"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
"At present the Tories are making the same mistakes as their continental cousins – aping the rhetoric and policies of the further right upstart party that is destroying them from the flank. As long as this happens the Blue Wall of small towns and rural hinterland across the South beyond London will disappear altogether with large swathes of the country turning into a Lib Dem/Reform battle (council by election results show this is already happening)." Matthew Pennell asks if centre-right parties are finished across Europe.
AI chatbots are gossiping about us behind our backs. Ashley Fike summarises a paper by the philosophers Joel Krueger and Lucy Osler.
Fiona Sturges says podcasts are being ruined by their rush to video: "Much of the drive behind video content comes from its potential as a marketing tool for the show. Footage can easily be clipped up and shared on social media to help drive audience engagement and, where possible, generate news lines."
Tom Yarrow has been studying heritage railway volunteers to learn about male friendship: "Rather than dismiss their approach as 'repression', I argue in a forthcoming paper that we need to appreciate how people can develop intimate and caring relationships, without naming emotions."
"With a preference for pastel pink powdered wigs and lavender floral suits, Mozart is depicted as a punk rocker before there was punk rock, which worked in the film’s favor in 1984 as a reflection of ‘80s fashion and still works today." Michelle Swope welcomes the appearance of a restored version of Amadeus.
Sam Dalling offers an appreciation of Somerset County Cricket Club's Rew brothers: "There is a danger of getting too hyped up, of heaping too much pressure on young shoulders, but the sense is that both can cope. There is a humility to the pair and an apparent ability to block it all out. They still live at home with their parents and are just enjoying life with their mates."
Thrill to footage of Nevill Holt Hall (now widely accepted to be the chief model for Bonkers Hall) from 1:13 and of Market Harborough cattle market from 9:57.
This film brings home just how powerful the British state became during the Second World War. Thanks to Mark Howson for posting it on Bluesky – he says the Clarkes are still farming near Medbourne.
In his The Folklore of Shropshire, Roy Palmer quotes a letter by a John Noakes recording the belief that it was unlucky to have a female come first into your house of New Year's morning:
So generally does this absurdity prevail, that in many towns young lads "make a good thing of it" by selling their services to go round and enter the houses first that morning.
The folklorists Iona and Peter Opie noted in the 1950s that a boy of about 10 banged on a door at Pontesbury and recited:
Happy New Year! Happy New Year! I've come to wish you a happy New Year. I've got a little pocket and it is very thin, Please give me a penny, to put some money in. If you haven't got a penny a halfpenny will do. If you haven't got a halfpenny, well God bless you.
A decade later in the Clun Valley, Michael Rix found small boys still going "gifting":
On New Year's Day as early as possible they visit outlying farms and cottages to recite versions of the poem:
The cock sat up in the yew tree, The hen came chuckling by. Please give us some pudding or a mince pie. We wish you a merry Christmas and a cellar full of beer, A good fat pig in the sty to last you all the year. Please to give us a New Year's gift.
The first boy to reach the house got silver (a sixpence), all later comers got coppers.
A film producer who lied about his income to secure a £519,000 loan has been jailed for more than three years.
David Shipley, 37, admitted editing images of his payslips and P60 to "over-inflate" his income to obtain money, Southwark Crown Court heard.
He is credited with producing the 2016 documentary film Brexit: The Movie, which promoted the UK's departure from the European Union.
Judge Martin Griffith said his actions were "a blatant piece of dishonesty".
Quite. And to be precise, he got three years and nine months and was disqualified from being a company director for seven years.
Released in the weeks before the June 2016 referendum, Brexit: The Movie was a feature-length documentary advocating Britain's departure from the European Union.
With most of the low-hanging fruit having been picked, canal "restoration" projects now tend to involve the digging miles of new route. The Derby Canal is no exception.
This video illustrates plans the Derby and Sandiacre Canal Trust has had for years. They obtained planning permission for the scheme back in 2011, but funding it in the current economic climate will be a much greater challenge.
Still, it would be great to see boats on the Derwent in the centre of Derby.
This idea is frequently attributed to Gramsci but surely, as a critical sociologist, he must have been aware of Matthew Arnold’s lines: "Wandering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born…"
In 19th century Britain, cultural criticism was a recognised literary form and practically a profession. And Matthew Arnold was one of the more attractive of the Victorian sages who practised it.
I'm still grateful for Roland Hall's 19th century English thought option when I did my philosophy degree at York and for its wonderfully comprehensive reading list in particular. ("You are not expected to read all or none of these books.")
"By restricting jury trials, removing protest rights and expanding surveillance, Labour is entrenching an authoritarian legal infrastructure that a far-right government will not hesitate to exploit." Karl Hansen says Labour is building Farage's state for him.
Phoebe Weston reports on the French ski resorts that are closing as the snow line in the Alps edges higher: "In France, there are today 113 ski lifts totalling nearly 40 miles (63km) in length that have been abandoned, nearly three-quarters of them in protected areas."
Catherine Rampell says Trump is misusing Norman Rockwell's art to promote Gestapo tactics and nativist ideas: "The works have been endlessly parodied since their introduction in 1943. In the internet age, they’ve become ubiquitously memed. (Freedom of Speech, for example, is nowadays widely known as the 'unpopular opinion' meme.) But originally, they served as wartime propaganda, meant to help rally support for America and its cause during the years of war against the Nazis."
"Take Me High's unexpected legacy is to act as a kind of Brummie Rorschach test: what do you see in its depiction of the angular 'new' Birmingham of 1973? An ugly, car-worshipping mess that, like Cliff's career, needed desperate reinvention? An ambitious feat of post-war planning? Or a nostalgic vision of your childhood? It’s a question that becomes more poignant with each landmark razed and every area redeveloped beyond recognition." Shaun Patrick Hand has discovered the Cliff Richard film from 1973.
"Raynor’s efforts simply render the magnificent landscapes of Devon and Cornwall as joyless, grey backdrops to her own ceaseless complaining. The South West Coast Path should sue for defamation of character." Finlay McLaren takes aim at The Salt Path.
Andy Marshall chooses and photographs his all-time best pubs.
Augustus Carp finds the Conservatives are losing local councillors, but not as fast as Labour are losing them, and Reform UK are gaining.
Back in January we were solemnly assured by the nation’s leading political commentators that 2025 was going to be a tough year for the Conservatives, and a good one for Reform UK.
That’s pretty much how it panned out, but why didn’t anyone predict that, when it comes to political defections, the biggest losers were going to be the Labour Party?
The figures are stark. The Conservatives lost a net 212 councillors in 2025, but the Labour Party lost a net 275. For the others, the figures are Reform +138, Greens +32, Lib Dems -14 and the Nationalists -5. The balancing figure is Independents on 336.
To be clear, my methodology treats every single change in status as a recordable event. So a councillor leaving Party A to sit as an Independent in January, and then joining Party B in August is regarded as two separate data points. Suspensions, expulsions and readmissions are all included in the tally.
By my reckoning there were defections in 271 local authorities during the year. Councils where eight or more councillors have changed their allegiance are
Tameside20
Kent16
Dudley13
Durham10
Sevenoaks10
Wakefield10
Bolsover 9
Buckinghamshire9
Hounslow9
Oldham9
South Kesteven9
Tamworth9
Cornwall8
Dumfries & Galloway8
Portsmouth8
Solihull8
The figure for Tameside is perhaps a bit misleading – seven Labour councillors had their status changed for them when they were suspended and subsequently reinstated after being caught up in the Shiver Me Timbers WhatsApp fiasco/scandal. Nevertheless there were other goings on there to ensure that Tameside would still rank highly in the table.
Kent and Durham have trouble retaining councillors within their Reform UK groups, and Dudley has seen movements from Labour to Independent and from the Conservatives to Reform UK. Wakefield saw councillors move from Labour, Lib Dems and Conservatives to Independents, and a few suspensions and readmissions in the Labour Group added to the complexity there. Bulk defections have occurred in Sevenoaks (from the Conservatives) and in Buckinghamshire (from the Lib Dems).
Labour defections in the London boroughs increased towards the end of the year, once the reselection season started. Councillor defections in areas which still have two levels of local government (for example Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire) might deserve more attention, as some councillors there wear two hats.
Watch out in 2026 for problems with party discipline if local government reform is pushed through against local opposition, as has already happened in Suffolk.
It is very difficult to identify how many defections arise out of personality clashes rather than ideology. There have been 92 defections straight from the Conservative Party to Reform UK, which would seem to be driven by ideology or the survival instinct.
There have also been 28 straight swaps from Labour to Greens in 2025, with another 14 councillors making the slow-burning transition from Labour to Independent to Greens. This, together with the number of ex-Labour councillors forming their own Independent groups, would seem to indicate that politics is more significant than personalities at the moment. That matters when it comes to fielding troops in a general election ground war.
As ever, these figures are provided on a best endeavours basis, so E&OE and DYOR. Perhaps if readers have any simple questions on the goings on in any particular authority, they could put them in the comments below and I will answer them if I can.
Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.
I've written another post for Lion & Unicorn. To celebrate its 10th year, the blog asked me to write about what the last decade has been like for the Liberal Democrats:
Swinson saw her party’s vote increase from 7.4 per cent of 2017 to 11.5 per cent, but its number of seats dropped from twelve to eleven, with none of the recent star recruits from Labour and the Conservatives (such as Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and Sam Gyimah) managing to get re-elected in Lib Dem colours.
And Swinson’s own East Dunbartonshire seat was one of the ones that were lost. In a striking illustration of the maxim that all politics is local, her defeat was attributed locally to her getting on the wrong side of an indoor bowls club in Milngavie.
The image above was posted in the large few days of 2024. It shows one of the less visited locations in the Bonkersverse: The Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness. Think of it as Les Quatre Cent Coups with added shingle.
But let's see what Rutland's most popular fictional peer has been up to this year.
February
Shocked by the number of Tory placement at the top of the BBC, Lord Bonkers called for a traditional arse-booting at Broadcasting House:
The Chief Commissionaire, traditionally a former RSM from one of the Guards regiments, boots the miscreant the length of the longest corridor at Broadcasting House and out through the revolving doors. That corridor is lined with BBC luminaries, who tut and look disappointed in the bootee. You might spot, for instance, John Snagge, Grace Wyndham Goldie, Alvar Lidell, Franklin Engelmann, Katie Boyle, Moira Anderson, William Woollard, Angela Rippon, Lauren Laverne, Richard Osman, the Frazer Hayes Four, the more senior Teletubbies and several generations of Dimblebys in the throng.
March
When Ed Davey urged Keir Starmer to visit Canada to show support for Mark Carney in his stand against Trump, I was able to report:
Lord Bonkers tells me that when Queen Victoria was once urged to visit Canada, she replied: "We are not a moose."
I also mentioned the old boy in posts about about otters arriving unbidden on Rutland Water and about one of the models for the Bonkers Arms being mentioned in a an Evening Standard article about "The Notswolds".
April
Lord Bonkers found his tender-hearted Cook "manifestly in charge" of the wrapping of food parcels for the US state of New Rutland:
“No, that Stilton’s not too ripe, my girl. Foreigners like strong flavours. And make sure you screw those jars as tight as tight – we don’t want to give the poor Americans salmon-error and bolshevism. And write the contents on the parcel or the customs and exercise men will be after us.”
He also found time to object to talk of "the first all-female space crew" being launched:
I well recall that a British rocket took off from Woomera 56 years ago almost to the day. Its crew?
Marguerite Patten Helen Shapiro Pat Coombs Marion Mould on Stroller
Still in April, I found plentiful mentions of Lord Bonkers' old friend Violent Bonham Carter, the gender-fluid gang boss of the Sixties both on the net and in books. See?
June
The old boy was rather proud of a zinger he supplied to Ed Davey for use at prime minister's questions:
“First he came for our steelworkers and carmakers. Now Donald Trump is coming for our world-leading British film industry. Will the PM make it clear to him that if he picks a fight with Commander Gideon, Dr Simon Sparrow and the girls of St Trinian's, he will lose?”
Lord Bonkers entertained Nick Clegg at the Hall and broached the subject of Artificial Intelligence:
“I’ve been looking at the money people pay artists and writers. It’s only a few thousand quid each, but it adds up, and my plan is that it should go to me instead. I shall help myself to the artists and writers’ work and feed it into a computer, which will jumble it up and produce versions of its own. Obviously, I’ll make these versions free at first, but when all the writers and artists have given up, I’ll be able to charge what I like.”
September
When fire broke out at what was slated to be the venue of the Lib Dems' annual conference, my employer entertained dark suspicions:
When I heard there had been a fire at the Bournemouth International Centre, I naturally assumed it was the latest ruse by the party’s high-ups to justify the cancellation of our Autumn Conference. In recent years this gathering of the Liberal clans has been canned because of, variously, the Covid pandemic, the death of Her Late Majesty and a threatened bombing campaign by Isle of Wight Separatists.
I once had a shot at it myself; all went well until I sat down to pen the final chapter, only to find I had not included a butler among the cast of characters and thus had no murderer to reveal.
The Cascades were a clean-cut American vocal group who had an international hit in 1962 with Rhythm of the Rain and were later influenced by the Beach Boys.
I Bet You Won't Stay is a Ray Davies song that, as far as I can tell, The Kinks never recorded. It turned up on the B-side of an unsuccessful Cascades single in 1965.
It's easy to imagine Davies singing this himself. The poster on Bluesky who alerted me to the song described it as a "fantastic link between See My Friends and Tired of Waiting". It's the best Kinks single that never was.
Twelve years old Dennis Mallard, who appears very briefly in the new Harry Secombe film "Davy," thought his film career was not developing fast enough.
He ran away from home on Monday night, aiming to get to a film studio.
While his family thought he was asleep in bed, he was trudging through the cold night wearing only jeans, shirt and blazer, to Dartford, six miles from his home, 119, Milton Road, Gravesend.
There he hid in the back of a lorry which took him to London.
He stowed away on another lorry and found himself in Ealing.
Then the glamour of finding the limelight the hard way wore a bit thin and he became frightened.
He went to a church for help and a clergyman informed the police.
But that was not the end of Dennis Mallard.
I can't find any mention of him having appeared in Davy, which was one of the long tail of inferior Ealing comedies and designed as a star vehicle for Harry Secombe.
But I have found a page that has him making an uncredited appearance in a Children's Film Foundation production, One Wish Too Many, as early as 1956.
And the British Film Foundation has him making a similarly unacknowledged appearance in The Violent Playground later in 1958. As this film's premiere was in March 1958, it must (as Flashbak suggests) have been filmed in 1957, before the boy ran away to Ealing.
So it looks as though young Dennis Mallard was already appearing in films by the time he ran away, but as nothing more than an extra.
Researching him is difficult because he does not have an IMDb entry, so I was pleased to find that the British Film Institute has a page for the 1959 BBC adaption of Great Expectations, which lists him as having played Pip, along with the slightly older Colin Spaull and much older Dinsdale Landen.
Yet a clip of the young Pip encountering Magwich in the churchyard from this serial looks nothing like the photo of Dennis Mallard in the local newspaper report that sent me down this rabbit hole. And, sure enough, IMDb has a photo of the encounter, with the boy playing Pip named as Colin Spaull. As this scene is as young as Pip gets in the book, what did Dennis Mallard do?
The answer is on BBC Genome, where he is billed as playing Pip Gargery. Over to Dickens, and the scene thee a sadder and wiser adult Pip returns to the forge, only to find that Biddy, who he has resolved to marry, has wed Joe Gargery:
There, smoking his pipe in the old place by the kitchen firelight, as hale and as strong as ever, though a little grey, sat Joe; and there, fenced into the corner with Joe’s leg, and sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire, was – I again!
"We giv' him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap," said Joe, delighted, when I took another stool by the child’s side (but I did not rumple his hair), "and we hoped he might grow a little bit like you, and we think he do."
And if you think Dennis was too old to play this part, he's not. Because Nostalgia Central helpfully tells us:
One major narrative change has Joe Gargery’s proposed marriage to his housekeeper Biddy taking place before Pip goes to London (this revelation occurs much later in the novel and is the last nail in the coffin of Pip’s disillusionment as he was planning to marry Biddy himself).
Let's cut to the chase. Here's a report from the Kent Evening Post for 27 June 1975:
Few people meeting the quiet and unassuming Dennis Mallard at his Leysdown china shop would ever dream of his past. For the man who compared last night's Evening Post search-for-a- star show was once a star of stage and screen himself.
Dennis. now married and a father of three living in Poplar Avenue, Gravesend, started his carcer at the age of five.
He went to stage school at Upton Park till he was 11 when he landed his first mal part in a BBC production of Great Expectations.
After numerous theatre and TV appearances in plays and adverts he landed his own ITV show in which Una Stubbs (remember her as the screen daughter of Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part) was a dancer.
That was all in the days of early commercial TV – and before Dennis’ 16th birthday.
"Then I for some reason felt I'd had enough of showbusiness and decided to try and make some money instead.
"I thought being a market trader was next best thing and began selling china."
He still keeps his hand in however by doing occasional compering slots and has accepted an invitation to be MC at all the talent competition evenings.
I've not so far found any trace of his ITV series or of an ITV adaption of A Christmas Carol starring Stephen Murray as Scrooge in which he is said to have appeared. But the upturn in his career does seem to have happened soon after he ran away to Ealing.
And there is one thing we know he was doing in 1960: he was in the first performance of Oliver! as a workhouse boy and member of Fagin's gang. Because his name is on the credits for the original cast recording.
Here's a holiday treat: a South Bank Show documentary from 1980 that follows Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince as they rehearse the first West End production of Sweeney Todd. It had opened on Broadway the year before.
Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovat are Denis Quilley and Sheila Hancock – look out for wine expert Oz Clarke and Michael Staniforth (Timothy Claypole from Rentaghost) in supporting roles.
It was a mark of my mother's liberal parenting that. aged 9 and 10, I was allowed to stay up late on a school night to watch Up Pompeii! I later found from a Twitter conversation with the novelist Jonathan Coe that he was granted the same dispensation.
In my case, at least, it worked. I passed O level Latin, despite receiving free school meals and having Allison Pearson in the same class.
Watching Up Pompeii! today, it stands up pretty well, notably the clever formal device whereby Howerd is constantly breaking the fourth wall to criticise the script or the audience, but none of the other characters ever does.
And the show was comforting in that it was the same every week. Poor Lurcio never got far with the prologue before Senna the Soothsayer came along, and then there was Nausius with his ode and inability to find a rhyme.
Throw in an element of plot involving high Roman politics or Lurcio's master Ludicrous Sextus's love live and you had your show.
There were a lot of nubile young women on show – a reminder that the permissive society came before feminism – but I think they were safe with Frankie.
Note the contemporary jokes about Waggoners' Walk and decimalisation. And note Pat Coombs enjoying herself immensely as the sorceress – you never knew who would turn up in the cast.
"At its core, A Christmas Carol is the transformation of a man without empathy, to a man with empathy. It accomplishes this through forcing the character Ebenezer Scrooge to remember the past, witness the present, and to consider the future. It is through seeing other human beings as human beings with lives equal in worth to his own, that forms the basis of Scrooge's transformation." Scott Santens sets out the science behind Charles Dickens' famous story.
Barbara Speed on the shocking scale of the abuse perpetrated by the Jesus Army: "The ... coroner returned an open verdict, but noted his 'concern' about the two strange deaths and the letters he had received from parents of young people in the fellowship, who were worried about their children’s safety. These incidents were closely reported by local media but never became national news."
Welcome to the working week - Microsoft Teams will soon start telling your boss where you are, reports Zak Doffman.
"I think, therefore I am" isn’t the best translation of Descartes’s famous pronouncement "cogito, ergo sum", argues Galen Strawson.
Owen Hatherley has been watching a new box set of immediately post-war films from the DDR: "'Rubble films' were sponsored by the Soviet occupiers of Eastern Germany and East Berlin as part of the project of de-Nazification, with the theory being that mass market film was uniquely suited to forcing ordinary Germans to understand and come to terms with what they had done. It was a brief moment, necessarily compromised ... but the films are fascinating as attempts to make antifascist commercial blockbusters, in a devastated society that would have preferred to think about almost anything else."
Gavin Speed looks at the latest research into Saxon Leicestershire: "Along the River Welland in south-east Leicestershire, extensive fieldwalking surveys have identified several settlements close to the north of the river, and close to former Roman roads."
Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee, Gave thee life, and bid thee feed By the stream and o'er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing, woolly, bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice? Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?
Little lamb, I'll tell thee; Little lamb, I'll tell thee: He is called by thy name, For He calls Himself a Lamb. He is meek, and He is mild, He became a little child. I a child, and thou a lamb, We are called by His name. Little lamb, God bless thee! Little lamb, God bless thee!
Father Christmas has been around a lot longer than Santa Claus. A version of Father Christmas called “Sir Christmas” featured in a fifteenth century carol, and Father Christmas himself was appearing regularly in print by the seventeenth century.
At first, Father Christmas was just a personification of the season. Most often depicted wearing a crown of holly, he represented wintry weather, feasting and drinking with friends and family, and a generally merry spirit of Christmas celebration.
But, at least to begin with, he didn’t have anything to do with stockings.
When Santa Claus became popular with Victorian children, slowly but surely Father Christmas started to push back on the American’s grip on the nation’s stockings.
So, he started helping out with the business of delivering presents, dressing a bit more like Santa Claus, and by the dawn of the twentieth century, the two figures had become virtually interchangeable and shared the load of making sure everyone’s stockings were full up on Christmas morning.
