GUEST POST Lib Dems must be "Tough on billionaires, tough on the causes of billionaires"

Anselm Anon says Liberal Democrats should be concerned about concentrations of economic power as well as about concentrations of political power.

It is axiomatic for liberals that power ought to be dispersed and accountable. The Liberal Democrats tends to be fairly good at articulating this when it comes to political structures – supporting an elected House of Lords, empowering local government, opposing mayors and PCCs who have "dubious democratic mandates and little scrutiny".

In contrast, the party’s approach to concentrated and unaccountable power that derives from wealth, as distinct from politics, is much more patchy. Ed Davey should be credited for his response to the Epstein scandal, and for standing up to Elon Musk on a range of issues. But he has been unwilling to move much beyond a critique of bad individual American billionaires, to the illiberal concentration of power which great wealth inevitably entails.

With reference to tech oligarchs, he writes:

I see it as the fundamental purpose of liberals … to hold the powerful to account and put real power in the hands of ordinary people. That means breaking up concentrations of power wherever we find them.

This is an excellent starting point, but needs to be supported by tangible and far-reaching policies.

The existence of all billionaires* is a structural problem. There are perhaps three broad reasons why the Liberal Democrats have not sufficiently acknowledged this, but each can be challenged. 

First, some billionaires fund worthy causes, from the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery, to Sir Chris Hohn’s support for action on climate change. Joseph Rowntree died in 1925, but his philanthropy continues to do a great deal of good, inspired by liberal values. Yet even if they are sympathetic characters, that doesn’t negate the systemic problem that billionaires are inherently over-mighty.

Liberal Democrats rightly reject the ‘good chap’ approach to Britain’s political institutions, which assumes the benign personal qualities of political actors. They are right to insist on robust formal structures, based on a written constitution. We wouldn’t want hereditary peers in the House of Lords, even if they all had the sensibilities of successive Earls Russell. And the same should go for billionaires: however well-meaning, they shouldn’t be allowed to wield unaccountable power, or pass it on to their children, which means that they shouldn’t be allowed to amass wealth beyond a certain point.

Secondly, there may be electoral calculation at play. Liberal Democrat voters, and constituencies represented by the party’s MPs, tend to be wealthier than average. It is sensible to be hesitant about alienating people who earn comfortable salaries and own detached houses. But hostility to the existence of billionaires need not entail this.

The sort of affluent citizen in her fifties in Tunbridge Wells, who now votes Liberal Democrat, but previously supported Blair and Cameron, knows all about the malign effects of the concentration of wealth. She knows about her daughter's experience in the rental market, about her father's experience in a care home owned by private equity, and her own experience of a water company which exists solely to amass capital for its investors. 

The party is well able to make it clear to her that hostility to the existence of billionaires is not an attack on her bourgeois lifestyle. And it is an electoral imperative, too, because we want her daughter, and the staff of her father’s care home (and her father!) to vote for the Liberal Democrats, and to become involved in the party.

The third obstacle is perhaps the most deeply rooted within Liberal Democrat thinking. There is a very sound liberal instinct to let people get on with their own personal and collective projects, without impediment or judgementalism. The distinction between public and private spheres of life is essential to liberalism. If someone wants to devote her energies to climbing the very highest Himalayas, or being the greatest ever tennis player, or winning at chess, or studying hard and becoming an eminent professor, then she is welcome to get on with it. 

But being a billionaire is never a private choice: it is inherently public, because decisions about how to invest and spend so much money have an enormous effect, even if the billionaire doesn’t make overt political interventions, such as donating to a political party, or underwriting a newspaper.

And the existence of billionaires inevitably induces some politicians to serve their interests, even if less cravenly than Peter Mandelson. Great wealth is inherently different in kind, not just in scale, from the resources of the bulk of the population, and this is inherently political.

So, one of the central aims of the Liberal Democrats’ economic policy should be to inhibit the creation and continuation of billionaires. I won’t go into the details of this, but starting points would include different approaches to taxing wealth (especially land), to inheritance, to regulating monopolies and oligopolies, and to the offshore tax havens controlled by Britain. 

At the moment, it seems that the Liberal Democrats are willing to be tough on (some) billionaires, but not on the causes of billionaires. This isn’t a call for the class warfare of the far left, or the inchoate left-populism of Zack Polanski’s Green Party, but to work through the implications of liberal insights when applied to economic power, as well as to political structures.

Anselm Anon has been a member of the Liberal Democrats since the 1990s.

* I use "billionaire" as a shorthand for "an individual or family possessing so much wealth that it would distort a liberal society". I suspect the relevant amount is much less than one billion pounds, but won’t pursue that here.

Conrad Russell on Bertrand Russell (with a pinch of Carly Simon)

In the 1 September 1988 issue of the London Review of Books, Conrad Russell reviewed Alan Ryan's "political life" of his father Bertrand Russell.

Here is a little personal reminiscence from that review:

My father’s situation in 1918 was not an enviable one: he was 46, and had just lost his job, suffered imprisonment and social disgrace, and was facing the failure of his marriage. He had, in effect, no inherited money left, and, it must have seemed, a very bleak future indeed. 

Many men have broken under stresses no greater than this, and that the writing which came out of it should sometimes have been done for effect is no more than, reasonably, we should have expected. 

His situation in 1941 was no more enviable: he was trapped in the United States by the outbreak of war, unable to get himself into England or his money out of it, again dismissed from an academic job in disgrace, and in difficulties even for money to pay the fare into New York to meet a publisher. 

I can still remember the day when Simon and Schuster came to lunch (and my own bewilderment that they turned out to be a single person), and the overwhelming relief in the household when they happily departed. The result was The History of Western Philosophy.

The whole review is worth reading. Conrad names the two greatest changes of his father's last time as the way it became safe not to be a Christian and the relaxation of sexual morality.

On a more trivial note, the publishing firm of Simon & Schuster was founded in 1924 in New York. The Simon was Richard L. Simon, who was the father of the singer and songwriter Carly Simon, but I don't suppose it was he who called on the Russells.

Bertrand Russell: "First they fascinate the fools..."

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When asked how fascism starts, Bertrand Russell replied: "First they fascinate the fools. Then they muzzle the intelligent."

I have seen this tweet several times in recent days. As ever with quotations posted on social media, you have to ask if its genuine,

The answer is that there's no evidence of Russell having a conversation like that, but he did write something similar.

Quote Investigator alerts us to an essay - Freedom and Government - that Russell contributed to a collection complied by Ruth Nanda Anshen. It was titled Freedom: Its Meaning and published in 1942.

There Russell wrote:

The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.

This technique is as old as the hills; it was practised in almost every Greek city, and the moderns have only enlarged its scale.

So Russell didn't say that, but he did write something very like it.

John Russell's maiden speech in the Lords

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John Russell after making his maiden speech yesterday (Are you sure about this? Ed.)

As Mark Valladares says on Lib Dem Voice, until yesterday, it was a long time since there had been a maiden speech by a Liberal Democrat peer.

That changed thanks to John Russell, the younger son of Conrad Russell, who now holds the title Earl Russell and recently won one of those odd by-elections for hereditary peers they hold in the upper house.

Here are a few highlights from his speech:

"Thank you for the kind words I have received about my father, Conrad. I know he is still remembered, particularly for his unique historical and constitutional knowledge. If I might share with your Lordships: one of his proudest moments was when, during one very late-night sitting, he out-quoted the Bishops one by one with the Bible."

"I am passionate about the environment. My commitment and care come from my personal experience of adventure, long-distance walking and a love of wild places. Climate change is happening now. It is real and it is truly frightening. No longer the stuff of dystopian films, it is our present reality."

"The questions of what to do and how we fight for our common survival must be addressed and solutions found and implemented with utmost urgency. We have to adapt our ways of life, our cities, our transport systems, simply for our society to continue to function and survive. We must have hope and inspire confidence that change is possible."

"Big companies and businesses must adapt: they will be part of the solutions we need for a functioning society. The biggest polluters must be held accountable. We must give nature and the ecosystem an economic value and assign it worth. We need a new economics and a global green economy." 

You can read the whole speech on They Work for You.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Sporting on its shore in animal skins

Back in 2004, before Tony Blair had won his third election, I blogged:

Conrad Russell died last week, an irreplaceable loss to the Liberal Democrats and to Liberalism in general. There were worthy obituaries in the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. I remember his saying once, rather overgenerously, that I did for the party what Matthew Parris does for the country. 

I also remember his asking me, as his wife had always wondered, why Lord Bonkers talked about Earl Russell and his Big Band. I explained that as there were band leaders called Count Basie and Duke Ellington... When I was studying philosophy as an undergraduate, I never dreamed that I would have this conversation with Bertrand Russell's son.

And if you read the whole post you will find that there really was an Earl Russell, Big Band, or at least an Earl Russell Orchestra.

Saturday

How splendid to have a Russell on the Liberal Democrat benches in the Lords again! Earl Russell won the by-election among hereditary peers, casually giving a member of the Lloyd George clan one up the snoot in the process. 

My only worry is that he has mentioned more than once his dream of getting his father’s big band back together and asked if I know what became of them. 

It happens that I gave them sanctuary on an island in Rutland Water after Conrad’s death. From time to time I see them sporting on its shore in animal skins and playing upon rude instruments, and I know Meadowcroft rows out for the occasional jam session, but few others know of their presence. 

Will they thank me if I shatter their idyll? Can I continue to change the subject when my newest colleague broaches the matter?

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

Earlier this week...

• The other animals would lay their disputes before the kangaroos
• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys
• Ofwat, Ofgem, Ofthis, Ofthat
• Charabanc trips to the coast have been booked

Liberator celebrates its 50th birthday

To celebrate Liberator's 50th birthday, the whole of its latest issue - the magazine's 400th - can be downloaded as a pdf for free.

There are topical articles, including a look at the runners riders to be the next Liberal Democrat leader, as well as ones that look at the magazine's history. There are also reprinted pieces from such absent friends as Conrad Russell and Simon Titley.

Look too for an important announcement about Liberator's future.

To think, if I hadn't met John Tilley at a Kingston Liberals barbecue in the summer of 1983, I might never have got involved with it.

Bertrand Russell remembers the terror of playing host to Mr Gladstone as a 17-year-old

I knew Bertrand Russell's younger son Conrad, who was an inspirational figure in the early years of the Liberal Democrats.

I am therefore three moves from Mr Gladstone - and almost anyone of importance between him and the Second World War.

Lord Bonkers on the by-election for a Lib Dem hereditary peer

The sad death of Eric Avebury means there has to be a by-election to choose a new Liberal Democrat hereditary peer.

A BBC News report suggests there will be two candidates: John Russell (the current Earl Russell and the son of the much-missed Conrad Russell) and John Thurso (former member of the Lords and former MP for Caithness and Sutherland).

But then the electorate is barely larger than the number of candidates:

Three current Lib Dem hereditaries are entitled to vote: Lord Addington, the descendent of a Conservative MP from the 1880s; the Earl of Glasgow, the descendent of one of the Scottish Commissioners who negotiated the 1703 Union of the kingdoms of Scotland and England; and the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who is directly descended from the Liberal Prime Minister H H Asquith.

Or should that be four current Lib Dem hereditaries?

Lord Bonkers holds a Rutland peerage, which means he is sometimes overlooked by the pundits, but he is determined to vote in this election.

I don't know which way he will vote, but he did remark at dinner the other night that "the Russells always come good in the end" and that "this Thurso fella needs to make up his mind which House he wants to sit in".

He also said that a donation to the Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans before the votes are cast on 19 April would be "a Terribly Nice Gesture".

Thanks to Mark Pack.

19 October on Liberal England

19 October 2012

Liberal Democrat Voice has chosen five of its own posts from 19 October in different years.

Back in the old days, in the noughties, when the internet was in black and white, on for only three hours in the evening and closed down at 10 sharp with the National Anthem, these memes were the lifeblood of blogging.

In those days we were interested in other bloggers just because they blogged, and we took ourselves a little more seriously.

So join me as I journey back in time to see what Liberal England said on 19 October.

2014. I chose Stranger on the Shore by Acker Bilk as my Sunday music video. Two weeks later he was dead. The police couldn't prove a thing.

2013. Rather like today, I had just been to the Battle of the Ideas. I took the opportunity to photograph the disused platforms at Barbican station.

2012. Down in London for work, I photographed St Pancras in the autumn sun.

2011. The Daily Mail announced that Mike Hancock had resigned from the cabinet. He had, thank goodness, never been in it. What he had resigned from was the Commons defence select committee.

2010. I quoted evidence that A levels had got easier: "No wonder that York, like many other UK universities, now runs remedial classes in basic skills for students who know their stuff on their specialist subject, but don't make the basic grade for numeracy and literacy."

2009. My review of The Liberal Moment by Nick Clegg reached chapter 6. Never accuse me of not being a party loyalist.

2008. I asked if the Shropshire Star had driven Lembit Opik mad.

2007. In my House Points column for Liberal Democrat News I argued that Ming Campbell had been right to resign as Lib Dem leader and had a go at Mock the Week: "For 10 or 15 minutes they unleashed a tirade against Ming, all of it based on the assumption there is something inherently funny about being old. If they had attacked a woman or someone who was gay or black in the same way they would never have worked for the BBC again."

2006. I marked the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising.

2005. An anonymous wit had suggested that David Cameron was "born with a silver spoon up his nose".

2004. I didn't blog on 19 October - I don't recall the world coming to an end. The following day I quoted a tribute to Conrad Russell by Nick Clegg ("former Lib Dem MEP for the East Midlands and PPC for Sheffield Hallam"): "He was a striking, slightly beguiling figure. He walked with an intellectual's stoop, invariably with a cigarette in hand. A shock of white hair was permanently standing to attention above an angular, slightly hawkish face."

So that is Liberal England on 19 October. Music, railways and even a little politics.

Now what about your blog?

Six of the Best 453

What You Can Get Away With completes its series of posts inspired by Conrad Russell's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism.

On British Politics and Policy, Mareike Kleine provides three suggestions on how Lord Hill can be a good European commissioner and still serve the British interest.

China is setting up fake social media accounts to give a false impression of life in Tibet, reports Andrew Jacobs in The New York Times.

Ben Goldacre, in an editorial for the British Medical Journal, says true informed choice will require wholesale changes to the way we gather and communicate evidence: "When we offer a preventive drug to such large numbers of healthy people, we are a long way from the doctor treating a sick patient. In some respects, we are less like doctors and more like a life insurance sales team: offering occasional, possibly life changing, benefits, many years from now, in exchange for small ongoing inconvenience and cost."

"Audiences in 1949 didn’t see the film as fanciful. Vienna may have been badly bombed, but so had Coventry, London and Liverpool. Crime was a UK problem, too. Shortages and rationing meant plenty of people knew a man who could get a hold of extra petrol, sugar or meat. Fellas like Lime had their stories in the papers and their pictures on post-office walls." Gerald Heyes celebrates the 65th anniversary of Carol Reed's The Third Man for Spiked.

London Reconnections explores the Connaught Tunnel and Silvertown Station.

Six of the Best 447

What You Can Get Away With has been reading Conrad Russell's An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Liberalism. As you should.

"So the choice, for the foreseeable future, seems clear: do we want independent schools to continue as they are, largely closed to those who can't find the substantial fees; or do we want them to be open on merit, not money, so that a wider group of children can benefit?" On the Sutton Trust blog, James Turner asks some radical questions about private schools.

A fifth of all websites blocked in the UK, says Krystal Vermes on Venture Beat.

Carl Bromwich remembers his visit to a Soviet pioneer camp in Belarus for the Guardian.

"I got the sense that being at Wimbledon was something I was expected to feel privileged about – as if taking part in a great British institution was the whole point of the exercise. British tennis, despite Murray, isn’t doing particularly well. It’s hard not to suspect that Wimbledon may be part of the problem." William Skidelsky describes two days at the tennis for LRB blog.

IanVisits finds fragment of London’s Roman wall hidden in a car park.

More on Earl Russell's Big Band

I love blogging.

A couple of months ago I wrote about my discovery that there really was an Earl Russell's Big Band - or at least an Earl Russell Orchestra.

Now the daughter of one of its members has left a comment on that post:

I was surprised to find this image on your blog. My dad played in the Earl Russell Orchestra (he's in the front row, playing sax, on the right). From what I understand (and this is only from oral history), they just came up with the name "Earl Russell" out of the blue. There never was a person of that name in the orchestra or associated with the orchestra. They played a lot of dances in the small towns around the area. Very popular.

Earl Russell and his Big Band

Can it really be almost nine years since Conrad Russell died?

In October 2004 I wrote:

Conrad Russell died last week, an irreplaceable loss to the Liberal Democrats and to Liberalism in general. There were worthy obituaries in the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. I remember his saying once, rather overgenerously, that I did for the party what Matthew Parris does for the country. 

I also remember his asking me, as his wife had always wondered, why Lord Bonkers talked about Earl Russell and his Big Band. I explained that as there were band leaders called Count Basie and Duke Ellington... When I was studying philosophy as an undergraduate, I never dreamed that I would have this conversation with Bertrand Russell's son.

I also recall that David Boyle found the exchange inordinately amusing.

My reason for recalling it - apart from urging anyone who has joined the party in the last nine years to read that Guardian obituary - is that today I discovered there really was an Earl Russell and his Big Band. Or at least an Earl Russell Orchestra.

Harlan Online recalls:

In the 1940s, swing dancing was sweeping the nation. With people flocking to dance halls, bands began springing up, including the Earl Russell Orchestra. Led by George Stoltz, the Earl Russell Orchestra, made up of people primarily in the Shelby County area, played big band and swing music throughout Iowa and parts of Nebraska.

And thanks to that website for the loan of the photograph above.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: On the knight bus

Wednesday

The morning finds me in a clearing in Rockingham Forest. I am surrounded by Liberal Democrat knights and their horses. Here is Sir Bob Russell, though if I am honest I think his brother Earl should have received a knighthood for his services to jazz. Here is Sir Robert Smith, about whom little is known, except that he is a knight. Here are Sir Alan Beith, Sir Malcolm Bruce and Sir Menzies Campbell – Sound men all. And here are Sir Nicholas Harvey and Sir Andrew Stunnell, who are among our newer knights. Indeed, they are so new that I have to ask to see their credentials.

“Gentlemen,” I begin, “it is many years since I last saw the Spirit of Liberalism. I believe I last caught site of it in Ashplant’s day, though I have to admit his elderflower champagne was pretty powerful stuff. Who knows where it has got to today? That is why I am sending you on this quest.”

Sir Alan Beith, who is sitting the wrong way round on his horse and polishing his glasses on its tail, speaks up.

“A quest is a wonderful idea, but some of us aren’t very used to horseback.”

“I have thought of that,” I assure him, “and have laid on mechanised transport for those who prefer it. Think of it as a knight bus.”

Before they set off, however, I lead them to the village green at a smart trot. The judges of the Rutland Best Kept Village competition are due any day and those lances look just the job for picking up litter.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• Too many knights
• Escape from Liberal Youth

Summer Reading Round-Up 4

I have invited some bloggers to nominate a couple of books they have enjoyed recently and write a few sentences about each. 

You are welcome to send me your own choices. I suggest you nominate one political and one non-political book, but I don’t insist on that.

You can read Round-up 1, Round-up 2 and Round-up 3 on this blog.


Mary Reid

People Power: A User’s Guide to Democracy by Dan Jellinek (Bantam)

A few weeks ago Dan Jellinek sent me a proof copy of his book. I intend to review it for Lib Dem Voice, but real democracy, in the form of a challenging by-election, has erupted in my patch, so I need to finish reading it very soon.

Dan is one of the movers and shakers in online democracy, although he carefully treads a non-partisan path in all his activities. His book is an ambitious everyman’s guide to democratic systems in the UK, comprehensively researched and written in an engaging style. He did interview me about policy making in the Lib Dems, but if you doze for a moment while reading the book you will probably miss it.

A Small Town Affair by Rosie Wallace (Headline)

I headed up to Orkney for a holiday earlier this year, so it seemed appropriate to take with me the first novel written by the wife of the former MP for Orkney and Shetland. Perhaps not surprisingly, the plot centres on the wife of a new Lib Dem MP, as she becomes the focus of gossip on the town’s grapevine, through a series of beautifully written comic scenes that made me laugh out loud.

This is perfect light holiday reading, especially for Lib Dem activists, who are gently but affectionately caricatured within. I’m sure you all have a Minty Oliver in your local party – an elderly and eccentric activist who manages to untangle all the complicated situations that the rest get themselves into.

The question is: which of these two books is my political choice?

Mary Reid writes a blog.


Andrew Hickey

My political choice is Conrad Russell's An Intelligent Person's Guide To Liberalism, which I recently read at the prodding of Alex Wilcock, and wished I'd read years earlier. A wonderful, insightful book, it manages to express in its 122 pages everything that distinguishes Liberalism both as a set of principles and as a specifically historical movement linked to the Liberal and Liberal Democrat parties in the UK. It's absolutely essential for all Liberals, in and out of the party. It's out of print, but second-hand copies can be picked up for ten pounds or so.

Favourite quote: "I can still remember, when I was five, looking at William Lord Russell’s portrait on the wall, and asking my father what he did. My father replied; “Oh, he was a very good man. The King cut his head off." The distrust of unfettered power implicit in that remark is very deep in the Liberal inheritance, and very deep in the current Liberal Democrat concern with constitutional reform."

As for my other choice, I think readers of this blog would be likely to enjoy Shell-Shocked, the autobiography of Howard Kaylan. While it concentrates too much on the sex and drugs and not enough on the rock and roll, there are still plenty of wonderful details about recording music in the 1960s and 70s. Kaylan started out as the lead singer of The Turtles, but has performed in some capacity or other with almost every great musical figure of the 60s and 70s, whether by having Ray Davies produce a Turtles album, being lead singer for Frank Zappa for three years, backing John Lennon at an impromptu appearance, singing backing vocals on all T-Rex's hits or singing on Springsteen's Hungry Heart.

And where else are you going to find out Tom Jones' pet name for his penis?

Andrew Hickey blogs at Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! Follow him on Twitter.


Paul Walter

A Swim-on Part in the Goldfish Bowl by Carol Thatcher

A very absorbing book. It didn't make me feel all that enamoured of Carol Thatcher but I enjoyed reading all the little anecdotes. The book appears to be largely (and rather outrageously) the basis for the Oscar winning film The Iron Lady. So it is worth reading for that reason alone.

Crying with Laughter: My life story by Bob Monkhouse

A bit of an old one, but a fascinating story of an extraordinary man. Worth reading alone for the amusing story of the early days of The Golden Shot. Little known trivia fact: Bob Monkhouse bequeathed the largest known collection of Butlin's whisky glasses. He did shedloads of stand-up for Butlin's in the 70s and 80s. Before each performance they would give him a glass of whisky. Once drunk he put the glass in his brief case and took it home. Then he kept them all along with his vast collection of (annotated) TV Times and TV programmes recorded on video. He owned the UK's first privately owned video recorder. It cost him almost as much as house cost at the time.

Paul Walter blogs at Liberal Burblings. Follow him on Twitter.

The Treaty of Ripon

Thanks to the booklet published by the city's civic society, I came across the plaque in a Ripon backwater.

The Treaty of Ripon put an end to the Bishops' Wars of 1639-40 between England and Scotland. These were caused by Charlies I's attempt to impose an Episcopalian system of church government upon Scotland.

Defeat in these wars, and their expense, forced Charles to abandon his attempt to govern without a parliament and were thus a Cause of the Civil War.

The English puritans were sympathetic to the Scots' resistance to High Anglicanism but suspicious of what they saw as their attempts to interfere in English business. Again, this attitude prefigured the concerns of the Commonwealth era.

The late Conrad Russell writes: There was more to it than that.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Meet the Russells

Meet the Russells

If there is a family to rival the Attenboroughs (who have always struck me as a talented version of the Dimblebys) for fame, it is the Russells. I think first, of course, of my old friend Bertrand, author (with Norman Whiteside) of Principia Mathematica; if I were to be asked to sum up his character in a phrase, I should say that he was “Terribly Clever”. Then I think of dear Conrad: Liberal theorist, historian of the Civil War and leader of his celebrated Big Band.

There were, however, other Russell brothers who were remarkable men in their own right and deserve to be celebrated. I speak of ‘Hotel’ Russell, who went into the catering trade, and Russell Russell, who travelled in paper bags for many years.

Yet it is the youngest Russell brother who, as Liberal Democrat MP for Colchester, has achieved the highest eminence of all; indeed, he has just been knighted. Here he is, only the other day, replying to a constituent who had written to him questioning the idea of buying a new Royal Yacht:

Are you serious? Don’t you have more important things in your life to be worried about without bothering me with this? I am not sure if you have actually read the wording of the Motion, but if you had you would have seen that I am one of the Sponsors. Thus I was one of those who was behind it being Tabled in the first place. And I am very proud that I was able to. I have pride in our nation’s history and its maritime heritage. A new Royal Yacht would be in Britain’s national and international interests. Are you not capable of understanding this?

If anyone deserves a knighthood, then Bob Russell does. Or, to put it another way, if Bob Russell deserves a knighthood then anyone does.

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• The fall of David Attenborough
• Welcoming Ruth Davidson

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The Rutland International Arts Festival

Lord Bonkers' latest Diary was written on the final day of the Rutland International Arts Festival. At his suggestion, I am reproducing the whole Diary as single blog post now that the new edition of Liberator is with subscribers.

I sit on the terrace at Bonkers Hall, enjoying a hard-earned macaroon and cup of Darjeeling as I survey the crowds in their Sunday best and the trim marquees erected by the Queen’s Own Rutland Highlanders under the supervision of Regimental Sergeant Major Carmichael. Yes, you join me on final day of the Rutland International Arts Festival.

As ever, the Festival is taking place in the Hall and its grounds, as well as at numerous locations across the village and beyond. The performance of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, for instance, took place in the Bonkers’ Arms and, though the double booking with the darts match was inadvertent, I am told that, if anything, it added to the drama.

If I may offer an unbiased opinion as Chairman of the Organising Committee, Patron and occasional performer, our annual cultural festival is widely recognised by the world’s leading arts administrators as being a unique event. There is Edinburgh, they often say, and then there is Rutland. In short, it is the eel’s eyebrows.

I could not be present at the Marat/Sade myself as I was at the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans to cheer on their now traditional play. Good as it was, I must have a word with Matron in the morning as there was an awful lot of noise from under the stage towards the end of the performance and the little mites did not reappear to take their bow after it was over.

I have also had the rare pleasure of going to the pictures in my own cricket pavilion. The film I saw was Mulholland Drive, which has certainly made me see the more affluent suburbs of Leeds in a different light (high tea with the Wainwrights was never like that), even if the reels were obviously exhibited in the wrong order. Such are the riches of the week that I could equally well have seen Annette Brooke’s Lord of the Flies or The Outlaw Ian Swales at the same venue.

Elsewhere there has been a traditional huppert show on the village green for the children and, of course, there has been a rich diet of theatrical performances on offer in the Village Hall. Unfortunately, the responsibilities of office mean that the parliamentary party has been unable to put on its usual performance of Shakespeare – for many years, people would come for miles to admire Cyril Smith’s Bottom – but there has still been much to enjoy. Tomorrow I shall be taking in a production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Anyone Can Birtwistle, which I imagine offers a guide to those ambitious to gain Labour seats in the North, and a musical by one Willy Russell entitled: John, Paul, George, Ringo... & Lorely Burt.

This year I have taken the precaution of staging all the musical events on an island in the middle of Rutland Water. It is not that I object to Susan J. Kramer and the Dakotas playing their “rock and roll” for the young people: the problem is the jazz. Meadowcroft, naturally, was all for there being a large jazz component in this year’s festival, and when I ventured to demur he started leaving copies of the Horticulturalist’s Journal about the place with various job advertisements ringed in red crayon. I took his point, which is why I shall be staying well clear of the shores of the Water this evening. For Meadowcroft will be playing in a concert with the former members of Earl Russell’s Big Band. (You may recall that I offered them sanctuary here on the Bonkers Hall Estate after their leader died. Charitable as we Bonkers have always been, I still think his brother Bob could have Done More.)

Elsewhere on this final evening of the Festival, you can hear the Elves of Rockingham Forest and their “plangent melodies and Aeolian cadences (no money returned)”, while I shall be at the performance of Beith in Venice (Benjamin Britten’s controversial last opera) that is being staged in my own Ballroom.

Some will then take their refreshment in the Bonkers’ Arms – rest assured: extra casks of Smithson & Greaves’s Northern Bitter have been laid in – or at the hog roast on the village green. Miss Fearn will be on hand to offer her assorted fancies, while Mrs Patel from the shop will no doubt be offering her delicious Norman Lamb rogan josh.

The most discerning lovers of the arts will have bought tickets for the Festival dinner, at which I happen to be the guest of honour. Talking of the celebrated Aldeburgh composer, I have a feeling that during the meal I may be prevailed upon to retell my celebrated anecdote about the chamber concert that we put on in my boathouse many years ago. There was a high tide on Rutland Water that night and strong winds; the result was that the waves burst into the boathouse, sweeping away performers and audience alike. I had the foresight to snatch up a double bass as it floated past and paddled myself to safety (accompanied by Benjamin Britten on the piano).

If that were not treat enough, the evening and the Festival will close with the traditional firework display. I like to keep the most spectacular effects under my hat – not literally, you understand – but I fully expect to see such pictures as the Bird of Liberty and a likeness of Nancy Seear painted in the midnight skies. On evenings like this, there is nowhere else one would wish to be but Rutland.

Lord Bonkers, who was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10, opened his diary to Jonathan Calder.

Conrad Russell remembered in the London Review of Books

The latest issue of the London Review of Books carries a review of a book by Conrad Russell, who died in 2004.

King James VI and I and His English Parliaments is an expanded version of the Trevelyan Lectures Conrad gave at Cambridge in 1995, edited and brought to the press by Richard Cust and Andrew Thrush.

Unfortunately, Colin Kidd's review is not one of those freely available on the LRB website. But I am a subscriber so I can give you a few extracts:

"A chain-smoker in an ill-fitting suit, who carried his voluminous notes around in supermarket carrier bags, the 5th Earl Russell defied most conventional stereotypes of the aristocrat."

"He was never one to stand his ground in the face of persuasive evidence, even when presented by the most junior colleagues or postgraduates, and was constantly redefining his position in the light of the work of other historians."

"Russell’s arrival in the House of Lords after the death of his half-brother in 1987 changed the focus of his commitments. Henceforth, he combined teaching at King’s College London, to which he moved in 1990, with his duties in the Lords, and students were happy to make the detour to the Palace of Westminster for tutorials when parliamentary business was pressing. As the Liberal Democrat spokesman on social security, he brought historical depth to his portfolio, tracing the English commitment to welfare back beyond Beveridge to the Elizabethan Poor Law."

"The book confirms that Russell, who had more regard to historical accuracy than to his own reputation, remained to the end open-minded, daring and imaginative. He was never restricted to revisionism as doctrine, and throughout the latter half of his career he changed his mind in significant ways while still conserving the broad message of his earlier anti-Whig interpretation of history."

"Seventeenth-century Englishmen, indebted to a unitary conception of the state, could not find a way to accommodate the ‘inconvenient fact of Scottish sovereignty’. The second Anglo-Scottish Union in 1707 provided a workable compromise. Nevertheless, the English remained oblivious – some of them wilfully so – of the fact that post-1707 Britain was a new state born of an international treaty between sovereign kingdoms. The blinkers were still on when Russell was writing in the late 1990s, and, devolution notwithstanding, it still seems fair to conclude, as he did then, that ‘Britain has not yet risen to the intellectual challenge of 1603'."

It is hard to believe that it is seven years since Conrad died, yet already a world in which a student could wander into the Palace of Westminster for a tutorial seems like a lost Eden.

Five Years Ago: Nick Clegg on Conrad Russell

One benefit of having been writing a blog for so long is that I can do this: go back and see what I was saying five years ago.

On 20 October 2004 Conrad Russell had just died and I reported that Nick Clegg had written a good column about him for the Guardian.

That column is still on the paper's website:

He was a striking, slightly beguiling figure. He walked with an intellectual's stoop, invariably with a cigarette in hand. A shock of white hair was permanently standing to attention above an angular, slightly hawkish face. He talked in paragraphs.

Helpfully, I informed my readers that Nick was the "former Lib Dem MEP for the East Midlands and PPC for Sheffield Hallam".

Incidentally, more people will read this blog today than read it in the whole of October 2004.