of back and forth parlay and the garrison surrendered." Keep Your Powder Dry has a survey of Civil War sites in Shropshire that confirms Stokesay Castle was built chiefly for show.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A phone number for the Overton-Window twins

So that's what Lord Bonkers was up to on Bournemouth Beach! I did wonder.

We all wish the Liberal Democrat team well, but having seen one of Lord Bonkers' early net practices with them, I'm tempted to put a fiver on the Andorrans.

Tuesday

Perhaps you saw me on the sands at Bournemouth, making notes as some of our leading lights played cricket? I am, of course, always on the look out for new talents I can invite to turn out for my own XI, but this time there was more to it than that. 

For we Liberal Democrats have been drawn in the Group of Death at next summer’s ALDE T20 competition, along with Democraten 66, Radikale Venstre and Liberals d'Andorra. 

If I am to lick a team into shape while the party copes with May’s local elections, scrutinising a full Labour legislative programme and the St Pancras Day festivities, the sooner I commence net practice the better. 

The other approach, I suppose, would be to sign up some top-hole cricketers as party members. If anyone has a phone number for the Overton-Window twins, a postcard sent c/o the National Liberal Club will find me.

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

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys

The Who: Substitute

I was 16 when The Who re-released Substitute in 1976. I went out and bought it because it was so much better than anything else in the charts at the time.

Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain’s Prime Minister Since Thatcher by Mark Garnett

Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain’s Prime Minister Since Thatcher

Mark Garnett

Agenda, 2025, £20

It’s not a novelty for British prime ministers to leave No. 10 without having lost an election: Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Wilson all did so. What is new, says Mark Garnett, is for them to be bundled out of power when they are still in good health.

He dates this trend to the fall of Thatcher in 1990, and it’s tempting to put its acceleration in the years since then down to Brexit. As Garnett says:

The 2016 referendum, and its consequences, accounted directly for Cameron and May; and while Johnson and Truss found means of self-sabotage, arguably neither would have earned the chance to showcase their ineptitude for leadership without Brexit.

But he sees other forces at work. The social upheavals of the Sixties led to a decline in class consciousness and in strong identification with a particular party among voters. In this new world, the popularity and perceived strengths of party leaders became increasingly important, as seen from the fact that Margaret Thatcher is the last party leader to have won an election while being less popular than her main opponent. 

This trend has encouraged a presidential style among prime ministers – a style that the public and press seem to have come to expect. When John Major tried to undo some of the changes of Thatcher’s Boadicea years and restore the importance of the cabinet, it was widely seen as a sign of weakness.

It’s no wonder, then, that politicians, journalists and voters alike now look to a change in prime minister to improve things when a government is in the doldrums. Keir Starmer had better watch out.

Garnett writes with wit and an eye for a good anecdote. David Cameron’s courtship of the Liberal Democrats after the 2010 election "made Casanova sound like a tongue-tied ingénue". At her post-election party conference, Theresa May received "the kind of sympathetic audience response that, in bygone days, had greeted the arrival of the condemned at Tyburn Tree". The claim that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng crashed the economy was inaccurate, "but it was certainly not from want of trying".

Downing Street Downfalls is an agreeable companion to contemporary political history and, when it turns to the last ten years, a reminder that there’s nothing quite as strange as the recent past.

This review appears in issue 432 of Liberator magazine.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys

The new Liberator has dropped. You can download issue 432 free of charge from the magazine's website. And that, of course, means it's time to brave another week at Bonkers Hall. 

When I first read this entry, I assumed his lordship meant that some Well-Behaved Orphans grew up to become locksmiths. I now fear that is not what he is saying.

Monday

Word has reached me that some of the backroom boys and girls at Buckingham Gate – no doubt Freddie and Fiona are to the fore – have taken to awarding our elected MPs chocolate bars if they judge them to have done particularly well. I should not have put up with such patronising treatment in 1906, nor, I wager, would anyone else on our benches. 

It reminds me of the time when the then Matron at my Home for Well-Behaved Orphans took to playing favourites and dishing out tuck only to a select few. I wasn’t having that, so I arranged for one of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys to call by on her afternoon off to teach the little inmates the rudiments of lock-picking. 

After that they were able to share out the confectionary fairly amongst themselves – and several WBOs were able to turn this new skill into an adult career. Perhaps I should do the same for our MPs today?

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

Bagworth Incline and the remains of one of the world's oldest railway buildings

Steve from the What Once Was channel (like and subscribe, my pretties) writes on YouTube:

Join me as I explore what’s left of the Bagworth Incline House – a forgotten but historically significant structure from one of Britain’s earliest public railways. 

Built in the early 1830s as part of the Leicester & Swannington Railway, this incline control house once helped transport coal across Leicestershire using rope-worked, self-acting incline technology – long before modern locomotives took over.

In the course of this video reveals that he lives in Hugglescote, where I once went to photograph its Edward VIII postbox.

The Joy of Six 1440

"The 'peace deal' that America is now attempting to force on Ukraine, is not like Neville Chamberlain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich; it is far, far worse," says Jonty Bloom.

Sam Bright on the right-wingers who claim to love Britain, but want to destroy all its institutions: "The whole of Britain has become one big Oxford restaurant after a Bullingdon Club dinner: the tables upturned, the glass smashed, the staff left to sweep up the mess while the lads stumble out laughing, having dumped a bag of cash on the table by way of compensation."

"This feels partly like a sidelining of Wales in the national agenda, but also something more than that: a kind of disaster ennui. Floods aren’t new any more. They have become commonplace: but the way they are disregarded by some of the media and the government is deeply dangerous." Jude Rogers asks why the floods Storm Claudia caused in Monmouthshire received so little coverage.

Jack Walton remembers the lost world of Greater Manchester’s newspapers: "The Manchester Evening News is now the only local newsroom in Greater Manchester that has more than a handful of staff reporters, but go back 25 years and it would have been one of a dozen. Grand old titles like the Oldham Evening Chronicle and the Bolton Evening News used to inhabit imposing buildings which were buzzing with staff. In 2011, the Chronicle had 22 journalists and 76 total staff at its Union Street offices."

Colin Thurbron gave the eulogy for the writer Gillian Tindall at her memorial gathering last week: "'Houses and barns,' she wrote, 'gate posts, hedgerows, field slopes and the lie of paths, persist and persist, even when people that created them are earth themselves'.  In effect cities and buildings become, in her work, a palimpsest, in which the past lingers beneath the surface of things, and continues to shape them."

"Twain eventually came to believe that his idyllic childhood in Hannibal – immortalised in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – had been only a dream, from which he had awakened to inescapable loss and misery. The boom and bust so redolent of American life haunted Twain, as it would F Scott Fitzgerald." Edward Short reviews a new biography of Mark Twain.

GUEST POST In the cause of duty: Walter Stolworthy is remembered at Wymondham station

Intrigued by a sign on a Norfolk railway station, Neil Hickman discovers a story of selfless service.

We take the people who work on the railways very much for granted. Sometimes, we get jolted out of our complacency, as with Samir Zitouni, who shielded passengers with his own body during the Huntingdon stabbing attack and was left hospitalised and fighting for his life.

Now, a little while back, I got off the train at Wymondham, once an important railway junction, though no more – the ambitious plans for a new station for the Mid-Norfolk heritage railway near the main line station have come to nothing. 

Wymondham (you pronounce this one "Windum", by the way, unlike the one near Bonkers Hall in Leicestershire) is a town with a history. Back in the 16th century, a brave and principled local landowner named Robert Kett led an ultimately doomed uprising early in the reign of Edward VI. He was hanged in chains at Norwich Castle (some reports say that he took three days to die), and was forgotten as a failure for many years, but his story has been rescued from obscurity and now Wymondham takes pride in him. 

When you arrive at Wymondham station, an illustrated sign, bearing drawings of the Market Cross and of Wymondham Abbey, welcomes you to what is rightly described as a fine historic town.

There is a poignant dedication on the station sign: "Dedicated to a loyal railwayman, who died in the cause of duty – Walter James Stolworthy, of Wymondham (1927-1988)". Having lived hereabouts for 15 years, I knew nothing of Walter Stolworthy, of his loyalty, or of his devotion to duty. What had become of him? Had he, like "Sam" Zitouni, sought to protect others? Internet searches yielded no information.

I found the answer in the pages of the Eastern Daily Press for 14 October 1988. It turned out to be distressingly banal. He had been working with colleagues on the track near a level crossing at nearby Attleborough. And he had been fatally struck by a Sprinter train, one of the diesel multiple-units introduced a few years previously.

It's a reminder that although railways are a very safe form of transport – it used to be said that the safest place in the world was the inside of a British railway train – danger is not far away, particularly with the relatively quiet diesel and electric trains. And indeed, the day after Walter Stolworthy was killed, an elderly couple were seriously injured when a train hit their car on an unmanned crossing near Oulton Broad, and one of them died the following month.

In fact, railway workers have faced danger for many years. The National Railway Museum accompanies a display of safety posters and literature with the sobering statistic that in 1900 alone over 16,000 railway workers were injured or killed, and by 1913, that figure was over 30,000. Much has been done to protect railway workers from danger, but that danger will never be eliminated, as the unfortunate Walter Stolworthy found to his cost.

Walter was married and had three grown up daughters. And there were two death notices for him in the Eastern Daily Press. One mourned him as "loving father and grandfather, tragically taken from us, doing the job he loved." The other simply remembered him as a good friend.

He died doing a job he loved, he was loved and missed by his family and his friends. That deserves a memorial. And he deserves to be more than just a forgotten name.

Neil Hickman is a retired county court judge, amateur historian and independent parish councillor. He is the author of Despotism Renewed? Lord Hewart Unburied.

Johnny Bristol: Memories Don't Leave Like People Do

I was all over chart music in 1974, even though I was dimly aware that the records I was hearing weren't as good as the ones I could just remember from the Sixties. So I remember this one clearly and am surprised to find it wasn't a hit.

Johnny Bristol (1939-2004) recorded a few singles in the US from 1959, but he was best known as songwriter and producer at Motown. He wrote Love Me for a Reason for the Osmonds and was co-producer of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's classic Ain't No Mountain High Enough.

He had a big hit in the UK with Hang On in There Baby at the start of 1974, sounding rather like Barry White. This was his follow up.

A year later Bristol produced a Tom Jones album that included five of his songs. One of them was Memories Don't Leave Like People Do, which became its title track.

The Joy of Six 1439

"The sections of Restoring Order and Control that mention children are chilling, suggesting that many asylum seekers bring their children not because they love and care for them but as a 'fact' to 'exploit ... in order to thwart removal'." Christopher Betram reads the government's new paper on its asylum and returns policy.

Morgan Wild believes municipal bond markets can save Britain: "This is one way to give public servants skin in the game. The team delivering the project should also raise the finance. Their decisions matter to them – cost overruns mean higher local taxes – in a way that they don't when they're trying to talk money out of the Treasury."

Why has government found it impossible to repair or replace Hammersmith Bridge? Do we need to replace it all? A fascinating investigation by Nick Maini.

Hetan Shah asks why no one cares that the British Library is in crisis.

"Carved from Forest of Dean sandstone, the structure was designed to appear as if gently rippling in the breeze. Blending Christian and Islamic symbols, the tomb reflects Burton’s lifelong fascination with Middle Eastern culture." Ian Visits reports that Conservation work has started on one of the most unusual mausoleums in the Roman Catholic world – the Bedouin tent shaped tomb of Sir Richard Burton and his wife, Lady Isabel, which stands in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen in Mortlake.

Susan Major offers a new insight into York's history: "York’s back alleys hide a striking feature of the city's past: scoria bricks, made from the molten waste of Cleveland’s 19th-century blast furnaces. Distinctive for their silvery blue sheen and unusual shapes, these bricks tell a story of recycling, ingenuity and urban change."

US judge resigns after being disciplined for wearing Elvis wig in court

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

"If judges are allowed to wear silly wigs in court, no one will take them seriously," said the judges.

The murder of Charles Walton at Lower Quinton in 1945

You can't beat the local by-election previews that Andrew Teale posts every week.

Yesterday there was an election in the Lib Dem held Quinton ward of Stratford-upon-Avon District Council. (Don't worry: we held it.) I wondered if Andrew would know about a notorious murder that took place there.

I needn't have worried. Andrew wrote in this week's preview:

The Quinton ward extends north-east from here to take in the village of Lower Quinton. This was the scene for the 1945 murder of Charles Walton, with local rumour having it that he had been ritually killed and that witchcraft was involved. 

Despite the involvement of the Metropolitan Police officer DS Robert Fabian of the Yard as chief investigating officer, no-one was ever prosecuted for Walton’s death and Warwickshire Constabulary class it as their oldest unsolved murder case.

My suspicion is that – as in many an Agatha Christie plot – what appeared to be an extraordinary killing was in fact an ordinary one with mundane financial motives. But, like poor Bella in the Wych Elm, this murder has gone down in West Midlands history.

For a short introduction of the case, you can try the relevant episode of Punt PI. But what I really recommend is the three-part investigation of it by Hypnogoria. I like its observation that it's common to come across, when researching your family history, to come across people who have left no mark on official records.

The case also inspired a new film called The Last Sacrifice. I've not seen it, but the trailer below plays up the idea that the murder of Charles Walton inspired the folk horror cinema that flourished two or three decades later.

I found the press cutting above in my folder of newspaper stories about Dennis O'Neill. The juxtaposition of the two stories is positively spooky, but that was the West Midlands in 1945.

Sultana accused by Corbyn allies of encouraging 'ultra leftists' to disrupt Your Party conference

The judges' verdict is in: Sky News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Reform UK councillor removed from Leicestershire cabinet amid complaints about "Islamophobic" emails

Charles Whitford has been removed from Reform UK's Leicestershire County Council cabinet following complaints from three members of the public. 

The Leicester Mercury says the complaints are believed to relate to emails Cllr Whitford sent to residents about flags being flown in his Markfield, Desford and Thornton ward:

In the emails ... Cllr Whitford claimed the people raising the flags were doing so to "reject" the "destruction of British values" amid an alleged "influx of soon to be millions of mainly Muslim men of fighting age". One recipient described the councillor's response as "flat out Islamophobic". ... 

Cllr Whitford also claimed that immigrants were coming to make the UK a "Muslim state", leading to one of the residents accusing him of "whipping up hatred" with his words.

You can read Whitford's response to the complaints and to his removal from the cabinet – he feels he has been "stabbed in the back" and that Cllr Harrison "was out of line" and had "no right" to suspend him – in the Mercury report.

Whitford, who held the highways, transport and waste portfolio, becomes the third councillor to leave Reform UK's Leicestershire cabinet since it was appointed only six months ago.

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Callum Miller, the party's foreign affairs spokesperson, sets out a Liberal Democrat approach to foreign policy: "Our economy is stronger and our security greater when we work with other nations. As an open economy, the UK is a beneficiary when all nations work together and abide by shared rules."

"Gibb’s allies say he’s trying to save the BBC from itself. To me, though, his behavior resembles less a tree surgeon trying to prune an oak for stronger growth than a lumberjack sizing it into planks of wood." Jem Bartholomew dissects the right-wing plan to bring down the BBC.

An investigation by openDemocracy and the Children Rights International Network reveals the shocking extent of the bullying, harassment, self-harm, sexual offences and safeguarding failures that teenagers who join the British Army are subject to.

Fiona Daly says we have grown too comfortable with the exclusion of older people from the digital world.

Alan Tyler tells the story of the remarkable Isokon flats in Belsize Park: "Along with the Bauhaus refugees came many notable residents through the coming years – crime novelist Agatha Christie being the most famous and Soviet spymaster Arnold Deutsch probably the most notorious."

"From the start he has the air of a man who’s seen it all, little of it good. His reaction to a source being gunned down in front of him at Checkpoint Charlie is so restrained as to make it seem routine." Sara Batkie on Richard Burton's performance in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Disturbing moment binman punches naked cyclist off bike during charity ride 'by mistake'

The Daily Star wins our Headline of the Day Award.

As the judges remark, it's come to something when a naked Englishman can't go for a bicycle ride without being punched by a mistaken binman.

Thanks to a reader for alerting me to this story.

No, Pope Leo XIV did not mail dead rats to American radio stations to promote The Boomtown Rats

Embed from Getty Images

This claim was made in a recent Word in Your Ear podcast, but sadly it appears not to be true.

In fact, the young Bobby Prevost, as the Holy Father was then known, was a temporary replacement for the man who did mail the rats.

So close, but no cigar. You can read the full details on Facebook. And Mike Bone tells the same story on Best Classic Bands, but doesn't mention the young temp there.

Labour leader of Camden quits Fortune Green in fear of Lib Dems

Richard Olszewski, the Labour leader of the London Borough of Camden, is quitting his Fortune Green ward next May to fight what he hopes will be a safer seat.

Fortune Green is already split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and a crushing Lib Dem victory in a recent by-election in neighbouring West Hampstead suggests he would have trouble holding on there.

Of course, it wasn't Olszewski's idea, you understand, He told the Camden New Journal:

"Over recent months, several colleagues approached me to raise their concerns that, as Leader of Camden Council, I am likely to be especially targeted at the forthcoming London elections in the ward I currently represent, which is one of the most marginal wards in the borough,” said Cllr Olszewski.

"I have proudly represented Fortune Green Ward through three successive elections, and although I have secured an increase in my vote at every election, my seat remains very marginal.

"I was urged by colleagues to consider that my role as leader places significant responsibilities on me and demands on my time, both in dealing with council business and within the Camden Labour Group I lead, which would prevent me from spending the time I would need to campaign in Fortune Green, not just during the election period itself, but in the months beforehand. Therefore, with encouragement and support locally, I stood for selection in Holborn and Covent Garden Ward."

No doubt he thinks the costermongers and sopranos of Covent Garden won't mind being used in this way.

But cunning plans don't always work out. In 1983 the Conservative minister Iain Sproat decided to leave his seat of Aberdeen South to fight the newly formed Roxburgh and Berwickshire constituency in the Scottish Borders.

He was beaten there by the Liberal Archy Kirkwood. Meanwhile, the new Tory candidate held Aberdeen South.

10cc: I'm Mandy Fly Me

People rave about I'm not in Love, but it's a bit of a dirge and was played to death on the radio at the time. It's the cleverness of the production that people admire about it.

But I still love I'm Mandy Fly Me and want to listen to it again if I hear it. The song exemplifies what made 10cc so interesting: the combination of, even tension between, two very different types of musician. Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman were Tin Pan Alley songwriters: Kevin Godley and Lol Creme were art-school experimentalists.

I'm Mandy Fly Me began as a conventional song by Stewart that wasn't quite working, then Godley turned it into something wonderful.

The long history of Chinese food in Britain

The view that the British subsisted on overcooked vegetables until the Eighties is a tenet of faith for many, but the reality is more nuanced and interesting.

Here's an extract from an article on the Newham Chinese Association website:

The history of Chinese food in Britain is best understood in relation to the history of Chinese immigrants. Historically, the first Chinese eating houses in Britain catered not for local customers, but for Chinese sailors who had settled around the docks in London’s Limehouse and wanted a taste of home. Until the 1940s, the majority of customers in the restaurants were not English but Chinese immigrants.

In the aftermath of World War II Chinese food began to grow in popularity. British servicemen returned from various parts of the Empire and the Far East with a willingness to try different foods and cuisine and a new enthusiasm for Chinese food and restaurants. This in turn saw the rise of the restaurant trade in Soho. Chinese people entered the catering trade because of the downturn in shipping and the closing of laundries, traditional areas of employment.  

In the 1950s and early 1960s there was an influx of Chinese from Hong Kong who provided the necessary workforce. The restaurants served Cantonese food because of Britain’s old colonial links to Hong Kong where most of the chefs came from. The lack of certain authentic ingredients meant having to improvise and also adjust a few dishes to suit the liking of British customers, for example Chop Suey, an old style Chinese cuisine consisting of meat and eggs, cooked quickly with vegetables such as bean-sprouts and a starch-thickened sauce.

With the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China, staff at the Chinese Embassy in London were recalled but the majority chose to stay in the UK and many of them then went on to open Chinese restaurants. Kenneth Lo, a former Chinese diplomat, became a popular and well known author of several Chinese cookery books explaining the intricacies of Chinese cooking to the British public throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. He went on to become a legendary figure on the capital’s restaurant scene and also the foremost expert in Britain on Chinese food, and played a huge part in popularizing and improving its consumption.

What I find particularly interesting here is the insight that servicemen returned from war in the Pacific with a taste for Asian food. That's a useful corrective to the consensus view that the Fifties took place entirely in black and white.

But being an imperial power had affected our tastes well before then. Tea became the quintessential British drink, and we take it with milk because we learnt to drink it in India.

My only question about the article is whether it takes too London-centric a view. Chinese restaurants soon spread far beyond Soho – the advertisement above dates from 1962, and the headline below relates to an incident at The Painted Fan in Market Harborough in 1966.

The Joy of Six 1437

Sienna Rodgers takes us inside the power struggle at the top of Your Party: "There is talk that the leadership race could feature at least one other candidate; a non-MP perhaps with a 'plague on all your houses' campaign aimed at highlighting the chaos that has emerged under those running the show so far."

"The whole estate shares the same creaking water, electric, sewage and gas systems, most of which are interconnected across the buildings – meaning shutdowns for repair affect the whole estate. According to the official Restoration and Renewal unit, there are 'also hundreds of miles of rusting pipework, obsolete electrical cables and gas pipes, and the giant, inefficient Victorian steam heating, all of which need replacing'." The Palace of Westminster is falling down, reports Simon Wilson.

Tom Chidwick pays tribute to Lord Taverne - Dick Taverne - whose victory in Lincoln in 1973 was, along with the Liberal Party by-elections triumphs of that era, one of the things that got me interested in politics.

"The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry. It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not paintings; as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything." William Day seeks to explain Ludwig Wittgenstein's dislike of Shakespeare.

Georgia Poplett emphasises the Leicester roots of Adrian Mole and his creator Sue Townsend: "As a teenager and young adult, the aspirant Leicester Tolstoy moved between jobs, working in retail and at a garage where she spent most of her time reading books on the forecourt. She was sacked from a clothes shop for reading Oscar Wilde in the changing rooms."

"Bitterns are elusive and well camouflaged. They hide in the dense reed beds, popping out to catch eels, fish and amphibians, and quickly darting back under cover. This makes them a secretive bird and extremely hard to spot in their environment with their unique plumage. Typically, it’s their call, the Bittern boom, that announces their hidden presence." Leslie Cater remembers his encounters with Britain's loudest bird.

Former nun Emma Smith's 101 days buried alive in Skegness

There's a sad and fascinating story in today's Guardian about Mick Meaney, and Irish labourer who in 1968 was buried alive in a coffin under a Kilburn builder's yard. 

He hoped the stunt would bring him riches and fame, but he was swindled by his manager and returned to Ireland with nothing to show for it:

No Guinness Book of Records representative recorded Meaney’s feat and a rival burial artist named Tim Hayes, who spent less time underground in a regular-sized coffin, disputed his champion credentials. Later in 1968, a former nun named Emma Smith had herself buried beneath a fairground in Skegness for 101 days.

I just had to look up Emma Smith in the British Newspaper Archive, and found this front-page photograph from the Daily Mirror (18 September 1968). You can read more about her on the Skegness Magazine blog. She came to no harm, unlike Harold Davidson, the Rector of Stiffkey, who was mauled to death in the town by a lion called Freddie.

Emma Smith's record lasted until 1981, when it was broken by an American who lasted 141 days in his coffin. In 1999 a man stayed buried under the garden of the Railway Inn, Mansfield, for 147 days to win the record back for Britain. He was Emma's son Geoff.

One of the problems with our political system is that it produces such inexperienced leaders

In recent days I've come across three instances of people arguing that one of the problems with our political system today is that it produces such inexperienced leaders.

You can hear Robert Saunders making this argument in the latest episode of Nick Cohen's podcast The Lowdown. (Click play on the video and you'll get the relevant extract.)

Mark Garnett also touches on it in his new book Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain's Prime Ministers Since Thatcher, which I review in the next Liberator.

In the book he writes:

Even before Brexit there had been signs that individuals with slender qualifications were beginning to regard themselves as viable candidates. In January 2015 Adam Afriyie, a right-wing backbencher little known to parliamentary colleagues let alone the public, was mooted as a serious challenger to David Cameron's position. Unlike Sir Anthony Meyer in 1989, before the rumours fizzled out Afriyie showed every sign of wanting to run purely on his own behalf.

And you can see the same concern in the Chris Dillow article I blogged about the other day:

Labour party members in 2020 were so keen to see Corbynism without Corbyn that they overlooked questions about Starmer's suitability: is a man who became an MP only in 2015 sufficiently experienced in Westminster politics? Does being head of a large hierarchical organization equip a man to lead a more egalitarian one facing fierce competition? Does he have any good record in developing and selling policy?

Closer to home, how much did Liberal Democrat members know about Nick Clegg when they elected him as their leader.

I know I'm getting old, but I think there is something in the argument that our leaders are too inexperienced.

GUEST POST Reform are still gaining councillors and Labour and the Tories are still losing them

The latest Defections Update from Augustus Carp provides a corrective to the view that Reform are falling apart in local government.

Now it is autumn, and the falling fruit,
And the long journey to oblivion….
D.H. Lawrence

The Seer of Eastwood probably didn’t have local government defections in mind when he wrote The Ship of Death, so it falls to us to consider these mysteries on his behalf. 

The toll continues, mercilessly. Since early September, a further 227 elected councillors have decided that they will be better able to serve their wards, or advance their careers, or sleep more easily in their beds, if they leave the party that supported them when they were elected. Their reasons for doing so may be many and various, but the consequences are similarly disturbing.

As has been noted before, defections by sitting councillors probably tell us more about local politics, and the health of local parties, than council by elections. Of course, personalities play a large part in this, and some people seem to be impossible to accommodate within any of the existing party disciplines. Nevertheless, when these people resign, defect, or flounce out, it is indicative of problems in the local party that may run deeper than appears on the surface.

For example, a number of Labour defections – particularly in London – are occurring now, in the run-up to candidate selection for the all-up Borough elections next year. Serving councillors are not being reselected, for whatever reason, and so are serving out their time as Independent councillors. 

Whether they decide to seek re-election has yet to be determined, but in any event they have deprived the party of canvassing time, campaigning ability and local knowledge. Their friends and family might also stop delivering leaflets and sitting outside polling stations – time will tell. 

If they do stand for re-election as Independents, they might take a significant number of personal votes with them, and can probably be guaranteed to slag off their old party, much to the mirth and merriment of the local press and the other candidates.

The little coverage this topic receives in the mainstream media tends to be used to reinforce today’s bigger political narrative, i.e. that lots of Conservative councillors are leaving, and as a consequence Reform UK is on the rise. As ever with political analysis, it seems to be a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, the Conservatives have not lost as many councillors as Labour recently.

Since September, a net total of 57 councillors have left the Conservative party, compared with 75 from the Labour Party. The Lib Dems are unchanged, the Greens have gained 13, and the Nationalists have lost 3. Reform UK have gained 34 councillors, and the balance have become Independent, non-aligned etc.

As usual, there are very few straight swaps between Party A and Party B. The process seems to be to leave Party A, become non-aligned or independent, and then see the light and join Party B. The duration of these moves can be extensive.

Clearly, in the current political climate, most direct party-to-party defections involve Reform UK - of the direct changes between parties, 32 Conservatives have moved to Reform UK, with one going in the opposite direction. One Lib Dem and one Labour councillor have both made the same move. 

Nine Labour Councillors have become Greens, and one has gone to Reform UK. Other Labour defections (included in the Independent category for now) have expressed their intention to join Your Party in due course – the Labour defectors seem to be going in many more different directions than Tory defectors.

Activists are (or at least should be) getting ready for the May 2027 elections now – the selection, reselection and deselection processes in all parties might persuade many more councillors to defect before then.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.