Jane Dodds to stand down as leader of Welsh Lib Dems

Embed from Getty Images

Jane Dodds has announced she is standing down as leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, saying the work to increase its presence in Wales's parliament "should be led by a new generation", reports BBC News.

She will remain as the party's only Member of the Senedd.

BBC News goes on to say:

"Leading the Welsh Liberal Democrats has been the honour of my life," she said in a statement on Tuesday, adding "now is the right time" to hand over the role.

Only Welsh Lib Dem MP David Chadwick is eligible to seek nomination to replace Dodds at this stage, the party said.

The Liberal Democrats have been represented by just one member in Cardiff Bay since 2016, initially by former Welsh Lib Dem leader Kirsty Williams and later by Dodds since 2021.

Jago Hazzard on the planned West London Orbital rail service

Transport for London says:

We're making plans for a new rail service on existing, underused rail lines in west London - this would become part of the London Overground network. The West London Orbital rail service would run between Hendon in north London towards Hounslow in southwest London.

And Jago Hazzard shows us the lines that would be combined to provide this new service. One of the attractions of the scheme is that the track is already in place.

You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.

Local Liberal Democrats, says the Richmond & Twickenham Times, are pressing for the service to be extended from Hounslow to serve Whitton and Twickenham. It quotes Lib Dem London Assembly member Gareth Roberts speaking at a City Hall meeting on 15 October:

"I rarely use the word literally, but on this time I will. It literally does not go far enough. Just two more stops, and it could join to Twickenham."

And reports:

Later, Mr Roberts said extending the line to Twickenham would allow people from Teddington, Norbiton, Raynes Park, New Malden, Wimbledon and Hampton Wick to travel into north London with just one train change.

He said: "At the moment they've got to go into Central London, they've got to go to Clapham, they've got to mess around, they've got to do all sorts of things.

"This would be a single interchange which would open up north west London for hundreds of thousands of residents in the south west."

However, the TfL view appears to be that the line between Hounslow and Twickenham is too busy to accommodate more trains.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a man falling off a paddleboard – for ever

Embed from Getty Images

So what went on in that meeting of Liberal Democrat MPs on Tuesday evening?

The fury with critics of Ed Davey we were told about beforehand seems to have evaporated overnight, as everyone has told us how positive it was.

Zoe Crowther and Harriet Symonds say on PoliticsHome:

Supportive MPs described Davey as having been “in listening mode” at the meeting, with most MPs keen to join in a discussion on how the party can grow ahead of the next general election and build on its record number of MPs. 

PoliticsHome understands that only three MPs spoke out with criticisms of Davey’s leadership approach in the meeting, and the party has not sent out any communication to party members about the internal rows.

Maybe not everyone has got the message about listening. Here's Lisa Smart on Times Radio, as quoted by Josh Self on Politics.co.uk:

Smart said the party had gone "from having 11 MPs elected in 2019 to 72 at the last general election". She said she had heard a colleague describe that as going "from a startup to a scale-up".

She said: "There are organisational things that come through that. Just think about the meeting that you have when you’re a team of 11 versus the meeting you’ve had when you’re a team of 72. If everybody contributes for two minutes, that goes on for hours and hours and hours." 

Asked about the stunts that characterised Davey’s 2024 general election campaign, Smart said she thought he would “continue to do things that are visually interesting that get across our message”.

I've said many times that the media - local television in particular - want good video and images, and that Remain's inability to offer much beyond George Osborne in suit threatening to put your taxes up was a major weakness of its referendum campaign.

But there is a danger that if we just offer them Ed Davey falling off a paddleboard again they will tire of it, quite possibly on Day 1 of the campaign. We need to offer them something fresh,

Added to that, Ed seems to have ambitions to promote himself as the most experienced political leader, so his advisers need to think how they blend his stunts with looking prime ministerial.

My own view is that the lack of an obvious alternative means Ed will lead the party into the next general election.

Lord Bonkers 30 years ago: David Chidgey in the Bird of Liberty

It's high time (it says here) we saw again what Lord Bonkers was up to 30 years ago. So here's an extract from the diary he contributed to Liberator 239, which was dated September 1996 and available from our stall at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Brighton.

The late David Chidgey, I should explain, as well as being MP for Eastleigh from 1994 to 2005, was in 1996 the pilot of the Liberal Democrats' own spacecraft Bird of Liberty. He was eventually rescued from a tropical island paradise after being downed in a collision with a Russian (or Commonwealth of Independent States) satellite.

His son, also called David Chidgey, is the chief presenter of one of my favourite podcasts, Chelsea Fancast.

Friday

As evening falls the Bird of Liberty appears once again above the chimney pots and pinnacles of Bonkers Hall. “Young Ashport want you to go to Mars,” I call up to the gallant Chidgey, “it seems they've found life up there.” “The engines will never take it, your lordship” he replies. “Nonsense man,” I return, “there could be votes in it. You'll just have to pedal faster.” 

Perhaps my admonition has some effect, for the wings do seem to be flapping a little more vigorously as the craft disappears over the horizon. 

Whether it is possible to adapt conventional polling day organisation to weightless conditions remains a moot point, but anyone who has seen the film Independence Day will be only too aware of the need for liberal values to be introduced to the less enlightened parts of the Galaxy.

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

The only Tory MP to gain a seat at the last election is under threat

The only Conservative to gain seat for the party at the last general election is in danger of deselection, reports BBC News:

Leicester East MP Shivani Raja has faced an attempt to block her standing as a candidate in the next general election.

The Leicester Conservative Federation met at the end of September to vote on whether Raja would be selected to defend the seat she won in 2024.

The BBC understand she narrowly lost the secret ballot and was not readopted.

However, party officials have subsequently declared the meeting null and void, saying it was not properly constituted.

So the drama isn't over yet. 

I do recall gossip before the election that the Tories had "chosen the wrong candidate", and I think it's fair to say that Raja hasn't made a huge impact since her victory.

If she were to be deselected and stand as an independent next time, she would only be following the best traditions of the constituency.

Leicester East was won by the Tories last time largely because two former Labour MPs for the seat, Claudia Webbe and Keith Vaz, stood against the official Labour candidate.

The full result is here: note the creditable third place for the Liberal Democrat Zuffar Haq in a constituency without a single branch of Gail's.

Roz Savage and her Liberal vision for a flourishing Britain

Roz Savage has written a paper called Liberalism Alive: A Liberal Vision for a Flourishing Britain for Compass. It was published last month and touches upon questions that Liberal Democrats are currently wrestling with, such as leadership and defining what we stand for.

It's well worth a read. You can download it from the Compass website.

Here's a little of what Roz writes:

Britain does not need another political saviour. It needs direction: leadership capable of describing that direction, institutions capable of learning, a state strong enough to protect the public interest, and millions of people with enough security, ownership and freedom to shape their own futures.

I see that possibility every week. It is there in the volunteer running a food pantry, in the farmer bringing a wetland back to life, in the councillor who spends three patient years campaigning to make one dangerous junction safe, and in the people quietly getting on with running community energy schemes and repair cafés and flood groups.

Most will never describe what they are doing as Liberalism, but that scarcely matters. They are demonstrating something Liberals have always believed, which is that the future is not handed down from above, but built by people.

The Lib Dem leadership should listen to our MPs

Peter Black blogged this morning about the reaction to Charlie Maynard call for the Liberal Democrats to elect a new leader:

The reaction has been predictable, with the leadership recruiting the usual suspects to go public in support of Ed Davey. Their social media posts are all suspiciously similar., and also slightly ridiculous, but ... what is really interesting is how few of them have gone public in this way.

The politics.co.uk website lists just 17 out of 72 prepared to pin their support of Davey to a public mast. The rest appear to be keeping their powder dry.

There are currently 71 Lib Dem MPs, and the 17 has gone up to 18, but this is still a significant point. There are few signs that "the vast majority of our MPs ... are furious at this distraction" as some of those 18 claim.

The feeling that the Lib Dem leadership has "lost the dressing room" is widespread at Westminster. As someone said on Bluesky yesterday, wise supporters of Ed Davey continuing as leader will listen to our MPs to understand why this has happened and what can be done to put it right.

So far there have been few signs of this happening.

The Joy of Six 1589

Chaminda Jayanetti on successive governments' failure to grasp the nettle of social care: "As far back as 1997, Tony Blair’s New Labour government launched a royal commission into adult care, only to then reject its calls for tax-funded free personal care and more support with residential care costs."

"Fascism is a strange ideology with a universe of conflicting and bizarre beliefs and rituals. Among the strongest is the ritualization of death that both mirrors and serves the main political drive of fascism: the creation of in groups and out groups. This is done through legal capture, the erosion and destruction of rights and protections, political framing of reality, fearmongering and weaponized activation, and the creation of religious cults of power, personality, and collective delusion." Jared Yates Sexton explains the fascist politics behind the public execution of Nidal Hasan.

Nick Baird asks where the Liberal Democrats' ambition has gone: "back in 2024, we were a Party on the up with a record number of MPs. The Tories were banished and in disarray. We talked, in all seriousness, about how we would be the Official Opposition after the next General Election. We looked admiringly at the Canadian Liberals who went from third place with a rump of MPs to an overall majority and thought 'that could be us'."

"I was confronted with a dilemma towards the end of writing my book because I had this line in the conclusion which I’d written a long time ago and thought was a really elegant, pithy sentence that summed up the argument of the book. But, as I was reading one of the final edits, I looked at it again and, having spent the last year immersed in AI slop on places like LinkedIn, I thought to myself, oh God, that sounds like something ChatGPT or Claude would write." Sarah O'Connor talks about her book We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work.

"Dadd seems to have been captivated by extreme contrasts of large and small, beautiful and grotesque – which are, of course, a feature of fairy folklore but had also been exemplified in earlier depictions of Shakespeare’s fairies (such as Joshua Reynolds’ famous Puck of 1789, and the fairy paintings of Henry Fuseli). Dadd, however, took the grotesqueness of fairies to a new level." Francis Young reviews the Royal Academy's Richard Dadd exhibition, which runs until 25 October.

Anne Bilson chooses 15 of the best movie car chases.

Charlie Maynard resigns from Lib Dem front bench and calls for no confidence vote in Ed Davey

Embed from Getty Images

So the gossip about disaffection with the party leadership at Westminster was accurate.

Earlier this afternoon, the Financial Times broke the story that Charlie Maynard, Liberal Democrat MP for Witney. has resigned as the party's shadow chief secretary to the Treasury and asked other Lib Dem MPs to join him in a vote no confidence in Ed Davey's leadership/

The FT website can be hard to access, but Traders Union now has the story too.

While Traders Union concentrates on the party's poll ratings, the FT, I think rightly, sees more significance in our continuing inability to gain press or public attention in a crowded field.

It is some MPs' frustration at this, along with the current leadership's top-down style, that I believe has brought us to where we are today.

Peter Kellner: Zack Polanski should have won at a canter

Embed from Getty Images

Peter Kellner sets last night's result in the Holborn & St Pancras by-election in its historical context:

Only three times in the party’s history has a Labour government been able to cheer a by-election night as a boost to its prospects of remaining in office.

The first was retaining Kingston-upon-Hull North in January 1966, ahead of its big national victory two months later. The second was four months ago, when Andy Burnham won Makerfield (though some ministers were happier than others).

Sagal Abdi-Wali has not just defeated the Greens in a local by-election. She has defied history. Four weeks ago, I argued that Holborn & St Pancras was a contest Zack Polanski should win. 

Going back more than half a century, Labour has a truly dreadful record defending its own seats when it is government and faces a by-election challenge from the left or centre-left. The average swing against Labour in such contests was 24 per cent.

On those figures, Polanski should have won at a canter.

And later he writes:

It was no mean achievement for Labour’s Abdi-Wali. Her share of the vote was down just 3.7 points on the general election. 

This was the tenth time that Labour has had to defend a seat when it has been in government and the main by-election challenge has come not from the right but from either the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. Abdi-Wali has retained a higher share of the vote than any of her predecessors. 

Only Virendra Sharma, in 2007, came anywhere near, and he won Southall during Gordon Brown’s honeymoon as a new prime minister. 

Lib Dem MPs are talking to the media about their concern at the party's direction

Embed from Getty Images

There have been whispers about discontent with the party's leadership among Liberal Democrat MPs for some time. Now some of those MPs are talking, some more openly than others, to the media about their concerns.

This is from BBC News yesterday:

One frontbench Lib Dem MP told the BBC after Burnham's Labour conference speech: "Lots of us [are] struggling tonight with [a] Labour leader articulating Lib Dem values better than we do."

They pointed to Burnham's promises on electoral reform, social care, the water industry, and relations with Europe - all Lib Dem campaign points in recent years.

"I'm honestly utterly despondent with the state of things," another Lib Dem MP said.

Some senior Lib Dems believe Sir Ed's position as leader has been vulnerable for some time, even if they stressed no challenge is imminent.

"A plausible candidate could take him tomorrow in a bloodless coup," one prominent party figure said.

"But that person hasn't yet revealed themselves as far as I'm aware. Nobody is going to blow anything up without a clear plan to put something in its place."

A second report appeared on Sky News today, focused on dissatisfaction with our reaction to the government's proposals on social care and the triple lock. It seems there are some MPs who share my reaction:

Others, who don't necessarily agree with scrapping the triple lock, felt frustrated by the tone of Sir Ed's response - especially given he's been Westminster's most prominent campaigner in recent years for an improved social care system.

It's clear that the arrival of Andy Burnham at Number 10 has fundamentally changed the political landscape. I don't know if the Liberal Democrats need a new leader to navigate that landscape, but we certainly need some new thinking and a new approach from the top of the party.

The Joy of Six 1585

"Burnham’s speech was, in some ways, an exercise in calling the electorate’s bluff. 'I have given you what you often say is missing from politics,' Burnham concluded. “Honesty, ideas and a clear direction for the country we all love.' The message was thus: You say you want change and are sick of politicians who dodge difficult decisions and offer little beyond managerialism. So here are some difficult decisions — will you back me?" Zoe Grunewald was in Liverpool for Andy Burnham's speech.

Chris Grey looks at the the speech's effect on the Brexit debate: "In personal life, we rarely regard terrible decisions we have made as being unalterable, or at least not for long. We may, moralistically, tell ourselves that we have 'made our bed and must lie in it'. We may, stoically, insist that we 'mustn’t grumble' and 'have to make the best of it'. But few of us are so moralistic, or so stoic, as to deny ourselves the chance to revisit our bad decisions, if it is possible. With Brexit, that has not, in the sense of realistic politics, been possible until now. Burnham’s speech this week has made it so."

Ruth Bright has some questions for Burnham (and the Liberal Democrats) on what a 'National Care Service' would look like.

"In November 1749 John London walked from his home to vote in the Westminster constituency parliamentary by-election at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. He was probably with a group of his near neighbours from Hungerford Market, just south of the Strand (where Charing Cross railway station stands today). He cast his vote for the government candidate, Lord Trentham, then presumably returned home to continue his day’s business."  Gillian Williamson explores the earliest known record of a Black person voting in a British parliamentary election.

Finlay McLaren suggests I, Claudius as a model for out beleaguered television industry: "I, Claudius is also a reminder that costume drama doesn’t need armies of extras, CGI palaces or international location shoots. It needs good scripts, good actors and directors who know how to use them. As the television industry struggles with budgets and commissioners become increasingly frightened of expensive productions, perhaps the future lies not in trying to compete with multi-million-pound streaming hits, but in cheap, writerly drama like I, Claudius."

"Without wine’s prestige, and with relatively minimal transport costs and, at those ABVs, considerably lower UK alcohol duty than wine, some of the bottles in today’s picks are nothing short of a giveaway." Mina Holland on the appeal of perries

Russia opens criminal case against Lib Dem councillor

Embed from Getty Images

Russia's spy agency has opened a criminal case against a Liberal Democrat councillor, accusing her of being part of a terrorist organisation.

Ksenia Maximova, who was born in Russia, is a Lib Dem member of Ealing Borough Council. She is also the founder of the Russian Democratic Society, an organisation that works to counter authoritarianism and war by empowering democratic voices from Russia. It is designated "undesirable" under Russian law.

She told Sky News that being put on Russia's list of terrorists comes as no surprise:

"For years everyone was saying it's a bit random that I was still not on it. I guess I'm one of the last ones, I was a bit more careful."

Now the Russian authorities have opened a case against Ms Maximova under Part 2 of Article 205.5 of the Russian Criminal Code, which concerns participation in an organisation designated as terrorist under Russian law:

Ms Maximova could face prosecution if she returns to Russia, but says she already knew she could not go back:

"The problem comes if they stick you on Interpol," she added, saying that could see her held up at passport controls when she travels.

Christine Jardine will not fight Edinburgh West for the Lib Dems at the next election

Embed from Getty Images

Yesterday evening Christine Jardine, the Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West, published a statement saying she would not be the party's candidate in the seat next time. 

Liberal Democrat Voice published the full text:

I have written to my local party to let them know I shall not be standing as the Scottish Liberal Democrat candidate for Edinburgh West at the next election, following the recent decision by  some of the local party.

I have informed them that although I am able to request a ballot of the membership,  it is with a heavy heart I have decided not to pursue this. I do not wish to expose anyone to more tension and division.

I shall continue to represent my constituents with the care I have always sought to bring over the last nine years.

It has been, and remains, an honour and a privilege to represent this part of the city, and to work with our fantastic communities.

This development has been met with surprise on social media and amid the picturesque ruins of what we used to call the blogosphere. For myself, I think it's a great shame, as Christine has been a good Liberal and a good campaigner.

The Independent thinks it knows what lies behind it:

Allies of Edinburgh West MP Christine Jardine have told The Independent that she has decided to not stand at the next election as a Lib Dem because she was being forced out in favour of an ally of the party’s Scottish leader Alex Cole-Hamilton.

And Andrew Page, reminding us that Christine is a former journalist and will have chosen her words carefully, draws attention to the fact that this statement leaves her all her options open:

I note that she does not say she will not stand in the next General Election, only that she will not stand as the Scottish Liberal Democrat candidate.

Make of that, as he says, what you will. His observation does at least explain my careful choice of headline.

Lord Bonkers' foreword to the new Liberator Songbook

As far as I know, this foreword appeared in the new Liberator Songbook on sale at Brighton. It's not perhaps his lordship's most seminal work, but I'm posting it here for completeness and so I don't lose it.

Besides, he's reminded me that my rent falls due on Lady Day.

Talking of Liberator, you can download the latest issue for free from the magazine's website. And, while you're on there, why not sign up to be notified each time a new issue drops?

Bonkers Hall

Rutland

Tel. Rutland 7

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Home Counties. I’m never happier than when toying with a macaroon in a tea shop in the shadow of the North Downs. But don’t you think there should be more Liberal Democrat MPs from other parts of the country? It’s not as if they’re labelled “Here be dragons” on the map. Well, the upper Welland Valley is, but that is an exception.

To encourage the party’s bigwigs to widen their horizons, I’m going to suggest some songs from these neglected areas that could be included in this songbook next year. We appear to be doing Terribly Well in Scotland, but perhaps less so in Wales. So let’s hear the Eurovision winning Boom Bangor Boom (but not that ancient Welsh anthem Cwm Sixth).

From the North East of England, we could have Earth, Wind & Fire’s Boogie Sunderland, and from Lincolnshire Roxy Music’s Louth is the Drug. We hold North Norfolk, of course, but it would do no harm to slip Cromer Chameleon in there too.

From Shropshire comes The Wham!’s Clun Tropicana, and from the North West Olivia Rodrigo’s Bootle and Billie Eilish’s Bury a Friend to attract the young people. Do I surprise you, reader? I didn’t get to mastermind the RutBeat movement of the Sixties without keeping up with the hit parade, you know.

Finally, it’s worth noting that “Market Harborough” can be substituted for “California” or “San Francisco” in any song title where they appear. So we have Market Harborough Dreaming, (I Left My Heart) In Market Harborough and The Move’s Market Harborough Man.

So I ask you now to join me in a chorus of Market Harborough (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).

Bonkers

My days in the Lib Dem News broom cupboard with Jock Gallagher

Here's something sad that I had missed: Jock Gallagher died in May of last year at the age of 87. I've not found an obituary for him, but there was a news report in the Daily Express.

I knew Jock in the days when I helped with the production of the issue of Liberal Democrat News that was put together during the Liberal Democrat's autumn conference – one year I copped for all the desktop publishing work.

My reward was that I got to chat to two other people who pitched in to help: Adrian Slade and Jock.

I talked Cambridge Footlights with Adrian Slade, who went down in history as the man who auditioned Peter Cook. I once blogged what he said about Cook:

He said Cook was the funniest man he had ever met and that you would spend all evening with him laughing and then not be able to remember a word he had said the next day.

Adrian also said, however, that being a revue performer – putting on a hat and a funny voice for a two-minute sketch - is not the same as being an actor. And he agreed that sometimes with Peter Cook it showed.

With Jock, I talked about The Archers, which he had been responsible for when he was head of network radio at Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham.

When he took on that role in 1971, The Archers was in the doldrums and the BBC was debating whether to bring it to an end. Jock managed to modernise it without upsetting its existing fans too much. Hence a Daily Record article from 2017 that described him as "the Scot who saved the most English series on radio".

I once tried a theory popular with a long-defunct group called 'The Archers Anarchists' on him, and Jock confirmed that Brian had murdered Adam when he was a boy – they never got on – and buried him somewhere on Home Farm without Jennifer noticing. Who this "Adam" they have now is, God alone knows.

It was remembering these happy days in the Lib Dem News broom cupboard at conference that led me to look Jock up last week and find that he had died. Adrian Slade also died last year, and I am very glad that I knew them both.

The Joy of Six 1581

Tom Gordon, Liberal Democrat MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, argues that we must stop avoiding the subject of student finance if we are to win back younger voters.

Margaret Hartmann reports that Trump's interference in the plans for his White House ballroom has produced a design that is a menace to public safety: "McCrery informed the White House that Trump’s ballroom design did not meet fire safety codes, which require the majority of guests to be able to quickly exit through the main entrance during an emergency ... The architect also pointed out that alternative emergency exit routes out of the building were insufficient, and that there was little in the design to prevent a kitchen fire from rapidly spreading into the event space on the floor above."

"We want children to become physically competent, but we also want them to become confident decision-makers, good communicators and effective collaborators. We might want them to learn how to deal with mistakes, take responsibility and work things out for themselves. None of this is guaranteed simply because a child participates in sport." Children’s sport is great at keeping them busy but, asks Jose Castro, are they learning?

"Born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlin in Moravia, before becoming a triply displaced refugee boy. Having been taken to Singapore as a two-year-old, two days before the Nazis invaded, he was to speak his first words, in Czech, in East Asia, but was soon to forget his mother tongue. Aged four he was again on a boat, this time to Bombay, two days before Singapore fell to the Japanese. So many of his earliest memories were of Darjeeling, in British India, where his mother met Major Kenneth Stoppard, marrying him in Calcutta, before they traveled to Southampton and then Derbyshire, where the young brothers Petr and Tomas became anglicised as Peter and Tom Stoppard." Sunder Katwala reflects on the shifting identity of the playwright Tom Stoppard, who died last year.

Amy Louise Burney says it doesn't have to be Jane Austen. She suggests five other 18th-century writers with whom TV could have a wonderful love affair.

"This is the early 1960s and the physical changes taking place in the city centre, wrecking balls and cranes visible in many shots, mirror wider societal upheaval. You suspect that when Liz (Julie Christie) gets off her train in London, the world will be in colour, not monochrome." Graham Rickson on John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963).

Councillor defies council to install hedgehog sign

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The councillor is Christian Vassie, a Liberal Democrat member of City of York Council, and the sign has gone up in the village of Wheldrake.

Britain's hedgehogs salute him.

The Joy of Six 1580

"Later he announced that the party are now in favour of cutting fuel duty by 10p, a policy that has not been agreed by conference and one that flies in the face of our commitment to tackling climate change. The Deputy Leader, Daisy Cooper also launched a new economic policy in her speech, which, once I had got hold of it, appears to be largely sensible, however, that too has not been approved by conference and it also talks about tax cuts." Peter Black reports from the Liberal Democrats' autumn conference in Brighton.

George Monbiot asks why lawbreaking on our roads isn't just visible, but designed to be seen.

"It had been intended that Lloyd George would go with Lord Kitchener to Russia in order to 'see in what way the Ministry of Munitions could best help' to remedy Russia's shortages. Had he done so, then he would have been aboard the armoured cruiser Hampshire, which on 5 June 1916 struck a recently-laid mine off the Orkney Islands. The weather was foul, and she went down in twenty minutes, taking 749 men with her." Charles Stephenson writes on Ireland, Churchill and Lloyd George.

"For more than seventy years after the war ended, the town elected only left-wing mayors. And yet, ever since 1957, when Rachele reclaimed her husband’s corpse, Predappio has relied on Mussolini for its living." Dani Garavelli visits the village where the Italian fascist dictator was born.

"I wanted to understand why so many people read her, and why they stopped. But I also knew that her life story was like a bonkers telenovela – with suicides, plane-crashes, wartime heroism and royal intrigue – and that during her lifetime she had presented it in a carefully curated way, which could now be interrogated." Matthew Sweet is interviewed about his biography of Barbara Cartland – and an ill-advised attempt to watch 700 episodes of Crossroads.

Rebecca Hutcheon discusses why the places we love in books – the Brontës’ Haworth, Jane Austen’s Bath, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex – can never quite be found in real life. 

GUEST POST Reform and Labour are losing councillors fast

We’ve all enjoyed the regular resignations, defections and disgrace of Reform UK councillors, but the party actually gained councillors from by-election victories and defections, between May 2025 and May 2026. But now, as the latest post from the indefatigable Augustus Carp shows, the tide has turned for them.

The kaleidoscope of local government has continued to twist since the local elections in May, and with it a number of political allegiances have changed. Sometimes a councillor’s defection has little impact, but clustering in some authorities has led to significant weakening in control. For the first time since I started paying any attention to this phenomenon, all political parties have suffered a net loss of councillors, to the benefit of Independents and a number of new Localist groups.

Mark Pack’s website, which diligently catalogues the various defections, expulsions, resignations and arrests of Reform UK councillors, provides a lot of entertainment value, particularly for the type of person who likes watching slow-motion car crashes. But why isn’t anyone paying the same sort of attention to the Labour Party? In terms of defections, ReformUK has lost 48 councillors since the local elections in May. Labour has lost 42 – a similar number, which has received almost no publicity whatsoever. In both cases, there have been a number of councillors in the same political group who have gone at the same time, presumably for ideological rather than just personal reasons.

Seven Labour councillors have gone in Luton, four in Neath, four in Colchester and three in North Tyneside. In Luton, it’s reasonable to assume that the losses from the Labour group were significant in allowing the Lib Dems to form a new minority administration. (But to be fair, the situation there is complex, and the resignation of a senior Lib Dem complicates matters further.)

Four Independents have joined forces with the Conservatives in Braintree, but one has gone the other way. Four of the councillors in Sevenoaks who left the fold in May 2025 to form the West Kent Independent Group have now drifted back. Three others have left the party in Fife

The big losses for Reform UK have been in Durham (8, or maybe 9 councillors, including a suspension) and Plymouth (6) but four have joined in North East Derbyshire and three in Flintshire 

For councillors flying off in all sorts of different directions, have a look at Worcestershire. The Conservatives are unchanged, with two coming and two going, taking at face value their assertion that the national suspension of one of their number doesn’t apply locally. Likewise the Lib Dems are unchanged – one in and one out – but ReformUK are down three. The situation is similarly unclear in some of the District Councils covered by the County.

Across the nation, in the 18 weeks since the local elections in May, the net changes for the number of councillors defecting or getting themselves suspended is:

Conservatives       -6

Labour                 -44

Lib Dem               -15

Greens                  -4

Nationalists           -1  

ReformUK           -48

Independents   +118 

Let’s see if conference season causes any more movement.

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