The Joy of Six 1417

"Muscular patriotism of the flag waving variety marries rather well with aggressive nationalism - and we’re seeing quite a bit of that all over the world. Neither impulse allows for complexity instead it demands loyalty of the 'for us or against us' variety." Ritula Shah explains why the aggressive flag flying of recent weeks has bothered her so much.

Carole Cadwalladr investigates the opaque workings of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, its funding from friends of Israel – including billionaire Larry Ellison – and an emerging right-wing media takeover of the global information space.

Timothy Garton Ash talks to Catherine E. De Vries about writing, freedom and the lost art of disagreement.

"If the BBC had kept the Boat Race and paid more for the privilege, the Telegraph’s angle could well have been to talk about a waste of money on an event whose viewing figures have been in decline over the years. The key thing with any story about the BBC in the right-wing press is that the corporation must always be in the wrong." Mic Wright on the way the Boat Race's move to Channel 4 was used to attack the BBC.

In 1873, a choir of formerly enslaved African American students from the newly established Fisk University, Tennessee, embarked on a fundraising tour of the UK during which they sang for both Queen Victoria and Mr Gladstone. The National Archives tells the story of the Jubilee Singers.

Madeleine Brettingham discusses her favourite situation comedy: "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is an early crack in the post-war sitcom’s floral wallpaper. The protagonist, Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, is a restless, self-directed twenty-first century man trying to break out of a claustrophobic twentieth-century show."

BOOK REVIEW Liberalism by Jonathan Parry

This review appears in the latest Liberator (issue 431), which can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's website.

Liberalism

Jonathan Parry

Agenda Publishing (2025), £19.99

In this short book, written as part of a series that promises “incisive and provocative introductions to topics, ideas and events for students wanting to know more about how we got where we are today”, Jonathan Parry provides a history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats and makes you think again about the relation between political philosophy and political practice.

The first three chapters deal with the years 1830 to 1914 – the Liberal Party’s era as a party of government – and do so thematically rather than chronologically. In the first of these, Parry discusses the widening of the franchise, the taming of the House of Lords and the intermittent Liberal enthusiasm for proportional representation.

Asquith’s battles with the Lords will be familiar to all, but the Liberal attitude to the widening of the franchise was more ambivalent than you might imagine. The Liberal Party, Parry argues, was forged in the struggle for parliamentary reform, but that was not the same thing as democratic reform. 

So the Reform Act of 1832 swept away many of the abuses of the old system – notably 143 rotten boroughs, which effectively allowed seats in the Commons to be bought – but it was not born out of zeal for any abstract principle of democracy. Rather, it was intended to make sure the Commons did its job of representing the country’s various interests and allowing the peaceful expression of grievances.

Many 19th-century Liberals had their doubts about democracy. John Stuart Mill, for instance, hedged his support for the democratic principle in his Representative Government with all sorts of conditions that would ensure educated opinion was well represented in any elected chamber. Among these conditions was the introduction of proportional representation to ensure that minority points of view were heard.

But other tendencies within the Liberal Party did not share these patrician fears, so no legislation to change the voting system appeared. Nor did it under Asquith, when the rise of the Labour Party and the consequent inevitably of three-cornered contests led Liberals to explore the virtues of the Alternative Vote.

Parry’s second chapter on Liberal history before 1914 deals with the development of the Liberal attitude towards the state. Gladstonian retrenchment had great appeal earlier in the 19th century when the party was busy attacking the corrupt old city corporations. When these were replaced by elected local councils, school boards and health boards, then the good that government, national and local, might do became of increasing interest to the party. The growth of the Empire also brought with it irresistible pressure for more spending.

The third of these chapters looks at Liberal moves towards a pluralist society, notably in religion, where the party became the champions of Nonconformists in their disputes with the power of the Established church and a supporter of Catholic emancipation, both in Britain and Ireland. Parry notes that support for Home Rule changed the social basis of the Liberal Party, with most of its members from the landowning classes becoming Liberal Unionists.

Parry’s final two chapters cover the Liberal Party’s long years in the wilderness as it tried to survive as a centre party in a two-party system – and that in an era when politics was principally about economics and the struggle between capital and Labour. There were interesting Liberal economic ideas – the party was putting forward Keynesian policies on the need for public works while Asquith was still leader, and Elliott Dodds’s advocacy of an idiosyncratic blend of Distributism and private enterprise was influential after World War II – but no single one that voters identified with the party.

The Alliance years are passed over quickly, which is surely fair, as social democracy never did cohere as a force or a philosophy outside the Labour Party. The two most prominent former SDP members of the new Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy and Robert Maclennan, were already pretty much Liberals by the time the parties merged.

Nor did The Orange Book have much discernible long-term effect on the party. Its reputation was always a triumph of marketing over content, as it wasn’t the bracing call for an end to “nanny state” interventionism its adherents sometimes pretended. The chapter on social policy was thoroughly Blairite, born from middle-class impatience with the lower orders and the way they brought up their children. If only they were better raised, the authors reasoned, there would be less need for public spending on them in later life and taxes could be cut.

And maybe we have always worried too much about economic policy. Today’s Liberal Democrats have little to say on the subject, but that didn’t stop us electing 72 MPs last year.

Finally. Parry looks at the agenda that the Liberal Democrats have made their own: devolution, civil rights and Europe. Much of it has been party policy since the Grimond years – our early support for British membership of the European Economic Community, in particular, was seen as proof of our farsightedness and proof that, despite all the humiliations of life as a third party, history was on our side. This, I think, explains the reluctance, noted by Parry, of Liberal Democrats to criticise the EU in the years before the referendum.

I enjoyed this breezy and unusually accurate history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats, but what I will remember most from Liberalism is Parry’s discussion of the relationship between a party’s philosophy and its practice.

There is a temptation – I have been guilty of this myself – to turn to works by John Stuart Mill or L.T. Hobhouse or Jo Grimond in search of an expression of Liberal philosophy that will tell us what the party should be saying today. But this is to put the philosophical cart before the horse of practice.

Parry has no truck with this view:

This book claims that Liberal leaders such as Lord John Russell, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, Jo Grimond and Paddy Ashdown are better guides to political Liberalism than theoretical writers such as J.S. Mill or T.H. Green. It argues that politics has its own rationale, and that politicians take up bodies of ideas for specific purposes, rather than allowing works of theory to set their policy agendas for them.

This is surely right, as is his reminder that:

Hundreds of Victorian Liberal pundits made interesting and rich contributions to national political debate. We know much more about these than was once the case, so there is no longer any excuse for elevating Mill or Green into a small elite of Liberal “thinkers” who have had a transcendental impact on the party’s definition.

And when we do read the works of this elite, we are likely to misunderstand what they were about:

Liberal intellectuals such as Green, or later L.T. Hobhouse, described the aim of Liberalism as the socialisation of individuals into civil society without the intervention of a heavy-handed state that would suppress the energy and self-control that was the essence of their individuality. These writings sound more utopian and radical than they were. They were elegant ways of describing social arrangements that were increasingly visible in many towns by the end of the century.

And if that is not enough iconoclasm for you, here is Parry on Mill:

On Liberty was not intended as a political party bible but as a contribution to general educated discourse. It was also intended to be provocative. Mill knew that most Victorians would not agree with his underlying assumptions. Most educated Victorians did not see orthodox religion as a restrictive cultural force. On the contrary many of them viewed the issue of liberty through a religious lens. Individual responsibility was responsibility and accountability before God.

Again this is surely right. Gladstone, for one, certainly took this view of liberty.

I shall add Parry’s Liberalism to my shelf of very good short books alongside Bryan Magee’s ones on Karl Popper and Richard Wagner and James Hawes’s “shortest histories” of England and Germany.

Jonathan Calder

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Rescuing fallen women or scourging himself

This is why I stay working for Lord Bonkers despite everything: these precious snippets of Liberal history that somehow never make it into the textbooks.

Thursday

Those bad hats who chopped down the tree at Sycamore Gap are, by all accounts, in for a stiff sentence without the option. I am reminded of the tales told me by colleagues who had been in the House in Mr Gladstone’s day. When the Grand Old Man wasn’t rescuing fallen women or scourging himself, he was to be found felling trees. 

The problem was that he didn’t confine himself to the woods at Hawarden, but would often attack random trees on his way to speaking engagements. The result was that there were few Liberal MPs of his era who hadn’t at one time or another had to sweet talk the local rozzers to secure his release from custody and stump up for tickets for the next police ball.

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

Earlier this week...

• From the pubs of Oswestry to the crumbling walls of Ludlow
• Matron told me at the party last night
• Commander Gideon, Dr Simon Sparrow and the girls of St Trinian's

Post Office Scandal: A blog that keeps you up to date with the inquiry and other developments

Yesterday saw two eminent lawyers appearing in front of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry: Anthony de Garr Robinson KC and Lord Grabiner KC.

This gives me a chance to recommend the entertaining blog on the inquiry written by Nick Wallis, whose reporting did much to bring the scandal to light.

Here are his two posts on the day. First de Garr Robinson:

Poor old Tony Robinson, just trying to make an honest crust defending his client, whilst being misled by his instructing solicitors (Womble Bond Dickinson), his client’s supplier (Fujitsu) or possibly even his client – the Post Office!

As leading counsel for the Post Office in the Horizon Issues trial during Bates v Post Office, de Garr Robinson regularly seemed to be on the receiving end of duff information, which he took at face value and dutifully represented to to the High Court as fact. This, as he described in his witness statement, was sub-optimal. Recalling the first such occasion, he wrote:

"I had unintentionally misled the court. As will be clear from the rest this statement, this was not the first occasion on which such a thing happened, and nor was it the last. It is a horrifying experience."

And here's Grabiner:

Up until this point in his evidence, Lord Grabiner had been acting with courtesy and politeness. Something seemed to change. Grabiner replied:

"Well what Lord Neuberger thought, I think you’d better ask him about. I can’t really climb into his mind beyond what he has said in communications that we have between ourselves that I’ve made full disclosure of."

As Grabiner and the Inquiry well knows, Lord Neuberger is not being called to give evidence, possibly to spare such a senior person from being embarrassed by his actions.

Lord Neuberger, a former president of the Supreme Court and sometime Master of the Rolls, had given rather gung-ho advice to the Post Office, urging it to challenge the impartiality of the judge in the class action by sub-postmasters that it was defending. The challenge failed.

I'm reminded of Gladstone's observation that former prime ministers are "like untethered rafts drifting around harbours - a menace to shipping".

Nick Wallis writes on his blog:

If you want to stay on top of what is happening with the scandal and are able to make a small (or large) donation, you will be added to the 'secret; email – an irregular and sometimes irreverent newsletter which will give you the inside track on what is happening around this story.

There are now many hundreds of subscribers to the secret email, which started in 2018, just before the first trial in the Bates v Post Office High Court litigation.

More details here.

The Joy of Six 1229

"Over the past decade the Conservative Party has taken millions of pounds from individuals and businesses with ties to Russia. Just this week it was revealed that JCB, which is owned by a major Conservative donor, continued to send equipment to Russia for months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, despite publicly saying that they wouldn’t. This is not a one off. Over the past decade, Russia-linked donors have repeatedly been given access to senior Conservative ministers after donating to the party. This culminated in the absurd spectacle of former Prime Ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson." Adam Bienkov reminds us how the Tories emboldened Vladimir Putin.

Giorgia Tolfo on Chiswick Women's Aid, who opened the world’s first safe house for women and children in 1971: "In the first month of opening the centre, a woman suffering violence at home arrived asking for shelter. Erin Pizzey, CWA's coordinator and spokesperson, didn't think twice. She quickly made arrangements to host the woman at the centre until her situation improved. Word spread and soon more women arrived seeking shelter."

Amid rising rents and closing businesses and venues, locals in South London are increasingly forming cooperatives to take charge of spaces and reinvigorate their communities, reports Kemi Alemoru.

"He discovered ... the fine perspectivist and occasional architect Raymond Myerscough Walker living in a vagabond caravan in a wood near Chichester, his archive stored in his car, a near sunken Rover. Such persons are much more than also-rans. They are the substance of a parallel history of Stamp’s creation that abjures inflated reputations, vapid self-promoters and the slimy gibberish of PRs and journalists who pump them up to this day." Jonathan Meades reviews Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 by Gavin Stamp.

John Boughton has been to Thamesmead, where tenants are trying to fight off unwanted redevelopment.

Jonathan Denby discusses the importance of gardening to Victorian politicians: "Their involvement in gardening went much further than being responsible for a large estate. At Hawarden, it was a fixture of Gladstone’s calendar to host the annual horticultural society show in his garden, giving an address on horticulture, which was later published as a pamphlet."

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Mr Gladstone with his dander up

Today Lord Bonkers has holts and hangers on his mind.

Wednesday

This modern habit of giving storms names does not appear well advised to me: it Gives Them Ideas. The last one that passed over Rutland did more damage to my woodlands than Mr Gladstone with his dander up. If they ever name one after the first Lady Bonkers, it really will be a signal to batten down the hatches.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• The board of Thames Water, Mauricio Pochettino and Nigella Lawson
• They could most fairly be described as "repentant headhunters"

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A feathered headdress on state occasions

Lily Gladstone is related to William Ewart Gladstone on her mother's side, while on her father's side she is descended from Red Crow, a Kainai Nation chief who was a signatory of one of its treaties with the Canadian government.

The opportunity was too good to miss, even if my knowledge of American Indian culture has not progressed much since I read Little Plum in the Beano - and even that now removes the word "um" if it reprints old strips.

Gentle humour at the expense of foreigners is a sin I must confess, but I do think a feathered headdress would have suited the Grand Old Man.

Thursday

You may have read that Lily Gladstone, the star of Killers of the Flower Moon (‘Goes On A Bit’ – High Leicestershire Radical), is the great, great granddaughter of a cousin of the Grand Old Man and grew up on the reservation of the Blackfeet Nation until she was 11. 

For some reason, the historians rarely touch upon William Ewart Gladstone’s American Indian heritage, but I can reveal that Queen Victoria’s animus towards him was partly occasioned by his insistence on wearing a feathered headdress on state occasions and his habit of calling her “paleface” when she failed to agree with him. My own father told me that the occasional “heap big” cropped up in his conversation to the very end. 

All I shall add it is that it’s a great shame that the disputants of the Irish Question did not agree to “smoke um pipe of peace” when he urged the idea upon them.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• We have talked of little but Europe ever since
• "Beelzebub’s Brownies"
• I toss the volume aside

Lily Gladstone and William Ewart Gladstone

Lily Gladstone, star of Killers of the Flower Moon, was interviewed about an earlier film - Certain Women - in the Guardian in 2017:

Gladstone was born in 1986 and grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in north-western Montana, and, as her biography in the film’s press notes proudly elaborates, has "tribal affiliations that include Kainai, Amskapi Piikani and Nimi’ipuu First Nations". 

She explains: "I lived in the reservations until I was 11, when we moved for lack of economic opportunities."

But what wins her my Trivial Fact of the Day Award is another extract from that interview:

Gladstone then adds a postscript about her forebears, revealing that her great, great grandfather, on her mother’s side, was first cousin to William Gladstone, the British prime minister.

h/t to Marie Le Conte on Bluesky.

The Gladstone family is right to apologise for its links with slavery

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From today's Observer:

The family of one of Britain’s most famous prime ministers will travel to the Caribbean this week to apologise for its historical role in slavery.

Six of William Gladstone’s descendants will arrive in Guyana on Thursday as the country commemorates the 200th anniversary of a rebellion by enslaved people that historians say paved the way for abolition.

Charles Gladstone, whose family will travel to the Caribbean this week to apologise for its slave-owning past.

The education and career of William Gladstone, the 19th-century politician known for his liberal and reforming governments, were funded by enslaved Africans working on his father’s sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

As well as making an official apology for John Gladstone’s ownership of Africans, the 21st-century Gladstones have agreed to pay reparations to fund further research into the impact of slavery.

The Gladstones are from being the only landed family whose fortune was founded in enterprises built on slavery, but I have not come across another one acting in this principled way.

Another piece in the Observer reminds us that the Conservative MP Richard Drax inherited and controlled one of the biggest plantations in Barbados where his ancestors were the driving force behind plantation slavery. They also owned slave ships. The MP for South Dorset, who is worth about £150m, refuses to apologise for his ancestors' role or offer reparations.

But the Gladstones are clear:

Charlie Gladstone, 59, who lives in Hawarden Castle, the north Wales home of his great-great grandfather William, said: "John Gladstone committed crimes against humanity. That is absolutely clear. The best that we can do is try to make the world a better place and one of the first things is to make that apology for him.

"He was a vile man. He was greedy and domineering. We have no excuses for him. But it’s fairly clear to me that however you address it, a lot of my family’s privilege has stemmed from John Gladstone."

When looking at Britain's past we tend to be selective in what we are associate ourselves with. It's a territory thick with irregular verbs: we defeated Hitler, but I have nothing to do with slavery.

And as Eric Williams, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, observed:

The British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.

So I salute the Gladstones for what they are doing. You can read about the Demerara Rebellion in the Observer too.

Noel Coward took over Gracie Fields's orphanage

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Lord Bonkers isn't the only politician to have had an orphanage: both Mr Gladstone and my local hero Paddy Logan had one too.

Now I am discovering that showbiz celebrities had them too. I blogged the other day about Noel Coward and The Actors' Children's Orphanage and I've now found that someone has written a book about this:

Here is a 2020 article from the Ham & High:

A little known aspect of the great playwright is illuminated in a new book by Kentish Town actor and author Elliot James.

While researching an article on the Brief Encounter and Hayfever writer he uncovered letters and records for The Actors’ Orphanage, a home for the abandoned children of struggling thespians.

Coward took over as President in 1934 and over 22 years turned it from a harsh institution into a place of love and laughter, drafting famous actors onto the committee and visiting with stars like Marlene Dietrich and Mary Pickford.

"I’ve always been a Noel Coward aficionado but this part of his extraordinary life has been forgotten," says James, who has appeared in several Coward plays.

"Doing some research I came across a picture of Coward walking along with these children and realised no-one knew this story. I got huge boxes of paperwork, letters and discovered many of the orphans are still alive in their 80s and 90s. When I interviewed them they said 'no-one's ever asked us about this'."

And I've also found that in 1962 the trust that ran this orphanage took over a building at Peacehaven in Sussex that had housed the Gracie Fields Orphanage since 1933.

I wonder how many more such establishments there were?

GUEST POST Wealthy Rishi Sunak should give it all away

Rishi Sunak should take a leaf out of Mr Gladstone's book and give his fortune away, argues Eduardo Reyes.

Leaving aside our different locations on the political paint chart of this country, I can see that Rishi Sunak wants to be first known, and then remembered, as a good prime minister. 

To get to ‘good’ he faces some fierce headwinds. 

But I have an absolute zinger of an idea as to how he can remove a major threat to his aspiration. 

Sunak, having first discussed the matter with his wife, should say they are giving up pretty much all of their extraordinary wealth. 

It’s getting in his way. Their way.

Their asset protection, tax avoidance strategy – that non-dom status – possibly cost him his first shot at being PM. It was awkward, and that awkwardness overshadowed his pitch. 

Right now, his enemies (mostly, though not exclusively, within the post-logic Conservative party), opponents, the media, campaigners and folk with a benign curiosity are sniffing around his arrangements and his family’s affairs. 

Why run the risk? He’ll have seen the hit that his fellow parliamentarian Nadim Zahawi took when ex Clifford Chance tax lawyer Dan Niedle started to take an interest in the former’s tax affairs. And that line of inquiry is not even spent. 

Wealth is interesting. Why wouldn’t we look? 

Am I mad, you might be thinking? Perhaps unrealistic or naïve? Surely the world doesn’t work like that? As the song has it, the rich get rich, and the poor get poorer. 

In between time, in the mean time, ain’t we got… actually, a chat about politics and wealth. Because it really is all about political context. 

Let’s talk about William Ewart Gladstone, son of Sir John Gladstone. When slavery was abolished the compensation scheme listed dad-Sir-John as the single biggest recipient of payments to make up for his sad loss of enslaved labour. 

A Liberal hero of mine, and possibly yours, sits on such slave money. 

But perhaps the question was, or is, ‘What will/did he (Sunak/Gladstone) do with it?’ 

‘What will he do with it?’ was the question posed by Edward Bulwer Lytton, a 19th Century Liberal turned Conservative, in his novel of the same name. 

It is not quite off topic to note that in the novel, leading 14 sub-plots (there is no main plot), is the one where ‘he’ is a half blind peasant actor cared for by his angelic granddaughter, ‘it’ is £5, and what he does ‘with it’ is he buys a prize performing poodle, so the two of them can be self sufficient. 

In literary and political terms, it showed the poor really can stand on their own two feet with a bit of thought. (Though, spoiler alert, the dog isn’t there at the finish.)

Back in the room, as hypnotists say. 

W.E, Gladstone’s awkward wealth was for so long uninterrogated because of the liberal, and Liberal, bent his life took. Early parliamentary activity, the website ‘They Work For You’ would have shown if online in the 19th Century, had Tory-era Gladstone speaking up for enslaver interests. He changed, and his original position is mostly forgotten. 

And so back to Sunak. He had a period as a rich but beneficent chancellor of the exchequer. When he was the sponsor of the furlough scheme and Covid business continuity grants, we weren’t talking about the fact he might have a secret share in an ultra-high-net-worth pasta and toilet roll mine that only he and his mates could access. 

But things are different for him now. It might, or might not, be the right thing for him to cut certain taxes, or reduce regulation in certain sectors. But the suspicion of both self interest, and a lack of empathy with folk unimaginably worse off, clings to him like so many barnacles as he does it. 

So he should give up the wealth. 

Other ultra-rich people are talking about this. They range from folk who worry about their children becoming a pastiche of obnoxious trustafarian privilege, to others who look at the climate crisis, autocracy or modern slavery

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and wonder if their extraordinary wealth should go to change the things that worry them and elicit their sympathy. 

Why shouldn’t the Sunaks join them? 

There is a tendency in new-right circles to conflate ‘wealth’ with ‘wealth creation’. They are different. Inherited wealth, as some members of early 20th Century Liberal governments saw, is utterly different to wealth creation. The difference, for this prime minister, will be unpicked if he cleaves to the notion that these are the same. 

What, we and Sunak, should ask, is the purpose of wealth? 

It is a question worth asking – worth asking for the wealthy and for the rest of us. 

When it comes to private wealth, up to $68 trillion will transfer to another generation in the next 25 years. That dwarfs the wealth of many nations. It is spectroscopic in scale. The imagination of Scott Fitzgerald would have struggled to express it. It is far bigger than ‘a diamond the size of the Ritz’. 

What happens to it matters. If it all takes the route of asset protection, tax avoidance and vanity projects, that will be a problem. 

If Sunak’s wealth stops him doing well the PM job he wanted for so long, because details of its maintenance are exposed as, by turns, unideal or taxationally cirumnavational, he’ll kick himself. 

Why not, say, keep just two houses and, say £5m in the bank. Everything else is holding him back.  

If he doesn’t do this, every decision of his that cuts a tax or a benefit will be judged, scutinised, resisted and may be frustrated because of his own status as being absurdly wealthy. He won’t be able to argue for the much derided ‘Laffer curve’ without his intentions being doubted.  

He can’t take it with him – none of us can. But we hope to sense we leave a legacy of something – a skein above us that could be love, could be a reputation for good government, but is certainly something that a figure north of £730m, perhaps surprisingly (perhaps unsurprisingly), cannot buy. 

Bulwer Lytton, in his Liberal youth, thought the independent income a right-thinking gentleman got from the land gave him the ability to assess political and artistic questions with an objective head. 

But with a right leaning government, led by wealth, the money takes on a different colour. 

As for Sunak, on his largely unearned income: what, as Bulwer Lytton asked, will he do with it? What he should do, for his own sake, is give almost all of it away. 

Eduardo Reyes is a journalist and low-net-worth individual. He read history at Clare College Cambridge, and is a member of the sneering, metropolitan liberal elite. He lives in South London. You can follow him on Twitter.

In 1930 the victims of the R101 airship disaster lay in state in Westminster Hall

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The Stuart Kings used to lie in state in Westminster Hall (those who weren't tried and sentenced to death there), but the modern revival of the idea began with Mr Gladstone in 1898.

Here's a list of those who have lain in state there in modern times:

• 1898 - William Gladstone
• 1910 - King Edward VII
• 1930 - Victims of the R101 airship disaster
• 1936 - King George V
• 1952 - King George VI
• 1953 - Queen Mary
• 1965 - Sir Winston Churchill
• 2002 - Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother

The victims of the R101 airship disaster? The fact that they lay in state, a decision taken by George V on the advice of his ministers, may be a measure of the hopes the government had entertained for this means of transport as a way of keeping up the Empire.

The R101 was bound for India on its first long-distance flight when it crashed into a hill near Beauvais in northern France. Because it was filled with hydrogen, the craft caught fire and 46 of the 54 passengers and crew died at once - two died later in hospital, leaving only six survivors.

So ferocious was the fire that some of the victims were never identified and others were identified by their possessions. Which leads to gruesome questions about what can have been in the coffins that appeared in Westminster Hall.

Still, Wikipedia (based on contemporary reports in The Times) says:

On Friday 10 October a memorial service took place at St Paul's Cathedral while the bodies lay in state in Westminster Hall at the Palace of Westminster. Nearly 90,000 people queued to pay their respects: at one time the queue was half a mile long, and the hall was kept open until 00:35 to admit them all:

There was an official inquiry that suggested possible causes for the disaster and found that the voyage to India was undertaken for political reasons before the R101 had undergone enough trials.

But there is a more fundamental safety problems with long-distance airship travel. To carry heavy loads you need plenty of hydrogen, and if you have plenty of hydrogen then you can't fly very high. If you do, the lack of atmospheric pressure will allow the hydrogen to expand and bursts its bags.

Maybe that's why the return of the airship, which has been regularly predicted for as long as I can remember, has never taken place.

I will leave you with a remarkable fact about the R101 from the Great Disasters site:

The most important part of the airship - the bit that provides that lift - is, obviously, the gas itself, and the giant gasbags holding it. They were painstakingly made from "gold-beater skin" – a particular membrane taken from an ox’s intestine. 

It had taken something like a million oxen to make the R101’s gasbags, which were prepared on-site by a team of women who scraped, washed, stretched and glued them into their final form. 

The R101 design team had tested various other materials, but came to the conclusion that gold-beater skin, the tried and tested option, was the best then available.

A million oxen to make one airship? This conjures up a Dieselpunk world where the skies are filled with airships and whole continents are given over to raising the billions of oxen that demands.

Gladstone's son played football for Scotland

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We have seen William Henry Gladstone, the Grand Old Man's eldest child, twice before.

As a small boy he amused Queen Victoria and shortly after that he went to a prep school at Geddington in Northamptonshire.

Today I learnt from Twitter that he was also a footballer. He played for Old Etonians in the FA Cup and for Scotland in their first unofficial international against England in 1870.

William Henry was Liberal MP for Whitby at the time of the international. There was another MP in the Scottish Team: John Wingfield Malcolm, a Conservative who sat for Boston.

Ben Bradley is a rare beneficiary of snobbery

Ben Bradley is solidly middle class. His parents sent him to Derby Grammar School, which despite its name is an expensive private school. Its current fees the sixth-form students are £14,233.

Ben Bradley is as much a career politico as it is possible to be. When he was elected to parliament at the age of 27 he had a degree in politics, was a member of Nottinghamshire County Council and Ashfield District Council, and was working at Westminster as a political researcher.

So why do people regard him as a working-class outsider? How does he get away with being the Chairman of Blue Collar Conservatives?

The answer is snobbery. Because Bradley speaks with an East Midlands accent, people assume he must be working class.

This is absurd and patronising, but our national life is so dominated by people from the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge that people in the political world seldom come across people with an accent different from their own. 

When they do, they generally assume it's because he or she is working class - as if there are no middle-class people north of Watford Gap.

This makes Bradley a rare beneficiary of snobbery. He has so far largely got away with his repellent views because it has been thought his is an authentic working-class voice with no time for the niceties of middle-class debate. Salt of the earth and all that.

I suspect this view of him will not survive his current manic self-exposure.

In the 19th century accents were more diverse. Gladstone is reported to have had a Lancashire accent (though its hard to detect in the only genuine recording of him), while Charles Kingsley spoke with a strong West Country accent.

The only survival of this you hear today is when a Northumbrian aristocrat is interviewed and turns out to speak with the local accent.

Photo of Ben Bradley by Richard Townshend.

Six of the Best 934

Helen Belcher writes an open letter to J.K. Rowling: "Trans women come under huge pressure to conform to gender stereotypes – driven by a fear of what might happen if we don’t.

So does Sophia Grace, who reckons she is the only professor of philosophy in the UK who is also transgender.

"Yes, in 1831 William did speak in the Commons in favour of compensation for slave owners. It was his first speech in the Commons and he was still in thrall to his father. By 1850, he was a changed man and in Parliament he described slavery as 'by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind in any Christian or pagan country.' Peter Francis and Charlie Gladstone defend the Grand Old Man's reputation.

Former England batsman Michael Carberry writes for the Daily Mail about the racism he suffered in cricket.

Martin George says bird watching is good for our mental health. "The modern world creates an unhappy, unhealthy environment for us of largely sedentary lifestyles; invisible threats such as financial worries; travel delays and looming meetings; working in an open plan office with large teams and our backs exposed." 

"Mara Keisling, now one of the nation’s most prominent transgender rights activists, was then an 11-year-old boy living in central Pennsylvania. And when she heard the song on the radio, she suddenly felt less alone in the world." Corky Siemaszko marks the 50th anniversary of The Kinks' Lola.

Telford Lib Dems plant trees to offset election carbon footprint

Embed from Getty Images

From, inevitably, the Shropshire Star:

Liberal Democrats in Telford have bought 175 trees to offset the carbon footprint the party built up during this year's election. 

The party decided to make the purchase through the Eden Reforestation Project, which seeks to plant a minimum of 500 million trees each year and to offer hope through the employment of tens of thousands of people in countries where extreme poverty is rampant. 

The idea was brought forward by Telford & Wrekin Young Liberals through their chair Molly Morgan. 

Party chairman Councillor Greg Spruce said: "We want to help achieve carbon neutrality in Telford & Wrekin before 2030, by setting this example we hope other parties, businesses, charities and residents join us in offsetting their carbon usage."

We've come a long way from Mr Gladstone.

So farewell then Kettering Conservative Club

In Kettering last Saturday I noticed that the town's Conservative Club was up for sale and likely to be converted into "luxury apartments".

Unfortunately, I suspect this has more to do with the general decline of licensed premises than it has with the decline of the Conservative Party.

If I remember correctly, the shop next door used to sell secondhand goods and always had a good selection of books. I once picked up a Malcolm Saville there.

The Dukes of Buccleuch own Boughton House near Kettering.

The current holder of the title was recently deployed as a scary rich person in an article on Liberal Democrat Voice to show that we should not require mobile phone networks to provide a good level of service across the whole country.

We should require them to do so, just as Mr Gladstone made the railway companies serve the whole of society.

Mr Gladstone found alive!

As a #historyteacher I find this (re)animation of Gladstone hypnotic and creepy in equal measure! pic.twitter.com/VphRZRQbJM

— Russel Tarr (@russeltarr) June 10, 2018

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.

Nick Clegg's lecture on William Gladstone

In a lecture given at Gladstone's Library, Hawarden, yesterday, the former Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg considers Gladstonian Liberalism.

He asks whether the central tenets of William Gladstone's politics should be confined to history or used as a model for the future.

Read more about Gladstone's Library.