My days in the Lib Dem News broom cupboard with Jock Gallagher

Here's something sad that I had missed: Jock Gallagher died in May of last year at the age of 87. I've not found an obituary for him, but there was a news report in the Daily Express.

I knew Jock in the days when I helped with the production of the issue of Liberal Democrat News that was put together during the Liberal Democrat's autumn conference – one year I copped for all the desktop publishing work.

My reward was that I got to chat to two other people who pitched in to help: Adrian Slade and Jock.

I talked Cambridge Footlights with Adrian Slade, who went down in history as the man who auditioned Peter Cook. I once blogged what he said about Cook:

He said Cook was the funniest man he had ever met and that you would spend all evening with him laughing and then not be able to remember a word he had said the next day.

Adrian also said, however, that being a revue performer – putting on a hat and a funny voice for a two-minute sketch - is not the same as being an actor. And he agreed that sometimes with Peter Cook it showed.

With Jock, I talked about The Archers, which he had been responsible for when he was head of network radio at Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham.

When he took on that role in 1971, The Archers was in the doldrums and the BBC was debating whether to bring it to an end. Jock managed to modernise it without upsetting its existing fans too much. Hence a Daily Record article from 2017 that described him as "the Scot who saved the most English series on radio".

I once tried a theory popular with a long-defunct group called 'The Archers Anarchists' on him, and Jock confirmed that Brian had murdered Adam when he was a boy – they never got on – and buried him somewhere on Home Farm without Jennifer noticing. Who this "Adam" they have now is, God alone knows.

It was remembering these happy days in the Lib Dem News broom cupboard at conference that led me to look Jock up last week and find that he had died. Adrian Slade also died last year, and I am very glad that I knew them both.

William and Ed Grundy are the King's sons William and Harry

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One of the great Archers scenes was the one with Clarrie in labour with her first child:

"Eddie, if I die, I don't mind you marrying again. But not that Jolene."

After the baby had been born, she told Eddie and Joe:

"His name's William and I want the house cleaned before I come home."

It was clear that William Grundy was named by Clarrie after Charles and Diana's son William.

Which has made me realise how much the Charles III's sons resemble Ed Grundy's:

• William – upright, respectable and just a bit of a prig – is William.
• Ed – chaotic, a little dodgy but likeable – is Harry.

QED.

One of the perks of helping out with Liberal Democrat News at party conference was that I used to get to talk Cambridge Footlights with Adrian Slade and The Archers with Jock Gallagher.

In one of those conversations Jock confirmed the truth of the old Archers' Anarchists theory that Brian had murdered the real Adam when he was a boy and buried him somewhere on Bridge Farm. (They never got on.)

Ruth Shaw (1937-2024): Doyenne of Liberalism in Sutton

Mourning the death of Adrian Slade the other day, I initially wrote that he was the Liberal Party's first councillor on the Greater London Council.

I should have known that Stanley Rundle had been the member for Richmond upon Thames before him, because I heard many tales of the contribution he made to local politics when I lived there in the early Eighties.

But I had not heard of Ruth Shaw, who represented Sutton and Cheam between 1973 and 1977.

Ruth died in 2024, and Sutton Liberal Democrats have a page celebrating her life - I have borrowed the photo here from it.

The page lists her lifetime of work for the Liberals and then Liberal Democrats:

Ruth was one of a small group of people who kept the Liberal Party alive in Sutton & Cheam through the lean years of the 1950s. She: 

• was a founder member of Sutton & Cheam Young Liberals in 1950; 

• was the first ever Liberal councillor on Sutton & Cheam Borough Council in 1961 (finally winning a seat on her seventh attempt); 

• was elected to the GLC in 1973 to represent Sutton and Cheam, one of only two Liberals on the council. She put her victory down to "community politics" and the party's opposition to the Ringway 3 project. She was given a place on the GLC's transport committee; 

• was the first (and last!) Liberal Greater London Councillor for Sutton & Cheam 1973-77; 

• was Sutton councillor for Worcester Park North 1986 to 1990 and North Cheam 1990 to 2002; 

• was named an Honorary Alderman by Sutton Council in 2011; 

• held most Local Party offices, including Chair and President.

The page also records what Ruth said to the Sutton Guardian when she was awarded and OBE for her services to politics:

"I didn't see this coming at all.I was  absolutely astonished and obviously very pleased. To get this recognition is wonderful although I don't even feel like I've done all that much - although I must have been doing something right. 

"I just believed liberalism was the right way to go. In the '50s people on the doorstep told me it had no future but I couldn't see it that way. Now the Liberal Democrats have been in power here for more than 25 years."

It's obvious that Ruth's early work in Sutton and Cheam did much to make Graham Tope's victory in the 1973 Westminster by-election there possible.

Remembering Adrian Slade (1936-2025)

I knew that Adrian Slade had died because I saw we were discussing commissioning an obituary of him for the next Liberator. But I had not found any announcement of the sad news until this morning, when I saw this notice in The Times:

ADRIAN SLADE
Adrian died peacefully on 24th January 2025, aged 88. CBE, cabaret performer,adman and Liberal politician. Husband of Sue. Father of Nicola and Rupert. Much loved by friends and family.

The notice also links to a memorial page for him.

Discussing comedy with Adrian was one of the perks of helping out with production of Liberal Democrat News at party conference - I have mentioned his memories of Peter Cook, whom he auditioned for the Cambridge Footlights, here more than once.

But Adrian was also a politician. He won Richmond at the GLC elections of 1981, defeating Edward Leigh in the process. to become its only Liberal member.

What was impressive was how well known he was. When we went down to the bar after a Liberal meeting, there were always people who came up to him to sat hello or ask for advice. If Adrian had been the parliamentary candidate, we might well have won Richmond earlier than 1997.

That GLC victory was not without cost for Adrian, as the Conservatives contested the election lodged an election petition, contesting the result because of technical errors in Slade's return of expenses. The election result stood, but he was left with potentially ruinous legal expenses. His showbiz friends organised a comedy evening to help pay the bills - sadly the link in my post that told you who was there no longer works.

His experiences of Ken Livingstone were more pleasant. When he went to see Ken, the GLC leader as a new councillor, and was asked which committees he would like to be on. They then fell to discussing where Adrian should sit so as to upset the Tories most.

So farewell to Adrian Slade. We shan't see his like again.

God save me from former Cambridge Footlights members stretching their brand

I was in Sainsbury's the other week when Ben Miller came on the PA. You will remember him from the sketch show Armstong and Miller. (Or was it Mitchell and Miller? Or Miller and Webb?)

What was he doing in the supermarket? Plugging his latest children's book.

Not long after that, Humanists UK announced a collection of essays, What I Believe. (It was actually published today.)

And among the contributors - indeed listed first on the page announcing it - are two former Footlights members, Sandi Toksvig and Stephen Fry.

Also announced recently was the presenter of the BBC's eagerly awaited new series Chess Masters. Any guesses? 

It was Sue Perkins.

The British left has accorded comedians too high a status for decades now, perhaps because their politicians have been so uninspiring. Future historians will have to account for the cultural eminence Fry enjoyed for so long.

There used at least to be a second route into BBC comedy - the Socialist Workers Party. But now the SWP is too toxic for any ambitious comedian to associate themselves with it, the Footlights has an open field.

Of course, a person can be good at more than one thing, and, of course, Cambridge takes some of the brightest and best.

But I am reminded of the days when I helped produce Liberal Democrat News at conference. One of the things that made it so enjoyable was that I got to talk about the Archers with Jock Gallagher, who produced the programme for many years, and to talk about the Footlights with Adrian Slade, the man who auditioned Peter Cook for the society.

I remember Adrian saying that Cook was the funniest person he had ever met. He would have you laughing for a whole evening, yet the next day you wouldn't remember a thing he had said. This, I think, was because Cook’s greatest contribution to British comedy - and he was enormously influential - was his absurdist attitude to serious things and important people.

But Adrian also said that there is all the difference in the world between being a stage actor and being a revue actor, where you put on a hat and a funny accent for 90 seconds and then move on.

You see that, I think, in Cook's films. If acting is reacting, then he gave his fellow cast members nothing to work with, because he seems wholly detached from what is going on around him. This sort of works with the characters he plays in The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer and Bedazzled, but beyond that it certainly doesn't.

You can see something of the limitations of revue acting in the later careers of David Mitchell and Stephen Fry. In his latest success, Ludwig, Mitchell is essentially playing himself. Fry is a better actor, but even in his finest hour, the film Wilde from 1997, you came away with the idea that Oscar Wilde must have been very like Stephen Fry.

Add to this the way the British tend to confuse an upper-class accent with intelligence - something that has fuelled more than one recent political career - and the increasing funding gap between private schools and the rest, and you realise that the future for former Footlights people will be like the present - only more so.

John Sessions: A lost comic genius

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When the improvisational comedy panel show Whose Line Is It Anyway? was first screened on Channel 4 in 1988 it was compulsory viewing. People would make a point of staying in to watch it.

And the most talented performer on the show, above Paul Merton or Josie Lawrence or Stephen Fry, was John Sessions.

His ability to mimic almost anyone, extraordinary range of knowledge and love of cinema history led to some remarkable performances.

Sessions died on Monday. Writing in the Guardian, Stephen Moss expresses what many who remember his appearances in the 1980s must feel:

What an enigma John Sessions was, and what a peculiar career. Not unsuccessful by any means - he was a fixture on the emerging comedy scene in the 1980s and kept popping up in screen parts, some good, some atrocious, over the next 30 years. But there was always a sense of what might have been: of what this glorious freewheeling talent could have achieved if he hadn’t been dogged by self-doubt or if the cards had fallen differently.

Later in his article Moss describes Sessions as suffering from Peter Cook syndrome: 

the imagination is so great, the possibilities so enticing, that they cannot easily be fitted into a conventional commercial box.

Except that Sessions had one thing over Cook: he could act. In his films, Cook always seems a little disconnected from what is going on around him. Sometimes directors made good use of this - it is one of the things that makes him so enigmatic in The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer - but it did limit him as an actor.

I remember discussing Cook with Adrian Slade, who had auditioned him for the Cambridge Footlights. He said Cook was the funniest man he had ever met and that you would spend all evening with him laughing and then not be able to remember a word he had said the next day.

Adrian also said, however, that being a revue performer - putting on a hat and a funny voice for a two-minute sketch - is not the same as being an actor. And he agreed that sometimes with Peter Cook it showed.

But John Sessions could act: he was RADA trained. Moss quotes him as saying:

"When I left Rada, my plan was to try and do two careers at once - to be a comedian and an actor. For some years, I managed to juggle the two, but I never felt I joined either club. I still feel like a rookie. I feel inadequate when I’m working with great actors like Michael Gambon. It’s like talking to God."

Moss concludes:

If only Sessions had realised that in comedy terms, he was God.

Wishing that a performer had enjoyed a more stellar career can be selfish, in that it is expresses disappointment that you did not get to see more wonderful things from them. But it also contains a love and concern for that performer, and I think Moss is right about John Sessions.

Six of the Best 852

Adrian Slade has some lessons from history for those who scent an easy way to power: "Soggy centrism has never worked and the process of arriving at a realignment that actually achieves something is very far from easy, particularly without reform of the electoral system."

"Right now, forbidding kids to walk and play outside unsupervised seems normal. But thanks to states revisiting their neglect laws - including South Carolina, Arkansas and Texas - soon this may seem as strange as it would have in the '80s." Lenore Skenazy reports growing support for free-range parenting.

Lynn Hunt reviews two books on the French philosopher Diderot, whom she describes as "the most radical thinker of the eighteenth century".

Stephen Fry and Ben Challacombe, his surgeon, discuss the former's operation for prostate cancer.

Film treatments of the Arthurian legend tell us much about the time they are made in, argues Neil Archer.

With a 1972 article about East London buildings at risk as his guide, A London Inheritance walks from Bromley by Bow to the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs.

Why I do not support the recall of MPs

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I am a great believer in representative democracy. You elect someone and if you do not like how he or she performs as your MP, you vote for someone else at the next election.

Increasingly, however - fuelled chiefly by the expenses scandal - there have been moves to allow voters to petition for the ejection of an MP between elections and the holding of by-elections.

Some versions of recall require an MP to be convicted of a criminal offence or some other former of wrongdoing. Others just require the voters not to like them very much.

It is this latter sort of recall that is championed by the Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith. And the problems with it were laid bare by the Labour MP Kevan Jones in the Commons today:

Mr Kevan Jones: I am very interested in what the hon. Gentleman says about recall empowering voters. In practice, would it not do what it does in the United States, which is to empower wealthy individuals who are not happy with what their representative is doing to mobilise against them? It would empower wealthy individuals, such as the hon. Gentleman, to influence events in a way that my ordinary constituents and I cannot? 

Zac Goldsmith: I will explain why such concerns are groundless during my speech, but I will make one point, partly in response to the Opposition spokesman. Concerns about expenditure during the recall process are a matter for regulations; the amendments that my colleagues and I seek to introduce would not tamper with the Government’s proposed regulations on expenses. That separate technical issue can be very easily addressed. 

Mr Jones: I am sorry, but that is not the point. Expenditure limits can be put on the recall election, but the campaigning in the lead-up to such an election would undermine the representative in getting their constituents— 

Douglas Carswell: Trust the voters. Mr Jones: This is not about trusting the voters, but about putting influence in the hands of a small group of very wealthy individuals. If the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), with the wealth he has, wanted to shift a Member of Parliament, he could do it. 

Zac Goldsmith: The hon. Gentleman takes a very dim view of his electorate if he thinks that that is so easy. Irrespective of that, the two-month petition stage before a referendum will be regulated, so his cost arguments simply do not apply. 

Mr Jones: What happens in practice in the United States is that individuals who take against a policy or a state or national representative can use their tremendous wealth to use a campaign in the lead-up to the recall election to undermine such a representative. The idea that that is somehow empowering the voters is not the case. Recall empowers very wealthy individuals who could then— 

Douglas Carswell: You don’t trust the voters. 

Mr Jones: I do trust the electorate. The hon. Gentleman should stop chuntering from a sedentary position. The fact is that recall will give influence over who the Member of Parliament is not to the majority of the electors but to a small group of very wealthy individuals.

Note how Douglas Carswell, despite his change of party, has mastered the art of modern politics - feigning outrage on behalf of some group or other. Most debates on education, for instance, consist in accusing your opponent of "not trusting parents" or "not trusting teachers".

Yes, it can be irritating if an MP is caught doing wrong and refuses to resign. But there is a danger that the cure will be worse than the remedy.

And I have a particular reason for not giving wealthy Tories - you might even say Richmond Tories - the power to launch campaigns against MPs from other parties in this way.

As I recalled back in 2010:

In 1981 Adrian Slade won the Richmond seat on the Greater London Council for the Liberal Party, defeating the sitting Conservative Edward Leigh in the process. The Conservatives then lodged an [unsuccessful] election petition, contesting the result because of technical errors in Slade's return of expenses for the contest. 

The process, however, left Adrian facing ruinous legal expenses. His friends rallied round and staged An Evening At Court on Sunday the 23 January 1983 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to help him raise the money. As Smarter than the Average! tells you in exhaustive detail, many of the greats of British comedy performed that evening.

Peter Cook nearly fought Hampstead for the Liberal Democrats

One of the perks of helping out with Liberal Democrat News at the party's conference was that I got to talk about The Archers with Jock Gallagher, who used to edit the programme, and comedy with Adrian Slade.

Adrian was the man who auditioned Peter Cook for the Cambridge Footlights. I remember him saying that Cook was the funniest person he had ever met. You would spend the whole evening with him laughing, but the next morning you wouldn't be able to remember what it was he had said.

Today I picked up a copy Something Like Fire: Peter Cook Remembered. Edited by his wife Lin, it contains tributes to Cook by many people who knew him.

One of those people is Adrian Slade, and he tells a story about Cook I had not heard before:

He had always felt more at home with the Liberals than any other party and he told me that he relished the idea of taking on Glenda Jackson, who had just become Labour candidate for Hampstead. The Hampstead Liberal Democrat candidacy was still vacant and for a short time he was on the verge of being persuaded by me to put himself forward for the next general election (1992). Discussions had become almost official when a new project intervened and he backed away. It would have been an intriguing and explosive contest.

Adrian Slade, Zac Goldsmith and election expenses

Recent mentions of the attention being paid to the election expenses of Zac Goldsmith in Richmond and of Adrian Slade inevitably put me in mind of this story.

In 1981 Adrian Slade won the Richmond seat on the Greater London Council for the Liberal Party, defeating the sitting Conservative Edward Leigh in the process. The Conservatives then lodged an election petition, contesting the result because of technical errors in Slade's return of expenses for the contest.

The process, however, left Adrian facing ruinous legal expenses. His friends rallied round and staged An Evening At Court on Sunday the 23 January 1983 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to help him raise the money. As Smarter than the Average! tells you in exhaustive detail, many of the greats of British comedy performed that evening.

I moved down to Richmond a month or two after that, and it is fair to say that because of this case relations between the Liberals and Conservatives were not exactly warm.

The current attention being paid to victorious candidates' returns of elections expenses is unlikely to end well for anyone in the long run. But I have a good memory and find it hard not to enjoy Zac Goldsmith's discomfiture.

House Points: Frank Johnson's Best Seat in the House

This week's acting editor of Liberal Democrat News was Adrian Slade - the man who auditioned Peter Cook for the Cambridge Footlights.

Whenever he Adrian takes charge I feel under great pressure to be funny. As I couldn't think of any witty lines of my own, I decided to review Best Seat in the House so that I could steal someone else's.

In praise of Johnson

Frank Johnson, who edited the Spectator and wrote the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary sketch for many years, died in 2006. A collection of his journalism – Best Seat in the House – edited by his widow Virginia Fraser was published by JR Books last year. It is still available and certainly worthy of review.

Johnson, as everyone agreed when paying tribute to him after his early death, was witty but never vicious or nasty. His victims did not take offence.

Which is just as well when you read some of what he wrote. He summed up Enoch Powell nicely in 1982: “It was the full Enochian carry-on. The gaunt features. The death-mask face. The black suit. The creepy Black Country vowels. Mr Powell is essentially the man who opens the door of the Gothic mansion to the travellers seeking refuge from the storm at the start of one of the many tales in the genre inspired by Edgar Allen Poe.”

Then there was his fantasy of the young Michael Martin as a Billy Elliot figure, caught wearing black tights by his father. “The little boy would have been brutally informed: ‘We’re no havin’ a lad of oors end up as Speaker of the House of Commons. That's for gurrrls.’”

And older readers will recall the train that once carried the SDP’s rolling conference across the English countryside. It broke down in East Anglia: “Another railwayman appeared: ‘We’ll have a new engine put on in March,’ he announced. Despair! Those throughout the country ‘distressed at Britain’s continued decline and fearful of our future’ could not be expected to wait until March. Happily, he turned out to be referring to March in Cambridgeshire, rather than March 1983.”

Best Seat in the House also reflects Johnson’s love of opera, and this enthusiasm provides the best story in the book. It happened that his Shoreditch school traditionally provided the urchins for performances at Covent Garden, and at the age of 14 he played one of Maria Callas’s children in Norma.

He retained a clear and painful memory of the experience of being clasped to her breast at a particularly dramatic moment: “there penetrated, into my left eye, the top of the diva’s right breast, which partnership remained throughout the subsequent duet with Stignani.”

Scenes from a Westminster with no government

I had dinner in Hampstead last night with Disgruntled Radical and am now writing this from the Lib Dem News office in Cowley Street.

When I got to Westminster this morning I went first to the Pass Office to see about renewing my Commons press pass. It was not the best day to choose, because there were several eager new MPs there.

There was general agreement amongst them that there is currently an unreal atmosphere at Westminster. And one new Tory said: "No one knows what's going on. No one knows anything."
Then I walked across College Green where the journalists and TV cameras are assembled. Iain Dale was being interviewed live as I walked past the BBC News people. I was polite and did not heckle him.

Then to Cowley Street, where I was greeted by outside broadcast vans and a throng of journalists. I took some pictures of them in case I never see such sights again. (I'll add one to this post when I get back to Leicestershire.)

Security at Lib Dem HQ now turns out to be in the hands of a couple of gorillas in suits. One of them had a fit when I tried to take a picture of the journalists from inside the building.

Welcome to the political big time.

Later. As I was leaving Cowley Street, Adrian Slade was coming in. He kindly gave me a CD of some of his recent songs (the David Cameron Song is one of them).

Then crossing College Green again I met Flick Rea. She pointed to a familiar figure being interviewed by some television station of other.

Lembit Opik.

Even Later. The photograph above shows the scene on College Green. The ramshackle structures are temporary studios for the television companies.

The photograph below, taken through a window at Cowley Street and showing some of the loose maul of journalists outside, is the one whose taking so annoyed the goons there. If anyone employed by the party can explain why my taking it was remotely a problem, I would be fascinated to hear from them.

Adrian Slade sings his David Cameron Song

Listen to this masterpiece by Adrian Slade, former President of the Liberal Democrats and brother of the late Julian Slade who wrote Salad Days:

I learnt my tricks when in PR:
Don't commit, don't go too far,
be friendly, frank, but not quite true
And never say what you will do.

The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer

Here is an interesting film. It came, not from LoveFilm, but form Amazon. In fact, on looking back over this blog I found they sent it in error. I had ordered Sir Henry at Rawlinson End.

But I kept the DVD (having seen the film once before - on television in the 1970s) and finally got round to watching it the other day.

Viewed today, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer is at once a period piece and strangely prophetic.

It is a period piece because so many familiar faces from earlier British films are in it - Ronald Fraser, Denis Price, Michael Trubshawe. It is also a period piece of the presence of Peter Cook, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. It was shot as the sixties were drawing to a close and Monty Python was about to become the big thing in television comedy (rivalled only by Arthur Lowe, also in the film, and Dad's Army).

The film is prophetic because Rimmer, played by Peter Cook, uses the techniques of public relations and consumer research to become prime minister and then subvert the constitution. On its release the film was seen as fanciful, but it turns out to have anticipated Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson by 25 years.

A few years ago Peter Cook was chosen as the top British comedian by other British comedians. I once spoke about him to Adrian Slade, the former president of the Liberal Democrats, who is the man who auditioned him for the Cambridge Footlights.

Adrian said that Cook was the funniest conversationalist he has ever met - he would make you laugh all evening, though you could remember nothing of what he had said the following morning. However, said Adrian, to be good in revue it is enough to pull on a hat and do a funny voice. That does not make you an actor.

Peter Cook's career bears this observation out as his limitations with an actor are often on display. Michael Rimmer, however, is an outsider whose past is a mystery to us, so Cook's slightly wooden quality and the limited degree to which he engages with the other characters somehow suite the role.

For this reason the claim by William Cook, in a Guardian article a couple of years ago, that The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer is a turkey is well wide of the mark. The film is slow to start, with an extra beat after each joke which suggests someone did not trust the script or the audience. But it soon warms up and the satire is relevant even today - or perhaps more today.

The DVD also has an amiable and informative commentary by the director Kevin Billington - almost 40 years on he too is surprised at the film's relevance today and its occasional spots of gratuitous sexism.

Finally, a glimpse of the film...