Cleaners From Venus: Illya Kuryakin Looked at Me

A wonderful homage to the Sixties as they were or should have been. Rita Tushingham. Harold Wilson. David Hemmings. David Bailey. The Avengers. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

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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.

Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain’s Prime Minister Since Thatcher by Mark Garnett

Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain’s Prime Minister Since Thatcher

Mark Garnett

Agenda, 2025, £20

It’s not a novelty for British prime ministers to leave No. 10 without having lost an election: Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Wilson all did so. What is new, says Mark Garnett, is for them to be bundled out of power when they are still in good health.

He dates this trend to the fall of Thatcher in 1990, and it’s tempting to put its acceleration in the years since then down to Brexit. As Garnett says:

The 2016 referendum, and its consequences, accounted directly for Cameron and May; and while Johnson and Truss found means of self-sabotage, arguably neither would have earned the chance to showcase their ineptitude for leadership without Brexit.

But he sees other forces at work. The social upheavals of the Sixties led to a decline in class consciousness and in strong identification with a particular party among voters. In this new world, the popularity and perceived strengths of party leaders became increasingly important, as seen from the fact that Margaret Thatcher is the last party leader to have won an election while being less popular than her main opponent. 

This trend has encouraged a presidential style among prime ministers – a style that the public and press seem to have come to expect. When John Major tried to undo some of the changes of Thatcher’s Boadicea years and restore the importance of the cabinet, it was widely seen as a sign of weakness.

It’s no wonder, then, that politicians, journalists and voters alike now look to a change in prime minister to improve things when a government is in the doldrums. Keir Starmer had better watch out.

Garnett writes with wit and an eye for a good anecdote. David Cameron’s courtship of the Liberal Democrats after the 2010 election "made Casanova sound like a tongue-tied ingénue". At her post-election party conference, Theresa May received "the kind of sympathetic audience response that, in bygone days, had greeted the arrival of the condemned at Tyburn Tree". The claim that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng crashed the economy was inaccurate, "but it was certainly not from want of trying".

Downing Street Downfalls is an agreeable companion to contemporary political history and, when it turns to the last ten years, a reminder that there’s nothing quite as strange as the recent past.

This review appears in issue 432 of Liberator magazine.

Robert Jenrick: In the real world, If you lie about your CV you resign

Rachel Reeves and Jonathan Reynolds have been embarrassed in recent days by inaccuracies in their CVs on LinkedIn.

And these were perfectly valid stories for the media to investigate, even if what they have found looks to have been overhyped, at least in Reeves's case.

But one man was in no doubt that these stories were serious: step forward Robert Jenrick - you can see his tweet above.

Which makes this story from the Mirror rather amusing:

Ambitious Tory Robert Jenrick has been forced to correct his own CV - after accusing Labour politicians of embellishing theirs.

In a biography on his website, Mr Jenrick claims to have been "the joint youngest Cabinet Minister since the Second World War, tied with Harold Wilson and William Hague" when he was made Housing Secretary in 2019.

But he was 37 at the time he was elevated to the cabinet, while Wilson and Hague were 31 and 34 respectively when reaching Cabinet minister status.

Thanks to Peter Black for flagging it up.

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Amanda Litman argues that it's time for the ageing leadership of the US Democrats to stand down: "While their wisdom and experience have value, and while some can certainly still hold their own, the septuagenarian and octogenarian class of Democratic leaders - predominantly older white men—are by and large ill-equipped for this crisis we have found ourselves in."

How do radical ideas go mainstream? Alice Evans studies the women's magazines of the 1970s to help her understand the rise of feminism.

How well did Queen Elizabeth II get along with her prime ministers? Rebecca Cope has the answers: "It would be easy to think that as a Labour Party leader from a northern middle-class background, Harold Wilson would not have gotten on well with the Queen, but quite the opposite was true. A regular at Balmoral, he was frequently asked on picnics with the wider family, and reportedly enjoyed the informality of the occasion, mucking in to help clear up after the Duke of Edinburgh’s famous barbeques."

Ellie Robson on the philosopher Mary Midgley: "In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men."

Writing in Country Life of all places, Lewis Winks demolishes the case against allowing wild camping on Dartmoor.

Michael Wood goes to the movies and thinks about Brady Corbet’s films: "How brutal or damaging does your childhood have to be to make you a great dictator or a memorable pop star? Are the connecting words ‘because of’ or ‘in spite of’? Or is there no causality here at all, just a sort of baffling coexistence? Are the films in love with an ugly idea of chance? This possibility seems especially relevant to The Brutalist."

In which Jeremy Thorpe, John Pardoe and Paul Tyler tour selected resorts of Cornwall and Devon by Hovercraft

The summer of 1974 was enlivened by Jeremy Thorpe and other Liberal MPs touring the beaches of Britain by hovercraft, in anticipation of a general election in the autumn. Harold Wilson duly called one for October.

Whether people enjoying a seaside holiday would  be in the mood to meet politicians is a point you hope the party considered first. Anyway, here is a report from the  West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser  (15 August 1974) looking forward to such a tour by Thorpe, John Pardoe and Paul Tyler. There's a mention too for Edward Sara, the Liberal candidate for Falmouth and Camborne.

In this era hovercraft were very much seen as a mode of transport of the future. There would be displays of miniature ones at top-end village fetes.

As it turned out, there's a lot to be said for the Jonathan Meades theory that in Britain the future happened briefly in 1969.

How Harold Wilson dealt with hecklers

Rachel Reeves was heckled during her conference speech today. Naturally, the man responsible was grabbed by security and bundled out of the hall.

Our politicians used to be more robust. Before the decline of the public meeting, they were expected to deal with hecklers using their own wits and wit. The heckler would stomp off defeated, not in the grasp of a gorilla in a suit.

The most able of politicians, such as Harold Wilson, positively welcomed heckling because it gave them the chance to appear in a good light. All Reeves had was a line copied from Keir Starmer, delivered after her heckler had been disappeared.

And this post is a chance to pay tribute to Wilson for not getting Britain involved in Vietnam.

Harold Wilson's estate owes Roy Wood a fortune

It was the first record to be played on Radio One and reached number 2 in the UK singles charts, but the Move's single Flowers in the Rain didn't earn its writer Roy Wood a penny.

Because, in one of the stunts for which he was famous, the band's manager Tony Secunda issued a postcard promoting the song that showed a naked Harold Wilson, the prime minister of the day, in bed with his political secretary Marcia Williams.

Wilson sued, won his case and the High Court ordered that all royalties from the song be donated to a charity of Wilson's choice. They are still being donated today to a range of good causes chosen by the Harold Wilson Charitable Trust.

While yesterday's revelation of Wilson's affair involved another lady and took place some years after the Flowers in the Rain affair - stay with me - it still paints his character in a different light to that which must have been deployed in the High Court.

I'm not calling for the good causes to repay the money, but shouldn't the meagre royalties on Wilson's books be made over to Roy Wood until he has received his due from Flowers in the Rain?

With thanks to Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

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"In March 2023, the EU made the historic decision to deliver a million artillery shells to Ukraine within 12 months. But the number that has actually been sent is closer to 300,000. For all the rhetorical commitments to support Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s invasion “for as long as it takes”, Europe has largely failed." Jack Watling says Ukraine can still defeat Russia, but it will require far more support from Europe.

Hein de Haas argues that "we cannot divorce debates about immigration from broader debates about inequality, labour, social justice and, most importantly, the kind of society we want to live in".

Andy Neather explained two years ago why the Brexiteers' pint bottles of wine will never be seen on supermarket shelves.

"In an era when a woman’s role in Downing Street was limited largely to typing and filing, Williams had to fight to be taken seriously, while simultaneously keeping a jaw-dropping personal secret. During her time in No 10 she had two sons by the then Daily Mail chief political correspondent Walter Terry, managing to conceal two pregnancies and the children’s existence for years with the help of a rich party donor and a compliant Fleet Street." Gaby Hinsliff reviews the first biography of Marcia Williams.

"Have you ever felt a sense of joy because you knew you were missing out on an invitation to a party, shiny new opportunities or the latest social media posts and influencer trends because you were 'unplugged'? If so, then you have probably experienced 'jomo' - the joy of missing out." Fuschia Sirois introduces a valuable concept.

Pete Paphides on Paul Young and the greaetest non-Christmas Christmas song ever: "His number 9 hit Everything Must Change: a song which has scarcely impinged on a single waking thought I’d had in the preceding 39 years suddenly reactivated itself about three weeks ago, and all I can do is wonder what took me so long. It was in my head yesterday; it’s in my head now; and it’ll probably be there tomorrow."

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"These ‘final’ train journeys are part of a long tradition for major public figures such as King George V and Winston Churchill, and everything possible should have been done to maintain this rather special way of enabling people to make their farewells without travelling to London." Christian Wolmar says the Queen’s final journey should have been by train.

David Boyle considers the causes of inflation: "So much of our economy in the UK now panders to the ultra-rich that it has worn grooves where the money flows towards them. It gathers around them like great fatbergs and the inflation gathers there too. Then, hey presto! It spreads around."

Anne Perkins reviews a new biography of Harold Wilson.

"Socially, North-East Scots is of the soil. Its distinctiveness derives from the traditional work and lives of its inhabitants, in particular, farming and fishing. This means that much which made it so distinctive has faded as the world has changed." Robert McColl Millar on Doric - once the language of the Scottish court, it is now a dialect of English.

Conrad Brunstrom watches the John Lennon film How I Won the War: "The film is certainly a satire on war movies, and on how a certain kind of British war movie is constructed for propaganda purposes. But it’s clearly more ambitious than a mere genre satire effort."

South West London once had a network of trolleybuses. Roger French joins a group retracing its routes 60 years after they closed.

Remembering George A. Cooper

It was announced yesterday that the British actor George A. Cooper has died at the age of 93.

He had an important role in Hell is a City from 1960, which Talking Pictures TV has been showing recently, but I remember him best in Peter Cook's satire The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer.

Cooper played a Labour prime minister modelled closely on Harold Wilson, seen here being advised and destroyed by Cook's Machiavellian Rimmer.

The scene also shows Cook's limitations as an actor.

A plaque for C.P. Snow and the first Nazi raid on Leicester

Placed so obscurely that you have to know it is there before you find it is a plaque marking the Leicester birthplace of C.P. Snow.

Snow, who lived from 1905 to 1980. was a scientist and civil servant who served in the Lords as a minister in Harold Wilson's short-lived Ministry of Technology.

He was also a novelist and was at one time was taken enormously seriously by the critics. Since his death, though his sequence Strangers and Brothers has been adapted by the BBC for both radio and television, he has fallen into almost total eclipse.

Really, it is the writers this doesn't happen to who need explaining, but reading Snow today it is difficult to see why he enjoyed such a reputation. As Simon Hoggart once observed, his characters address one another in the language of Times editorials.

Even the famous phrase he coined - "the corridors of power" - seems to be used less these days.

Anyway, Snow's plaque is not on his birthplace, which has disappeared, but on the house next door.

When I read about this I remembered the German raids on the area around Leicester station. You can map where the bombs fell by finding the postwar buildings dotted down incongruously among the Victorian streets. 

Could the same thing have happened here in Aylestone? It did. 

The air raid near Leicester station took place in November 1940 and was the city's worst night of bombing in the war. But its first raid was in August 1940, when the streets where Snow's house stood were attacked. 

Bryan Blow remembers it:

As we came up the Saffron Lane past the end of Cavendish Road the gas main was blazing and I could see lots of bomb damage, many buildings were in ruins, people were just being rescued with ambulance’s and fire engines all around. This was less than half an hour after the raid. 

Six people were killed; Cavendish Road was only one mile from our house. In broad daylight the German Dornier Do.17 bomber flying very low curved round the gas works after dropping its bombs (it missed), straight towards our house. 

Mother had the pram with Graham in it just approaching our front gates. My brothers Arthur and Tony had been debating what sort of plane it was, when they decided it was German, they made a dash for our shelter. 

Mum had heard reports of German planes machine gunning civilians; she snatched Graham up out of his pram and made a dash for the shelter just as the plane roared over, my mother fell into the Anderson shelter; mum was black and blue for weeks.

The six people who died are now remembered on a discreet plaque on the wall of a hall attached to the Ecumenical Church of the Nativity, which stands where Cavendish Road joins Snow's Richmond Road.

So was Snow's old family home destroyed by a German bomb? No, but it was damaged.

Snow's brother Philip was himself a remarkable man who captained Leicestershire's second XI, became a colonial administrator and captained Fiji in first-class games.

In his memoirs Philip Snow recalled:

As the bombing of England started in earnest in 1940, my conscience in beautiful remote Lau was deeply stirred, not least when I heard that the area around our Richmond Road house in Leicester was almost the first to be bombed. 

A single German plane had dropped its bombs near the gasometers and all along the unbroken line of terraced house in Cavendish Road, which was at the bottom of our garden: flying fragments has smashed our third-storey windows and some people living parallel to us had been killed.

It's a long way from lower middle-class Leicester to Fiji or the House of Lords.

Exploring the area I found the former Aylestone Library, which must have been known to the Snow boys - a third brother became a historian and wrote a history of Leicestershire cricket.

Be Bop Deluxe: Ships In The Night

I heard this on the radio the other day and it sounded good. Don't let the dry ice in this video put you off.

It was a minor hit in February 1976 when Harold Wilson was still prime minister and the nation's youth was waiting impatiently for punk to happen.

Huddersfield railway station in 1983

Nikolaus Pevsner described it as "one of the best early railway stations in England". John Betjeman said it was like "a stately home with trains".

Today Huddersfield station contains two pubs and a celebrated cat.

I photographed it in the early 1980s. I am pretty sure it was on 22 January 1983, the last day of operation of the branch line to Clayton West. (More about that another time.)

Since then the streets in front of the station have been pedestrianised and a statue of Harold Wilson erected.

Margaret Thatcher was right about referendums

Embed from Getty Images

Perhaps the late Lord Attlee was right when he said that the referendum was a device of dictators and demagogues.

That was Margaret Thatcher speaking in a 1975 Commons debate as Harold Wilson called a referendum on Europe to paper over Labour's divisions on Europe.

Earlier in the debate she had quoted a letter that Roy Jenkins had written to The Times in 1972, which shows why that observation was in her mind:

"It may be argued ... that the EEC referendum would be a once-for-all operation. The device would never be used again. Who can possibly say that? 

Once the principle of the referendum has been introduced into British politics, it will not rest with any one party to put a convenient limit to its use. And most history shows, as Clem Attlee pointed out with terse force in 1945, that it is a splendid weapon for demagogues and dictators."

The referendum on Scottish independence and on British membership of the European Union have shown that Attlee was right, Roy Jenkins was right and Margaret Thatcher was right.

One of the strengths of British Conservatism has always been that it had little time for Continental abstractions like "the Will of the People".

All that has been cast aside and you will now find Conservatives condemning parliamentary scrutiny of the executive and the independence of the judiciary - the very things they are meant to believe in - because they threaten the unopposed implementation of the Europe referendum's decision,

We know that Ukip doesn't like anything about Britain except its past. Now the Conservatives are going the same way.

No, I am not a new convert to Mrs Thatchers' view: I wrote a post entitled Scribbling on the constitution: A referendum on Europe was always a bad idea as long ago as June, when everyone expected Remain to win.

And back in 2011 I wrote an article for Liberal Democrat News saying the party should stop calling for referendums on Europe, in part because of their damaging effect on British politics:

For years the main parties have engaged in something close to a conspiracy. The issue of Europe has been taken out of general elections, with the promise that it will be decided through a referendum. Those referendums never take place. The result has been an infantilisation of debate on Europe, as politicians are allowed to take up self-indulgent, extreme positions they know they will never have to defend to the electorate. 

This process has been bad for us Liberal Democrats, encouraging the idea that all we need do to prosper is not offend anybody and deliver lots and lots of leaflets. And it has been bad for democracy as a whole. Why should voters feel enthusiastic about Westminster when their representatives avoid talking about one of the most important issues facing the country?

They should have listened to me and Maggie.

The February 1974 general election campaign

Jeremy Thorpe, Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, a butcher from Kingstanding, Margaret Thatcher, Cyril Smith, Hester Smallbone, David Steel, Enoch Powell...

And proof it was true even 38 years ago that, whoever you vote for, David bloody Dimbleby gets in.

Tony Blair is the new Harold Wilson

It is striking that David Miliband is trying hard to play down his former closeness to Tony Blair, but no one holds his brother or Ed Balls's closeness to Gordon Brown against them.

This suggests two things.

The first is that Blair has become the new Harold Wilson: someone who won multiple general elections for Labour but has now been written out of Labour's history.

The second is that Labour clearly has little idea of what it has to do to regain an appeal to the wider electorate.

Jeremy Thorpe still has steam in his pipes

Today's Guardian has an interview with Jeremy Thorpe, who led the Liberal Party between 1967 and 1976.

Speaking of the Parkinson's disease that now afflicts him, Thorpe says:

"The saliva and shakes make me seem gaga" the 78-year-old says of his disease. "I'm not. I remember pretty much the lot."

He rates his own contribution to the party highly:

Thorpe sees himself as a guardian of the Liberal vote through difficult times. "It's now a three-party system and I think I built it up. I know it's an arrogant thing to say but, if it weren't for me, the party would have disintegrated."

And, of the affair with which his name is now inevitably associated, he says:

"If it happened now I think ... the public would be kinder. Back then they were very troubled by it," he says. "It offended their set of values."

Harold Wilson thought the allegations a Conservative smear, asking in a memo to one of his ministers, Barbara Castle, why damaging details surfaced later in the 70s at a time when Labour might want to go into coalition with the Liberals, rather than earlier when Heath wanted them.

There are supposed to be new details that will emerge about the Thorpe trial only after his death - all he will say now is that it was more likely to have been his opposition to apartheid that brought about the trouble. "South Africa certainly attempted to smear me. They made life very difficult.

House Points: Europe and boundaries

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News - perhaps not my most inspired effort.

I heard Michael Meadowcroft tell the Berehovo story at a Liberator fringe meeting at Lib Dem Conference a couple of years ago. On his own website Michael credits it to the late Rabbi Hugo Gryn.

No boundaries

Gordon Brown was back from Lisbon on Monday, waving his red lines. Cheered on by the Tory benches, David Cameron demanded a referendum on the reform treaty. His party is feeling happier, but that's largely because it has reverted to the agenda that lost it the last three elections.

This will give whoever wins the Liberal Democrat leadership contest - and House Points in scrupulously neutral - a terrific opportunity.

It fell to Vince Cable to lead for us. And for the first time our demand for a referendum on our continued membership of the European Union made sense to me.

Vince said much has changed since Harold Wilson's referendum of 1975. There has been the Single European Act, the Maastricht treaty, the Amsterdam and Nice treaties, and now this one. "The time has come for consultation with the British public on the cumulative effect of those treaties, because there is anxiety about national sovereignty, and that has to be addressed through public debate."

But the danger is that such a referendum would be about the past. If it were won - and it would probably be won by scaring voters about the economic consequences of withdrawal - it would only give retrospective approval to those treaties. The first time something new came up, we would be back to square one.

It would be backward-looking for the Lib Dems too. For decades, it was congratulating ourselves on our foresight in backing the Common Market that kept up our morale. But Europe is a more complex issue these days.

Michael Meadowcroft is fond of using a story about a peasant from the village of Berehovo to show how arbitrary national boundaries are. The peasant says: "I was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, educated in Czechoslovakia, started work in Hungary and was for a time in Germany, spent most of my adult life in the Soviet Union and now I am retired in the Ukrainian Republic." His companion says, "You must have done a lot of travelling." "Not at all," replies the peasant, "I never left Berehovo."

But the boundaries of Europe are arbitrary too. When we debate whether Turkey should join the EU, we find there are no simple answers any more.

When Conrad Russell almost became a Labour MP

I knew that the late great Conrad Russell had been a Labour Party member, but I had not realised that he once fought a Westminster seat for it.

He fought Paddington South in 1966. It was essentially a rock-solid Tory seat, but in Harold Wilson's best general election victory he came within 1443 votes of winning.