Kevin Keegan: The humble superstar of the Seventies

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Kevin Keegan made his debut for Scunthorpe United at the age of 17 and played for them for three seasons in the old fourth division. Word soon got round that he was a talent, and managers and scouts from many big clubs came to watch him. Perhaps discouraged by his short stature, none of them took their interest further.

But Bill Shankly did sign him for Liverpool before the start of the 1971/2 season. What made Keegan's name was that Shankly put him straight into the first team, playing just off the tall Welsh striker John Toshack rather than in the midfield role he filled at Scunthorpe, and he was an immediate success. A year later he was playing for England under Alf Ramsey, who did make some funky selections in the dying months of his reign.

During his time at Liverpool, Keegan won three league titles, the European Cup, the FA Cup and the Uefa Cup twice. By 1976 he was England's captain and best player, and the following year he left to play for Hamburg. 

This was an era when hardly any British footballers played abroad, but Keegan made a huge success of it, twice winning the Ballon d'Or, which was effectively the European Player of the Year Award. Keegan returned to England in 1980, playing first for Southampton and then for Newcastle United.

His international career ended in disappointment. In 1982 England qualified for the World Cup Finals for this first time since 1970, but their best two players, Trevor Brooking and Keegan himself, were injured and probably shouldn't have been picked at all. This was a particular blow as the two enjoyed the sort of near-telepathic understanding that Keegan had developed with John Toshack in his early days at Liverpool.

As it was, England won their three group games, and then went through to second group of three teams, along with West Germany and Spain. England played out two goalless draws and failed to progress to the semi-finals, with Keegan only able to play for their last 26 minutes in the tournament.

Keegan's managerial career began at Newcastle United, where he electrified supporters with an attacking brand of football that took the club back into the top division and made them strong contenders for the title. In the end, though, his "don't worry if we let three in because we'll score four" style didn't win trophies, and he was psyched out by the wilier Alex Ferguson. He managed England for 18 months in 1999 and 2000, but resigned admitting that he was not up to the job.

Two more things need to be said. The first is that, while Keegan was undoubtedly a talented player, his prodigious appetite for training was what made him an outstanding one. In his early days at Anfield he upset some of the established players by beating all of them in every single gym test. I don't often remember or quote the words of David Mellor from his days hosting football phone-ins, but when he said Keegan had made himself a better footballer than God had ever intended him to he, he had it about right.

The other thing is that readers today may not realise just what a huge celebrity Keegan was in the Seventies. He released a pop single (it was a hit in Germany where he was then playing), he was a star of the hugely popular BBC television multisport contest Superstars and he advertised Brut alongside Henry Cooper, then the most loved man in British sport. It was the next best thing to being asked to do a television commercial with the Queen Mother.

George Best ('the fifth Beatle') had been a big celebrity in the Sixties, but it was rare before Italia 90 and the advent of the Premiership for footballers to find such fame outside the game. After 1982, for instance, England's captain and best player Bryan Robson was much less famous than Ian Botham.

But in the Seventies Keegan was everywhere. And his personality – hardworking, honest, genuine – made him popular wherever he went.

Geography: She does well to find her way home – E

Stamford, Lincolnshire: Nowhere near Newcastle upon Tyne

Watch a few TV quiz shows and you will realise there are that two subjects the British public knows nothing about. More than that, they think it's funny if they are expected to know anything about them. Those subjects are British politics and British geography.

Kemi Badenoch is bound to know more than most of us about politics – she's heard of Kemi Badenoch, for a start – but she's no better than the rest on geography. Over to John Crace and his Guardian sketch on her series of short interviews today with regional journalists:

Anna reminded Kemi she had been a minister at a time when health and education outcomes in the north were considerably worse than in the south. Why were buses so much more expensive and infrequent in Newcastle? 

Kemi started talking about buses in Lincolnshire. "But Lincolnshire is nowhere near the north-east," Foster said, sounding completely bewildered. She had clearly expected someone with a working knowledge of UK geography.

"It is near the north-east," said Kemi. After all, Lincolnshire was quite a way from London so it might as well be near the north-east. In any case, it was all in the wilderness called "outside the M25". A nether world where people barely existed. 

Anna had another go. How could she put this nicely? Lincolnshire was two and a half hours from Newcastle. Next time, could she speak to someone who wasn’t a halfwit? Thank you and good night.

It's worth adding that this ignorance on part of the south-eastern establishment is often an affectation – a way of signalling that they are of this class through and through. 

Start talking knowledgably about the Midlands or the North and you will find people asking searching questions about what your parents do or which school you went to.

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Charlie Young, Carole Cadwalladr and Ian Tucker have discovered "a 'revolving door' that has led to dozens of highly experienced UK government officials, former ministers, intelligence service chiefs and members of the House of Lords taking up key roles in the controversial Silicon Valley surveillance tech company co-founded by Peter Thiel, the libertarian friend and ally of Donald Trump."

"There is no need for the UK to replace its warheads. A Holbrook’s maximum yield is ninety kilotons of TNT-equivalent, about six times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But the US Navy wants a new warhead in the mid-2030s and the UK has to follow suit even though there are no good reasons to do so. No one in Britain played any part in choosing the parameters of the W93." Norman Dombey dissects Britain's nuclear subservience to the US.

Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. But it's feared that this slice will come to dominate how humans communicate, report Ada Palmer and Bruce Schneier.

Pam Jarvis offers a personal memoir of the Blair-era widening participation policy for higher education, which promised opportunity but left a complex legacy.

"It is impossible not to talk about The Reckoning in the same breath as Get Carter. Both films are about men who have left their working class roots to become successful in their various professions in London, and who are then forced to come home due to a family tragedy. Liverpool, like Newcastle in Get Carter, is depicted as a tough, rainswept working class town. And much like Jack Carter, Marler is intensely uncomfortable in its bleak surrounds, the tiny council house that his family still live in, with its wood panelling and flocked wallpaper, the raucous smokey pubs they drink in, with their bad torch singers and cheap bingo games." Andrew Nette watches Nicol Williamson heading north before Michael Caine.

Chris Baker on an 18th-century plan to build Britain a new capital – in Rutland.

GUEST POST Defections Update: Lib Dem Conference Special

The Conservative and Labour Parties are continuing to lose councillors in significant numbers, finds Augustus Carp in his latest survey of political defections.

Danny Kruger, MP for East Wiltshire, may be getting the headlines in the defection newsfeeds, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg. The rate at which councillors are changing their political allegiance doesn’t seem to be slackening.

Since June, 39 councillors have defected from the Conservatives and 56 from Labour. The Lib Dems are unchanged, Nationalists have lost 1 and the Greens are up 4. Reform UK has gained 29 and the Independents (widely defined) make up the balance with 63.

The pattern over recent years has usually been for defecting councillors to become Independents and then, if so inclined, to join a new party after a respectable period in the wilderness. Straight switches from Party A to Party B are not as frequent, but they do happen – 18 of the former Conservative councillors have moved straight to Reform UK, but one has joined them from the Greens.

The Lib Dems have lost one councillor to Reform UK (in Burnley). Three Labour councillors have moved to the Lib Dems, with the same number joining the Greens and one going to Reform UK. The remainder of the departing Labour councillors have aligned themselves with a variety of Independent political mini-groups, ranging from the Broxtowe Alliance to the Potteries Party.

The net figure of departing Labour councillors would have been much higher had it not been for a large number of suspended and unwhipped councillors being readmitted to the party over the summer. One hopes that the majority of them have learned their lessons regarding the inappropriate use of social media.

Some of these defections have had a significant impact on the local councils – Labour have lost notional control of South Tyneside, and the Labour group on Reigate and Banstead has evaporated. Senior figures have been involved in recent defections – the former leader of the Conservative group on Aberdeenshire Council is now an Independent, as is the former Labour leader in Caerphilly.

As Jonathan Wallace has noted in his blog, we are now also seeing defections from Reform UK – perhaps the most curious of which is a councillor in Kent moving from them to UKIP. Jonathan has provided some useful background on the defections of Reform UK office holders in the North East of England, but only elected councillors have been included in these figures.

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

Defections from Reform in the North East of England

It's not all one-way traffic as far as Reform UK are concerned.

Jonathan Wallace writes on his blog:

Two of Reform's constituency chairmen in Gateshead constituencies have defected to Advance, the party that split from Reform and was created in the image of its founder Ben Habib.

According to an Advance news release, Damien Heslop, who was Reform's candidate in Gateshead Central and Whickham, as well as chair of Reform's constituency branch, has defected to Advance. He was the only Reform candidate in the local elections last year in Gateshead.

And in neighbouring Jarrow and Gateshead East constituency, the chairman Paul Milburn has upped sticks and defected to Advance as well.

So it's bye-bye Reform and hello Advance for Mr Heslop and Mr Milburn. They are not alone. The news release also lists three other Reform constituency chairmen in the North East who have jumped ship: Stephen Holt (South Shields), Gordon Fletcher (Cramlington and Killingworth) and Sam Woods-Brass (Houghton and Sunderland South).

Advance UK is a far-right party led by Ben Habib, who was deputy leader of Reform before he fell out with Nigel Farage – which everyone seems to do sooner or later.

As Jonathan says, its launch, or perhaps relaunch, is taking place somewhere in Newcastle on 27 September.

Lindisfarne: Meet Me on the Corner

Younger readers will know Lindisfarne, if they know them at all, for making a record with Gazza and for Christmas concerts that have a reputation for being a bit Jimmy Five Bellies.

But it wasn't always like that. At the start of the Seventies they were a highly regarded band with a talent for producing catchy singles with a folk rock tinge.

As well as Meet Me on the Corner there was Lady Eleanor and, though it wasn't hit, Fog on the Tyne, which came to be their best-known song (with or without help from Gazza).

English rock rarely celebrates English places, but not only is Fog on the Tyne inspired by local geography, but so is the name of the band itself.

The only other English bands I can think of who chose such names were Fotheringay (though the village name was chosen for its connection with Mary Queen of Scots and the modern spelling is Fotheringhay) and, sort of, The Merseybeats.

No doubt there are others...

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"The second Elizabeth was born on April 21, 1926, and has reigned over Britain since 1952. She was six weeks older than Marilyn Monroe, three years older than Anne Frank, nine years older than Elvis Presley - all figures of the unreachable past. She was older than nylon, Scotch tape, and The Hobbit. She was old enough to have trained as an army driver and mechanic in the last months of the Second World War." Helen Lewis on the end of the second Elizabethan Age.

Max Ghenis, Nikhil Woodruff and Charles Bauman make the case for bringing the taxation of land values and universal basic income together.

Tom Ravenscroft looks at 20 significant buildings opened by the Queen during her 70-year reign.

"We read to prepare for life. It follows, then, that we are raising our boys to dismiss other people’s experiences, and to see their needs and concerns as the centre of things. We are raising our boys to lack empathy." Caroline Paul says boys should read books with female protagonists.

"Harold was in high spirits, and read to us his favourite lines about cricket, from Francis Thompson’s poem 'At Lord’s', with added relish: 'For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,/ And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,/ And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host/As the run stealers flicker to and fro...'" Shomit Dutta remembers playing cricket with Harold Pinter.

David Cantwell senses a Creedence Clearwater Revival revival.

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"Johnson proposes to close a 2,000-year-old divide with a few more bus routes, some 'free ports,' the relocation of parts of government departments out of London, and a 'levelling up fund' of £4.8 billion, equivalent to 0.2 percent of Britain’s annual GDP." Boris Johnson claims to have taken back control but, says Tom McTague, has hardly tried to exercise it.

Carolyne Willow argues that the Bill of Rights just introduced into Parliament will make it even harder for breaches of children’s human rights to be challenged: "I am constantly taken aback by the intransigence of professionals, forcing children to pursue drawn-out complaints to secure the basic markers of a decent childhood or a sincere apology and recompense when they have been failed."

"Many home educators are worried that, backed with new powers and under pressure to boost attendance, local authorities will take a risk-averse approach, demanding unreasonable information from parents and forcing children into school." Eloise Rickman on the new Schools Bill and its attack on home education.

Christian Wolmar praises the campaign that will see railway services between Ashington and Newcastle upon Tyne restored.

Is morality innate? A new study, reports Jeffrey Kluger, suggests that babies as young as eight months old can show a desire to punish wrongdoers.

George Sobell introduces us to the South Asian Cricket Academy, which gives unsigned players the chance to display their talents to county sides: "The entire cost of the programme is around £50,000 a year. The ECB have declined to contribute."

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"Those that claim to be the party of clever economics and fiscal responsibility would do well to remember this simple truth: the square root of fuck all is always going to be absolutely fuck all, no matter how creatively you’re told to to dice it." Jack Monroe asks why elected representatives and salaried journalists and presenters are trying to undermine the ten-year career and credibility of a food blogger.

Andrew Adonis reviews Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper: "In place of Kuper’s plan, I would instead introduce a different 'levelling-up' reform challenge for Oxford. It needs to radically broaden the social intake of its state school recruitment, which today is too largely drawn from grammar schools, sixth-form colleges and academies in London and the southeast".

Helena Horton on ambitious plans to rewild London.

Neal Ascherson is always worth reading: here he discusses the history of the extraordinary Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

"Tragically, he was discovered, captured, and deported during a raid in Toulouse in 1944 - first to Drancy, then to Auschwitz, and finally Kaunas-Reval in Lithuania. Of hundreds of people captured in Toulouse that day, only a handful survived. They perished without a trace." Janet Horvath says we should not forget the cellist and composer Pál Hermann.

"It was a big car park, but it was in bad shape. So in 2010, the Trinity Square high rise car park, an iconic brutalist building that dominated Gateshead’s skyline in the 1970s, was demolished, and a part of British film history was gone. Though not before the canny council sold tinned lumps of rubble to film fans for £5.00 a go." Tim Pelan watches Mike Hodges' 1971 film Get Carter.

Tyne and Wear Metro: The Way Ahead

This promotional film was made in 1980, shortly before the Metro opened.

Secrets of the Tyne & Wear Metro

Another video from the engaging Geoff Marshall.

Lib Dems slip back in Cornish local by-election

Photo of Falmouth © Colin Babb

On Thursday the Liberal Democrats scored a magnificent victory in a local by-election in Sunderland. We went from fourth place and 4.4 per cent of the vote to first place with 53.9 per cent.

This was a reminder of what hard work targeted on a compact urban ward can achieve against a party that has been in power too long – in Sunderland that was the Labour Party.

It is good that the Lib Dems can still record such victories and may well be an omen of further gains in Sunderland in May.

This result also reminds us that it is not so long since we ran Newcastle upon Tyne and had serious ambitions of gaining Labour seats in the North East.

What it does not do is show that Sunderland has changed its mind on the European Union or show that we are poised to sweep to power with similar swings across the country,

On the same night there was another local by-election in Falmouth, where Labour held the seat made vacant by the death of the town’s former MP Candy Atherton.

Even though the Conservative candidate had to apologise during the campaign Nazi-themed Facebook posts he had made, the Liberal Democrat vote slipped back from 18.9 per cent to 17.2 per cent.

A former MP will probably have looked after the ward and her death might well have led to a significant sympathy vote for Labour, but this is still disappointing.

After all, the Liberal Democrats held the old Falmouth and Camborne constituency between 2005 and 2010.

Last year we came third in the new Falmouth and Redruth with six per cent of the vote. If there had been a Ukip candidate we would probably have come fourth.

Yet we have fallen back on our result in the election that took place in the same ward a month before the general election.

I love to see the Lib Dems gaining seats in local by-elections and tweet the results as eagerly as anyone.

But, as I have blogged before, we must beware of confirmation bias – our tendency to notice evidence that supports our view (say, that there is a Lib Dem revival taking place) and pass rapidly over evidence that does not.

I suspect this bias explains why we Lib Dems were disappointed by last year’s general election result and even more why we were shocked when we lost seats in the local elections the month before.

This week a national opinion poll showed the Lib Dems on 6 per cent. That sounds a little low, but if it had been 7 per cent it would have been more or less in line with other recent polls.

And that means the party is still deep in the doldrums. Yes, there are wards and constituencies where we are doing much better than 6 or 7 per cent, but those areas will have been polled like any others.

That means there must be plenty of areas where we are doing significantly worse than 6 or 7 per cent.

Local by-elections often tell us this, but those are not the results we retweet to each other.

I once tweeted to point out that we had scored less than 1 per cent in one contest. I immediately had someone giving me reasons why this was nothing to worry about.

I take no pleasure in this situation and can suggest no easy recipe for improving the party’s fortunes.

But it is best to face the truth, otherwise we shall continue to be disappointed by every round of national elections.

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Will Dyer was the Liberal Democrat candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow at this year's general election.

One of the last interviews the philosopher Richard Rorty gave was to Robert Harrison for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Talking of philosophy, Peter Worley believes it should be at the centre of education: "So, what is a suitably philosophical spirit and how can it be taught? I would suggest that it is not merely responding to a problem or question but doing so reflectively and using reason to progress."

"Everybody now spoke as though at last, after decades of shock therapy, debilitating or addicting drug treatment and a stigma that psychoanalysis had done little to dispel, the late twentieth century had simply discovered a cure for depression." Brian Dillon remembers the central place Prozac briefly held in our culture.

"We Are the Martians is everything we hoped it would be and possibly even more." Folk Horror Revival reviews a tribute to Nigel Kneale.

Rob Baker on Ted Lewis, his Brit Noir novel Jack’s Return Home and the film Get Carter.

Get Carter locations revisited

Dave Mitcheson revisits the 1971 film's locations (though not the most famous of them - the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead).

Drunk Geordies fined for pretending they were suitcases on airport carousel

Metro wins our Headline of the Day Award.

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Alwyn Turner paints a portrait of Tom Watson - "an overfed Che Guevara".

"I started out drawing clear lines linking schoolmates to flatmates, Bullingdon buddies and policy wonks, but pretty soon exactly the same people started popping up in new guises — as fellow MPs, cabinet colleagues, party donors — and the lines started to veer into ever more deranged spirals as everyone turned out to be linked, several times over, to everyone else." Emily Hill on the rise and full of the Cameron chumocracy.

Ferdinand Mount reviews a new biography of Karl Marx: "By the end of his life, his was a name to strike terror into bourgeois hearts across Europe, which gave him no little satisfaction. Yet at his funeral in Highgate Cemetery there were only eleven mourners."

In 2013 the poet Geoffrey Hill, who died earlier this year, was interviewed by Sameer Rahim.

"As soon as I saw those huge rust-coloured bridges stretching across the Tyne I knew this was Jack’s manor. Tough, ruthless and uncompromising." Mike Hodges talks to Adam Scovell about Get Carter.

John Fleming tells the sad story of the fallen Blue Peter presenter Christopher Trace.

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Allison Keyes on a rediscovered manuscript that casts light on the Tulsa massacre of 1921 - an attack on a thriving Black neighbourhood.

Alexandra Lange contrasts the reactions to Garden Bridge and Pier 55 - "Two cities, one designer and one strategy – to build a privately funded park above a river."

"Thanks to my older brother, I was an Observer reader as a schoolboy. On most Sundays in the year or two either side of 1960 he would take the bus six miles to our nearest town and return with a paper that augmented the Sunday Post – delivered to the door that morning by the village newsagent – and its claustrophobic worldview formed fifty years before in Presbyterian Dundee." Ian Jack reviews a new life of the paper's editor David Astor.

"[Jack] Cardiff achieved many of the visual effects in camera by drawing inspiration from the use of light and colour by such artists as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh." David Parkinson looks back at Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus.

"One of the reasons I can’t stand United is the air of sanctimony that hovers over the club. If Mourinho takes them back to the summit it ought to puncture that – it’ll show they’re no better than anyone else, just another plaything for the great man’s ego." David Runciman is right about Jose's re-emergence at Old Trafford.

The Beauty of Transport celebrates Tynemouth Station.

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"Eric's family hope you can join them for an afternoon to celebrate his life and work at The Royal Institution, 2.00pm on Thursday 30th June 2016. There will be a number of guest speakers, audio visual clips and music, followed by light refreshments." Details of the memorial service for Eric Avebury,

"I wish I'd never decided to work in an immigration detention centre," says an anonymous article on politics.co.uk.

Stephen Williams presents an electoral history of Bristol Liberal Democrats 1973-2016.

"Newsagents reached parts of the population that most booksellers and stationers hadn’t previously: the working class. Newsagents could provide a one-stop shop for working-class autodidacts in the interwar period." Misplacedhabits on the need for a history of newsagents' shops.

"Get Carter was different from all other films in that it somehow ‘belonged’ to the north-east – projecting and validating a tough-but-tender image of the region that chimed with the area’s self-romanticising view of itself." Neil Young on a great film, 45 years on.

Railway Maniac on a little piece of Lincolnshire railway history: the Allington Chord.

Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1940s and 1950s

Glorious footage with plenty of buses, trams and trolleybuses.

The city lost its trams in 1950 and its trolleybuses in 1966.

The Geordie haka

[The video has disappeared from Youtube, but you can view it here.]

England have gone out of the World Cup.

But we can take comfort in the discovery that the haka originated, not among the Maoris of New Zealand, but in Newcastle Upon Tyne.