‘They were casting out demons’: Scottish manager recalls attending exorcism with Gordon Brown to sign a player

Embed from Getty Images

"This one's a doozy. The lads have really given it 110 per cent today," remarked the clerk who brought me the judges' decision.

And she was right. Congratulations to The Athletic on winning our Headline of the Day Award.

The Joy of Six 1477

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunak should not resign as Tory leader after he loses the election

He has not, God knows, been much of a leader, and it's not even certain that he will be returned for Richmond and Northallerton next week, but Rishi Sunak should not resign the Conservative leadership if he loses the election.

Martin Kettle makes the point in the Guardian today:

He should wait until at least after the autumn party conference before making any announcement, to allow the Tories some time for reflection and, if possible, to change the leadership election process. 

And Kettle links to a whole article on the subject that he wrote back in March:

Many Tory MPs seem to take it as read that Sunak, if he loses office, will do the same thing.

He should not do so. Instead Sunak should stay on as Conservative leader if he loses the election. He should prepare the ground for staying on with trusted colleagues. He should then stand at the Downing Street lectern and say responsible leaders do not just jump ship. He should say it is his duty to see the party through a period of necessary reflection. He could even say what Callaghan told Labour MPs in 1979: “There is no vacancy for my job.”

But he needs to have a plan for what he can bring to opposition as well as a plan to then leave later. Here, Michael Howard could be the model. Howard stayed five months after losing the 2005 election before resigning. This had important consequences. The leadership election process was rethought, though not as radically as Howard wanted, and the shadow cabinet was reshaped. This allowed younger faces to catch the spotlight. The result was the election of David Cameron.

The first weeks of a new government can set the tone of a whole parliament. In 2010, because Gordon Brown resigned his party's leadership immediately after leaving Downing Street, Labour had no one to challenge the growing narrative that it had "maxed out the nation's credit card". It was still having this claim hung around its neck at the 2015 general election.

So the Tories need to remain in the debate following their coming defeat and not spend all their energies on a leadership election.

But all this sounds far too sensible for the modern Conservative Party, so expect an immediate resignation with civil war to follow.

Alistair Darling's politics were not as dull as people are saying

I'm sorry to hear of the death of Alistair Darling. We owe him our gratitude as, together with Gordon Brown, he did much to stabilise the world financial system after the global crisis of 2007-8.

He is being written of as an outwardly dull politician who was funny and charming in private life.

While such figures today seem to belong to a more civilised but vanished order, it's fair to say that Darling's politics were not always dull.

So let me, in a spirit of affection, repeat the George Galloway's reminiscences from the Daily Record in March 2008:

When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf. 

Later, in preparation for his current role he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze. 

The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy. 

Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left. 

The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time. 

The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been. 

Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.

Yes, Darling's politics were once so exciting that the Scottish Labour Party sent George Galloway to talk some sense into him.

Rev., Tom Hollander and the shrinking market for Nick Clegg trivia

I went to put some flowers on my mother's grave this afternoon. When I got back I saw a tweet by Andrew Male about rewatching Tom Hollander's situation comedy Rev. He said it has lasted well and even looks prescient:

I now realise how much it was a show about a changing Britain, one where humanity and generosity were gradually being replaced by something more cruel and corporate.

That made me think about how the series and I how I would watch it on DVD with my mother in the days when she was still well enough to come over to my house. 

Andrew Male says that, like Doctor Who, it's all on iPlayer at the moment.

Then a tweet arrived from a Senior Welsh Liberal Democrat Who Now Writes Political Thrillers, asking if I knew that Nick Clegg had been directed in a play by Sam Mendes. I didn't know it. 

Peter Black's tweet sent me to one by Marie Le Conte. which quoted a 2010 Guardian article about... Tom Hollander's situation comedy Rev.

The vital passage says of Hollander:

At Cambridge, where he studied English, he took the title role in a memorable 1988 production of Cyrano de Bergerac that brought together an interesting array of talent. Sam Mendes, a childhood friend from Oxford, was the director, their pal Tom Piper was designer and Nick Clegg, then a frequent student actor, played Carbon de Castel-Jaloux, captain of the cadets.

The market for Nick Clegg trivia has been falling for years, yet I can remember when a blog post about his great great aunt was enough to get you a column with the New Statesman website.

And Tom Hollander's verdict on him has lasted as well as his sit com:

Hollander can't recall Clegg's student performances, but thinks he did well in this year's televised leadership debates. "I would say he's a better actor than Gordon Brown and a worse actor than Tony Blair."

But it was when Blair stopped acting, and everyone else despised him, that I came to have a grudging respect for him.

Cadbury's Dairy Milk and the supersonic Seventies

As I remember it, this is where the Seventies began. There were no more flower children or village green preservation societies: we had landed in a new decade of supersonic air travel, traffic and pollution. (I seem to recall another Cadbury's commercial, using the same tune, that mentioned "the supersonic Seventies", but I can't find it online.)

"Like it always will be?" Cadbury's was sold to the US firm Kraft Foods after the Gordon Brown's government declined to intervene.

And supersonic travel is no more. As Jonathan Meades has pointed out, the future happened briefly in 1969. It seems Cadbury's was already too late.

The hole in the middle of that Dominic Cummings interview

Dominic Cummings' interview with Suzanne Moore has garnered plenty of attention, but for me the most remarkable thing about it is the hole at its centre.

Do you still think it was right to leave Europe?

A lot of people, especially the centre-Left in London, thought joining the Euro would be a success. Now we know we are best off out of it. When the Euro came under pressure it completely wrecked the Greek economy.

That took the blinkers off for me.

Especially now, when you look at how history worked out, and knowing that Covid was coming, it’s very hard to make the case that things could have been different.

I find Cummings' reasoning bizarre.

Moore asks him about British membership of the European Union and he replies by talking joining the Euro.

But Britain joining the Euro hasn't been a serious prospect for 20 years. Tony Blair was attracted to the idea in the early years of his premiership, but his chancellor Gordon Brown wasn't and the idea went nowhere. Since then it has hardly been mentioned.

And then there is his idea that the coming of Covid showed that Brexit was the right decision.

I suppose this rests on the belief that having shaken off EU Britain was able to race ahead with its vaccination programme. But EU law would not have held us back and, though the percentage of the British population who had been vaccinated was impressive for a while, our performance soon dropped back to the European average.

So no benefit from Brexit there either.

Elsewhere in the interview I see the polishing of the Cummings myth: he is the disruptive outsider who shakes up systems and gets results. Except there is little sign of any results from his time at Downing Street.

And behind it all somewhere is another myth: that public schools and Oxbridge and foster a "brilliance" that must be tapped at the heart of government. The result is that contrarianism is valued over knowledge and competence, with results we see all around us.

Boris Johnson tells lies with his hands on the Bible

I've just come across this video of the actor Ian Richardson on the BBC's Sunday AM programme in 2006, the year before he died.

In the excerpt I have chosen here, he reveals something I didn't know. And I speak with all the authority of a former parliamentary sketch writer for Liberal Democrat News.

Chris Leslie joins the bailiffs

Embed from Getty Images

Sitting on the front bench, Tony Blair surveyed the massed ranks of his parliamentary intake and then lent over to Gordon Brown.

"It’s weird,” he said "but there’s a guy back there who’s the splitting image of the boy who does your photocopying." 

"That is him,” Brown replied. “He’s your new MP for Shipley."

That boy was Chris Leslie. So good was his photocopying that he was parachuted into the safe seat of Nottingham East after he lost Shipley and eventually became Ed Miliband's shadow chancellor.

Then he left Labour to join The Independent Group and scorned any thought of an electoral pact with the Greens or Liberal Democrats:

He said a tie-up with other pro-EU parties "wasn't ever on the agenda", adding: "I don't think it will ever be likely because we are starting something new. We are not joining the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party."

Instead, Mr Leslie urged Lib Dem members to switch allegiance and join Change UK, saying the "emergency situation" of Brexit required "a completely fresh overhaul of the centre-ground".

As it turned out, neither Leslie nor his new party, with its ever-changing name, proved attractive to Nottingham East's voters. In last year's general election he finished fourth with 3.6 per cent of the vote.

Now he has emerged as the new chief executive of the trade body for the debt collection industry, the Credit Services Association.

Brynley Heaven, who once wrote a guest post for Liberal England, comments on Twitter:

for a brief period, Chris Leslie was always in the media invited into studios to explain how cuts were unavoidable, Keynes was impossible and misery was the right medicine for the precarious and the poor. Now he has an exciting & poetic opportunity to see some of ideas bear fruit

— Brynley Heaven (@BrynleyHeaven) July 19, 2020

Hemel Hempstead wasn't built in a day

Embed from Getty Images

A lovely paragraph from the Guardian obituary of the historian Paul Addison:

His work not only demonstrated how the great forces of history meshed with the agency of individuals but also displayed a wonderfully elegant style and turn of phrase. In The Road to 1945 he characterised wartime Britain as "Colonel Blimp being pursued through a land of Penguin Specials by an abrasive meritocrat, a progressive churchman, and J.B. Priestley". My own favourite line comes in a chapter on Britain’s New Towns in Now the War is Over: "If Rome was not built in a day, neither was Hemel Hempstead."

The obituary also records that Gordon Brown once wrote of Addison:

"I feel privileged to have been taught by him and to have counted him as a friend."

John Major's eulogy at Paddy Ashdown's memorial service

A memorial service for Paddy Ashdown was held at Westminster Abbey today, attended by four former prime ministers: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Sir John Major.

Here is John Major's eulogy for Paddy.

Child migrants to receive government compensation at last

Embed from Getty Images

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse can now point to a solid achievement.

The government, reports BBC News, has agreed to pay compensation to thousands of Britons who were sent abroad as children under a resettlement scheme, often to a life of drudgery and abuse..

Back in 2010, Gordon Brown apologised on behalf of the government, referring to a "shameful episode" in Britain's history, and the Department of Health said it would set up the compensation scheme as quickly as possible.

But since then nothing has happened.

So it looks as though it was the inquiry's March hearings into the child emigration scheme and call for compensation to be paid within 12 months that made things happen.

Richard Branson quotes me in his new autobiography

Unable to sleep in the small hours, I reached from my Kindle. As you do, I tried a bit of ego-surfing on Google Books - and this was one of the things I found.

I am quoted in Richard Branson's Finding My Virginity: The New Autobiography, which was published in October of last year.

The joke he quotes is from one of the columns I used to write for the New Statesman's website.

You can still find this one on the magazine's website,

In fact all of them are still there, though the Statesman has announced that it is soon to put up a paywall.

Alexei Sayle explains why Blair and Brown were like a comedy double act

Embed from Getty Images

Today's Guardian has an article by Simon Parkin about comedy double acts and how they break up.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Lee and Herring. Newman and Baddiel. They are all there.

I was reminded of an old column by Alexei Sayle, where he discussed the same subject.

It dates from 2005, and it contains an observation on the politics of the day so penetrating that I remember it today.

For Sayle wrote:

In trying to fathom the personal dynamic that exists between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it occurs to me that the closest show business equivalent is that funny business version of the abusive marriage - the comedy double act.

Over the years I have studied double acts. Although I have always been a lone-wolf solo act, the original Comic Strip Club touring line-up was me, and three pairs of comedians. So I have always been well placed to witness the internal affinities and tensions that power these co-dependent comedy relationships. 

In the early days, they start out in hope and a deep and profound friendship. After all, the members of a double act will spend a lot more time with each other than they'll spend with their partners and families. In the early days there is also an equality between the two performers, but then, as they start to become successful, things almost always begin to go wrong. 

From my experience, one member of the double act inevitably begins to get more attention than the other. The neglected one may indeed be less talented, or they may just be less fashionable, or less adept at smooching journalists. 

Whatever the reason, they begin to sink into bitterness and rancour, while the performer who's regarded as the talented one starts to believe that they are truly better than their partner and begins to adopt a "I can't help it if I'm more talented" attitude. They start to waste a great deal of time fighting with each other, to gain tiny crumbs of status over their sidekick. 

But there is also poison contained within the unhappy realisation that maybe the two of them still need each other, they both fear and suspect that there is some gestalt that exists, that what they do together is greater than the sum of its parts. 

The result is that they are locked into working night and day with somebody they now hate.

As his short stories have shown, Sayle is a remarkably good writer.

Sell George Osborne

If George Osborne ever hits a target, it will look something like this...



Thanks to Jeremy Corbyn and the rabble around him, George Osborne must think himself invulnerable. Hence his trip to California at the expense of Google to watch the Super Bowl.

But it is noticeable that in recent weeks more articles critical of the Chancellor have been appearing in Conservative newspapers.

At the end of January there was a vicious piece in the Sun:

George Osborne’s hopes of becoming PM have been severely dented by the Google tax shambles, Tories claim - as a senior minister branded him a "social cripple like Gordon Brown". 

Top Conservatives are increasingly worried the Chancellor does not have what it takes to succeed David Cameron, with another minister saying voters see him as "weird" like Ed Miliband.

And this morning Peter Oborne wrote in the Mail:

Mr Osborne has always been a part-time Chancellor. He is often not at the Treasury, because he is, in effect, the Government’s chief strategist and party manager as well as being Chancellor. It’s he who decides on promotions and sackings. 

He has taken charge of negotiations with the European Union and will manage the campaign to keep Britain in Europe once the referendum is called. 

In addition, he is running his personal campaign to succeed David Cameron as Tory leader, and is particularly assiduous in wining and dining Tory MPs in order to get their support. 

Let’s try a mental experiment. Let’s imagine that Britain was a public company and the finance director also ran human relations, marketing, PR and strategy — all the while intriguing to take over as chief executive. 

There would be an almighty row. Shareholders wouldn’t allow it. They would insist the finance director focused to the exclusion of all else on making certain that the accounts were properly maintained.

Maybe this has something to do with his colleagues' growing awareness that David Cameron will not be Conservative leader for ever.

If so, George Osborne is still the bookies' favourite. But I would suggest you sell George Osborne.

Gordon Brown as Susan Boyle

From the Telegraph, 1 June 2009:

Speaking on GMTV Mr Brown said he watched the final on Saturday night and described the winning dance group as "absolutely wonderful". 

But he said: "I hope Susan Boyle is OK because she is a really, really nice person and I think she will do well. 

"I spoke to Simon Cowell last night and to Piers Morgan and wanted to be sure that she was OK."

How long ago all that now seems!

Eynsham Cricket Club stands on the Cameron/Osborne fault

I like to think Eynsham's ground looks like this

David Cameron is a patrician Conservative from a land-owning and banking background. Like most such politicians he is a pragmatist and not greatly interested in ideas for their own sake.

He is on record as saying that he wanted to be prime minister "because I think I'd be rather good at it". You sense he went into politics, like many sons of the gentry, to (as they would put it) stop Labour ruining everything.

George Osborne is a different animal: urban (he went to St Pauls' rather than Cameron's Eton) and from a more nakedly commercial background.

He is also intensely interested in ideas and in free-market economics in particular.

So far what has been remarkable about Cameron and Osborne is the way they have kept together - the relationship of Labour's equivalent, Blair and Brown, soon foundered on the latter's thwarted ambition.

But there are potential fault lines between Cameron and Osborne, as an otherwise inconsequential story in the Telegraph shows:

David Cameron’s attempt to save a local cricket club from folding because of an unexpected tax bill has been stumped by his own Chancellor George Osborne. 

Eynsham Cricket Club in Mr Cameron’s Witney constituency has been fighting for months against a decision by HM Revenue and Customs to saddle it with a £34,000 VAT bill. 

The bill is due after the club raised £170,000 to pay for a new club house after it was burned down in 2012 in an arson attack. 

The cricket club, which has just 25 adult members and 20 juniors aged five to 65, taking in £2,300 a year in annual subscriptions, is warning that it will have to close if the bill is enforced ... 

Mr Cameron then raised it with Mr Osborne, who investigated but found nothing could be done. 

In a letter from his House of Commons office, Mr Cameron told the club on March 17: 

“I have raised this with the Chancellor and we have looked very carefully at what can be done. 

"I am afraid it is not promising."

This is a neat parable. The pragmatic Cameron, has a good local grandee wants to help his local cricket club, but the more theoretical Osborne tells him that nothing can be done.

Note too that this incident features Cameron as the supplicant and Osborne as the one who makes the decision.

That may be a neat metaphor for what has happened in the Cameron-Osborne relationship.

Cameron's attempt to give his beliefs shape - The Big Society - failed. In fact it would be more accurate to say that it was not even tried.

Today it is Osborne ideas that define the Conservative Party. How happy Cameron is with this remains to be seen - particularly if the polls suggest those ideas are not going down well with the public.

In the mean time, keep any eye on Eynsham Cricket Club. It may be the field where this battle is lost and won.

Chris Leslie demonstrates how to get ahead in politics

Chris Leslie first swam into my consciousness by starring in an an anecdote about the first parliamentary session following Labour's landslide victory of May 1997.

Here is Dan Hodges retailing a version of it:

Sitting on the front bench, Tony Blair surveyed the massed ranks of his parliamentary intake and then lent over to Gordon Brown. 

“It’s weird,” he said “but there’s a guy back there who’s the splitting image of the boy who does your photocopying.” 

“That is him,” Brown replied. “He’s your new MP for Shipley”.

Informed speculation this weekend has it that Leslie, now MP for Nottingham East, will be appointed as his party's new shadow chancellor on Monday,

Which puts me in mind of Gilbert and Sullivan...

Lord Bonkers advised Labour against having Gordon Brown as leader

If I am unable to sleep, I turn to the diaries of Lord Bonkers - they usually do the job quite quickly.

Every now and then, however, I come across something that brings me up short. Like this from 2006.

Saturday 

It is hard not to sympathise with the New Party’s MPs: Blair has clearly gone barking mad – his public protestations of love for a chimpanzee, all those foreign wars, his plans to send children to the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness, before they are born – but their constitution makes it impossible to get rid of him. 

We Liberal Democrats recently had leadership problems of our own, but Kennedy’s fondness for drink never put the country in peril. Yes, he might fall asleep in meetings, sing raucous Highland ballads or try to kiss Alan Beith, but life was still more restful than under his predecessor, Paddy Ashplant, and – dash it all – I am rather fond of old Beith myself. 

A word of advice to the New Party: if you do succeed in tipping Blair out of the window, don’t replace him with that dour Brown fellow. Try someone younger and fresher like Tony Benn’s charming daughter Hilary or one of the Millipede brothers.

Would it be a tragedy if there were no televised election debates?

#98485469 / gettyimages.com

The broadcasters are struggling to arrive at fair arrangements for leaders' debates in next year's general election and risk being snookered by the realities of multi-party politics and threats of legal action.

But would it be such a tragedy if there were no debates?

Many argue that the 2010 debates were a breakthrough and interested new people in politics.

But the most striking thing about those debates was the way that all three party leaders avoided talking about what the secretly regarded as the biggest issue facing the country.

Because there was barely a mention of the public-sector deficit - and even fewer of the tax rises and spending cuts that would be needed to reduce it.

So while the debates were certainly a novelty, it is hard to argue that there content was a revelation.

And from a partisan Liberal Democrat position, Nick Clegg will never be able to repeat the impact he made in the first debate in 2010.

You can even argue that Cleggmania (that short-lived phenomenon) ultimately harmed the Lib Dems. The breakdown in our targeting strategy as more and more constituencies dreamt of victory meant that a small increase in our vote actually resulted in a loss of seats.

So I should not be too concerned if there were no leaders' debates in 2015.

And there is a precedent from over the Atlantic.

Everyone knows the 1960 debates where JFK bested Richard Nixon. But far fewer realise that there were no televised debates in the US after that until 1976, when both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter judged that they needed more exposure and so agreed to debate.