Lord Bonkers' Diary: Wah-wah brass and boings on the timpani

The new issue of Liberator has dropped. Download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

And that, whether we like it or not, means it's time to set out on another week with Rutland's most popular fictional peer.

Monday

A productive morning at PieTown studios in Melton Mowbray. Having heard rumours (I do miss Freddie and Fiona giving me the inside track on the party) that Ed Davey is determined to spend the next election campaign as he spent the last – falling off paddle boards and wrestling gorillas in custard – I hit upon the idea of providing a musical accompaniment for his antics. 

So, along with handpicked members of Earl Russell’s Big Band, I have been busy recording ascending and descending slide whistles, wah-wah brass and boings on the timpani. Add to this our arrangement of Benny Hill’s celebrated theme ‘Yakety Sax’ and you have a package that will confound the critics who claim Davey lacks the gravitas required of a leading national politician.

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

Gareth Epps and the quiet lanes of Oxfordshire

Liberator's Gareth Epps has made the BBC News Oxfordshire pages because the Liberal Democrat run authority is about to approve its first 'quiet lane' at Stanton St John, a village to the north east of the city of Oxford.

Quiet lanes are closed to almost all through motor traffic, with exceptions made for residents and emergency services, to create safer and more pleasant routes for pedestrians, cyclists and horse riders. 

I was hoping to add a killer quote here from Gareth, the council's cabinet member for place, environment and climate action, but BBC News, true to form, is more interested in the scheme's critics than its advantages. It does at least call him the county's "transport boss" though.

So for an account of the many advantages of quiet lanes, download the guide produced by the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

Book Review: Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt by Lon Milo DuQuette and Jim Bratkowsky

This review appears in the new issue of Liberator, which you can download free of charge from the magazine's website.

Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt

Lon Milo DuQuette and Jim Bratkowsky

Weiser Books, 2026, £14.99

The year is 1900 and a young Aleister Crowley – poet, mountaineer and Cambridge chess Blue – is keen to learn the mysteries of London’s leading occultists, but he arrives in this fashionable circle to find it riven by a power struggle. The old guard of MacGregor Mathers and his wife Moina, who were real historical figures, are being challenged by a new generation that includes W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne and Bram Stoker.

Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt began life as a screenplay, which at one time came close to being shot with the late Alan Rickman as the lead. Its frustrating history is set out in a preface and, perhaps because of that history, this novelisation sees an eminent British director describing, to a young American who is also in the movie business, the action of a film about Crowley he has long planned but is now too ill to make. This extended dialogue takes place at a wake held for Crowley after his funeral in 1947 at the Marylebone home of two more real figures, Sir Percy and Lady Frieda Harris.

Percy Harris held Harborough for the Liberals at a wartime by-election in 1916, but was defeated there two years later after his Conservative opponent received Lloyd George’s coupon. He returned to Westminster as MP for Bethnal Green South West in 1922 and represented that seat until 1945, becoming one of Sir Archibald Sinclair’s most important lieutenants. Frieda Harris, his wife, was an artist and follower of Crowley who painted his famous Thoth tarot pack. After Sir Percy’s death in 1952 she moved to a houseboat in Kashmir and made a modest income from writing and artistic projects. When Matthew Taylor (now Baron Taylor of Goss Moor), the former Liberal and Liberal Democrat MP for Truro, who was adopted as a baby, traced his birth mother, he found that Sir Percy and Lady Frieda were among his great grandparents.

But it’s not just the Liberal trivia that makes this book fun. Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt, a work of fantasy that is firmly grounded in fact, paints an intriguing picture of an Edwardian London where men in wing collars and women in enormous hats believe the most extraordinary things. It’s a world not unlike the one G.K. Chesterton created in The Man Who Was Thursday.

My Liberator article on the Yorkists' New Deal

This article appears in the new Liberator – you can download the whole issue from the magazine's website. Following the best traditions of academic reviewing, I spend a lot of time stating my own views before I get on to the publication I'm meant to be writing about.

You can find The New Deal online.

Lib Dem Narrative – The Search Goes On

The 2024 general election saw 72 Liberal Democrat MPs elected, the most for a third party since the Liberals’ brief revival in 1923. It was a result that exceeded all expectations, yet, two years on, there is a feeling of deflation among many Lib Dems. May’s local elections, whose outcome was in some ways very good for the party, were followed by a series of posts on Lib Dem Voice expressing dissatisfaction with the party’s direction or at least arguing that its current approach had been exhausted and a new one was needed.

This dissatisfaction arises from a sense of disappointment. If we have so many MPs, why aren’t we more central to the political debate? You can blame the media all you like, and they certainly do us no favours, but maybe the problem lies deeper than that. If we were allowed to write out own newspaper headlines, do we know what they would be? The approach with which we fought the last election – three bullet points and a reminder that Labour can’t win here – and its continuation after that election have left us with a limited number of headline policies.

Massive failures

Where we do have them, they aren’t necessarily as strong as we try to make them sound. We won support at the last election by campaigning on the massive failures of the water companies, but what would we do about them? The answer is that we would appoint a new, tougher regulator. The trouble with this is that the model promised at privatisation – businesses that displayed market-driven efficiency and went in fear of powerful regulators – has never looked like working. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is that the water industry is a natural monopoly. The second is regulatory capture, the process by which public institutions that are set up to keep an industry in check are subverted so they come to act in its interests. Nothing about the Lib Dems’ proposals for the water industry suggests they have found the answer to either of these problems.

Then there is the party’s performance in opinion polls and local elections. When it comes to the polls, despite the collapse of the Labour vote, we are happy if we see one where we match the 12 per cent of the vote we achieved at the last general election. We may remember Zack Polanski as an ambitious Liberal Democrat who was keener on austerity than most of us, but as James Butler wrote in the London Review of Books: 

Polanski’s political journey … is sometimes framed as opportunism but in fact reflects the often radicalising economic experience of millennials now approaching middle age.

We need to have more to offer such voters than we do at present.

Our vote is now heavily concentrated in the parliamentary constituencies that we won in 2024. We gained dozens upon dozens of councillors there in May, but I saw debate as to whether we had gained or lost councillors across all the other constituencies. What is certain is that our vote in seats where we have not been active in recent years is as low as one or two per cent, as is demonstrated weekly in local by-elections. And while we are being worried, the party’s membership is generally estimated to be 60,000, which is barely half what it was in 2022.

Many of the areas we now represent are prosperous, which means we must beware of simply representing their interests. Our opposition to inheritance tax on land, for instance, is hard to defend. As far as farmers have a grievance, it’s that the price of land has lost its relationship with the income that can be derived from farming it. But if you allow land to be used as a tax shelter, that problem will not be solved, it will get worse.

In the end, the Liberal Democrat hold on the seats they gained in 2024 may be out of their hands. In order for disillusioned Conservatives to come over to the Lib Dems, it is necessary for them not to be too scared by the possibility of a Labour government. If Andy Burnham turns out to be more Socialist than anyone expects, or at least if the press succeeds in getting the public to see him that way, then there is a danger that those voters will flock back to the Tories, however sensible or moderate we have been.

Against the background of this complicated political landscape comes The New Deal: How the Liberal Democrats Should Go into the 2029 General Election. It’s billed as “a pre-manifesto strategy document from the Yorkist group of Liberal Democrat activists” and, in his foreword, William Wallace explains its purpose:

This paper aims to start a conversation within the party on the narrative we need to construct. We have at most three years until the next election. Too many voters have come to despair of any political party’s ability to overcome the country’s economic stagnation and social divides. Liberal Democrats must find a way to offer them hope that national renewal – economic, social and political – is possible and attainable.”

To that end, The New Deal offers an analysis of the electoral position of the Liberal Democrats, a narrative they should develop before the next election and the policies it says flow from that narrative.

When The New Deal was published in May, it seemed that both the Greens and Reform UK were in line to make sweeping gains at the next election and that the Liberal Democrats would have to change their strategy to take account of this. Since then, both parties have faltered. The Greens appear to have hit their ceiling in the opinion polls and the media have at last started to ask hard questions about how Reform and its leader are funded. This position may change again, of course, but at the moment it seems the 2029 election may be more like the 2024 election than we expected.

Usefully, The New Deal considers the parties along two axes. There is the conventional one of Progressive/Centre Left vs Authoritarian/Orthodox, which sees the Liberal Democrats lined up with Labour, the Nationalists and the Greens against the Conservatives and Reform. From their history, their members and their voters, the Liberal Democrats are inescapably an anti-Conservative party, though that doesn’t mean that, deep down, we are the same as Labour or that ‘Progressive’ is a meaningful political identity rather than just a more impressive way of saying you are against the Tories.

The second axis is System vs Anti System, which sees the Lib Dems (and we still just about deserve this) placed in the Anti-System camp along with the Greens, the Nationalists and Reform, while Labour and the Tories share the System end. 

Anti-system

This ‘anti-system’ concept is a useful one and helps explain why, to the bafflement of the simplicities of social media, there are many voters who choose between Reform and the Liberal Democrats. It’s an identity that I suspect has something to do with being a long way from the centres of power, as voters are in Cornwall or Lincolnshire, and perhaps with the area being a historical stronghold of religious Nonconformity. As academics always say, more research is needed.

The New Deal emphasises the importance of developing a narrative, identifying Keir Starmer’s failure to do this as a key reason for his premiership foundering, but I’m not sure that what they’ve come up with quite fits the bill:

We are a better country than this! We are a kind, welcoming people, proud of our traditions, keen not to be taken for fools, but happy to be a modern, compassionate civic nation. We believe in a helping-hand role for a benign state, but one that doesn’t encroach any more into private lives than is strictly necessary. We believe in giving power back to the people, and in making all votes of equal value. 

This is a collection of four sentences, two of which are immediately qualified with a “but…”, that fails to tell a story. Stories involve movement through time or space, but these words just sit there. And they are statements about the Liberal Democrats when what is needed is a story about Britain today that will make voters nod in assent.

So an effective Liberal Democrat narrative might look more like:

In recent years politicians have looked to party interest rather than what’s good for Britain, the gap between rich and poor has grown too wide, and young people are finding it too hard to get a start in life. We need to rebuild our democracy, make it easier for people from all homes to make the most of their talents, and revive social housing.

That’s what’s on the back of my envelope, anyway.

When it comes to the paper’s policy offer, the cover leads you to expect great things because it has a mock-up of FDR wearing a Lib Dem rosette. In fact, it’s not always clear how different this New Deal would be. There are places where it talks about “success and progress being about more than GDP, including measures of social wellbeing and the environment” and “markets working for society rather than society being there to support markets”, but it’s not clear what these encouraging sentiments would mean in practice. Nor is it clear what the “unashamedly Keynesian” policy it wants to see at the next election would be. It seems to envisage more government intervention in the economy, which is welcome, but Keynes’s great theoretical innovation was the idea of demand management to avoid the cycle of economic booms and slumps. I’m not sure that’s on offer here.

But there are some very good ideas in The New Deal, and not only rejoining the European Union either. There’s a welcome emphasis on localism, and the inevitable support for electoral reform is strengthened by a call for it to be “linked to some form of bottom-up democracy to allow citizens to generate legislation, and to take more control over their local affairs”. There’s a call for the provision of rented accommodation (though it doesn’t say in which sector) and for an emphasis on “doing up the housing at the bottom of the ladder which is a health hazard for many of those living in it”. Education is there too, with a thoroughly Liberal emphasis on the importance of teaching critical thinking.

Above all, it’s great to see Liberal Democrat members publishing their ideas in a long form. Since the demise of Lib Dem News and then political blogging, communication within the party has tended to be very short (hello social media) or very top down. I hope The New Deal will be the first of many such publications.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"

The new Liberator is out. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

And that means it's time to spend another week with Rutland's most popular fictional peer. When I first mentioned the Well-Behaved Orphans' summer holiday in the pages of Liberator, Marcus Trescothick was a 14-year-old playing alongside his father for the Keynsham club in Bristol. In those days the WBOs went to a different Cornish resort: Trebilcock Bay.

Monday

I write these words in a deckchair on the sands of Trescothick Bay, the Cornish resort where I always bring the Well-Behaved Orphans for their summer holiday. As I watch, the mites are scaling the cliffs their predecessors have always declared to be "better than a chimbley", while Cook, who has accompanied us this time, is searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies". 

One advantage of being away from the Hall and Westminster is that I am no longer being pestered by Liberal Democrat HQ about what has become of Freddie and Fiona. Between you and me, gentle reader, I rather thought they had been burnt alive in a giant wicker hare by the Elves of Rockingham Forest at Beltane, but just before I left for Cornwall I overheard two young elves complaining that the "penguin ladies" had turned up at the eleventh hour to spoil their fun. 

Can it be that the sisters from the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes rescued F&F from the flames? I shall pump Sister Sid on my return to Rutland.

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

Call for the Rutland Water Monster to be displayed in Oakham

More than 2000 people have signed a petition calling on Rutland County Council to acquire the fossil ichthyosaur found at Rutland Water in 2021 for display in the county museum at Oakham.

Writing on Oakham Nub News, Lawrence Fenelon, chair of the Friends of Rutland County Museum and Oakham Castle, says:

At March last year RCC's accounts showed over £39m of usable capital reserve. Why can't a small bit of it be used to get the Sea Dragon back in Rutland? If it is not spent by March 2028 it will go to the new combined authority and be lost to Rutland.

Our council is in danger of missing a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring a major attraction to Oakham.

A BBC News story about the campaign for the fossil to be displayed Rutland says:

The authority told the BBC risings costs meant it could no longer afford to proceed with its original plan, but confirmed the petition would trigger a debate on the issue at a future full council meeting.

Readers of Lord Bonkers' Diary, whether in Liberator or on this blog, will have known all about the Rutland Water Monster long before 2021.

Two snorts and a smile: A new study of James Bryce reviewed

James Bryce was an academic who became a Liberal MP and then a diplomat – he served as Britain's ambassador in Washington from 1907 to 1913. He doesn't sound or look the sort of person to give rise to humour, but Jonathan Parry's review of a new study of Bryce for the London Review of Books won two snorts and a smile from me.

First snort (I have a dark sense of humour):

His schoolmaster father, a devoted geologist and botanist, taught him to observe the beauties of the natural world, believing that revelation and natural science were God’s complementary ways of communicating his love for mankind. He was killed in a rockfall while exploring above Loch Ness.

Second snort (some seats always have generated more casework):

He found the workload as MP for Tower Hamlets unmanageable, and escaped to a smaller constituency, Aberdeen South, in 1885.

The smile (I've always had a weakness for donnish humour):

Bryce’s book offered a comprehensive analysis of American political institutions, including state legislatures and political parties, and was founded on much reading and many interviews with Americans (Stefan Collini once suggested that his "genius largely consisted in an infinite capacity for taking trains.")

This is a good opportunity to recommend again Parry's recent short book Liberalism, which I reviewed for Liberator last year. 

He argues that we should not see thinkers like T.H. Green and L.T. Hobhouse as staking out a new path, which the Liberal Party then followed. Rather, they were attempting to systematise and justify what Liberal politicians and journalists were already doing and saying.

Michael Meadowcroft (1942-2026)

Embed from Getty Images

Sad news on Liberal Democrat Voice this morning: Michael Meadowcroft has died at the age of 84.

His victory in Leeds West in 1983 – the first Liberal gain from Labour at a general election in decades – was one of the few high points of what was, in the context of the Alliance's hopes and ambitions, a deeply disappointing election night.

By then Michael already had a reputation as the Liberal Party's thinker – I remember the frisson when he turned up on the final day of a Union of Liberal Students conference in Leeds in 1979. His pamphlets for Liberator gave you some hope that there was still a coherent Liberal philosophy that was distinct from centrism or social democracy.

Michael was unable to hold Leeds West in 1987 and the West Leeds Dispatch summarises his later career:

Following his defeat he turned to journalism and was a columnist in The Times and The Yorkshire Post. In later years he wrote obituaries of political figures for both The Guardian and Yorkshire Post.

From 1990 he was a consultant to new and emerging democracies and for 26 years led or was a member of 50 missions to 35 different countries

His attempt to run a continuing Liberal Party after the foundation of the Liberal Democrats soon foundered, and he later joined the merged party. It's a mark of his forbearance that he never once objected to my purloining his name to give to Lord Bonkers' gardener.

Searching for Normal by Sami Timimi

This review appears in the new Liberator – issue 435. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

Searching for Normal: A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress and Neurodiversity

Sami Timimi

Vintage, 2026, £12.99

Many years ago, through my then day job, I encountered the ideas of professionals who challenged the dominant account of serious mental health problems. It was wrong, they argued, to see these problems as caused by one or more of a collection of discrete mental illnesses. The term “schizophrenia”, for instance, now describes a quite different set of symptoms from those it did when it was coined in the 19th century, and despite all the advances made in neuroimaging, physical signs that would allow schizophrenia to be securely diagnosed remain as elusive as ever. And homosexuality ceased to be a mental disorder in the US in 1973, not because of any scientific discovery, but because of a vote among psychiatrists. Of those eligible to take part, 21 per cent said it was a disorder, 32 per cent said it wasn’t and 47 per cent failed to return their ballot paper.

Because the charge is often made, it’s worth emphasising that critical professionals don’t seek to minimise the suffering of people diagnosed with mental illness. What is true is that they are more likely to look for the causes in people’s life experiences, such as abuse, discrimination and poverty. They find the most useful question to ask a new client is not “What’s wrong with you?” but “What’s happened to you?” They also recognise that the treatments often prescribed, from psychoactive medication to electroconvulsive therapy, are not without distressing side-effects.

These critical mental health professionals are a heterogeneous group, but it’s fair to number the psychiatrist Sami Timimi among them. He writes well about what he calls the “mental health industrial complex (MHIC)” – which is in part what we used to call Big Pharma – and how it affects society:

Problems that are socio-political can easily be converted into problems that are psychological. The devastating consequences of discriminations, together with the persistent and pervasive inequities in society, are turned into mental disorders that need mental health care rather than political action. The diminishing boundaries for normal also mean that, over recent decades, the MHIC has continued to benefit from billions in revenue through individualising and psychologising mental suffering.

Where Searching for Normal will be controversial for many is that Timimi includes conditions like ADHD and mild autism in this analysis. Again, he is not denying people’s problems: one of the best things in the book are his case studies of young patients. (They are composites to protect individual clients’ confidentiality) They bring home that each person’s difficulties and suffering are different and that giving a patient one, two or half a dozen diagnoses – and some do receive that many – tells you little about them or what is likely to help them. 

Yet it is undeniable that both ADHD and mild autism are fluid concepts. ADHD has gone from a condition affecting small boys, whose symptoms sounded very like a list of those things about children that most irritate adults, to one found in both sexes and in adults as well as children. And, in online discourse though not psychiatric manuals, from one characterised by inattention to one that can equally well be characterised by paying too much attention. Who, we need to ask, is to say what too much attention is? The neurodiversity movement promised more acceptance of differing personalities, but it too often seeks a medical diagnosis for anyone who differs from an ever-narrowing and ever more stereotypical idea of what is “neurotypical”.

I was pleased to see that in looking at alternative frameworks for helping people, Timimi commends the Power Meaning Threat Network, which was published in 2018 by a group of clinical psychologists and service-user campaigners. He describes it as providing “a way of helping people to create more hopeful stories about their lives and the difficulties they have faced or are still facing, instead of seeing themselves as blameworthy. Weak, deficient or ‘mentally ill’.” It has its roots, to return to my old day job, in a project I once helped to initiate.

Remembering the wonderful Flick Rea

I was very sad to hear of the death of Flick Rea today. Flick was was leader of the Liberal and then Liberal Democrat group on Camden Council from 1986-2005 and 2014-2020. She was awarded an MBE in 2013 for her services to the borough.

After Flick retired she was made an honorary alderman, and you can see the speech she gave on that occasion in the video above.

Her Wikipedia entry reveals that Flick was a direct descendant of Sir Robert Peel and that she joined the Liberal Party in 1970. She fought her first election in her beloved Fortune Green ward in 1980, coming third in a by-election, and was first elected to the council in 1986.

Flick was also a great friend of Liberator and the Liberal Revue.

That Wikipedia entry talks about Flick's career in the theatre before she discovered politics, Flick trained at RADA, leaving in 1958, and worked in repertory theatre Salisbury and Oldham. By the early Sixties she was using the stage name Felicity Peel.

On the screen, she appeared in an episode of The Avengers and the film A Kind of Loving.

I once talked to Flick about her time at RADA and remember her mentioning two of her fellow students. One was Susannah York, and the other was a young man from a prosperous family who proved not to have the talent for a stage career and, after a couple of terms, went back to work in the family business in Liverpool.

His name was Brian Epstein.

The Shortest History of Ireland by James Hawes

This review appears in the new Liberator – issue 435. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

The Shortest History of Ireland

James Hawes

Old Street, 2026, £15

Teachers tried to tell you many things when you weren’t listening properly, but here’s some history they really didn’t teach you at school. James Hawes tells the story of Ireland from the earliest times to the present day in a way that is constantly surprising and enlightening. I shall first urge you to read this book and then share a few of its most startling insights.

One of the keys to understanding Ireland is that it was never part of the Roman Empire and was thus spared the dislocation that the rest of Europe suffered when that empire fell. Christianity came to Ireland, but it was assimilated into what was in many ways a highly developed Iron Age civilisation. So in the early Medieval period, when Ireland’s population was half of England’s, not the tenth it is today, Irish scholars were prized across Europe, but their independent ways increasingly met with disapproval from thde church authorities in Rome.

The first colonisers of Ireland were not English but French. The Normans who took land there had not troubled to learn English to speak to the serfs they brought with them, but they did learn Gaelic so they could talk to their neighbours. The result was that those Normans soon adopted Irish customs, while the serfs saw many attractions in deserting their positions and becoming Irish. This consistent tendency of settlers to turn Irish frustrated the English Crown’s ambitions: when England finally turned a serious imperialist gaze on Ireland in 1546, the only part of the country it controlled was Dublin. Elizabeth I’s court astrologer John Dee, incidentally, emerges as the first person to have talked of a British empire.

We English tend to see Ireland as sectarian, but the truth is that we exported it there. It was Protestant England that was sectarian, and it saw people who turned Irish as traitors. It was this attitude that explained the massacre of the garrison at Drogheda, and there were plenty of more extreme figures back at Westminster cheering Cromwell on. This was an England, as Hawes reminds us, that did not care that neither William III nor George I could speak English. The only thing that mattered was that they were not Catholic.

In the 19th century Britain spent a fortune trying to turn Ireland into a landscape of small Protestant farmers. The ruins of unwanted Anglican churches across Ireland are a reminder of this doomed project, while the payments to these uneconomically small arable farms. in what had historically been cattle country, were a heavy burden on independent Ireland until it joined the European Economic Community and its Common Agricultural Policy in 1971.

Finally, Hawes shows that the Catholic dominance of Irish society was a post-independence creation and did not fully establish itself until 1937. This dominance, with its satanic trio of institutions – industrial schools, mother and baby homes, Magdalene laundries – was the work of Éamon de Valera, the politician who dominated the first 50 years of the independent Ireland, and Archbishop John McQuaid of Dublin. Hawes likens de Valera, with his control of the press and closeness to the church, to one of the authoritarian leaders who flourish in Eastern Europe today.

And the book ends on an optimistic note: not even Brexit has slowed the economic and social forces making an eventual reunification look increasingly likely.

Is The UK heading for divorce? An interview with James Hawes

I referred to James Hawes's The Shortest History of Ireland the other day, and I've just sent Liberator a review of the book by fast orphan. Here Hawes raises wider issues about the future of the United Kingdom, and he's well worth a listen.,

Among his insights are that "England", to the Conservative Party, ultimately means the South East of England and the elite institutions to which it is home. And that the Reform vote is not working class, but a vote for a more hard-line Tory party. I suspect, though, that a good chunk of it is the sort of protest vote that we Liberals used to benefit from.

A word too for Adrian Goldberg, who was one of the most welcome voices in the early day of BBC Radio 5.

Frank reaction today to the Lib Dem election performance

"Am I alone in thinking our response to the local election results is a little too self-congratulatory?" asked David Vigar on Liberal Democrat Voice this morning. We can safely say he is not alone, judging by comment on that blog and further afield.

Next up on Lib Dem Voice was Shaun Ennis:

No one has ever asked me to devise an idea for Ed Davey’s next stunt. But if I was approached from on high, I might suggest having him wade through a river of treacle.

That’s how it feels trying to spread the Liberal Democrat message in the North of England these days.

It’s been an underwhelming set of elections in our part of the country. Despite some notable and very important exceptions such as Stockport, Preston and Sefton, the Liberal Democrats have failed to cut through with what has been a predominantly nationally motivated electorate.

And Johan Prinsloo saw a similar pattern in London:

We saw major success stories in Brent and Ealing, with the local parties there making significant gains on Labour. Our ground game all across London was a marvel to watch, and the establishment of a 100 per cent majority in Richmond, as well as maintaining/improving large majorities in Kingston and Sutton is something to champion going forward. 

These are emblematic of our strong ground game resonating well, when there was a record of results behind them. 

However, it is also important to accept the reality of the situation that we have underperformed in many areas, even just in London. Our major target of Merton has fallen flat with only two councillors gained. 

Also, in Lambeth, Southwark, Islington and my home borough of Croydon, expected gains have somehow evaporated and in some areas, paper candidate Greens in areas like Newham, Barking and Enfield have won without ever campaigning!

While Tara Foster detected a malaise than goes beyond disappointing election results:

In my view, from 2024, we've been electorally and politically stagnant, and the Party has forgotten how to be an effective campaigning machine. Many MPs are well-educated, but their expertise is being wasted. 

For example, we don’t have the tax experts working on treasury matters, and as a result we had Daisy Cooper come out with the politically-weightless idea of a Trumpian "Department of Growth" with a tagline of "Get Britain Growing Again."

James Graham, a fellow survivor of the golden age of Lib Dem blogging, has also gone deeper on his own Quaequam Blog!:

The party continues to do well in places where it has been doing well in recent years, and continues to decline in areas where it took a knock during the coalition years. The areas it does well tend to be rural, formerly Conservative dominated areas and it continues to decline in areas that historically were dominated by Labour. In the latter areas, the Greens have completely eclipsed the party.

Even in places where the party was doing well in recent history, such as Hornsey and Friern Barnet (most of which represented by Lynne Featherstone until 2015) and Manchester Withington (most of which was represented by John Leech), the Greens have replaced the Lib Dems as the main challengers to Labour. Wales, with the exception of a single MS in the form of Jane Dodds and a smattering of councillors, is now a no-go area for the party. ...

As some have pointed out, the extent to which the Lib Dems now represent the richest parts of the UK is quite striking; at the top end, Lib Dem MPs represent even wealthier areas than the Conservatives. No wonder Ed Davey has been quite as hostile to any suggestion of redistributing wealth as he has been over the last couple of years.

And this is my worry too. If we are increasingly drawn to campaigning on the grievances of these comfortably off constituents, then our policies are going to seem at best irrelevant to much of the country.

Let me end with an observation on Keir Starmer and Ed Davey from the Commentary in the current issue of Liberator:

There are worrying similarities in the predicaments of the leaders of what are traditionally the two main centre-left parties as they try to contend with both the Greens and Reform.

Both became leader by replacing an extremely unsuccessful predecessor, both conveyed an “adults are back in charge” air of calm competence and both won bigger than they can have dared hope in 2024.

Since then they have both shown little sign of knowing what to do with that success, both have struggled to manage a larger than expected parliamentary party and both have been unable to clearly articulate in public any narrative about what their party is for and what it wants to do.

While Starmer has made a series of u-turns Davey has made a series of diversion side turnings while not really getting anywhere. British missiles? A new Magna Carta? Splitting the Treasury? Defence bonds? Some of these ideas may have merits but nothing links them and they get the public no nearer to knowing what sort of country they would be living in were the Lib Dems in power.

That issue is no. 434 and you can download it free of charge from the magazine's website. You can also sign up to a mailing list there so you are informed each time a new issue appears.

George Orwell remembered by his family and friends in 1965

No recording of George Orwell's voice has survived, but in this extract from a 1965 BBC programme you can hear his wife Sonia, sister Avril Dunn and friends Malcolm Muggeridge and Cyril Connolly talking about him.

I review Rob Colls' George Orwell: Life and Legacy in the current issue of Liberator.

George Orwell: Life and Legacy by Robert Colls

This review appears in the latest issue of Liberator – no. 434. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

George Orwell: Life and Legacy

Robert Colls

Oxford University Press, 2026, £14.99

I read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a teenager because it felt like a moral duty and as a student regarded the four paperback volumes of George Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters as a sort of bible. So I wonder if Rob Colls (who taught me on my MA Victorian Studies course long ago) is right to say we are now living at peak Orwell. 

The imperative to read Nineteen Eighty-Four surely faded with the end of the Cold War, even if Orwell’s picture of a world divided into three power blocs – Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia – is beginning to look prophetic. My impression is that many who cite him today have been influenced by the American right (“Make Orwell History Again”) and have little idea that Orwell remained, in his writings at least, a revolutionary socialist until well after the outbreak of the second world war.

There are many good things in this short book. Colls notes how the Old Etonian Orwell took his preconceptions with him when he went to lodge with working-class families so he could write The Road to Wigan Pier:

His local … contacts reckoned he sought out the worst digs in the worst places. Having stayed a few days with the Meades, “some kind of trade union official” on their new council estate, Orwell seemed to think they couldn’t be working class because they weren’t poor and the house didn’t smell.

Nor did Orwell show any understanding of the rich network of chapels, clubs and societies that constituted working-class communities. Anyone he found not to be living in abject destitution risked being dismissed as “bourgeois”.

Colls is good too on the changing trends in Orwell scholarship. The importance to his work of Orwell’s two wives is becoming increasingly recognised, which is not something he always managed himself. It’s been said that it’s easy to read his Homage to Catalonia without realising that Orwell’s wife Eileen was in Spain with him the whole time. 

Colls cheerfully admits Orwell’s limitations as a writer – too many generalisations, too many “beastly old boy adjectives”, too keen to deploy his “stage army of potty progressives” – but rightly praises his ability to write without condescension about the pleasures of the poor and insists Orwell is and will remain a vital presence in our culture. I hope he is right.

A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars by Alwyn Turner

This review appears in the latest issue of Liberator – no. 434. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars

Alwyn Turner

Profile Books, 2026, £25

The most startling thing about Britain in the inter-war years is what didn’t happen. Across Europe, Communist and Fascist regimes took power, but neither force ever came close to it here. George V’s verdict on the General Strike was “That was a rotten way to run a revolution, I could have done it better myself,” but few on the left had revolutionary ambitions and the aims of the unsuccessful strike were modest. Meanwhile on the right, Alwyn Turner argues, Oswald Mosley and his New Party were in decline after 1934: 

After that early boom, the party never really amounted to anything. The momentum rapidly dissipated, and no candidates were fielded in the 1935 general election. It wasn’t entirely clear what the movement was supposed to do, save to provide a dramatic backdrop to Mosley’s speeches, and it failed at that: the thuggery and anti-Semitism ensured that no one paid attention to what its leader was saying.

Other factors Turner points to enhance this impression of stability. The murder rate, for instance, was lower than it had been in Victoria’s day and a tenth of what it was in the United States.

What is particularly enjoyable about Turner’s approach to history is the way he combines high politics with the concerns and the entertainments of the masses. This prevents us from viewing the period as one of unrelenting grimness – think of the absurd view of the Seventies as wholly taken up by strikes and power cuts that pertains on social media and in popular podcasts. 

Sometimes the two streams turn out to be related. The inter-war years saw the decline of music hall and the rise of the cinema and radio. 

Some politicians adapted to these changes better than others. When first invited to address the nation live on BBC radio, both Asquith and Ramsay MacDonald found it natural to opt for a relay of a platform speech at a public meeting; it was Stanley Baldwin, who sat down with a studio microphone and spoke in conversational tones, who was adjudged to be more effective.

Modern readers, familiar with the concept of posttraumatic stress, will not be surprised to learn there was a high male suicide rate after the first world war. And for all the fun Turner brings to light, I remember that my mother used to quote her own mother as saying: “We hadn’t got over the last war when the next one came along.”

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A contemporary review of Lucy Masterman's biography of her husband Charles Masterman

I once wrote of C.F.G. Masterman, Lucy Masterman's biography of her late husband Charles Masterman, in Liberator:

There are too many undigested extracts from her diary for it to rank as great literature, but besides its value as a picture of Masterman, it is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand the big beasts of that Liberal government.

For not only did Masterman serve under both Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, he and Lucy became friends of both families

On 3 November 1939 the Salisbury Times published a long review of the book by Alan Campbell Johnson. He was far from disinterested: he reveals that he was Lucy Masterman's research assistant while she was writing it. Still it's a good review and here's an extract:

Mrs. Masterman’s book corrects many misconceptions. Two in particular should be stressed: first, that the Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith Governments were made up of shallow optimists who were only scratching on the surface of "the condition of the people" question: second, that Liberalism means laissez faire, and is accordingly both dead and damned. 

The fact that C.F.G. Masterman's work and influence is so little known is testimony to the prevalence of these two falsehoods, Socialist Party propaganda has naturally tended to underestimate the importance of the pre-war social reform, but when a writer like Mr. George Dangerfield, in his book "The Strange Death of Liberal England," makes no reference at all to Masterman and his circle, it is time to protest in the interests of historical accuracy. 

The intellectual movement behind those Liberal Governments with which Masterman was so closely identified, of which many of his contemporaries admitted him to be the leader, was really one of pessimism, of a profound sense that the odds against them were great and that the time was short. 

There are countless quotations in "C.F.G. Masterman" to develop this contention. Here is a random example from a letter Mrs. Masterman received from her husband at the end of 1908:

Above all let's not relax our eagerness to do something for the poor; "all the world's agin the poor!" 1 feel that I am not so much inclined to care or at least to break into revolt against conditions of poverty as I come to settle down in the social order as one of a settled society accepting the whole as whatever is is right. Don’t let's do it; don't let’s ever tolerate the cruelties and injustices of the world. Pray for the fire within adequate to burn up the sins of the whole world.

Lucy Masterman's biography of her husband is surprisingly hard to find, particularly as it was republished around 1970. My mother, bless her, found me this copy one Christmas via a dealer in Brig o' Turk, Perthshire.

The political effect of our "silent epidemic of loneliness"

The Liberal Democrats have proposed a network of "Hobby Hubs" to combat what they call a "silent epidemic of loneliness", as a lack of community spaces is forcing people to find human interaction online.

These hubs could libraries, community centres and pubs where groups could meet for activities. The network would be integrated the into NHS social prescribing programmes, giving GPs additional options when recommending activities for their patients.

The BBC News report on this plan says the party estimates that £42m of funding per year could help hobby hubs in England stay open for an additional 300,000 hours.

It also quotes Ed Davey

"The Liberal Democrats want to breathe new life into British high streets and community centres to give everyone a place to do what they love, with other people who love it too. 

"It is so important that we do not allow isolation to become the new normal."

This is an important issue, and one that has political implications. Diane Bolet has written about her own research into the decline of community centres for The Conversation:

The decline of the high street has been hollowing out British town centres in recent years. When pubs, community centres, libraries and banks close, it adds to a sense of local decline. In my recently published research, I found that local decline contributes to a rise in support for radical-right political parties – and that the loss of local pubs plays a surprisingly important role in the shift.

A couple of other links seem relevant too. Here's Andrew Saint reviewing The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. III: 1840-1950. in the London Review of Books:

Edwardian Market Harborough, a town just short of 8000, boasted Sunday schools, friendly societies for young men and girls, a Church Lads’ brigade, a Territorial Army branch, a debating society, a reading society, a choral society, an opera society, a brass band, an angling 'society', clubs for cricket, football, tennis, golf, polo, water polo, bicycling and point-to-point riding, a swimming-bath and a roller-skating rink, and regularly put on carnivals, flower, produce and horse shows and swimming galas. I abridge. There can have been little room for masterly inactivity in Market Harborough.

And here is Simon Titley, writing in Liberator 331, on the world that the concept of "cool" is producing:

A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: "sad", "trainspotter", "anorak", "anal" or "get a life".

What the latest Epstein revelations mean for the Royal Family

I review Andrew Lownie's Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York in the latest Liberator. 

Here he talks about what the revelations contained in the latest batch of Epstein files mean for the Royal Family – Andrew and Fergie in particular.