Martin Wainwright's Guardian obituary of Michael Meadowcroft

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Michael Meadowcroft, who wrote so many obituaries himself, is remembered in the Guardian by Martin Wainwright, the son of a fellow Yorkshire Liberal MP:

Michael Meadowcroft, who has died aged 84 after a short illness, was a Yorkshire Liberal politician and activist of great resource and flair. He constantly wrong-footed Labour in its former heartlands in Leeds as a nimble source of new ideas, closely in touch with voters and patient at working with them to get local problems solved.

He served as a Liberal party member of Leeds city council from 1968 to 1983, and then as an MP for Leeds West for four years.

Meadowcroft was famously the only MP in the city’s history who led a weekend jazz ensemble in the main shopping precinct, pausing between numbers to discuss political issues with passers-by.

Exuberantly self-confident, he was a natural challenger with less interest in becoming part of any status quo. But he was steeped in Liberal philosophy as well as being a rigorous organiser, central to the party’s adoption of "community politics" during its resurgence under the charismatic leadership of Jo Grimond in the 1960s.

How the Guardian flattered Morgan McSweeney and why it did so

Those hoping to be impressed when Morgan McSweeney made a rare public appearance, courtesy of the Commons' foreign affairs select committee, will have been disappointed. A No. 10 led by him and Keir Starmer really was a case of the bland leading the bland.

But how did the Guardian's Whitehall editor greet Morgan McSweeney when he was appointed? Those of you with strong stomachs, read on:

As the brains behind Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign, McSweeney is credited with having brought the prime minister to power. He entered No 10 as head of political strategy, in charge of charting the party’s path to another victory in five years' time.

When it emerged there were rival power bases around McSweeney and Gray in No 10, few had any doubt he would survive any fallout. He has now emerged as chief of staff, with unrivalled influence, and is likely to bring a much sharper political focus to the job.

McSweeney is adored by many staffers, with some party figures retaining more affection for him than they do for Starmer. The highest form of praise in Labour HQ has been said to be: "Morgan loves it." However, he is something of a bogeyman on the left after leading the thinktank Labour Together in a campaign to purge the party of Jeremy Corbyn’s influence.

After working in Labour’s attack unit in the New Labour years, McSweeney cut his teeth as chief of staff to the then Lambeth council leader Steve Reed, who is now a cabinet minister, and helped defeat the British National party in Barking and Dagenham. Born in Ireland, he divides his time between Scotland and Westminster. His wife, Imogen Walker, is Labour’s MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley.

Why this unctuous tone? As I explained at the time, it was beat-sweetening and source-greasing.

And I got these terms from an article Timothy Noah published when Obama named his team after first winning the Presidency:

This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter's access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they've been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why. 

My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.

This is why even the teams behind candidates for the leadership of opposition parties get enthusiastic write ups. They may just turn out to be the people the journalist wants to take his calls for years to come.

Some staggering moments from 75 years of The Archers

A fellow Liberal Alliance councillor told me back in the Eighties that, when he was a small boy, he and his friends were avid listeners to Dick Barton – Special Agent. 

When they heard that a new series called The Archers was to occupy its slot, they naturally assumed it would be about Robin Hood and his Merrie Men.

Imagine their disappointment when they tuned in for the first episode...

At the start of this year, the Guardian celebrated 75 years of The Archers with 75 of its most staggering moments. Here are few they chose:

• Outsiders have always been treated with suspicion in Ambridge. In its first year, unrepentant townie Bill Slater was fatally injured in a brawl outside the Bull.
• Nelson Gabriel, once voted the Greatest Rogue in the series’ history, vanished in an alleged plane crash in 1967. Implicated in the Great Borchester Mail Van Robbery, he was eventually returned by Interpol.
• Adam Macy’s overprotective parenting style might be partly explained by the fact that in 1970, at the age of three, he was kidnapped from the Bull by a couple of Brummie bunglers hoping to blackmail his wealthy paternal grandfather. Three days later, he was rescued from the big bad city thanks to a tip-off from Sid Perks.
• Fresh from her adventures at Greenham Common, Guardian-subscriber Pat Archer almost left Express-reader Tony for her women’s studies lecturer in 1984 … until Tony wooed her back with a bold plan to go organic. (On the farm, not in the bedroom.)
• Four years after their first kiss, Emma and Ed Grundy made their relationship public – a delay explained by the fact that in the meantime she had married and had a baby with his brother Will.

A portrait of Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)

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The playwright Tom Stoppard died today. There will be plenty of obituaries, but there is a good portrait of him in this Guardian interview from two years ago (to the day) by Claire Armitstead:

Tom Stoppard is chatting in the theatre bar when I arrive to interview him about a revival of his play Rock ’n’ Roll. He was comparing ailments with an elderly director friend, he says cheerfully, as he heads up the stairs, having declined an offer of the lift. At 86 he has the nonchalant elegance of a spy in a cold war thriller, lean and mop-haired in a discreetly expensive-looking coat.

Though Stoppard is feted around the world for some of the cleverest plays of the last 60 years, as well as the Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, he is more gossipy than grand. “I said to him,” he reports of the conversation from which he has just been dragged away, “I’m being interviewed by the Guardian in half an hour and it’s supposed to be about Rock ’n’ Roll, but I’m going to have to have an opinion about Gaza, aren’t I?”

Being canvassed for opinions comes with the territory for a playwright whose identity straddles two of the biggest faultlines of 20th century history. His most recent play, Leopoldstadt, was a monumental reckoning with a Jewish heritage of which he only became aware in middle age. It ended with Leo, one of three survivors of a mighty dynasty, returning after the war to a Vienna of which he had no memory, having adopted his stepfather’s surname and lived in England since infancy.

Stoppard himself settled in England and adopted his stepfather’s name when he was eight, though his early childhood was spent not in Austria but Czechoslovakia. Rock ’n’ Roll, which premiered at the Royal Court in 2006, contains a different reckoning: what if, instead of getting remarried to an Englishman after the death of Stoppard’s doctor father in the war against Japan, his mother had returned to Soviet Czechoslovakia with him and his brother? 

“I thought I could write a play which was about myself as I imagined my life might have been from the age of eight,” he says. “And then I would find out whether I was brave enough to be a dissenter, or just somebody who would keep his head down and his nose clean. And I have a terrible feeling that it would have been the latter.”

In 2020 the same paper published a review by Stefan Collini of Hermione Lee's biography of Stoppard:

Although Stoppard’s plays can seem like the distillation of several course-loads of reading lists, he didn’t go to university. Instead, at 17 he started work as a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol. 

What he lacked in experience he seems to have made up for in chutzpah: he got himself made the paper’s motoring correspondent without revealing that he couldn’t drive. Increasingly, he wrote theatre reviews, and then followed his dream by giving up his job, moving to London, and writing plays.

That time 11 years ago when I upset Enid Blyton fans

Asked by the late David Boyle, who used to do freelance shifts on the newspaper's comment desk, I once wrote a piece on children's loss of freedom and its implications for children's literature for the Guardian website. David later told me that it had nearly made the printed newspaper.

In it, as any good Malcolm Saville fan would, I took the opportunity to take a few pot shots at Enid Blyton:

Her characters were wooden, her plots slapdash and her settings – generic ruined castles and spooky old houses – were like a Hollywood set; look round the back and you could see the struts holding up the painted hardboard.

And 

Blyton was not helped by the illustrator of her most popular series. The Famous Five were made to resemble enthusiastic members of the Hitler Youth. Julian, in particular, looked capable of ordering the burning of the entire village if the tea he and his chums were offered did not come up to scratch.

Fair comment, I'm sure you will agree.

I recently discovered that this article was the subject of a pained thread on The Enid Blyton Society's forum:

I find it very sad when an opinion article on a pertinent topic loses itself in the author's own posturing and point-scoring.

I stand by the conclusion of my Guardian article:

While we wait for the spirit of the children's adventure story to seep back into modern society, those of us who grew up on Malcolm Saville's books will remain convinced of his superiority, no matter what Enid Blyton fans say.

One day we will challenge them to a picnic and drink them under the table with ginger beer.

Zack Polanski and Alistair Darling: Two soft rides from the Guardian

I'm late to the party on last week's Guardian interview with Zach Polanski, but I've still decided to come.

Reading it today, I find it's not the first time the Guardian has allowed the politician to present a carefully edited version of his past without challenge.

Zoe Williams¹ tells us that Polanksi:

started by joining the Lib Dems, and standing as a councillor in north London in 2016. “That was for one very clear reason,” he says. “Proportional representation – it’s always been really important to me.” He joined the Greens the following year...

But Polanski didn't stand in a London borough election: he stood for the Greater London Assembly. And, a prominent figure on social media, he clearly had higher ambitions with the Liberal Democrats. 

Some say he had his eye on the by-election in Richmond Park, and made up his mind to leave the Lib Dems once the local party decided to stick with Sarah Olney as their candidate.

And then there was that notorious article where he told a Sun journalist he could make her breasts bigger by using hypnosis.²

Reading it now, it looks like a puff piece for his business rather than a hatchet job. Yet Williams defends it on the grounds that "he was only just 30".

But this is not the first such interview I've seen in the Guardian. Here's Decca Aitkenhead profiling the late Alistair Darling back in 2008:

Studying law at Aberdeen, he stood for election in the student union, but not for a party. "I was just quite interested in getting things done." His manifesto favoured "strictly bread-and-butter issues, things like food prices in the student refectory". When he joined the Labour party in 1977, he never expected to be more than a member.

The truth was rather different and will surprise anyone who remembers Darling in days as Gordon Brown's chancellor.

Here's George Galloway remembering a meeting with Darling in 1973:

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.

And joining Labour didn't curb his militant tendencies:

Later ... 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.

A reader asks: So what's the moral of all this?

Liberal England replies: I suppose it's that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the Guardian.

The reader persists: That a bit obvious, isn't it?

Liberal England admits: I suppose it is. To be honest, I just wanted to repeat that George Galloway story one last time. Oh, and to show that I've found how to do the numbers for footnotes in superscript.³

Notes

1. Nevertheless, I won't hear a word against Zoe Williams: in my press officer days she was always a pleasure to deal with. Polly Toynbee, by contrast, once made me miss my train.
2. I'm not scandalised by that Sun article, it's just that it reminds me of when P.G. Wodehouse's Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts, turns out to be a designer of ladies' underwear. And Polanski's suggested strategy of concentrating on winning an urban, Corbynite vote will appeal to many Green members.
3. See?

Running British universities as if they were businesses

Our universities used to be among the few British institutions that the rest of the world really did envy. But from 2010 the Coalition was determined they should be run more like businesses.

In recent weeks the collapse of this policy has been demonstrated by the wave of redundancies engulfing British universities. Looking for mainstream media coverage where I would expect to find it, it's hard even to locate the education coverage at all on the BBC or Guardian sites these days, but the story has been well covered on social media.

And the pithiest comment on it is to be found there too:

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

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— Ross Carroll (@rosscarroll.bsky.social) 25 February 2025 at 22:24

This anecdote neatly encapsulates a lengthier observation by Stefan Colini in the London Review of Books in 2013:

Future historians, pondering changes in British society from the 1980s onwards, will struggle to account for the following curious fact. 

Although British business enterprises have an extremely mixed record (frequently posting gigantic losses, mostly failing to match overseas competitors, scarcely benefiting the weaker groups in society), and although such arm’s length public institutions as museums and galleries, the BBC and the universities have by and large a very good record (universally acknowledged creativity, streets ahead of most of their international peers, positive forces for human development and social cohesion), nonetheless over the past three decades politicians have repeatedly attempted to force the second set of institutions to change so that they more closely resemble the first.

 Some of those historians may even wonder why at the time there was so little concerted protest at this deeply implausible programme. But they will at least record that, alongside its many other achievements, the coalition government took the decisive steps in helping to turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies. If you still think the time for criticism is over, perhaps you’d better think again.

And because this is Britain, these new business-like universities turned out to feature indifferent senior managers on grossly inflated salaries.

Lib Dems will continue to back 50 per cent cap on faith-based admissions to schools

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It may be unintentional, but as it stands the government's Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill allows the creation of a new generation of church schools that are not bound by the existing 50 per cent cap on faith-based admissions.

So I'm pleased that the Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Munira Wilson is to move an amendment that would make new schools subject to this cap too.

Pleased? Back in 2017, I blogged about a Sunday Times report that Muslim pupils outnumber Christian children in more than 30 church schools.

I said I regarded this as good news and quoted Timothy Garton Ash, in his book Free World, on the woolly duffle-coat of Britishness:

Gisela Stuart, herself a German-British MP, describes a neighbourhood in her Birmingham constituency that has a large Asian population. Since Asian parents want the best education for their children, and the best school in the neighbourhood is a convent school, they send their daughters there. Never mind the Catholicism; that can be expunged by Islamic instruction after school hours, at the local madrasah. 

So there they sit, row upon row of girls in their Islamic headscarves, being taught maths, British history and, incidentally, the story of baby Jesus, by nuns in their Christian headscarves. A complete muddle, of course, but Europe will need more such muddling through if it is to make its tens of millions of Muslims feel at home.

As to whether we should have faith schools at all, I remembered tackling this question long ago in an article for the Guardian website.

Reading it today, I find it better than I remembered - I'd still be happy to defend the views in it.

What I had forgotten completely is that it was written as a reply to the mighty James Graham. 

Those were the days. When the Guardian would invite one Lib Dem blogger to reply to another Lib Dem blogger and they both got paid for the privilege.

Josh Babarinde makes progress with his campaign for a separate domestic abuse offence

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The Guardian has slapped an "Exclusive" label on its report that Josh Babarinde has called for a specific defence of domestic violence to be introduced.

This is a bad case of overselling, given that he appeared on Good Morning on 10 December to talk about the idea.

But there are encouraging developments in the report. Josh says he has received support from both Labour and Conservative MPs, and its claims that:

Officials are examining whether to change the way domestic violence crimes are recorded after a campaign by an MP who says the lack of a specific offence allows abusers to be freed early from jail.

The quote from a Ministry of Justice spokesperson at the end is less definite than this:

"Domestic abuse comes in many forms, not just physical. Under the current system, domestic abusers already face longer sentences as it is considered an aggravating factor in sentencing for a wide range of offences. However, the independent review of sentencing, led by David Gauke, has been tasked with looking at how best to address crimes of violence against women and girls in future."

The other day I heard David Blunkett quoted as saying this government has "hit the ground reviewing," but let's hope something good comes of this one.

Josh spoked movingly to the Guardian about his own childhood, saying he recalls violence as creating a "really lonely" home life: 

"I would be upstairs in my room hearing an argument unfold, voices raised, shouts, screams, things smashed, and I would pull my covers over me and just sit crying. I didn’t know if my mum was OK."

We need to talk about "discombobulated"

‘Gimp play is a craft’: how a Canadian writer went from fetish sex work to creating powerful BBC drama

runs a headline on the Guardian website. And if it marks the birth of a way to a showbiz career that doesn't involve the Cambridge Footlights, then it's nothing but good news.

No, it's the first paragraph of the article below that worries me:

When the Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill moved to London in 2016, it was the week after the EU referendum. “For my partner at the time, who was British, it was a devastating kind of discombobulation,” Tannahill says.

Because you can't have "a devastating kind of discombobulation".

"Discombobulation" comes from "discombobulate", a word invented in the 19th century for comic effect. Dictionary.com explains:

Discombobulate “to confuse, upset, or frustrate” was originally a jocular American coinage from the North Midland U.S. (from Ohio west through Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, to Nebraska). Discombobulate is a pseudo-Latinism like absquatulate and confusticate, and based on learned Latin words like disaffiliate or disaggregate, or humorous alterations of discompose or discomfort. 

The many variant spellings include discombobligate, discombobolate, discomboberate, discombooberate, and discumboblificate. Discombobulate entered English in 1825 in the spelling discomboberated.

And for me the word maintains its slightly enforced jocularity. It's redolent, if not of red noses and outsize shoes, then at least of an uncle who can waggle his ears and wants to organise the children to play party games.

It's fine in letters between friends - not that friends write each other letters any more - and, if you must, on social media.

Simon Williams is one of those invaluable chess players who talks about games as he plays them and then posts the whole thing on YouTube (see also John Bartholomew and Daniel Naroditsky). If he succeeds in disrupting his opponent's smooth development in a game, he may remark that "White's queenside is discombobulated", and the word works in this informal context. But I have doubts about the use of "discombobulation" in a serious newspaper

And "a devastating kind of discombobulation" doesn't work at all. It's yoking together two words in completely different registers. All I see is a clown blowing his nose and miming exaggerated weeping.

Having a mate called Danny whose nickname is Danzo, "cuz he’s the king of Lanzo"

If you were lucky enough not to have come across this, er,  unique Guardian article 'The rise of Britishcore: 100 experiences that define and unite modern Britons', do not click this link.

It was suggested to me by on Twitter that the author must be the son of someone on the paper to have got it published.

The new Private Eye shows that was almost right: he's the long-term partner of someone there.

When the editor saw this article, the Eye goes on, she gave orders for it to be buried in the depths of the Guardian's website. But I recruited a team of professional cave divers to help me this afternoon, and we found it.

The Joy of Six 1217

"Everything John Barnett said about Boeing’s problems was true. Everything. If the company had been willing to listen to him, 346 airline passengers would still be alive. And maybe Barnett would be too." Joe Nocera on the death of whistleblower.

Tim Eaton and Christopher Phillips look at British foreign policy with David Cameron as foreign secretary. "Cameron’s energy ... does not appear to be part of a broader foreign policy strategy. The UK’s response towards Gaza and MENA [ the Middle East and North Africa] in general remains reactive and Britain is not at the forefront of discussion on what comes next."

Roz Kaveney, a veteran trans activist, talks to Hackney History about the history of the struggle: "I noticed a lot of bleakness creeping into trans social media and thought it my job as a community elder to remind young people that things had been, if not worse, at least as bad in different ways... The important thing about life in an embattled community is to have each others backs."

"There are loud voices, currently holding the microphone, who seem determined to run classical music into the ground. Even Arifa Akbar, The Guardian’s chief theatre critic, recently announced that traditional modes of listening to such music (respectfully and quietly) are elitist. This is only going to get worse. Those of us who really care about classical music, whether listeners, performers, educators, critics or arts administrators, need to be prepared to stand up and speak out." Alexandra Wilson says classical music is under threat from accusations of elitism.

"Train travellers approaching Peterborough from the south can still, for now, see what might once have been the future of train travel. It might have been yet another fruit of what many see as the engineering genius of the UK. What went wrong?" J.J. Jackson finds out.

Andy Walmsley takes us back 50 years to the launch of Radio Caroline.

Why does "Back to square one" date from the early 1960s?

Barney Ronay often appears the Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. That's because he writes intelligently and allusively about football, and nothing reveals the Eye's roots among public school boys of the 1950s more clearly than that column.

For the Eye, being dismissive of football is still an important social marker - you prefer rugby, of course - and artistic or other esoteric interests are to be teased out of your classmates in case they affect their ability to run the Empire in later life. (As I once blogged, it took the public schools decades to notice the dwindling of the British Empire.)

I'm saying all this because I'm now going to disagree with Ronay, who tweeted today after the prime minister warned us all against "going back to square one":

"Back to square one" is a phrase from early radio football comms when paper with squares on was used to convey where the ball was. It meant passing back to your own defence. In an irony lost on Rishi all successful modern teams go back to square one constantly

I'm not convinced by the logic of this gotcha. With my philosopher's head on, as Glenn Hoddle would say, I distrust the idea that an expression's meaning is decided by its derivation, so that it can "really" mean something other than what we all think it means.

Because, as Wittgenstein wrote, "the meaning of a word is its use in a language". There's no hidden, 'real' meaning to be discovered. (Incidentally, my philosophy professor at York was called Ronald Atkinson. It didn't seem funny at the time.)

I also doubt this story about "back to square one" coming from its use in early football commentaries. The question of its derivation was once debated in the Guardian, and this produced a pretty convincing debunking from a George Brindley:

As a boy in the 1930s, I regularly listened to such broadcasts while following the movement of the ball on a football-pitch chart in the Radio Times which was divided into eight squares. Captain H B T Wakelam gave the commentary while Charles Lapworth would murmur "Square 3" . . . "Square 5" . . . as the ball moved about the field. Wakelam never mentioned the squares, and Lapworth said nothing else. The phrase "back to square one" was never used. 

On the 50th anniversary of broadcast commentaries in 1973, an article in the Radio Times credited the phrase to these commentaries, but one has only to look at the diagram to see that the phrase could have no relevance: "back" to one team would be "forward" to the other; the restart after a goal was never in square one; and a pass-back to goal could also be "back to square two", "square seven" or "square eight".

My hunch was that it came from Snakes and Ladders or a similar game, though even the meanest snake won't drop you back on square one. So I turned to the British Newspaper Archive, expecting to find lots of 19th-century examples.

But it turned out to be very rare in those days, and you are as likely to find "back at square one" or "back in square one" as the phrase we are looking for.

And there was absolutely no sign of the expression catching on between the wars, as we would expect if the theory about it coming from early football commentaries were true. I expect suspect we have found another instance of the rule that all popular etymology is wrong.

What really surprised me is that the expression took off in popularity at the beginning of the Sixties and has never looked back since. The Ngram below confirms this.

Should we be looking for a forgotten television quiz or radio panel game where "Back to square one" was a catchphrase? Because something at that time caused it to become suddenly popular.

What does the panel think?

"For me he's written that too well. If he'd just dashed something off, he'd have beaten the keeper."

"He's trying to compete at the top level and he's taken way too long over moving the game on. It's embarrassing."

Later. Thanks for to a reader for sending me the link to an edition of Balderdash and Piffle from 2006 that considers the derivation of 'back to square one'. It examines and rejects the football theory, as well as another about the phrase coming from the game of hopscotch. It finds a 1959 example of the phrase that mentions the game of Snakes and Ladders, but the fact the author has to spell out his meaning suggests the phrase was not much in circulation then.

Besides what interests me now is the reason for the sudden popularity of the phrase from 1970. I shall go back to the British Newspaper Archive for clues.

Cricket journalist Matthew Engel wins Golden Valley South

One of my favourite cricket writers, Matthew Engel, was this evening elected as councillor for Golden Valley South ward of Herefordshire Council.

He was standing as an Independent in a by-election caused by the death of the sitting Independent councillor Peter Jinman.

Later. Engel received over 60 per cent of the vote, beating Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem candidates, as well as another Independent.

Somehow this disqualifyingly moronic assumption did not deter Russell Brand's political acolytes

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Twitter yesterday was full of people arguing that, because Russell Brand - who denies all the allegations made against him on Saturday's Dispatches programme - was being defended by right-wing conspiracy loons, there were no lessons for the left to learn from his rise and fall.

If you pointed out, as I did a couple of times, that Brand had written a Guardian column for years and edited a special issue of the New Statesman, some were outraged.

So I was pleased by Marina Hyde's article in the Guardian this morning, which looks at the role of the press - the Guardian and herself included - in boosting Brand over the year.

Here are a few quotations from it:

Back in the day, though, a lot of people were thrilled to be on what they thought was Russell’s side of the line. For a certain type of mournfully uncool man on the left, Russell Brand was quite the excitement. You only had to watch their little faces in his presence – lit up at being fleetingly indulged by the kind of guy who would probably have bullied them at school. 

And:

The apogee of this particular stage of Brand’s inevitable journey toward alt-right-frotting wingnut was surely the ludicrously feverish speculation over whether he’d endorse Labour in the 2015 general election. 

Keen to be awarded his royal warrant, the then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, traipsed to Brand’s London flat during the final stages of the campaign, for a filmed interview where committed non-voter Russell inquired rhetorically: “Since suffrage, since the right to vote, what has meaningfully occurred?” Nothing much, he reckoned. Somehow, this disqualifyingly moronic assumption did not deter his political acolytes.

And:

What is completely bizarre, with the benefit of 2023 hindsight, is how the Sachsgate story was framed, both by those who were reflexive defenders of the BBC and “comedy” and free speech (then a somewhat lefty preoccupation, funnily enough), AND by those who wished their destruction. Fleet Street quickly settled into tribes and covered it as a story where each assumed the other was acting out of vested interests. This was back when our only culture wars were about things that happened on the BBC. (My how we’ve grown.) Mail vox pops were incandescent; some Guardian ones found it an “overreaction”.

Hyde also reminds us that the Liberal Democrat contribution to this climate was Nick Clegg telling GQ he had slept with 30 women.

I have sometimes resisted the cult of Marina Hyde in the past, but this is a brave and important column.

Later. Sadly, the column isn't or brave as I first thought. Here is a Lost in Showbiz column by Hyde from January 2009 - thanks to Gerry Lynch for tweeting it:

Today in Jesus Wept we must turn to Sachsgate breakout star Georgina Baillie, who has thus far managed to parlay Russell Brand's insult to her dignity into an excruciatingly candid red-top buy-up and a number of semi-mucky photoshoots.

But can we please draw the line at the trenchant newspaper comment pieces? It seems not. Breaking another ten second silence, Manuel's estranged granddaughter takes to the pages of today's Sun with an opinion column unlikely to give PJ O'Rourke any sleepless nights.

Entitled "My View", it sees the Satanic Slut attempt to gain some sort of purchase on this latest Jonathan Ross "outrage", the details of which I literally cannot be bothered to even look up, let alone confect horror over. The world can now be divided into people who genuinely think caring about this crap is important, and people you might wish to know socially.

If Russell Brand was the school bully who was briefly your friend, then in these columns Marina Hyde was the most popular girl in the school, and she was being mean to someone else.

It's a shame she didn't acknowledge that in today's article. What appeared to be an admission of guilt now looks more like an attempt to hide it with fake candour.

Russell Brand was a creation of television and the tabloids, not the comedy circuit

Until last night's Dispatches, I had never seen Russell Brand's comedy act. I now look back on those days with affection. 

But that doesn't mean I wasn't aware of him. As I complained in 2013:

Russell Brand turned up writing on football for the Guardian. He guest edits the New Statesman. He's interviewed on Newsnight. I can’t get away from him.

He wasn’t much of a sportswriter and his political views on Newsnight were ridiculous – a bunch of media-left slogans and a call for unelected officials to tax us all.

But then why should he be expected to be an expert on these things? He is a niche comedian.

Brand’s trouble is that he has become a symbol of youthful cool and everyone wants to be associated with him.

Jonathan Ross’s exit from the BBC arose from his inability to grow middle aged gracefully. He wanted to show how young and hip he still was. And the way to show that was to demonstrate to us that he knew all about Brand’s love life.

And two years later Owen Jones fell under Brand's spell too. And have a look at the Guardian's contributor page for Brand to see just how much the paper loved him.

The extent to which Brand was a media creation was brought home to me by something Simon Evans tweeted this afternoon:

Brand is not now and never was a comedian. He was never on the 'comedy circuit', which is now being traduced as an unreconstructed sewer of nodding, winking, pawing, leering predatory men, with a code of silence to match their coercive behaviour.

He's a TV/tabloid/PR construct and that is the sewer you need to navigate if you want to understand the culture that allowed him to thrive. Pretty much the exact same one that allowed his illustrious precursors in disgrace to thrive before him.

I was a stand up from 1996 and gigged hard on the circuit until 2010 or so. I didn’t see Brand on a bill once. I’ve been in multiple dressing rooms with everyone else from that era, however quickly they elevated to TV and tour shows. That’s how it works. I’ve never even met Brand. 

The only time I saw Brand at a show was  standing at the back of a one off gig being hosted by his friend Simon Amstell. I am not guilting Simon by association, I don’t know him. But that’s who he was there with. 

Brand is (or rather was in those years) 100 per cent the product of the very culture that C4 deliberately cultivated like a pseudo left wing Daily Mail sidebar of shame, with a dash of Eurotrash. I found it nauseating but they loved his bad boy shock factor.

My honest gut feeling was that he would have been despised in 90 per cent of 'dressing' rooms on the circuit. They were old fashioned enough on the whole and If nothing else he showed a good deal of self awareness in steering clear of the place and booking himself on the fast track to notoriety via Big Brother and Bizarre.

And for some sharp analysis of the way the media kowtowed to Brand, read Evans on his appearance on Newsnight in the video above.

He says of it:

It’s not a masterpiece (and I cringe at some of the boosted “laughter track”) but then it was written and performed in a 48-hour period. And the hat was misjudged. I did not quite understand the format. 

But I will assert that my chosen take on Brand was driven through against the prevailing perception of his having spoken truth to power in that Newsnight interview. Prevailing in the SUFTW offices at any rate. And particularly among… but no. I’ll leave it there. 

"You can always get away with being rude about the Midlands"

On Twitter today, Brynley Heaven, who once wrote a guest post for this blog about three unlikely heroes from Grantham, mentioned the Blair government's long-forgotten proposal for eco-towns.

This reminded me that I had written an article for the Guardian website opposing the idea that one of them should be built just to the east of Leicester.

It began:

These days, there are few prejudices people feel comfortable displaying in public, but you can always get away with being rude about the Midlands.

This dismissive attitude goes back a long way. Hilaire Belloc described the Midlands as "sodden and unkind", and when Leicester council engaged a London advertising agency to boost the city's image, it was naturally offered an achingly ironic campaign with the slogan "Boring, boring Leicester". 

As with all prejudices, the most insidious effect of "Midlandsism" is the way its victims internalise it.

On his blog Unmitigated England, the writer and photographer Peter Ashley describes one of his favourite Midlands locations, the lane that circles Cranoe church in a hairpin bend as it drops into the Welland valley: "I once used to say to companions on this road 'Look at this. You could be in Dorset. Or Devon. You'd never think you were in Leicestershire.'"

But he has managed to raise his consciousness: "I have now realised what a fatuous remark this is. This is Leicestershire, and in fact very typical of the eastern side of the county."

And Midlandsism has actual detrimental effects on people who live here. In particular, it is hard to believe the Pennbury site in Leicestershire would have got anywhere near Caroline Flint's eco-towns shortlist if it were in the south east.

Read on to learn why Pennbury was not the place to build a new town: thrill as I absolve myself of the charge of Nimbyism.

These days you will find Peter Ashley on Instagram.

Liz Truss's leadership campaign is being run from a Westminster house owned by a former private secretary to Enoch Powell

A couple of week's ago the Guardian took us Inside Team Truss.

The one interesting thing I learnt from this article - and thanks to the reader who pointed it out to me - is that Truss's campaign is being run from a Westminster townhouse owned by the Conservative peer Greville Howard, who was private secretary to Enoch Powell between 1968 and 1970.

Beyond that. it's largely gush. 

We're told of one team member:

"She’s as dry as a pancake but got a great policy head," said one Tory source.

And before we've finished wondering why this Tory source thinks a pancake is proverbially dry, we've been told that one of the two people directing "strategic communications" is a former media adviser to Prince Andrew.

But no political journalist is going to slag off the backroom staff of a possible future prime minister. Because these may well turn out to be, for years to come, the very people this journalist needs to take her calls.

Two weeks on, we know that Truss's campaign has been run in a harebrained manner unrivalled in modern times - unless it is by the campaign being fought by her rival Rishi Sunak.

Suspect in shooting of Lady Gaga’s dog walker mistakenly released from jail

Today's Headline of the Day contest sees a victory for the mainstream media. Well done, the Guardian.

The right looks for converts: the left looks for traitors

Embed from Getty Images

You don't have to be active in British politics for long before you recognise the truth of this quotation:

The right looks for converts: the left looks for traitors.

Today, for instance, Twitter is full of left-wingers crowing about the redundancies at the Guardian because they believe the paper did not do enough to boost the saintly Jeremy Corbyn.

You even see this attitude in Liberal Democrat Twitter, which is strange given how inchoate the party's philosophy is.

Meanwhile Boris Johnson is showering Labour Leavers with peerages.

But where does the quotation come from?

Duncan Hill has kindly directed me to a blog post by Tom Maguire, who had asked just this question:

John Leo, columnist for US News and World Report (and proud possessor of a link from Matt Drudge, no less), was kind enough to send me an e-mail assuring me that the original source is Michael Kinsley. Apparently, Mr. Leo included the line in a Nov. 26, 1990 column rounding up the best aphorisms of the year. He also is kind enough to tell me that the correct quotation is:

"Conservatives are always looking for converts, whereas liberals are always looking for heretics."

Apparently Mr. Leo complained in his original column that he did not like the "whereas"; I'm with him.

I am with him too. The formulation people have settled on is more elegant.

You can read more from Michael Kinsley on his website.