Lord Bonkers' Diary: Wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents

Yes, Jeremy Thorpe really did pester the voters from a hovercraft that summer and Paul Tyler was on board. Lord Tyler's lawyers have asked me to point out, however, that at no time did he turn into the Beast of Bodmin at full moon or devour his then constituents.

I bet he did though.

Tuesday

Do you remember when hovercraft were all the rage? The boffins told us that within a decade we would have one each and use them to commute to the moon. As it turned out, they proved a great disappointment, but it was aboard a hovercraft that I first discovered this charming resort. Jeremy Thorpe had hit upon the idea of visiting the beaches of the South during the summer of 1974 to firm up the Liberal vote in anticipation of a second general election that autumn. 

I think it fair to say that we met with a Mixed Reception from holidaymakers – it was the way the natives of Trescothick Bay lobbed bottles at us that convinced me the village was a nest of free-thinkers among whom I should like to spend more time. 

Not everyone saw things that way. Poor Paul Tyler was so traumatised that he could be found 25 years later wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents who had lacked the sense to bolt their doors, bar their shutters and remain in their cottages. Thank goodness one of the Wise Woman of Wing’s tinctures sorted him out!

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

Earlier this week...

• Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"

GUEST POST Why have the Lib Dems given up fighting most parliamentary by-elections?

Lib Dem HQ has decided to stop making an effort in unpromising Westminster by-elections. Regular guest poster Augustus Carp argues that they've got it wrong.

Today I want us to think about a rather unusual chap called Ian Stuart – he was the "area manager" or whatever it was called of the Liberal Party in the Home Counties in the 1980s. On our rare meetings I found him to be a rather genial cove, although I gather he was not always popular with the party hierarchy. Anyway, it was his lot to be the Liberal Party candidate in the long-forgotten Uxbridge by election of 1972.

Long forgotten because, on the very same day (7 December) the Liberal Party won a Famous Victory in Sutton and Cheam. Graham Tope triumphed, Liberal hearts were gladdened, and progress suddenly seemed a little bit more inevitable. 

Ian Stuart told me that the only instructions he received from party HQ regarding his campaign were given to him by Jeremy Thorpe himself: 

"Go to Uxbridge and make a nuisance of yourself. You are going to fight a futile campaign, but in a good cause. You are a diversionary tactic from the main battle in Sutton & Cheam. If you don’t come back with at least two writs issued against you, then you haven’t been doing your job!"

I don’t think any writs were issued, but Ian certainly did his job. As he was the Convenor of Shop Stewards at Heathrow Airport at the time he was fully acquainted with the intricacies of the largest employer in the area, and was indeed able to stir up mischief. He certainly generated enough press releases, silly stunts and outrageous quotes to distract from Sutton and Cheam and keep Conservative and Labour activists away from the target seat. And he went down to a heroic defeat.

Bit here’s the thing – at least he tried. He knew what was needed of him – to fight as good a good campaign as he possibly could, with no money, half a dozen members, and no prospect of any external help. 

Now compare that with the situation today. The Liberal Democrats are infinitely richer in terms of money, activists, experience, MPs and councillors – but the national party seems to have given up on the idea of fighting elections, even as diversionary tactics. 

Why has the national party made so little effort recently, in Rochdale, Gorton, Makerfield, South Aberdeen? No doubt we could name others as well. I have no doubt that the candidates and local parties were doing their best, but where was the support for those campaigns? There wasn’t even an email asking for money. 

My local party is amazing. There’s perhaps only a dozen or so of them, but they are always coaxing me to deliver a few more leaflets, come out canvassing, give them some idea for Focuses etc. Their enthusiasm is infectious, and I am happy to help them – so much so that I probably don’t even qualify as an armchair member anymore. They deserve all the support I can give them. 

But why do I continue to pay my subscriptions to the national party (index-linked since the merger!) when I see so little bang for my buck? Why doesn’t the national party seem to want to put up a fight any more? I wouldn’t want to join a football club that wasn’t particularly interested in playing (or winning) football matches. As a member of a political party, I want to see it – and help it - fight elections. 

I heard the explanation given that the party doesn’t want to spend £50,000 just to save a £500 deposit. That might make economic sense, but it doesn’t make political sense anymore. Getting 2 per cent in a parliamentary by election is actively harming us. It makes us look irrelevant, even to voters in places where we are successful. 

The current political environment needs us to spend the £50,000 just to make sure that we retain some sort of credibility – not just in the relevant constituency, but nationally as well. We might at least try to come third, assuming that the first two places are out of reach – that might get us an honourable mention in news broadcasts. 

If that’s too much to ask, at least we might try to save our deposit. We cannot choose where by elections will fall, so we just have to make the best of a bad job. At least when they do happen, we should fight the good fight, and do the best we can.

Ian Stuart's other great observation to me was that every member of the Liberal Party, with the obvious exception of the two of us, was too bloody clever by half – always overanalysing problems and reinventing the wheel, rather than just getting on with the basics. Perhaps that’s the problem we have in the Liberal Democrats at the moment.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

The Joy of Six 1534

Keir Starmer should set a timetable for his departure from Number 10 and give his successor the opportunity to prepare for becoming prime minister, argue Hannah White and Alex Thomas.

"Digital spaces should be safe for people of all ages. But I don’t believe bans are the answer. Technology companies need to be held to account and required to block harmful content and build safety into their designs." Lisa M. Given on what Britain can learn from Australia's attempt to ban under-16s from social media.

Ben Mayfield has seen a new film on the countryside access debate in England and Wales: "Our Land is a title with two meanings – private land ownership for the landowners v the campaign for shared rights in land. The film explores different attitudes to ownership as well as the physical borders between landowners and, in the words of access campaigner and contributor Guy Shrubsole, 'the peasants'."

John Drury names six mistaken ideas in crowd psychology that refuse to die: de-individuation, groupthink, mass panic, contagion, the hooligan, mob mentality.

"Almost by chance, they ran across the uncanny, disorienting and inexhaustibly strange works that would help define the culture of the century, and fought against stiff odds to make them common coinage in every Anglophone domain." Boyd Tonkin pays tribute to Edwin and Willa Muir, whose translations made the work of Franz Kafka available to the English-speaking world.

David Hewitt looks back to Oxfam Walk '69 and Wembley Stadium's first concert: "Four-fifths of those who started the walk managed to complete it, and their total mileage was said to be equivalent to three trips to the Moon and back. The first of them arrived at Wembley at 3pm, where they were met by yet more celebrities. Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, told them they were 'the nation’s conscience' and 'one of the finest armies that has taken the field for many years'."

Liberal England: My failure to make a television detective of Jeremy Thorpe

I'm no Nancy Banks Smith, but if you ask me this wasn't one of the better ideas to emerge from the fecund brain of Lord Bonkers. That dog did us all a favour

Saturday

What with one thing and another – above all my riding the wave of Rutbeat like a portly surfer – I had a good Sixties, but I do have a regret from that enjoyable decade: my failure to make a television detective of Jeremy Thorpe. I imagined him storming the beaches of the South Coast by hovercraft to arrest drug smugglers, people traffickers and holidaymakers who had not paid to use their deckchairs. 

The scripts were written – we hit upon the novel idea of making Thorpe a maverick who nevertheless got results – and the show was cast: Peter Bessell as his loyal sidekick; Emlyn Hooson as his boss, who liked things done by the book; Claire Brooks as his housekeeper. 

All looked good to go, until it came to filming the pilot episode. The weather was terrible, the technical crew was seasick and, in what I now realise was a mordant irony, his craft was put out of action when a dog bit a hole in its skirt.

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

Earlier this week...

• From the pubs of Oswestry to the crumbling walls of Ludlow
• Matron told me at the party last night
• Commander Gideon, Dr Simon Sparrow and the girls of St Trinian's
• Rescuing fallen women or scourging himself
• We feed them sausages and plum bread

Lord Bonkers 30 years ago: I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles

Lord Bonkers mentioned the other day that my rent falls due on Lady Day. I took this as a subtle reminder that it's a long time since I looked to see what the old brute was saying 30 years ago.

So here's an entry from his diary in Liberator 227 (March 1995), when John Major was fighting the bastards of Euroscepticism - he now seems a giant in comparison to the Tory leaders who were to come after him:

The Palace of Westminster is not a happy place at present. One can hardly enter the gentlemen's lavatory without seeing a gang of Europhobes forcing some poor moderate Conservative's head down the pan and pulling the chain, and this morning I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles. 

The problem, I would argue, lies in a lack of leadership at the very top of the Conservative Party. This little grey chap they have nowadays may be very good when it comes to traffic cones and motorway service stations, but he is not the sort one would readily follow into battle. It is all too reminiscent of Woolacombe in 1968, when Jeremy Thorpe had to be rescued after he was pushed through a trap door and imprisoned under the stage by the Young Liberals.

I also enjoyed a detail from his visit to Wales, where he passes and enjoyable evening at a village whose name, he is informed, is best translated as: 

The Church of St Mary in the hollow by the pool where Lloyd George seduced Bronwyn - you know, the big girl who used to work in the Co-op.

It doesn't go back quite this far, but there's a free archive of back numbers of Liberator on the magazine's website.

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.

Roger Blackmore (1941-2024)

Liberal Democrat Voice has posted a tribute from Leicester Liberal Democrats to Roger Blackmore, who died on 6 September at the age of 82:

Having moved to Leicester in 1963 when he became a student at Leicester University, joining the local party whose brief revival that year quickly faded.

Roger managed to establish himself as the main voice for Liberalism in the city as well as contesting the Gainsborough constituency in Lincolnshire. He fought the seat four times, his campaigns being the stuff of legend.

As this excellent tribute says, Roger went on to fight Jeremy Thorpe's old seat of North Devon, to be leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Leicester City Council and then leader of the council itself, and after that a popular Lord Mayor.

If you click on the picture of a youthful Roger above, you will be taken to a 1975 news report about the strike at Imperial Typewriters in 1975. Roger is interviewed about the formation of an action group that attempted to prevent the factory from closing.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Some unfair coverage in the tabloid press

Let me say at once that I am certain - well, "almost certain" is probably wiser - that the "dog-shooting range" referred to here did not involve the actual shooting of dogs.

Wednesday

One stop I was particularly pleased to see Davey make during the campaign was that at Thorpe Park. I was instrumental in setting up this attraction after the February 1974 general election, when Jeremy Thorpe’s stock was at its zenith. 

The hovercraft rides remain as popular as ever, but over the years interest in chasing Princess Margaret has dwindled, while the dog-shooting range had to be closed after some unfair coverage in the tabloid press. Yet when I brought the Well-Behaved Orphans on an outing in the park’s early days, they were unanimous in the view that this last was “The Best Bit”. 

Let’s hope our leader’s patronage will point the way to better days for the old place. I have today given instructions for a relaunch under the name ‘Davey Park’.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• We drank the Bonkers’ Arms dry
• Practising with the Elves of Rockingham Forest

John Pardoe endorses Ben Maguire, the Lib Dem candidate for North Cornwall

Ben Maguire is the Liberal Democrat in the North Cornwall constituency. Today he tweeted this endorsement from John Pardoe.

A sweet young thing asks: Who is John Pardoe?

My early Liberal heroes were David Penhaligon and John Pardoe, who both sat for Cornish constituencies.

Pardoe won North Cornwall from the Conservatives in 1966 and held it until 1979. From 1970 until he lost his seat, he was the Liberal Party's treasury spokesperson, and was known for his pessimistic view of the prospects of the British economy. As it was the Seventies, he generally proved to be right.

It's 45 years since Pardoe was defeated in North Cornwall, perhaps as a victim of Jeremy Thorpe's antics. Though he has resurfaced from time to time - notably, in 1987, when he was the manager of the Liberal-SDP Alliance general election campaign - he is pretty much a forgotten figure today.

But clearly not in North Cornwall, where his endorsement is still thought valuable.

He is also remembered in Calder's Sixth Law of Politics, which holds that every Liberal Democrat leadership election is a rerun of the 1976 Liberal Party contest between Pardoe and David Steel.

I first pointed to the importance of that contest in a post here from 2014:

One candidate (Steel) was orthodox, sensible and just a little dull. The other (Pardoe) was more charismatic, more open to new ideas and just a little unreliable in his judgement.

So in later contests Paddy Ashdown was a Pardoe and Alan Beith was a Steel. And Chris Huhne was a Pardoe and Ming Campbell and then Nick Clegg were Steels. In all these cases I voted for the Pardoe.

It doesn't always work: in 1999 there were five candidates. I suppose you could make a case for Charles Kennedy being a sort of Social Democrat Steel, but a clear Pardoe failed to emerge.

Can we project this pattern back into past? I don't know, but it tempting to see Asquith as a Steel and Lloyd George as a Pardoe.

And was Jo Grimond a Steel or a Pardoe? He seems to have combined the better qualities of both.

Anyway, I'm pleased to see that John Pardoe is still around.

Alan Barton: July '69

This is a track from Barton's 1991 album Precious. If the lyrics remind you strongly of Candle in the Wind, that's because July '69 (a Nigel Tufnellesque title, it has to be admitted) is a tribute to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.

That makes the pipes on it appropriate - they're just the sort of unexpected instrument Jones used to bring to Stones tracks - but we are still left waiting for a big, power-ballad chorus that never comes.

So why have I chosen it?

Colin Gibb of Black Lace died the other day, and I was naturally reminded of a favourite piece of trivia. It was that one of the members of the band was the nephew of Jeremy Thorpe's co-accused George Deakin.

When I searched online, a worryingly large proportion of the results consisted of my repeating the story. But I know I didn't invent the tale: I got it from the reliable Twitter account Top of the Pops Facts.

So I did a little research and found that the story is indeed true, but that Deakin's nephew in the band was not Colin Gibb but Alan Barton.

The proof is in an amusingly garbled account of the Thorpe affair to be found in the book And Then Came Agadoo: Black Lace by another member of the band, Terry Dobson:

I quote, preserving Dobson's innovative punctuation:

Alan's Uncle George, George Deakin to the British public has a bit of a history to his name. 

Alan's family are from South Wales and in the business of providing gaming machines to clubs and pubs around the area, Alan's mum and Grandmother both work for the business owned by Uncle George... 

An attempt had been made to assassinate Jeremy Thorpe the Liberal Party leader during 1978, an accusation made that George had put up the money for the hired gun to do his dirty work... 

A lengthy court case followed, George seen on the televisions news programme wearing a different designer suit every single day of the trial, it had caught the eye of the press and TV producers alike.... so much so they had a competition between them to guess what he would be wearing or they would cheekily ask him what style and colour suit he would be dressed in the following day! 

When the trial eventually ended the jury acquitted George without charge clearing him off the offence of providing money to the would be assassin...

A plot to assassinate Jeremy Thorpe? I am reminded of Auberon Waugh's comment:

Poor Jeremy. He is his own worst enemy, but with friends like these he really has no need of himself. The only remaining mystery is why the Liberal Party policy committee decided to murder Scott rather than Jeremy.

Back to Alan Barton. 

After his time with Black Lace, which included singing the UK's Eurovision entry in 1979 as well as all those awful party records, Barton joined Smokie in 1986 as their lead singer. It's his voice on the version of Living Next Door to Alice that they recorded with Roy 'Chubby' Brown.

Smokie were a Chinn and Chapman creation who had a few hits in the Seventies and toured Europe successfully for many years after that. He died, aged 41, when the band's bus crashed in a hailstorm near Cologne.

The US is living through its own version of the Jeremy Thorpe Affair

Readers of a certain age will remember Rinka. She was the dog shot to persuade her owner, Norman Scott, not to talk about his affair with the Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe.

Now it's the US's turn to live through a political scandal about a shot dog.

Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, was one of the favourites to be Donald Trump's running mate this November. But she appears to have ruined her chances of becoming Vice President by publishing a book.

The Guardian takes up the story:

"Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old," the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an "aggressive personality" and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.

What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed – and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season.

By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going "out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life".

That's a picture of Cricket above.

The Guardian report goes on to say: 

"I hated that dog," Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself "untrainable", "dangerous to anyone she came in contact with" and "less than worthless ... as a hunting dog".

"At that moment," Noem says, "I realised I had to put her down."

Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.

"was not a pleasant job," she writes, "but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done."

Yes, she also shot a goat the family owned.

According to Noem, it was "nasty and mean", because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled "disgusting, musky, rancid".

Donald Trump is 77.

The wonderful Lynton & Barnstaple Railway

This is a tremendous video by Rediscovering Lost Railways that blends archive and contemporary footage. It shows us the 19-mile Lynton & Barnstaple Railway under operation and what remains of the route today, including a short restored stretch.

I dream that the whole line will be restored one day by the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway Trust. It was closed by the Southern Railway in 1935.

A few points:

• I once posted my photo of Barnstaple Town station standing derelict in 1962.
• The prime mover in the building of the line was Sir George Newnes, who was Liberal MP for Newmarket between 1885 and 1895, and for Swansea between 1900 and the first election of 1910.
• The publishing company that Newnes founded brought out most of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine stories.
• Bratton Fleming, which also had a station on the line, was the scene of the service of thanksgiving for the acquittal of Jeremy Thorpe.

Another song about the Jeremy Thorpe trial: Jeremy Is Innocent by Rex Barker and the Ricochets

It's been a good day today. Not only has it been much cooler, but I have discovered a second song about the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.

Rex Barker And the Ricochets is a pseudonym for the artist also known as Doc Cox and Ivor Biggun. Under the last name he released records that he calculated would be banned by the BBC and thus become irresistible to 13-year-old boys across the country.

In my day we had Judge Dread.

Let's be honest: Jeremy is Innocent is not a patch on the similarly named Jeremy Thorpe is Innocent by The Surprises. But I'm still glad it exists.

And not just because Doc Cox was a near neighbour of the Liberator editorial collective when I joined it in the 1980s.

Anti-Johnson Tories launch Operation Rinka

Photo of a Great Dane by edustalker at Morguefile.com

You've heard of Operation Save Big Dog, the push (prop. B. Johnson) to safeguard the position of the prime minister.

So it's natural that the Conservative MPs who want to see Boris Johnson go have named their campaign Operation Rinka.

Rinka, you will recall, was the Great Dane owned by Norman Scott, the man Jeremy Thorpe was tried with conspiring to murder. She was shot dead in what the jury apparently believed was an attempt to frighten Scott.

The Guardian has heard that Johnson now has opponents from across the party:

The source said multiple groups were angry with Johnson: lockdown sceptics, disgruntled ex-ministers and MPs from former Labour red wall seats who judged him to be failing to deliver on the levelling-up agenda. 

"It only takes a dozen letters from each group to get you close to the 54 you need [to trigger a no confidence vote in the prime minister], so it’s harder to keep them all down at once." the source said.

It's good to see poor Rinka is still remembered 47 years after her death.

Quite short and generally incomprehensible: Remembering Alasdair Mackenzie MP

Embed from Getty Images

I've rarely heard him mentioned, but Alasdair Mackenzie was Liberal MP between 1964 and 1970. 

Reading his Wikipedia entry, I want to know more about him:

At the 1964 general election Mackenzie was elected, at the age of 61 and contesting his first parliamentary election, as a Liberal for Ross and Cromarty. He defeated the sitting National Liberal obtaining a majority of 1407 votes. 

Initially he was denied admission to the House of Commons as he couldn't speak English and thus couldn't take the Oath of Allegiance. After Jeremy Thorpe arranged for Mackenzie to undergo quick lessons in English so he would be able to take the Oath of Allegiance. 

His prior lack of knowledge of English would lead to his speeches in the House of Commons being quite short and generally incomprehensible. 

I remember a story about a Scottish Liberal MP whose English-speaking constituents thought his English was good considering that his first language was Gaelic and whose Gaelic constituents thought his Gaelic was good considering that his first language was English.

That must surely have been Alasdair Mackenzie, who you can see in photo above standing behind David Steel at the right-hand end of the group.

Jeremy Thorpe had two stepsons on the rock scene

Jeremy Thorpe had an ambivalent relationship with rock and roll, as we saw last week. But he did have a close family relationship with it.

Because when Marion Harewood became his second wife she already had three sons with George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood. Lascelles was a grandson of George V and had been sixth in line to the throne when he was born.

The eldest son, David, duly became the 8th Earl, but it is the two younger brothers who interest us here. Because James and Jeremy were both members of the Global Village Trucking Company and are still on the scene today.

You can hear James Lascelles playing keyboards on the track above and read about his music career on his website.

Below you will find a BBC documentary about the band, which draws heavily upon an earlier one made in 1973.

Jeremy Lascelles features prominently - at the time it was made he was chief executive of Chrysalis Music. In fact, he may well be The Man.

Like Traffic before them, Global Village Trucking Company got it together in the country. But life in a commune had its downsides, as Dinah Jefferies once made clear in a Guardian article.

Jeremy Thorpe, racism and rock and roll

Embed from Getty Images

Here, photographed backstage at the Royal Festival Hall in 1967, are Jimi Hendrix and the then leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe. Other photos taken on the same occasion show Hendrix tutoring Thorpe in playing the guitar.

So was Thorpe keener on rock and roll than Cyril Smith was?

Judge for yourself. Here he is talking about the film Rock Around the Clock on BBC Radio in 1956:

"I am a lover of music; therefore I am prejudiced and don't like jazz. Jazz to me comes from the jungle, and this is jungle music taken to its logical conclusion. This is musical Mau-Mau."

The racism here makes you catch your breath, particularly as Thorpe was a principled opponent of Apartheid in South Africa.

I remember hearing this extract played on the radio more than once when I was a boy - it may be that John Ebdon used it in his creative archive programmes.

In his book The Restless Generation - How rock music changed the face of 1950s Britain, Pete Frame suggests that it comes from an edition of Does the Team Think (DTTT), but that sounds unlikely. DTTT was a sort of parody of Any Questions? with comedians on the panel, so it's more likely that it comes from Any Questions? itself.

Jeremy Thorpe and the Liberal Party's money

Though Jeremy Thorpe was acquitted of conspiracy to murder at his Old Bailey trial, there was never any thought of his being allowed to take up a prominent role in the Liberal Party afterwards.

My impression is that it was not his entanglement with Norman Scott that sealed Thorpe's fate. It was that a generation of Liberals had realised that he could not be trusted with the party's money.

Anthony Howard touched upon this topic when reviewing Thorpe's memoirs  for the London Review of Books.

Describing the book as a 'slim and inconsequential volume', Howard refers to a subplot of the Scott affair that was known as 'the money tree':

Thorpe had always been a very successful fundraiser – he was treasurer of the Party before he became its leader – and the suspicion gradually grew that a contribution of £20,000 from ‘Union Jack’ Hayward in the Bahamas had somehow been diverted via a Channel Islands bank account and had never reached the Party coffers at all. 

The allegation, of which the prosecution should probably have made more at the trial, was that the money had gone, first to paying off Norman Scott and, when that failed to buy his silence, to funding someone to kill him. It was certainly a mysterious, murky story in which a businessman friend of Thorpe’s called Nadir Dinshaw eventually emerged as the innocent dupe. 

The best discussion of the whole imbroglio is, surprisingly, to be found in a recent book by Trevor Beeson, a former Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, entitled Window on Westminster. Thorpe does himself few favours by ignoring the episode as if it had never occurred.

Roger Blackmore and the death of Imperial Typewriters

The old Leicester firm of Imperial Typewriters has cropped up on Liberal England before. I came across its impressive old factory in 2013 and last year I went to an exhibition about the 1974 strike that helped bring about its demise.

Click on the still to the right and you will be taken to the Media Archive for Central England site and an ATV report from 1975 about redundancies and attempts to keep the factory open.

That still shows the leader of the action group formed to try to save the factory. Unexpectedly, he turns out to be a young Roger Blackmore, who was to become Liberal Democrat leader of the city council from 2003 to 2004 and again from 2005 to 2007.

Roger was also a parliamentary candidate several times and in 1983 fought Jeremy Thorpe's old seat of North Devon for the Liberal Party.

As to Imperial, the whole typewriter industry was soon to be swept away by technological advance.

17 May in Liberal England history

I enjoyed doing this for 18 April - whether my readers enjoyed it as much is another question - so here is a survey of what has concerned this blog down the years on 17 May.

2019

Hard times in the Shropshire hills. Stiperstones primary school was to close and Bishop's Castle residents were planning to block the road in a protest against bus cuts.


2018

I previewed A Very British Scandal as the first episode was about to be shown.



2017

"Boris Johnson moos 'like a cow' and devours cakes on bakery visit" ran my Headline of the Day.

You can't say we weren't warned.


2016

Talking of Boris Johnson, I blogged about his failure when mayor to publish a report on air pollution near London' schools.


2015

Included in a Six of the Best, Down at Third Man was worrying about the future of English cricket:

"The players coming in during the next few years come from a generation deprived of free to air cricket. This generation will have come in on the echoes. Soon it will be a privileged generation: in the main sons/daughters of club cricketers and sons of parents able to afford a very expensive education, or sons able to win scholarships to such institutions."

2014

I went to Woodhouse Eaves, which had once been a sort of health resort in Leicestershire's Charnwood Forest:

Today, the first hot day of the year, the countryside was alive with hikers and Scouts, giving it something of the atmosphere of its 1930s heyday.

2013

UKIP supporters, I suggested, were not that keen on the UK. They were English Nationalists.


2012

I quoted Christopher Hitchens and his praise for Karl Popper's insistence on the importance of argument:

It is very seldom, as he noticed, that in debate any one of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or "converting" the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end upholding exactly the same position as that with which he began.

2011

Lord Bonkers reacted to the headline "Fox blasts British overseas aid plan":

It was clearly set out in the Coalition agreement. Now clear off down the garden and leave our dustbins alone.

2010

I quoted something I had written for the Guardian website back in 2006 (when it paid much better than it does today):

When [Charles] Kennedy stood for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats in 1999, the West Highland Free Press - a radical newspaper published in his own constituency - remarked that people in London were beginning to ask what it had been asking for 15 years: what exactly does Charles Kennedy stand for? 

Though he won that contest and went on to lead the party for nearly seven years, we never really found out.

2009

Those were the days. I wrote seven posts on 17 May 2009 and most of them were about politics.

In one of them I argued that:

the causes of the anger over MPs' expenses go beyond indignation at what has been done with our money. That anger is so great because this affair has laid bare what an unequal society we now live in.

2008

Michael Gove wanted to tell teachers what they should wear:

No doubt this is meant to appeal to Tory voters who like tradition, but in reality there is little tradition of teachers dressing smartly. The traditional dress for teachers was the academic gown, which was designed precisely to distance education from the world where a good business suit matters. 

Less grand teachers wore a tweed jacket with leather patches and a worried expression.

2007

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I asked why people could not forgive Ming Campbell for being old:

If a comedian or journalist had made similar reference to the fact that a politician was a woman or was gay or was Black, it would have finished that comedian or journalist's career. Yet in our society it is perfectly acceptable to make fun of people for being old.

2006

The idea that the state should decide the speed at which people walk their dogs is ridiculous.

I still hold that view today.

2005

I discussed Siôn Simon Syndrome:

there is a law that people accuse others of the faults they most fear in themselves, much as those who make most fuss about homosexuality are supposed to be repressed homosexuals themselves.

2004

Iraq Body Count estimated the number of civilian deaths in the country since the start of the invasion at somewhere between 9,148 and 11,005