Is Lord Bonkers a Time Lord?

Ever since I started writing Lord Bonkers there have readers who worry about his age.

How can he be so old? Maybe the Lord Bonkers writing now is the son of the one who started contributing to Liberator in 1990?

It has never worried me - it's fantasy as well as satire innit?

Besides, we all know the reasons he has lived so long.

He bathes every year in the spring of eternal life that gushes from the hillside above the former headquarters of the Association of Liberal Councillors in Hebden Bridge and purchases (at a rather steep price) a cordial from the Elves of Rockingham Forest.

Today someone suggested another explanation to me: is Lord Bonkers a Time Lord?

I am not enough a fan to be able to explore the full implications of this, but I like the idea of someone who has the ability to travel through space and time but chooses to spend his days fighting for radical Liberalism on our little island and stewarding the Rutland countryside.

Incidentally, if there is a problem with age and Lord Bonkers' Diary it is not his age but mine.

I sometimes fear that my references to Richard Holme, Nancy Seear and the Sutton and Cheam by-election just don't cut it with the younger generation.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The Liberal Detective Agency

Thursday

Little Steel, by contrast, has a lot of explaining to do, as he was informed long ago that Smith was far from being the clean potato. “We were a political party not a detective agency,” he has taken to whining about those years before we merged with the SDP Party. I am afraid conscience bids me explain why this is nonsense.

In the mid 1970s, when we were at something of a low ebb, I went to Steel and said: “As the politics is not going so well these days, we need a second string to our bow. What about all this crime you read about in the newspapers? We Liberals are intelligent fellows and should be able to help bring the bad hats to book.”

And so the Liberal Detective Agency was born. With Alan Beith’s sleuthing, Clement Freud’s pioneering work in psychological profiling and Nancy Seear’s willingness to play bad cop to David Alton’s good cop, we enjoyed no little success. The money the agency made was ploughed back into the party’s campaigning, with the result that we survived the 1979 general election in better shape than any commentator had dared predict.

I fear for Steel’s reputation when this comes out, and come out it will, as I am in advanced negotiations with an independent moving television production company about bringing the tale to the screen. I only hope he finds his missing locus before it is broadcast.

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

The elves in my covert

An inflatable Julian Huppert

Spotting a wrong 'un