I never did find a video of Jim Callaghan singing 'There was I Waiting at the Church' to a bemused TUC Conference in 1978. (He was mocking the press, who had turned up expecting him to call a general election.)
But here is his successor as Labour leader, Michael Foot, singing a song from the Twenties that appeared on the B-side of the Bonzos' first single 'My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies'.
h/t Alwyn Turner
It's not much to look at, but this notice from the Birmingham Mail for 23 October 1963 sets a new record for the earliest press mention of Steve Winwood I can find.
The previous record was 3 December 1963, and because new titles are being added to the British Newspaper Archive all the time, it's possible that this one will be broken too.
Here again, though he was only 15, Steve Winwood shares top billing with Spencer Davis. The band has not yet become the Spencer Davis Group.
This notice is on page 2 of the newspaper. Stories on page 1 include:
Shirley Williams was the subject of a fringe meeting organised by the Liberal Democrat History Group at the party's spring conference this year. You can watch the proceedings in the video above
What comes over is that it was Williams's personal qualities as much as her political beliefs that attracted people to her, and that a certain diffidence held her back in her political career. I think being a woman in politics in her era is enough to explain the latter point.
I was a little surprised by the fringe meeting's title - 'Shirley Williams: Liberal Lion and Trailblazer' - because throughout her time in her first party, Williams was seen as a mainstream Labour figure. She received considerable trade union support in internal elections, for instance.
It was her intellectual opposition to Trotskyism that led her to leave Labour: she wasn't prepared to mouth clichés about 'a broad church' or tolerate the compromises necessary to thrive under Michael Foot's leadership. That made her a lion, but not in itself a Liberal, still less a trailblazing one.
A puzzle late in her career is why she staked so much of her political capital on getting the Lib Dems to support Andrew Lansley's changes to the National Health Service. They were not in the Coalition agreement, went against everything David Cameron had said about health before the 2010 election and few people even in the Conservative Party had any idea what Lansley was trying to achieve.
When I started editing Lord Bonkers' diaries the old boy said of Shirley Williams: "Surely she must be the most popular politician ever to be defeated at three consecutive general elections?"
But I would never be that brutal, because I remember just how difficult it was to get elected as a Liberal or SDP parliamentary candidate in the Alliance years.
Andrew Page presents 25 unquestionable benefits of Brexit - hear him.
We need to overhaul what we grow, and how and where we grow it, if we are to make the most of our land and fight climate change, says Natalie Bennett.
"Craigie was contributing to a new environment that encouraged the formation of modern identities for young women, who would write in with their problems, escape into the worlds of torrid romance stories, compare their lives to those of the stars or fashion their own appearances and lifestyles based on beauty, health and relationship advice." Hollie Price looks at the early journalistic career of the film documentary maker Jill Craigie (who later married Michael Foot).
"Though they come to us via our hubbub-filled Instagram feeds, these stand-alone pictures are as quietly stunning as any made by our greatest American artists of alienation and loneliness, from Edward Hopper to Arthur Dove." Naomi Fry appreciates The Simpsons as art.
Mark Valladeres tours Suffolk by public transport.
It is not an exercise in nostalgia about a man universally considered to be the greatest cricket commentator and 'the voice of an English summer' it is an exploration of Arlott as a political figure both inside and outside the world of cricket.
John Arlott's politics can best be summed up as those of a radical liberal, and he twice stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Party. But he would have found obedience to the party whip difficult, and he rarely adopted a party political stance during the many years that he appeared on the panel of the BBC Home Service's Any Questions.
He appeared with such people as ... Michael Foot and a young Margaret Thatcher; and he attacked the political orthodoxies of both left and right. He always championed the 'common man' against the power or money or privilege.Thanks to James Tarry for putting me on to it.
"The general election of 1983 has produced one important result that has passed virtually without comment in the media,” said Benn. “It is that, for the first time since 1945, a political party with an openly socialist policy has received the support of over eight and a half million people.
"This is a remarkable development by any standards and it deserves some analysis … the 1983 Labour manifesto commanded the loyalty of millions of voters and a democratic socialist bridge-head in public understanding and support can be made."This determination of the hard left to learn nothing from defeat was a gift to Neil Kinnock, His reforms of the Labour Party met with little opposition because the only alternative appeared to be perpetual defeat,
"He's made it very clear when he's prime minister he's not going to be able to use these weapons so what's the point of having them.
"I've known Jeremy Corbyn, all the years I've been in Parliament. I'm sure he will use his persuasive skill in order to put these views forward.
"I've changed my mind on Trident and I've been persuaded by the things that he's said."I find this puzzling. The first time I came across Vaz was when he was the Labour candidate for Richmond and Barnes in the 1983 general election.
"There is a really big issue that needs to be addressed by the left, which is how do we now put together a sensible force of those who are the modern progressives?
"The left is a sort of smoking battlefield. I think we are facing the short term prospect of a government unconstrained by an effective opposition which is very bad for the country - and bad for the Tories too. And we’re facing in the long term the question I faced in 1992, which was are we looking at the Tories forever?"A smoking battlefield it is, but it seems to me that the situation we face is more like 1983 than 1992.
"I think this begins with a conversation about ideas. My guess is that if you’ve got sensible modern progressives in all the political parties in the room, and you started a day’s conference, debate, conversation, you would end up with five key points that you can very easily agree with.
"So I think that’s the way it begins. I think it begins on an informal basis. I think it begins around ideas, not structures. I think it begins with conversations. I think it can then develop, probably through the medium of the referendum, and it’s after the referendum that you begin to address the issue of how do we give this political force."He is right to call for conversations across party lines and it may be that the European referendum will encourage them. But that takes us right back to 1975.
Most of the blame, inevitably, is being aimed at the leader’s office. ‘When the campaign started we were told we had to clear all leaflet design past the leader’s office,’ said one party worker. ‘We thought that would be a nightmare, but for the first part of the campaign it worked really well. We’d email the art, and about an hour or so later we’d get the response, “Great. Go with this.”
Then one day someone got the message, “Excellent. All good.” But when they went to respond they realised they’d failed to insert the original attachment. All the time, Ed’s team had been signing off the leaflets without bothering to look at them.’And:
Another Labour insider told of the scene in the press office when Miliband posed with the notorious Ed stone, the 8ft 6in slab of limestone upon which his six key election pledges were inscribed. When it appeared on TV, a press officer ‘started screaming. He stood in the office, just screaming over and over again at the screen. It was so bad they thought he was having a breakdown.’
At about 8 p.m. on Friday 1 March 1974 I was elected MP for the Bodmin constituency by a majority of just nine votes.
The count had taken more than twelve hours, with six recounts, and we were locked into the public rooms at Liskeard with very little idea of what was happening in Westminster. Long before mobile phones we were dependent on the limited news brought in by friendly police officers alongside a supply of pasties.
My mother (aged seventy-two) had engaged obstreperous young Conservatives with fisticuffs, our daughter (aged nineteen months) was entertaining the supporters at the Liberal Club and it was threatening to snow.The second concerns the Beaconsfield by-election of 1982, where Paul finished second to the Conservatives' Tim Smith.
There were only four applications. The Labour leader of the neighbouring council of Slough, John Hurley, apparently performed badly at the only meeting at which the four were questioned.
Anthony Blair, smart London lawyer, long-haired and debonair, was later dubbed "Deb's Delight" in Gerrards Cross, but after his selection was announced the South Bucks Observer reported it under the headline "Benn-backing barrister is Labour's choice".
His appeal consisted of a loyal reiteration of Michael Foot's then current policy stance: exit from Europe, ban the bomb and doubts over the military adventure to recapture the Falklands.
In 1942-3, there were 1,750,000 allotments, amounting to 100,000 acres, or an area the size of Rutland.She also suggests that the slogan "Dig for Victory" was invented by Michael Foot in an unsigned Evening Standard leader in September 1939.
It is at times like these that Britain needs a party rooted in the centre ground, which anchors the country there.
The Liberal Democrats are that party. We’re not centre ground tourists. The centre ground is our home.
While the tribalists in other parties desert the centre ground under pressure, the Liberal Democrats have done the reverse. Under pressure, we’ve moved towards the centre.This is very much where I came in. Back in 1977, when the Liberal Party was finishing behind the National Front, our only remaining purchase on the public’s attention was the idea that we were a moderate party, a party of the centre.
The greatest strength of our party is our idealism. But in our strength lies our weakness – because sometimes idealism can turn into dogma, or at least an unwillingness to engage fully with the day-to-day experiences and perspectives of the British people we seek to serve.
A party of government knows that workable solutions need to be grounded in values – but also that they must respond to the hopes and fears of reasonable people.
This is the lesson we’ve learnt in government. The challenges of governing at a difficult time have given us a harder edge and a more practical outlook.I am a great fan of pragmatism, but it seems to me Nick is misunderstanding his own party here.
For us, that relationship is clear: it is the government's responsibility to ensure every person has the opportunity to get on, but every person must take personal responsibility for using those opportunities by working hard.
We cannot absolve people of their responsibility for improving their own lives, because to do so would be to turn them into dependants – and so deny their agency and compromise their dignity. You can’t build a stronger economy with people lost to dependency …
Parents know what I mean. You look at your children and yearn with hope for their future. You do whatever you can to give them every advantage. You worry about the obstacles they will face, and you plan to help them overcome them all.
But equally, parents know that kids need to learn to look after themselves. Slowly but surely, we guide them into independence and adulthood. Because we know that to be happy, they will need the means and capacity to run their own lives – and pass their love and skills on to the grandchildren they might give you one day.Nick may well see welfare dependency as a problem, but he needs to find better language than this in which to talk about it.
