Dame Mary Berry "frightened" after being arrested at US border

The judges were heard grumbling about "clickbait; nevertheless, yahoo news! wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Keir Starmer's 10 pledges from his leader leadership campaign

It's clear Keir Starmer never believed in much of what was contained in these pledges. They were written for him so he would appeal to Labour members in the party's last leadership election.

More and more, I favour Neal Lawson's account of how we ended up with a prime minister who possesses so few of the qualities you look for in a political leader:

Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of right-wing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. 

At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grown ups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured. 

But no one reckoned with Covid, Tory turmoil and the collapse of the SNP. Suddenly Keir Starmer wasn’t going to just lead Labour to a better defeat and a springboard for victory next time. Against the odds, he was going to win. Just as Jeremy Corbyn was Labour’s accidental leader in 2015, Starmer was the party’s accidental prime minister in 2024.

John Rogers explores Acton Town, Turnham Green and Chiswick House Park

Time for another London walk with John Rogers:

A walk from Acton Town Tube Station down Bollo Lane looking at the changes taking place there, then across Turnham Green where I talk about the Civil War battle that took place there in 1642. The video ends at the beautiful Chiswick House Park.

This walking tour explores West London history, urban change, and hidden landscapes, moving through Acton, Bollo Lane, Turnham Green, and Chiswick. Along the way it touches on London regeneration, psychogeography, Civil War history, grand houses, and the last industrial London.

Most signs of the Acton Town to South Acton branch disappeared long ago. Diamond Geezer has an article about it.

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

Some staggering moments from 75 years of The Archers

A fellow Liberal Alliance councillor told me back in the Eighties that, when he was a small boy, he and his friends were avid listeners to Dick Barton – Special Agent. 

When they heard that a new series called The Archers was to occupy its slot, they naturally assumed it would be about Robin Hood and his Merrie Men.

Imagine their disappointment when they tuned in for the first episode...

At the start of this year, the Guardian celebrated 75 years of The Archers with 75 of its most staggering moments. Here are few they chose:

• Outsiders have always been treated with suspicion in Ambridge. In its first year, unrepentant townie Bill Slater was fatally injured in a brawl outside the Bull.
• Nelson Gabriel, once voted the Greatest Rogue in the series’ history, vanished in an alleged plane crash in 1967. Implicated in the Great Borchester Mail Van Robbery, he was eventually returned by Interpol.
• Adam Macy’s overprotective parenting style might be partly explained by the fact that in 1970, at the age of three, he was kidnapped from the Bull by a couple of Brummie bunglers hoping to blackmail his wealthy paternal grandfather. Three days later, he was rescued from the big bad city thanks to a tip-off from Sid Perks.
• Fresh from her adventures at Greenham Common, Guardian-subscriber Pat Archer almost left Express-reader Tony for her women’s studies lecturer in 1984 … until Tony wooed her back with a bold plan to go organic. (On the farm, not in the bedroom.)
• Four years after their first kiss, Emma and Ed Grundy made their relationship public – a delay explained by the fact that in the meantime she had married and had a baby with his brother Will.

The Joy of Six 1482

Writing in the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, Hannah White says our political institutions are dangerously underprepared for a multi-party future.

Jane Green and Marta Miori argue that the electoral challenge Reform represents to Labour is widely misunderstood: "Focusing on Labour voters misses the much bigger threats to Labour from Reform, which is Reform overtaking the party in Labour councils and constituencies by continuing to capture Conservative voters and 2024 non-voters – the latter small in proportion, but currently larger in size than for other parties. This is made likelier if Labour’s vote continues to splinter broadly, to ‘undecided’ and to the left, and is a threat to the party in the many seats they won on lower vote shares in 2024 due to fragmentation on the right."

"Cambridge and Oxford are often spoken about as a pair – two high-achieving university towns with highly educated populations, cutting-edge firms and high average incomes. Both are prosperous, yet both struggle with tight housing supply. But beneath these similarities, differences are emerging." Xuanru Lin finds that Cambridge has pulled ahead of Oxford on jobs, productivity and housing.

"Historically, the psychogeographer became associated with the 'flaneur', a lone male wanderer who is able to move unheeded through the city. This romantic idyll doesn’t reflect the reality for many of us, and there are many barriers stopping folk." Morag Rose on exploring cities as a disabled woman.

Clare Bucknell visits the Joseph Wright of Derby exhibition at the National Gallery: "Tenebrism, the 17th-century Caravaggist method of illuminating figures and details against a deeply shadowed background, was admired by connoisseurs, but little practised or understood by Wright’s British contemporaries. Mastering nocturne painting, being able to replicate the way skin glowed in warm or cool light or colours changed in the dark, was a means for the young artist to distinguish himself."

"The club whose sustained excellence made the argument for change most powerfully will now discover that the goalposts have been replaced entirely, swapped for financial sustainability assessments, commercial strength metrics, governance frameworks and geographic strategic value criteria that Ealing were never given the opportunity to meet." James White reacts to the Rugby Football Union's decision to end promotion to and relegation from the Premiership.

Chartwell Dutiro: Mahororo

The opening of Chartwell Dutiro's obituary on Afropop Worldwide:

Chartwell Dutiro has joined the ancestors. More than a brilliant Zimbabwean mbira player and a pillar of Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited during their rise to international fame in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Chartwell was a musical visionary with a deep and abiding fidelity to the Shona tradition in which he was raised, and a wry, witty cosmopolitanism that made him a singularly effective ambassador to the world.

Shorayi Dutiro’s journey began in a Kaganda village in the Bindura region of then-Southern Rhodesia. According to his passport, he was born on Dec. 26, 1957, but he was never certain of the accuracy, given the cavalier attitude of colonial Rhodesian authorities toward the residents of rural communities. 

He often told the story of how a white doctor, not his parents, decided to call him Chartwell, after Winston Churchill’s summer home. Only years later when he actually visited the place did Chartwell learn that this was the derivation of his name. Nevertheless, the name Chartwell has always appeared on his official documents.

And Wikipedia takes up the story:

As a teenager Chartwell moved to the capital, Harare, and became saxophonist with the Salvation Army band. A little later, in 1986, he joined the world-famous band Thomas Mapfumo & the Blacks Unlimited. Touring the world for eight years with that band, he was their arranger, mbira player and saxophonist. From 1994 until his death in 2019, Chartwell based himself in Britain where he continued to teach and play mbira.

Chartwell had academic qualifications in music, including a degree in Ethnomusicology from SOAS in London where he also taught for many years.

Ben McGuire fights to save Sharp's Brewery in Rock

Ben McGuire, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Cornwall, has called the planned closure of Sharp's brewery in his constituency "devastating" and urged its American owners to think again.

ITV News reports that he has also said it would be "unacceptable for Molson Coors Beverage Company to market its products as Cornish if it moved out of the Duchy".

The brewery at Rock, which produces the UK's best-selling cask ale Doom Bar, is due to close by the end of the year with the loss of 50 jobs.

Ben told ITV News:

"I’m really disappointed to hear this devastating news that more than 50 local people are going to lose their jobs at this iconic local brewery. We have been so proud to see their beers sold the length and breadth of this country. ...

"I hope the parent company approaches the consultation in the spirit that it should be approached with and they listen to local residents and they come up with a solution to keep those jobs here, or at least some of the skilled jobs. They cannot use our Cornwall brand without production here in Cornwall."

Boak & Bailey wrote about the rise of Doom Bar back in 2008. And Rock always used to be where the upper classes dumped their unwanted teenage offspring for the summer, though I don't suppose they interfered with the brewing.

Derby councillors clash over cost of Snickers bars in heated council tax row

 Derbyshire Live wins our Headline of the Day Award. 

One of the judges was heard to ask what the point of Reform UK is if their councillors don't insist on calling them "Marathon bars".

How Charley fooled the Luftwaffe and saved Midland cities

Here's the blurb for one of the short Secret Leicestershire features on BBC Sounds – The secret RAF base which foiled the Nazis:

Slightly north of Coalville in the Leicestershire district of Charley are the remains of a secret RAF base which foiled Nazi bombing raids during WW2.

The RAF 80 Wing was formed in 1940 and comprised a team of specialist wireless operators who sent radio signal beams to throw German pilots off course, tricking them into releasing their bombs away from their intended targets.

Charley was one of those specially chosen sites, being close to the important manufacturing centres of Leicester, Derby, Coventry, Nottingham and Birmingham. That secret RAF team was nicknamed "The Beambenders".

You can read more about this operation in the Wikipedia entry for Battle of the Beams, and there's more about the site at Charley on the parish council's website.

The Joy of Six 1481

"Other guests at the party included Mandelson’s good friend Nathaniel (Nat) Rothschild, a financier and heir to the Rothschild fortune (Mandelson often stayed at his villa in Corfu), and Rothschild’s old schoolmate, the then shadow chancellor George Osborne." Tamsin Shaw looks back to the Yachtgate scandal of 2008 and argues that we misread it at the time.

"Across the country, thousands of children are quietly lingering in ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] facilities, unable to reunite with parents or relatives because of new Trump administration policies limiting who can sponsor them. According to a class action lawsuit filed by immigration advocacy groups last week, children are 'being separated from their loving families, while the government denies their release, unnecessarily prolonging their detention'." Julia Lurie on the cruelty of the Trump regime.

Tanya Park believes Liberals should care about the collapse of serious Conservative journalism: "Not because the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph were ever friends to progressive politics (they weren't), but because a functioning liberal democracy depends on a press that engages honestly with reality across the political spectrum."

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols predicts that general-purpose AI will poison itself: "We're going to invest more and more in AI, right up to the point that model collapse hits hard and AI answers are so bad even a brain-dead CEO can't ignore it."

"Alcohol has its many downsides as I can attest having a childhood punctuated by my father’s alcoholism, but it lowers people’s inhibitions making them willing to talk. It’s why you’re more likely to spark up a conversation over an interesting cask beer instead of waxing lyrical to the person next to you about the smooth flavour of an Arabica coffee bean." When it comes to social cohesion, beer beats coffee, says David Jesudason.

Ian Jones reminds us that Kenneth Williams was never off the television: "Yet over the next two decades he failed repeatedly to be – in one of his catchphrases from the BBC radio show Round The Horne – 'properly serviced' by the small screen. Despite all that graft on stage, he never landed a leading role in a TV drama series. For all the comic virtuosity that poured out of him in the Carry On films and his radio series with Tony Hancock and Kenneth Horne, he not once played lead in a TV sitcom." 

An elephants' graveyard: Toton sidings and locomotive depot today

Years ago, I was on a rare passenger working through Toton. The ranks of stored wagons and locomotives made it feel like an elephants' graveyard,

As Our History Underfoot – the new name for the old Trekking Exploration account – discovers here, the vast yards and loco depot Toton are largely derelict today. This was to have been the site of the East Midlands Hub for HS2, but that won't happen now.

Besides Toton, we see the River Erewash and some of the tangle of lines that makes Long Eaton a railway labyrinth.

Generate your own Allister Heath headlines with one click!

The absurd headlines it gives to Alister Heath's opinion pieces are one of the most florid symptoms of the Telegraph's sad descent into madness.

Now, thanks to The New World, you can generate Alister Heath headlines yourself.

But be warned: it's hard to replicate the craziness of the originals.

Jackie Trent: Where Are You Now, My Love?

This took Jackie Trent to number one in May 1965 – she wrote it with Tony Hatch, to whom she was married for many years. Their suburban take on Bacharach and David is very effective here.

The song owed part of its success to its use in the television series It's Dark Outside, which featured Oliver Reed among its cast.

But the footage in the video does not come from that but the film Four in the Morning. This ominous downbeat piece of late kitchen-sink suggested it could be grim in London too – Billy Liar might have been no better off if he had caught that train. It starred Judi Dench in a rare early cinema appearance. This was years before it was made compulsory for her to appear in every British film.

My latest article for Central Bylines... Paddy Logan: Harborough’s radical Liberal hero

I've had another piece published on Central Bylines this morning. It looks at the career of J.W. "Paddy" Logan, who was Liberal MP for Harborough from 1891 to 1904 and 1910 to 1916.

Here he is speaking in the Commons in 1897:

In the Board Schools the children were not taught to curtsey to the squire or to the parson. In the Church Schools the children were taught to fall down and worship the great god of the Clerical party – the landowner. Hon. Gentlemen might laugh, but he knew what he was talking about. He saw it too frequently.

What the children were being taught in thousands of villages today might be summed up in the words: “God bless the Squire and the Squire’s relations/And make us know our proper stations.” … The Church had always been against progress.

Uncannily, I invented Lord Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans years before I read of Mr Logan's cottage home at East Langton.

Fighting breaks out at Kibworth vs Gumley cricket match in 1873

At Kibworth library today in connection with a thing, I came across this report from the Leicester Chronicle (2 August 1873):

The cricket match which took here on Saturday between the Kibworth and Gumley Clubs was wound up with a scene - we might almost say a tragedy - which, with the exception of occasional poaching affrays, is happily seldom heard of in the rural districts.

It appears that a quarrel arose through some objections taken as to the fairness of certain individuals engaged in playing quoits. High words were soon followed by blows, and the pugilists were speedily reinforced by their friends on either side. The fight went on for some time until at length a perfect riot took place, and bats which for some time had been flourished in the air, began to alight on the nasal organs of the combatants.

Seven or eight men are reported to have been on the ground together and the disputants ultimately became so fighting or thrashing mad as to rush into the melee and knock down irrespective of friend or foe any person who came within reach.

The scene which beggars description went on until all appeared to have had enough, the office bearers of the Kibworth club utterly powerless to restrain the "dogs of war". Those who figured most conspicuously in the fracas we are told were from Gumley and Smeeton. Kibworth was also fairly represented. 

The greater proportion of the rioters were apparently maddened by drink; and their conduct will probably induce the members to forswear the future admission of intoxicating drinks on the ground.

I like to think that Kibworth vs Gumley remains a needle match to this day. Gumley cricket ground, incidentally, has a feature that must disconcert visiting teams.

Labour embraces rewilding in an attempt to stymie the Greens

We have another illustration of the truth that governments are much nicer when they are afraid of losing. 

White-tailed eagles, pine martens and beavers will be released across England before the May elections as the Labour government attempts to staunch the flow of nature-loving voters to the Green party.

Plans to reintroduce these lost species to the country have been mooted for years, but the previous Conservative government failed to get them over the line after opposition from landowners and its own MPs. 

Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, is understood to have told the regulator Natural England to dust off these plans and expedite them so there is a flood of good nature news before the polls open.

I don't know which polls the writer has in mind, but if she's thinking of the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour are cutting it rather fine.

Still, this is welcome news. It was only October that Steve Reed, the housing, communities and local government secretary, refused to support an amendment that would have mandated the installation of a swift brick in every new home. Apparently swifts are anti-growth. Yet Reed assured campaigners they were "pushing at an open door" when he was in opposition.

Whether the move will win back Labour voters from the Greens, however, remains to be seen. What has been notable about Zack Polanski since he became the Greens' leader is how rarely he mentions the environment. His talk is of taxing billionaires: pine martens and beavers hardly get a look in.

The Joy of Six 1480

"The memoir shows that for Mandelson the cast of people who matter is very narrow, he is always the betrayed rather than the betrayer, his press critics are always acting in bad faith, and he is never adequately rewarded or appreciated." James Butler on the fall of Peter Mandelson.

"'At the moment, you’ve got Reform, who are weaponising concerns around net-zero', she says, and 'the Conservatives recklessly rowing back on the very infrastructure they created to tackle climate change, which is the Climate Change Act;". Noah Vickers talks to Pippa Heylings, the Lib Dem spokesperson on energy security and Net Zero.

Gemma Motion makes the case for raising England's age of criminal responsibility: "Internationally, the UK’s position is becoming isolated. Article 40(3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child obliges states to establish a minimum age of criminal responsibility. While no specific age is prescribed, 14 is the most common minimum across Europe. Several other countries set it higher still. Even our devolved neighbour Scotland, which historically had a lower threshold at eight years of age, has now raised it to 12."

Tourettes Hero discusses the fallout from the BAFTA awards ceremony.

"The central strategic question is not whether non-host counties will survive. They will. The question is whether they will retain any meaningful competitive agency within the professional game. On the evidence available, the answer is no. Not under the current framework." Gary Mason and Simon Aldis argue that the future is bleak for most of cricket's first-class counties.

Discontinued Notes has been to Oxford to see the exhibition at the Bodleian about John Le Carré.

Martin Stephens remember making The Innocents (1961)

It wasn't only Jack Clayton who identified with the themes of The Innocents. Here's Martin Stephens who, at the age of 11, played Miles, remembering the making of the film. 

He has spoken about his career in general to filminc blog.

I can’t say that I was a natural actor but what I would say is that I was very directable. If you look at my fifteen, sixteen, eighteen films, whatever it was, you will see that when it was a good director I tended to be reasonably good and when it was a weak or poor director I was relatively mediocre. I would absorb what was going on. Also, to be honest, I didn’t have much of an ego in terms of what I was doing. ...

I’ll give you an example. I played Oliver in the musical in London when I was twelve. I did that for about seven months and my mom used to come a collect me.  Every day she would come up and sometimes she would be a few minutes early so she would go into the wings and see the final curtain calls before she would whisk me off to go to bed. 

One day the stage manager actually turned to her and said – as I was taking the bows and there was uproarious applause going on, and curtain call after curtain call – the stage manager actually turned to her and said "do you know that Martin couldn’t care less?" It was just doing a job.  I was enjoying it, but it didn’t really matter to me too much, I didn’t invest my ego into it.

And isn't the opening scene from the film disturbing? I do wonder if Clayton had seen Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.

Ed Davey flattens Nigel Farage on human rights

On 29 October last year, Nigel Farage put forward his European Convention on Human Rights (Withdrawal) Bill. You can read his speech in Hansard.

This, in full, was Ed Davey's reply:

The speech we just heard totally misrepresents the European convention, and the failure of the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) to mention the huge benefits and rights that the European convention has brought to millions of British people says it all. Let me give those attracted by the argument we have just heard one strong reason to think again. Russia under Vladimir Putin is the only country to have withdrawn from the European convention on human rights. Maybe that is what attracts the hon. Member—after all, he said that Putin is the world leader he most admires.

Russia: a country where those who oppose the regime are mysteriously pushed off balconies, and where, if it is not enough to murder a political opponent like Alexei Navalny, Putin has even jailed lawyers who dared to represent him—things not allowed under the European convention. As we have seen Nathan Gill, a leading political ally of the hon. Member for Clacton, imprisoned for taking Russian bribes, perhaps we should not be surprised that the Reform party is so keen to follow Russia.

Besides Russia, where else are people’s hard-fought-for rights under attack? Trump’s America. Of course, the US is not part of the European convention, yet its citizens have benefited from something similar: the US constitution, which was designed to check the power of tyrants and protect the individual from the state. Just as the hon. Member for Clacton desires to remove people’s rights here, his hero Donald Trump is doing the same in America, attacking the courts and the rule of law, and even inciting a violent mob against the US Congress to overturn an election. But of course, the hon. Member has called President Trump “an inspiration”. If we want to know the hon. Member’s intentions for British people’s basic rights and freedoms, we only need to look at Putin’s Russia or Trump’s America. That is not patriotic. It is deeply un-British, and he should be ashamed.

Unlike the hon. Member for Clacton, I am proud of our country; I love our country. I am proud that Britain helped to create the European convention on human rights, championed by Winston Churchill himself. The convention protects the very people who need it most: our elderly and most vulnerable, so that they may live and grow old with dignity; and our children, so that those facing horrific abuse have better protection. It also upholds our freedom of speech so that the press and public can criticise those in power without fear, and it protects our right to peaceful protest.

Seventy years ago, Britain became the first country to ratify the convention, as a leading voice on the global stage for human rights and the rule of law. That is our history. That is who we are. That is Britain at our best. Yet the hon. Member for Clacton wants us to forget our history, dump British values, undermine the rule of law and row back on people’s hard-won rights. I say no.

To help get across how wrong the hon. Member, the Reform party and the Conservatives are on this, let me give some examples. When people died because of poor care at Stafford hospital, their families secured change—because of these laws. When British troops died in Iraq because of poor equipment, the Supreme Court ruled that the Government were accountable—because of these laws. After 96 people were killed in the Hillsborough disaster and the victims themselves were blamed, their families finally got to the truth—because of these laws. When the Metropolitan police failed to properly investigate the horrific assaults of John Worboys, his victims were able to take the police to court—because of these laws.

Time and again, the European convention and its British twin, the Human Rights Act, have brought justice for our people, and protected them from gross misconduct and unfair treatment. These laws help individuals hold the powerful to account—to hold Governments to account. These laws can get justice when the elite and powerful cover up and abuse their power. So it is clear, is it not, that the hon. Member for Clacton is not about standing up for the individual—for the ordinary person, for the people with no voice—but that he is the friend of the elite and the powerful?

If we do not defend our human rights here at home, how can we possibly persuade other countries of the importance of human rights for their own people? If we do what Reform wants, the biggest cheers will come from the Kremlin, from Beijing, from Tehran, from Pyongyang, and from dictators and authoritarian regimes the world over. That would be a betrayal of everything our country stands for. The hon. Member’s plan would damage our country’s ability to shape our world.

Leaving the convention would be another nail in the coffin of Britain’s unique soft power. We have so often influenced world events for the better by being part of international agreements, by upholding international law and by leading. Of course, the hon. Member for Clacton has made his career by damaging our country and our influence. Remember how he led the campaign for Brexit with his Conservative friends? We know what a total mess that has turned out to be. He and his friends argued that Brexit would cut immigration, but immigration has gone up. Just look at how badly he has betrayed the people he claims to speak for. Brexit made the small boats crisis possible.

Before Brexit, we effectively had a returns agreement with every EU country: the Dublin system—a deterrent that worked. Now, undocumented migrants are trying to reach the UK because they know they cannot be returned. Thanks to the hon. Member, his Brexit ripped up Britain’s rights to return people with no right to be here and people who should have claimed asylum elsewhere in Europe. [Interruption.] Conservative Members may shout—they caused it!

Let us look at one of our closest allies, the Republic of Ireland, and a vital part of our country, Northern Ireland. The Good Friday agreement references the European convention seven times. The guarantee of basic rights and freedoms in the convention was fundamental to securing the Good Friday agreement, to ending the conflict, to stopping the bombs and to getting peace, yet the hon. Member for Clacton stands here today prepared to risk peace in our country—how utterly shameful.

As we approach Remembrance Sunday, let us never forget the sacrifices made for our freedoms today, and let us never forget the lessons that that greatest generation of British people learned and passed on to us— Interruption.] I think the veterans will notice this barracking. Our greatest generation showed us that we needed these laws to protect people from state abuse, to stop authoritarian Governments and tyrants, and to defend people’s rights. The post-war generation knew how costly far right-wing populism had been for our country and our people, so for our greatest generation, for British people today and for our democracy, I urge Members to vote against this Bill.

If the Liberal Democrats could talk about the economy with the same clarity and passion we display when talking about foreign policy and civil liberties, we would sweep the country.

Barlow and Watt investigate Jack the Ripper

Last night I watched the film Murder by Decree on Talking Pictures TV. I've watched it several times because the cast and premise (Sherlock Holmes tracking down Jack the Ripper) are so appealing, and because I always forget how disappointing it is.

But Holmes was the not first fictional detective to investigate the Ripper murders. In 1973 the BBC screened a series in which the nation's most celebrated television detectives Charlie Barlow and John Watt, played by Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor.

It was this series that introduced the public to the theory that the Ripper had been the eldest son of the future Edward VII, Prince Albert Victor. Stephen Knight did not publish his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution until 1976.

The 1973 television series avoided turning these terrible murders into a parlour game – Martin Crookall describes its approach well:

The format is simple, level-headed and unmelodramatic. On one level, Barlow and Watt move around a contemporary investigation room, surrounded by books, copies of newspapers, such documentary evidence as there is, and reconstruct the five canonical murders in chronological order. 

They don’t dramatise things, they talk like senior Detectives sifting evidence, looking for similarities and anomalies, testing the weight of the evidence against their professional experience, building up a picture of the time, the place, the people and the events, as fairly and neutrally as they can. Naturally, they talk as the characters they are playing, indulging in a never belaboured degree of the banter and cynicism of the veterans they are. 

Interspersed with this is the reconstruction. Intelligently, and in keeping with the series’ aim to be as factual and complete as possible, these eschew any reconstruction of the killings themselves and lapse into drama only once, showing fourth victim Catherine Eddowes being released from police cells after sobering up, only to be murdered within thirty minutes. She’s the only one of the five victims to actually be depicted in persona.

I'm writing this post because the whole series has reappeared on YouTube – it has a history of coming and going there.

The clip I have chosen above comes from the sixth and final episode. In it Joseph Gorman sets out the meat of the theory and claims that he is the illegitimate son of Walter Sickert. I don't believe a word of it, and Wikipedia says he later admitted to the Sunday Times that his story was a fiction. Elwyn Jones, one of the writers of this series, was introduced to him when he told one of his police contacts that he was working on a series about Jack the Ripper.

Finally, a moan and then my Trivial Fact of the Day.

The moan is that when the Rest is History tackled the Ripper story, it said that Barlow and Watt were still in Z-Cars in 1973. In fact, they had left the show as long ago as 1965 to appear in Softly, Softly and then Softly, Softly: Task Force. By 1973 Barlow had a series of his own, Barlow at Large.

And my Trivial Fact of the Day? It's that Jack Warner's daughter in the often misremembered Dixon of Dock Green was first played by Billie Whitelaw.

Mysterious blue glow traced to Flying Banana

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award with this tale of mysterious Lincolnshire:

Is it a UFO? Is it the Northern Lights? No, it's the "Flying Banana".

A blue glow that has lit up Lincolnshire's night sky in recent weeks has been traced to an unlikely source: a bright yellow train.

Network Rail said the mysterious light comes from its new measurement train – nicknamed the Flying Banana – which looks for faults on the line for engineers to repair.

The company said on hazy nights, equipment from the yellow train can create a blue glow "that looks like something from the X-Files" as it tests overhead lines.

My photo shows the Flying Banana at Leicester station some years ago.

The Joy of Six 1479

Richard Reich argues that employers will not share the gains from AI unless they are made to: "If the five-day workweek with five days of pay shrinks to four days with four days of pay, and then to three, and to two, and perhaps one, AI will supplant most people’s work and drive down our take-home pay. We may see a dazzling array of products and services spawned by AI, but few of us will be able to buy them."

"In opposing these children’s homes, neighbours resort to language about children in care that they would not use for other groups of people, such as same-sex couples or people who are not white. Children in care are trouble makers, they complain; they bring down house prices, they are not from our community, they make too much noise." Martin Borrow asks why proposals to open new homes, which often for only two or three children, are met with such hostility.

"This part of south-west England, much of which is currently under water, used to be known as the 'land of the summer people'. Historically, frequent flooding was the main reason for purely seasonal occupation in this area bordered by the Bristol Channel and the Mendip, Quantock and Blackdown Hills." Jess Neumann sets out the threat that climate change poses to Somerset.

Lottie Wood explores gender fluidity, rural landscapes and the Women’s Land Army, introducing us to E.M. Barraud's memoir Set My Hand Upon the Plough.

"It is deeply troubling that the drive of Brontë’s Isabella, a survivor of domestic abuse, has been reread to dramatically absolve her abuser. The girl sobbing behind me as the credits rolled attests to the success of this exoneration. Really, she should be crying over the scripting of violent abuse as consensual play." Anna Drury is concerned by Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.

Richard Elliott celebrates a new box set that brings together live and studio recordings of the Scottish folk singer, guitarist and songwriter Dick Gaughan.

Christopher Frayling on the making of The Innocents (1961)

The Innocents, Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw, is a wonderful film, and this documentary is worthy of it.

You don't see many of them here, but it's rightly been said that even monochrome behind-the scenes photographs of The Innocents are terrifying.

Ponden Hall: Sitting round a hearth with the Brontë sisters

Ponden Hall, which can be found below the village of Stanbury near Haworth, has been suggested as one of the inspirations for Thrushcross Grange in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and also for her sister Anne's Wildfell Hall.

What is certain is that the Brontës knew the Heatons, the family who owned Ponden Hall, and would visit them to make use of their extensive library. And, as everyone is talking about Wuthering Heights, I have been thinking about the place.

Ponden Hall was put up for sale in 2020, so you can see the interior in a Country Life article from that year. When I knew it – I had short breaks there twice in the 1990s – it had a more bohemian vibe, but I still recognise the place. I remember the stone-flagged floors in particular.

The first time I stayed was with a couple of colleagues from work, and I think it was in a pub in Haworth that I learnt to drink gin and tonic. My memories of the event are necessarily a little hazy, but I do recall that we walked to Wycoller and back by the reservoirs the next day, so I can't have been too bad. I also remember visiting Bingley Five Rise and seeing birds nesting in the lock gates.

My second visit to Ponden Hall was with some people from Leicester Friends of the Earth. I was never a member, but I was a sort of Friend of Friends of the Earth. Also staying that time were an American and his wife, and he turned out to be an expert on the Brontës.

As we sat in front of the open fire, he told us about the sisters using the library here, and then added: "They probably sat round this very hearth." We all shivered violently.

Queen: Killer Queen

I really liked Queen when they first appeared. They were inventive, clever, witty... Everything that Mud, Sweet and most of the singles chart in 1974 weren't. Killer Queen is a good example of them in this period.

Then came global stardom and stadium rock, which is rarely inventive, clever and witty. Laibach's satirical reworking of One Vision as a Nazi anthem tells us something important about the genre.

Maybe I was just the right age for early Queen. Bohemian Rhapsody has never sounded as impressive as it did when I first heard it, aged 15, just as I liked Seven Seas of Rhye because I was 14.

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"In a sense, Clegg is right: politicians are more focused on narratives than data. But it’s data they use to justify their policies these days. Indeed, far from modern politics being a vibrant competition of ideas in the way Clegg suggests, modern anglophone politics has been dominated by just one since the 1980s: There Is No Alternative." James Graham takes apart Nick Clegg's book How to Save the Internet.

Sam Bright is puzzled by the contradictions of right-wing journalists: "These journalists are neoliberals – they preach the free market gospel. You can’t get them to shut up about the Industrial Revolution and how deregulated enterprise supposedly birthed Britain as an economic superpower. And yet they’re stuck in the Middle Ages – terrified of the advances in science and engineering that also spawned from their favourite period of history."

"Trade unions are civil society organisations. They give working people a way to voice their concerns, secure representation, and exercise lawful leverage. In a country where bargaining is often fragmented and workplace voice is weak, that is not a threat to liberalism; it is a condition of it." Jack Meredith states the Liberal case for the government's Employment Rights Act,

Tracey Spensley on veterinary medicines and the decline of Britain's songbirds.

Darren Chetty looks at the current BBC adaptation of Lord of the Flies: "The decision to include a diverse cast, including the excellent Winston Sawyers who plays Ralph, will probably be viewed by many as a progressive move, ensuring that not only white actors are offered roles and not only white people are represented on screen. But for all its progressive aspirations, an adaptation like this obscures some of the most interesting themes discernible in the book."

"Barrie was always ageless, with a kind of supernatural vibe about him that makes me think perhaps he wasn’t quite of this world. And in a way, he wasn’t: he belonged to a London long vanished, full of glamour and promise. Did Barrie disappear along with it?" Melissa Blaise searches for a Chelsea socialite she once knew.

Lion & Unicorn: Children, bombsites and Innocent Sinners (1958)

Thanks to Lion and Unicorn for publishing a piece from me on British films about children and bombsites, and on the film Innocent Sinners (1958) in particular:

So dangerous did bombsites become for boy actors that Jon Whiteley ventured on to them twice and got caught up with a murderer both times. In Hunted (1952) he comes across Dirk Bogarde dumping the body of his wife’s lover, while in The Weapon (1956) he finds a gun, accidentally shoots a playmate and, thinking he has killed him, goes on the run. In reality, it’s not the police Whiteley needs to worry about but a villainous George Cole, who used the gun to kill some years before and now fears detection.

The radical instability of The Once and Future King

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

This is the final episode of Series Two, and our guest Elizabeth Elliott is helping us explore Camelot in The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Published in 1958, The Once and Future King adapts the famous stories of King Arthur and his Round Table. 

Beginning with the childhood of Arthur in the first book, The Sword in the Stone, White’s version of the familiar stories are complex examinations of leadership, nobility, romance and war. Of White’s novel, Burgess writes, "This is not remote and fabulous history: the lesson of the breaking of the Round Table is for our time."

So says the YouTube blurb for this video.

I love T.H. White's writing, but The Once and Future King is what literary theorists call an unstable text. We can't even agree how many books there are in the sequence. Is it four, or should The Book of Merlyn, which wasn't published until 13 years after White's death, be included to make it five? Is it for adults of children? The first book, The Sword in the Stone, is surely written for children and shows White's love of John Masefield, but the later books seem far more adult in their tone and themes.

And then there is his rewriting of the first two books. I'm far more familiar with the original versions, and I suspect I'm not alone in this. Maybe we all construct our own personal versions of The Once and Future King?

Anyway, this is a good discussion of The Once and Future King and some of these issues.

Boudicca the three-legged beaver is rewilding Rushden Lakes

Talk about burying the lede. BBC News has a story about Alan and Boudicca, the beavers at Rushden Lakes – they've featured here before – and late on it drops this in:

Alan was named after Alan Carr, who grew up in the county, and Boudica after the warrior, as it is believed she lost her leg in a fight.

Boudicca has three legs? That makes these achievements even more remarkable:

In February 2025, eight beavers were released into Delta Pit lake, part of Rushden Lakes, Northamptonshire – the first time the rodent had been reintroduced to the county in 400 years.

The Wildlife Trust for Beds, Cambs and Northants said parents, Boudica and Alan, had welcomed two new kits in September, had felled three large trees, coppiced 30 more, and built three lodges.

Project officer Ben Casey said the beavers had made "a big difference" in changing the structure of the site to improve the habitat for a range of species.

You can see Boudicca, Alan and their two latest kits in the video above.

Mayor of Desborough called opponent a "prick" and a "sad wanker"

It's all kicking off in Desborough. The excellent NN Journal reports a walk out at last night's meeting of the town council after the mayor refused to stand down:

Last month Desborough Town councillor and North Northamptonshire councillor Bill McElhinney quit the Conservative Party after sending a message to a resident calling fellow town councillor Labour’s Andy Coleman a "prick" and a "sad wanker".

Cllr Coleman has put in a standards complaint about Cllr McElhinney, which is being looked at by NNC’s legal officer, and last night he boycotted the town council meeting along with Liberal Democrat Alan Window. [Hello Alan!]

Cllr Coleman’s three Labour colleagues attended the meeting, but after Cllr Tim Healy’s request for Cllr McElhinney to stand down was refused, the trio quit the meeting.

NN Journal reports McElhinney as saying that he regrets the comments and as complaining that the Labour group "are making as much of it as they possibly can".

He says he has put in a counter complaint about Cllr Coleman. whom he accuses of double standards in the light of his own comments about public figures on social media.

Cllr Coleman's complaint is being investigated by the legal office of North Northamptonshire Council, of which Cllr McElhinney is also a member. I'm not aware that whataboutery is a defence under the act.

Former Reform cabinet member in Leicestershire joins Restore

Leicestershire County Council's minority Reform UK administration has lost a councillor and former cabinet member, reports the Leicester Mercury. Charles Whitford, the member for Markfield, Desford and Thornton, has joined Restore Britain.

I last blogged about Whitford when he lost his cabinet position over emails he sent to residents. I quoted the Mercury

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.

There's been a trickle of Reform councillors joining Restore this week, and if Whitford is in any way typical of them, Reform will be more credible for their leaving, even if Restore does siphon of some their voters too.

Despite the publicity we give to every councillor who leaves Reform – some of them, it has to be admitted for entertaining reasons – it should be remembered that they now have more councillors than they did after last May's local elections. As well as regularly winning by-elections, they are the big net gainers from defections – see Augustus Carp's latest round up for details.

Later. Now comes news that a Reform councillor has resigned from the county council altogether. It's Andrew Thorp, who represents Narborough and Whetstone.

Andrew Lownie on today's arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

Andrew Lownie, the indefatigable author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, responds to today's developments.

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Martin Parr looks at successful and unsuccessful attempts to depose a prime minister: "Labour, significantly, has never toppled a prime minister. It’s not in the culture of so cooperativist a party: there’s no equivalent of the 1922 Committee. And whenever it might have happened, the challenger blinked: Herbert Morrison with Attlee; Roy Jenkins with Wilson; David Miliband with Brown; Wes Streeting may have just joined the roster of the rueful."

Sumaiya Motara on the brutal contest for low-paid work: "It’s like The Hunger Games, but you’re all trying to get a job in a shop where you’re going to be folding clothes all day, for just over minimum wage."

"The case took a dramatic turn in November when Erin’s teenage son ... ran away from his father’s home and hired his own solicitor. After a period in foster care and a series of urgent hearings, he was later reunited with his mother for their first Christmas together in six years." Hannah Summers reports on a hearing that highlights the issue of unregulated psychologists appearing in court as expert witnesses.

Some major news organisations are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. They are doing so largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using it as a back door for large-scale scraping. Mark Graham argues that these concerns, though understandable, are unfounded.

"Whilst Landlord continues to power its way across the country ... it has to be hoped that the company doesn't forget its roots and the locality that sustained it for much of its existence." Real Ale, Real Music visits Keighley, home of the brewer Timothy Taylor.

Robert Hugill praises the new Opera North production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.

The effect on children when a parent loses a parliamentary election

Matthew Spender's book A House in St John's Wood is a portrait of his father, the poet Stephen Spender.

Stephen's father was Harold Spender and the Michael mentioned below is Stephen's brother Michael Spender. The third brother was Humphrey Spender – they were very much a family of Wikipedia entries.

Early in his book, Matthew Spender writes:

When Stephen was twelve, Harold stood as a Liberal candidate in a general election. My father remembered being hauled around Bath in a pony-carriage with his two brothers, each with a placard round his neck saying "Vote for Daddy". Harold lost and the effect on Michael and Stephen was traumatic.

Michael said: "When they are very young, the children of a public man worship their father for being famous – a kind of god: but it's extraordinary how soon they get to realise if he's a public failure." Michael developed a stammer. He decided that his father was "inefficient", which in eyes was the worst thing a man could be. 

Stephen, instead, just couldn't stop crying. It confirmed his suspicion that his father was a windbag whose exhortations of "on and ever on" were meaningless.

Spencer Davis Group: Every Little Bit Hurts

Recorded at the Marquee Club in February 1965, so Steve Winwood (on vocals and piano) is 16 here.

Lloyd George’s oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall

Embed from Getty Images

In 1992 the journalist Edward Pearce published a diary of that year's general election campaign. It was reviewed for the London Review of Books by Peter Clarke.

Here is Clarke on Lloyd George:

Lloyd George, too, did his bit to lower the tone of politics once secularisation had made the pulpit an obsolescent model. 

As A.J.P. Taylor liked to point out, Lloyd George's platform oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall. He could control an audience with the inspired timing of a stand-up comic. His one-liner about the House of Lords – "five hundred men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed" – was fit to bring the house down. 

He was the politician as entertainer, subordinating reason to emotion as much as any party political broadcast in the last campaign. He could pirouette, like Chaplin, from the broadest belly-laugh to tear-jerking pathos without having to say: "but to be serious for a moment, ladies and gentlemen ..." 

Yet, as the last of the great pre-electronic politicians, Lloyd George became a hapless victim of technological advance in the Twenties. While, like Archie Rice, he was still having a go on the public stage, Stanley Baldwin stole into the sitting-room of anyone lucky enough to have a new wireless. 

His avoidance of histrionics in favour of the fireside manner was pitched perfectly for his middle-brow, middle-class constituency, and showed that the public meeting, in its classic form, was doomed. Baldwin could be relied upon to rise to the small occasion.

Failed teeth op woman admits drug driving

This tale of everyday life in Telford wins BBC News our Headline of the Day Award.

Golders Green: A milestone in the history of the tube and suburbia

Jago Hazzard sets out the history of Golders Green station, and tells us about the history of the London Underground and of London suburbia in the process.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page. And why not subscribe to his YouTube channel?

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Chris Dillow argues that if government wants to foster economic growth, it will have to fight for it: "Right now, the social transformation needed to raise growth requires the government to face down the powerful interests of, if not capital in general, then at least the more regressive elements of it such as rentiers, monopolists and media barons."

Virginia Heffernan investigates Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon, Edge. She finds that it infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science.

"'Free School Meals' and 'Free School Clothing' were an absolute lifeline for us ... That support meant I could walk through the school gates looking like everyone else, focusing on my education rather than the clothes on my back. It taught me that while education is a right, the cost of accessing it can be a barrier we must actively dismantle." Shaffaq Mohammed on the importance of the Lib Dem amendment, passed by the Lords, that will put a price cap on school uniforms.

Lauren Leek crunches the numbers to see why so many pubs have closed: "So here’s the political economy of pub closures. It is not: people stopped going. It is: pubs became collateral in leveraged buyouts, debt costs were passed down as higher rents and lower investment, and the pubs that couldn’t sustain the extraction closed, while the ones that could were reshaped into higher-margin branded concepts serving a wealthier clientele."

Did climate change lead to greater persecution of witches? York Historian weighs the evidence.

"Whenever a performer had a Muppet on their hand, they never broke character. So all the time in between takes, Gonzo would still be Gonzo and I was still talking to Gonzo, not Dave Goelz, who is the performer of Gonzo. I believed that Gonzo and Rizzo were my friends, and we were on an adventure together. Rizzo in particular, Steve Whitmire, was so funny. We would just play all day long." Kevin Bishop shares his memories of playing Jim Hawkins in Muppet Treasure Island with Brian VanHooker.

The political effect of our "silent epidemic of loneliness"

The Liberal Democrats have proposed a network of "Hobby Hubs" to combat what they call a "silent epidemic of loneliness", as a lack of community spaces is forcing people to find human interaction online.

These hubs could libraries, community centres and pubs where groups could meet for activities. The network would be integrated the into NHS social prescribing programmes, giving GPs additional options when recommending activities for their patients.

The BBC News report on this plan says the party estimates that £42m of funding per year could help hobby hubs in England stay open for an additional 300,000 hours.

It also quotes Ed Davey

"The Liberal Democrats want to breathe new life into British high streets and community centres to give everyone a place to do what they love, with other people who love it too. 

"It is so important that we do not allow isolation to become the new normal."

This is an important issue, and one that has political implications. Diane Bolet has written about her own research into the decline of community centres for The Conversation:

The decline of the high street has been hollowing out British town centres in recent years. When pubs, community centres, libraries and banks close, it adds to a sense of local decline. In my recently published research, I found that local decline contributes to a rise in support for radical-right political parties – and that the loss of local pubs plays a surprisingly important role in the shift.

A couple of other links seem relevant too. Here's Andrew Saint reviewing The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. III: 1840-1950. in the London Review of Books:

Edwardian Market Harborough, a town just short of 8000, boasted Sunday schools, friendly societies for young men and girls, a Church Lads’ brigade, a Territorial Army branch, a debating society, a reading society, a choral society, an opera society, a brass band, an angling 'society', clubs for cricket, football, tennis, golf, polo, water polo, bicycling and point-to-point riding, a swimming-bath and a roller-skating rink, and regularly put on carnivals, flower, produce and horse shows and swimming galas. I abridge. There can have been little room for masterly inactivity in Market Harborough.

And here is Simon Titley, writing in Liberator 331, on the world that the concept of "cool" is producing:

A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: "sad", "trainspotter", "anorak", "anal" or "get a life".

See Charles Hawtrey and Joan Hickson staffing St Pancras in 1955

So I watched Simon and Laura, and found that, despite the presence of Ian Carmichael, who I always struggle with, it justifies the enthusiasm of that British Film Institute video I posted the other day.

But there is one scene that brought unexpected pleasure – click play above to watch it.

Peter Finch (Simon) has left his wife and is on his way back to Leicester. His agent (played by Hubert Gregg) catches up with him at St Pancras with news of the offer for the couple to star in the new BBC series.

It really is St Pancras, right down to the lovely maroon British Railways Midland Region enamel signs. 

A train to Bradford is announced, and one of the stations it calls at is Trent. (You can also hear Trent in a St Pancras announcement in the Kenneth More film The Comedy Man.)

Better still, the porter who takes Finch's luggage on to and then off the platform is Charles Hawtrey – this may well be the first time he has worked for the railways since A Canterbury Tale.

And the refreshment counter is in the charge of Joan Hickson. Enjoy.

In which William James uses a ladder to spy on G.K. Chesterton

In 1907 the American philosopher William James was invited to deliver a series of lectures to Manchester College in Oxford. (It was not then part of the University of Oxford: it educated Nonconformist students, who were barred by the university.)

After delivering the lectures, he went to stay with his brother, the novelist Henry James, in Rye. Seamus Perry, in the London Review of Books, tells what he got up to there:

He was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up which he climbed in the hope of getting a sighting. He was unsuccessful, but they did meet subsequently during the visit, and even took tea, and although, as James reported, Chesterton merely "gurgled and giggled", he apparently came across as "lovable".

Getting a glimpse of Chesterton was irresistible partly, no doubt, because he was enormously, legendarily, fat. Rather more respectably, however, James had long admired him, he told Henry, as a "tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradoxes"; he was especially taken by his book Heretics (1905). To like Chesterton despite his paradoxes is a little like liking Venice despite its canals, but you can certainly see what James would have warmed to in Chesterton's exuberant, if somewhat remorseless, celebration of the ordinary world, a world unconstrained by what Chesterton called "modern intellectualism".