"My name's Cole-Hamilton. Alex Cole-Hamilton"

It's not just Ed Davey who was approached by MI6. Alex Cole-Hamilton reveals in a notably friendly interview in the Scottish Sun that he was too:

Alex Cole-Hamilton could have been driving a James Bond-style Aston Martin instead of a second-hand electric Mustang – if he had chosen to join MI6.

The leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats has revealed for the first time how he was tapped-up by the secret intelligent service when he graduated from uni.

But Alex turned his back on life as a spy for the British Government due to his Quaker religion – who believe in non violence – when he was told the information he gathered could potentially lead to the loss of lives.

We've all watched enough Tinker Tailor and Slow Horses to know that life in the intelligence services is nothing like that, but what is it about Liberal Democrats that attracts the spooks? Or is it that spies are attracted to the Liberal Democrats?

I wrote in one of my Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy columns:

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

 And I still consider Paddy and Jo Grimond as the two best Liberal leaders of my lifetime.

"Fight for the soul of our country": Josh Barbarinde profiled in the New Statesman

During his successful campaign for the Liberal Democrat presidency, Josh Barbarinde's supporters emphasised his unparalleled ability to gain media coverage. They always sounded a little optimistic in a world where not even the party leader gets as much attention as he deserves, but Josh is indeed the subject of a substantial article by Rachel Cunliffe on the New Statesman website.

Much of the piece is about Josh personally, but then his compelling backstory is part of what attracts the media. And it does eventually get on to Lib Dem strategy:

As the Lib Dems gear up for 2026, this is how they are framing the conversation. Brexit is back on the agenda, with a renewed debate about the customs union as a way to spur economic growth and tackle the cost of living crisis. Electoral reform is high up on the list too, as the electorate fractures across too many parties for first-past-the-post to be able to cope with. Both are subjects on which the Lib Dems have campaigned vigorously, and even won parliamentary votes with the help of Labour rebels.

But if neither of those subjects can be relied upon to capture the public’s imagination, there is another option: presenting the party as the alternative to the narrative of division and nationalism seized upon by Reform. As flags pop up on roundabouts across the country like mushrooms sprouting over a lawn, the visible manifestation of a deeper decay, the Lib Dems, with their 72 MPs and message of “hopeful nostalgia”, want to be the antidote.

Asked what his personal role in this is, Josh replies:

"To gee-up our party to fight for the soul of our country."

The change isn't on the Lib Dem website yet, but the party constitution was amended at last autumn's conference to say that the president "shall be the voice of party members". This suggests that Josh, like every party president before him, will interpret the role in his own idiosyncratic way.

Perhaps the Lib Dem presidency is still a victim of its history. When it became clear the first leader of the Liberal Democrats would be a former Liberal (Alan Beith or Paddy Ashdown), the important-sounding but ill-defined role of president was created so it could be occupied by a leading former SDP member.

BOOK REVIEW Liberalism by Jonathan Parry

This review appears in the latest Liberator (issue 431), which can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's website.

Liberalism

Jonathan Parry

Agenda Publishing (2025), £19.99

In this short book, written as part of a series that promises “incisive and provocative introductions to topics, ideas and events for students wanting to know more about how we got where we are today”, Jonathan Parry provides a history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats and makes you think again about the relation between political philosophy and political practice.

The first three chapters deal with the years 1830 to 1914 – the Liberal Party’s era as a party of government – and do so thematically rather than chronologically. In the first of these, Parry discusses the widening of the franchise, the taming of the House of Lords and the intermittent Liberal enthusiasm for proportional representation.

Asquith’s battles with the Lords will be familiar to all, but the Liberal attitude to the widening of the franchise was more ambivalent than you might imagine. The Liberal Party, Parry argues, was forged in the struggle for parliamentary reform, but that was not the same thing as democratic reform. 

So the Reform Act of 1832 swept away many of the abuses of the old system – notably 143 rotten boroughs, which effectively allowed seats in the Commons to be bought – but it was not born out of zeal for any abstract principle of democracy. Rather, it was intended to make sure the Commons did its job of representing the country’s various interests and allowing the peaceful expression of grievances.

Many 19th-century Liberals had their doubts about democracy. John Stuart Mill, for instance, hedged his support for the democratic principle in his Representative Government with all sorts of conditions that would ensure educated opinion was well represented in any elected chamber. Among these conditions was the introduction of proportional representation to ensure that minority points of view were heard.

But other tendencies within the Liberal Party did not share these patrician fears, so no legislation to change the voting system appeared. Nor did it under Asquith, when the rise of the Labour Party and the consequent inevitably of three-cornered contests led Liberals to explore the virtues of the Alternative Vote.

Parry’s second chapter on Liberal history before 1914 deals with the development of the Liberal attitude towards the state. Gladstonian retrenchment had great appeal earlier in the 19th century when the party was busy attacking the corrupt old city corporations. When these were replaced by elected local councils, school boards and health boards, then the good that government, national and local, might do became of increasing interest to the party. The growth of the Empire also brought with it irresistible pressure for more spending.

The third of these chapters looks at Liberal moves towards a pluralist society, notably in religion, where the party became the champions of Nonconformists in their disputes with the power of the Established church and a supporter of Catholic emancipation, both in Britain and Ireland. Parry notes that support for Home Rule changed the social basis of the Liberal Party, with most of its members from the landowning classes becoming Liberal Unionists.

Parry’s final two chapters cover the Liberal Party’s long years in the wilderness as it tried to survive as a centre party in a two-party system – and that in an era when politics was principally about economics and the struggle between capital and Labour. There were interesting Liberal economic ideas – the party was putting forward Keynesian policies on the need for public works while Asquith was still leader, and Elliott Dodds’s advocacy of an idiosyncratic blend of Distributism and private enterprise was influential after World War II – but no single one that voters identified with the party.

The Alliance years are passed over quickly, which is surely fair, as social democracy never did cohere as a force or a philosophy outside the Labour Party. The two most prominent former SDP members of the new Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy and Robert Maclennan, were already pretty much Liberals by the time the parties merged.

Nor did The Orange Book have much discernible long-term effect on the party. Its reputation was always a triumph of marketing over content, as it wasn’t the bracing call for an end to “nanny state” interventionism its adherents sometimes pretended. The chapter on social policy was thoroughly Blairite, born from middle-class impatience with the lower orders and the way they brought up their children. If only they were better raised, the authors reasoned, there would be less need for public spending on them in later life and taxes could be cut.

And maybe we have always worried too much about economic policy. Today’s Liberal Democrats have little to say on the subject, but that didn’t stop us electing 72 MPs last year.

Finally. Parry looks at the agenda that the Liberal Democrats have made their own: devolution, civil rights and Europe. Much of it has been party policy since the Grimond years – our early support for British membership of the European Economic Community, in particular, was seen as proof of our farsightedness and proof that, despite all the humiliations of life as a third party, history was on our side. This, I think, explains the reluctance, noted by Parry, of Liberal Democrats to criticise the EU in the years before the referendum.

I enjoyed this breezy and unusually accurate history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats, but what I will remember most from Liberalism is Parry’s discussion of the relationship between a party’s philosophy and its practice.

There is a temptation – I have been guilty of this myself – to turn to works by John Stuart Mill or L.T. Hobhouse or Jo Grimond in search of an expression of Liberal philosophy that will tell us what the party should be saying today. But this is to put the philosophical cart before the horse of practice.

Parry has no truck with this view:

This book claims that Liberal leaders such as Lord John Russell, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, Jo Grimond and Paddy Ashdown are better guides to political Liberalism than theoretical writers such as J.S. Mill or T.H. Green. It argues that politics has its own rationale, and that politicians take up bodies of ideas for specific purposes, rather than allowing works of theory to set their policy agendas for them.

This is surely right, as is his reminder that:

Hundreds of Victorian Liberal pundits made interesting and rich contributions to national political debate. We know much more about these than was once the case, so there is no longer any excuse for elevating Mill or Green into a small elite of Liberal “thinkers” who have had a transcendental impact on the party’s definition.

And when we do read the works of this elite, we are likely to misunderstand what they were about:

Liberal intellectuals such as Green, or later L.T. Hobhouse, described the aim of Liberalism as the socialisation of individuals into civil society without the intervention of a heavy-handed state that would suppress the energy and self-control that was the essence of their individuality. These writings sound more utopian and radical than they were. They were elegant ways of describing social arrangements that were increasingly visible in many towns by the end of the century.

And if that is not enough iconoclasm for you, here is Parry on Mill:

On Liberty was not intended as a political party bible but as a contribution to general educated discourse. It was also intended to be provocative. Mill knew that most Victorians would not agree with his underlying assumptions. Most educated Victorians did not see orthodox religion as a restrictive cultural force. On the contrary many of them viewed the issue of liberty through a religious lens. Individual responsibility was responsibility and accountability before God.

Again this is surely right. Gladstone, for one, certainly took this view of liberty.

I shall add Parry’s Liberalism to my shelf of very good short books alongside Bryan Magee’s ones on Karl Popper and Richard Wagner and James Hawes’s “shortest histories” of England and Germany.

Jonathan Calder

Ed Davey, Nick Clegg, Paddy Ashdown... and hedgehogs

Ed Davey has posted this charming photo of him and Victoria Collins visiting a hedgehog sanctuary in Harpenden.

It puts me in mind of a Liberal England post from New Year's Day 2016:

Today in someone's review of the year I came across an interview Nick Clegg gave to the Evening Standard on the eve of the general election:

Looking back at the campaign, it is the comic moments he remembers. For instance, his first visit was to a hedgehog sanctuary, with Paddy Ashdown. Ashdown muttered under his breath to Clegg: "When I was in the Special Boat Service we used to eat hedgehogs."

No wonder Ed is keen to repair our relations with the hedgehog community.

That said, if you do have it in mind to eat one of the creatures, my old post will tell you how to cook it. Blame Malcolm Saville.

Ed Davey will publish his book 'Why I Care: And Why Care Matters' in May

After leading a strikingly successful first general election campaign, the next thing on a Liberal Democrat leader's to do list is the book. And Ed Davey is about to tick that one off too.

The Bookseller reports:

HarperCollins has bought Why I Care: And Why Care Matters, the debut from Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Editorial director for HarperNorth Jonathan de Peyer acquired world all-language rights directly from the author. The book will be published in hardback, e-book and audio in May 2025.  

“Care is the thread that runs through Ed’s life,” the synopsis reads. “Aged only four, Ed lost his father. When his mother also became ill with cancer, Ed and his brothers nursed her at home until she died when Ed was just 15. That formative experience was one of the main inspirations in seeking election and with it the opportunity to take action. 

Now, he and his wife care for their son John, who has severe physical and learning disabilities, as well as raising their younger daughter. So, Ed has real knowledge of the emotional, physical and financial challenges faced by legions of carers in Britain today.”  

HarperCollins said of the politician’s debut: “Why I Care is both a deeply personal story, drawing on Ed’s own experiences, and a book that reflects the stories of people everywhere to offer a vision of change. Shedding light on the often-invisible world of carers, he calls for society, our government and our institutions to recognise, support and lift up the silent carers who form the backbone of our communities. This isn’t just Ed’s story. It’s the story of millions.” 

And Ed Davey says:

“Carers don’t just look after their loved ones: they’re propping up our NHS and are so often the bedrock of our communities. It’s a tough job, caring. But the thing about being a carer is you develop these amazing relationships. As I’ve gotten older, having had all these family caring responsibilities and now seeing life through the eyes of my son, I could not be more passionate or determined to sort out care in this country. And that’s why I’ve written this book.” 

I can see Why I Care making more of an impact than the books Charles Kennedy and even Paddy Ashdown wrote as Lib Dem leader. And I shall end here by reflecting on how quickly "gotten" is replacing "got" in English English.

New Statesman: Lib Dems cheered and baffled by Kemi Badenoch

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The Liberal Democrats have two strategic objectives in this parliament. 

One is to be a better opposition than the Conservatives by focusing on issues of substance, like social care reform, rather than ones of style or personality.

The second is to embed our new MPs as local champions, so that even voters profoundly disillusioned with Westminster will welcome their achievements in their communities.

That's according to George Eaton writing on the New Statesman website.

He goes on to say:

From an electoral perspective, the Lib Dems’ aim is to "finish the job” in the Blue Wall. Of their 30 notional target seats, all but four are held by the Tories. That Kemi Badenoch has displayed little interest in defending – or reclaiming – such territory has cheered (and baffled) the Lib Dems.

But Davey’s team also believe they have opportunities against Labour. “We want a Liberal voice back in the cities,” an aide told me. Early targets include Nick Clegg’s former seat of Sheffield Hallam (Labour majority: 8,189) and Simon Hughes’s former seat of Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Labour majority: 7,787).

Elsewhere in the article, I was surprised to read that it was Paddy Ashdown who pioneered "pavement politics".

This approach, under the grander name "community politics" was developed in the previous decade by the Association of Liberal Councillors and graduates of the Young Liberals' radical era.

At that time Paddy was still... Well, if I told you what he was doing in those days, I'd have to shoot you.

Thought for the Day: Lord Macaulay on coalitions

I've just been sorting out some old papers, including a folder of press cuttings that I obviously thought might come in useful one day for something I was writing. Today they would be Chrome bookmarks.

One cutting is what looks like a Guardian Diary item inspired by Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair's grand strategy. It includes this comment on the errors of Fox and Lord North from one of Lord Macaulay's essays on the younger Pitt:

They ought to have known that coalitions between parties which have long been hostile can succeed only when the wish for coalition pervades the lower ranks of both.

Discuss with relation to the Cameron-Clegg coalition of 2010-15.

Spying: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones.

The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.

When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."

Spychology

The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for. 

Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.

Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.

But even George Smiley must have winced at this:

The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."

******

Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.

What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.

And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.

Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.

Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off. 

In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.

******

When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.

If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.

Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."

Jane Ashdown: "I can't wipe the grin off my face"

Jane Ashdown, the widow of the former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, has been talking to Somerset Live about her delight at the general election result:

"I can't wipe the grin off my face - it means everything. I just wish Paddy was here to see it and to celebrate. 

"He would have been especially thrilled to see two Lib Dems elected locally, Adam [Dance] in Yeovil and Sarah [Dyke] in Glastonbury and Somerton. But his interest was in the whole party. He would be gobsmacked at the national result - just speechless, which didn't happen very often.

"Paddy would have been so proud of Ed (Davey) who was part of his original office team in the 1990s. He would have greatly admired the energy Ed has put into the campaign and the attention to the issues he has received by doing all those incredible things on the campaign trail. 

"Paddy used to say that if you want someone to listen to you, you've got to make sure that they know that you are listening to them. Ed has done that through the campaign and has carried the party and voters with him."

Bit of a cock-up on the counting front in Dingwall: Lib Dems wait for their 72nd win to be declared

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BREAKING... Drew Hendry has conceded that the Lib Dems will win the seat after the recount, so 72 it is.

One general election result remains to be announced: it's the one from the Scottish Highland constituency of Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire. A second recount will be held there tomorrow morning.

The delay does not appear to be caused by an exceptionally close result, but we are still having to wait for what sounds as though it will be a 72nd seat for the Liberal Democrats.

The Press & Journal describes what  went on at the Highland Football Academy in Dingwall in the small hours of this morning:

Jamie Stone held on to his seat for the Lib Dems around 5am and a result in the neighbouring constituency was expected to follow shortly after.

However, election count officials were seen looking exasperated shaking their head as the delay wore on.

The candidates for the election were also left in the dark, unable to say what exactly was the problem.

Counters were left twiddling their thumbs and to grow increasingly frustrated as speculation about the next step filled the air. ...

At 6.30am a recount was announced.

That was due to take around 90 minutes but shortly before 10am, returning officer Derek Brown announced that another recount was needed.

The reason given was a “discrepancy between the number of verified votes totalled and provisional counted votes”.

A fresh recount will now take place at 10.30am on Saturday.

The Press & Journal says the Lib Dems, whose candidate is Angus MacDonald, are confident of victory - is closest challenger is Drew Hendry from the SNP.

And the Inverness Courier report suggests why:

Count agents have widely credited Liberal Democrat Angus MacDonald with having pulled off a major upset and secured the Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire seat ahead of the SNP’s Drew Hendry. ...

The calculus is quite simple as by the end of the night Mr MacDonald had between three and four more boxes than Mr Hendry – in each box there are 500 ballots so the margin of victory was likely between 1500 and 2000 votes.

Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire covers much of the area that was represented by Charles Kennedy. It would be good to reclaim it, just as we took back Paddy Ashdown's Yeovil yesterday.

The Joy of Six 1234

Pragna Patel argues that the establishment of Britain's first Sikh court threatens women's rights: "The use of religious laws to regulate minority women’s lives is not only discriminatory, it is immensely harmful in a context where domestic abuse and related femicides of South Asian and other minority women remain persistently high."

"People didn’t really care about the immorality. Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown discovered this when news of his adulterous affair was published under the headline "Paddy Pantsdown" ("dreadful, but brilliant," he acknowledged), and he enjoyed an opinion-poll bounce." Alwyn Turner looks back to the Nineties - "Britain's golden age of sleaze" - which seem strangely innocent today.

David Ward says it's time to regulate NHS Trust managers, because they act as "judge, jury and executioner" when whistleblowers raise patient safety issues.

"It suited almost everyone after Mussolini’s fall from power in 1943 to blame him personally for the disasters of the war, and to argue that most Italians had always been anti-fascist. The ‘bad Germans’ had forced the ‘good Italians’ into the war. They had been responsible for the massacres of civilians, not the Italians. They had persecuted and killed Jews, while the Italians had tried to save them." John Foot questions the 'bad Germans/good Italians' narrative that grew up around Italy's involvement in the second world war.

"After clearing the rubbish away, Natalie started with a few potted plants before turning her attention to the rest of the ginnel. With the help of another neighbour, Emily, they were able to secure a £1500 Neighbourhood Investment Fund from Manchester City Council. Most of the money went towards getting hanging baskets and hiring a joiner to make the planters. Natalie tells me that the ginnel had helped sell a house last year, over in the next street. An estate agent took a photograph and included it with the property." Dani Cole explores the beautiful, ingenious ginnels of Levenshulme.

Bob Fischer and Vic Pratt review the latest DVD collection of Children's Film Foundation treasures: "I watched Circus Friends, from 1956, and I knew I’d seen the young girl lead somewhere before, but I just couldn’t place her. It was only when the end credits rolled that I realised it was Carol White, from Poor Cow!"

Looking back at Simon Titley's writings for Liberator

The new issue of Liberator was posted on the magazine website this morning. You can download it free of charge from there - it's Liberator 422.

As well as Lord Bonkers' Diary, which I'll start posting here tomorrow, it includes an article by me on Simon Titley and his writings. The photo here was taken during our lunch in Melton Mowbray.

Does a decade make a difference?

Simon Titley was fond of claiming that he joined the Liberator editorial collective in the 1980s because it was the only way of ensuring that his articles were pasted down in the correct order. Whatever the truth of that, his individual take on politics soon became central to the magazine. He was well informed about machinations inside the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats, interested in new thinking from well beyond those parties and aware of the continuing importance of social class in British politics, when a more common view among his fellow Liberals and Lib Dems was that, yes, class existed, but it was rather bad manners to mention it.

Now that, incredibly, it is approaching ten years since Simon’s death, this seems a good time to look back at some of his contributions to the magazine. You can find a collection of them on the magazine’s website and I’ll give the issue number of those I mention so you can read more for yourself.

Let’s start with a characteristic article. In Liberator 351 Simon looked at Liberals’ fondness for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ and asked what they mean to us in concrete terms. He begins by quoting Ralf Dahrendorf’s account of being held in solitary confinement by the Nazi regime as a teenager and how he had found himself feeling “a visceral desire not to be hemmed in, neither by the personal power of men, nor by the anonymous power of organisations”.

It is that feeling, Simon goes on to say, that Liberal Democrat talk of ‘freedom’ consistently fails to convey:

It is because the Liberal Democrats have such difficulty talking about freedom in meaningful terms that I have been regularly referring to the concept of ‘agency’ in my writing. By ‘agency’, I mean the capacity of individuals to make meaningful choices about their lives and to influence the world around them. I define freedom in these terms because it is better to think of freedom as a practical ability than as a theoretical abstraction. Unfortunately, ‘agency’ is jargon in some professional circles but I shall stick with it because it encapsulates the meaning I seek better than any other word I can think of.

Defining freedom in these terms forces us to realise the extent to which the maldistribution of power is at the root of most of our political ills. It also forces us to realise the relationship between exercising freedom and wellbeing. We can then incorporate freedom as an integral part of our policies across the board, rather than tack it on as an afterthought or omit it altogether.

An insistence on agency also counteracts the classical liberal argument that market forces are the only legitimate means by which people may exercise power.

This emphasis on the importance of the lived experience of abstract ideas can also be found in an article about social class that Simon contributed to Liberator 345. In this case the experience was his own:

Rarely have I encountered worse snobbery than within the Liberal Democrats. The symptoms are wearily familiar; the snide put-downs, the supercilious smirks, the casual discounting of one’s skills or arguments. The low point came when a ‘fellow’ party member once addressed me as “your sort”.

My own experience is more benign. If I transgress the unwritten rules in something I write online, then I’m generally told a particular comment “is unworthy of me”, with the implication that I pass muster the rest of the time. I’ll admit the speed with which public school and Oxbridge ranks close is impressive, but it tells us much about why British society is the way it is.

Sometimes Simon chose less ostensibly political subjects. Here he is in Liberator 331 on the tyranny of ‘cool’, and in particular the British middle-class take on the concept, which gives us:

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’.

The phenomenon of ‘cool’ has been examined thoroughly in a pioneering book, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude by Dick Pountain and David Robins. Cool is essentially about narcissism and ironic detachment. Its modern origins can be traced to American black culture of the 1940s, when young black men adopted a defiant posture as a means of defence. It was then picked up by rebellious white icons of the 50s such as James Dean. During the 60s, ‘cool’ began to be exploited by advertisers as a means of selling consumer goods and in the 70s it moved from the counter-culture into the mainstream. But while ‘cool’ people today affect an air of rebellion, in reality they are conforming to commercially-driven norms.

Because he moved back to Lincoln a couple of years before he died, I was able to meet Simon three times in the East Midlands before he fell ill. Our last meeting was at a very Titleyesque event – the Melton Mowbray Food Festival – and it will be no surprise to anyone who knew him that one of his last articles for this magazine (Liberator 354) was concerned with the decline of the dinner party, suggesting that a turn taken by some television cookery programmes might be in part to blame:

The BBC’s Masterchef (“cooking doesn’t get any tougher than this”) promotes the mistaken idea that, for any dinner party host, nothing less than Michelin-starred restaurant standards will do. It makes people feel ashamed to offer a homespun casserole, even though that is much more practical for a domestic dinner party than Masterchefs labour-intensive, chefy food. Another disincentive is provided by Channel 4’s ‘Come Dine With Me’, which creates the impression that the average dinner party consists of incompetent cooking shared with a bunch of arseholes.

If you want to see Simon’s approach to politics summed up in a single piece of writing, then I recommend ‘Really Facing the Future’ (Liberator 349), which he wrote with another of the party’s original thinkers, David Boyle. It was written in response to ‘Facing the Future’, a paper from the Liberal Democrats that had failed to live up to its title. David and Simon described their article as:

an attempt to encourage Liberal Democrat policy makers to think more radically – partly because the challenges that lie ahead require more radical thinking and partly as an antidote to the idea that party policy is at its most effective when it tentatively suggests a few tiny changes that don’t threaten the status quo. 

Liberal Democrats believe the opposite is true. The justification for the party’s existence is to think radically, to force the political establishment to recognise the real world, and to put radical change into effect. If the party does not do that, it will find that people lose interest and the supply of committed activists begins to dry up.

The Simon Titley articles I enjoyed most were the ones that revealed the machinations of those on the right of the Liberal Democrats who saw political success much as Jeffrey Archer’s novels see success in business. To them, it was the result, not of new thinking and hard work, but of a clever trick, a new alliance or a bit of clever positioning. As many of these people work in public relations, as Simon did himself, he knew whereof he wrote.

So his review of Mark Oaten’s forgotten memoir Screwing Up gives us a pretty brutal portrait of the author:

Oaten … appears to have no fundamental political values but merely jumps from one bandwagon to another. In the 1980s, he joined the SDP but can justify his choice only in terms of it not being Labour or Conservative. In the 1990s, he was an überchampion of the Blairite ‘Project’ but can justify this only in terms of admiring Paddy Ashdown’s leadership. In the 2000s, he became defender of the classical liberal flame when he founded Liberal Future and the Peel Group, but can justify this only in terms of opposing the ‘nanny state’ (having presumably taken the opposite view in the SDP). In a Guardian interview on 8 January 2005, he admitted “I only really got a philosophical belief about three years ago” (i.e. nearly five years after being elected as a Liberal Democrat MP).

But Simon also discusses the book’s strange failure to mention Paul Marshall or Gavin Grant, who were important backers of Oaten’s varied projects. He also reminds us of the name of the Guardian journalist who penned a succession of articles which questioned the competence of various Liberal Democrat MPs while praising Oaten as a ‘rising star’. Who can have briefed her?

Simon also contributed a telling account in Liberator 339 of the reaction of some to the outbreak of Cleggmania that followed the first leaders’ debate in the 2010 general election campaign:

As Lib Dem opinion poll ratings soared, one cheerleader for the right-wing cabal running the campaign wrote on Facebook: “So... 26-34% in the polls, almost all the boost down to media skills and leadership not leaflets and target seats... I’ve got to ask... anyone missing Rennard...?” The complete collapse of the ‘surge’ to 23% on polling day, just 1% more than the party won in 2005, suggests there was no basis for such conceit.

To end, let’s go back to 2001 and the very first article by Simon on the magazine’s website (issue 277). Not for the last time, we find him asking why Liberals are so fond of apologising for being Liberal:

Liberals are often pilloried as timid and petty-minded. We sit on the fence and wring our hands. When we rebel, it is through self-indulgent individualism (for example, calling ourselves ‘Jedi Knights’ on the census forms) rather than confronting what matters. 

We have only ourselves to blame for acquiring this reputation. Why are Liberals so embarrassed? Why do we lack the courage of our convictions? One of the main reasons is our faith that everyone is reasonable like us. All we have to do is sit round the table and eventually we can reach agreement. If only that were so. In fact there will always be many people, probably a majority, who are not Liberals, who will never be Liberals, and whom we must confront. Beyond that, however, are groups so violent in their hostility that to tolerate their behaviour is to invite our own demise.

The contempt for Jedi Knights is an authentic Titley touch, but beyond that, I don’t know whether to be depressed or lost in admiration that his words are needed just as much today as they were all those years ago.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: They could most fairly be described as "repentant headhunters"

The Look at Life film really exists and is online - the young Paddy Ashdown appears at about 6.35 and the comment on the Dayaks at 8.20.

Gentle humour at the expense of foreigners again? I prefer to think of it as gentle humour at the expense of the 1964 commentary. To be honest, I'm more concerned about my recurring assumption that Liberal and Liberal Democrat victories come as the result of armed violence.

Tuesday

I was watching a Look at Life short about the Malayan Emergency on Talking Pictures TV when who should pop up as the Lieutenant in charge of a jungle patrol in Sarawak but a Jeremy Ashdown from Somerset? That’s right, our own Paddy Ashplant – the finest leader the Liberal Democrats ever had. 

The film mentioned the splendid Dayaks, who only a few years before had been "unrepentant headhunters" but now supplied officers to the Sarawak Rangers – not a football team, but a feared regiment of the British Army. I met some of these fellows after Ashplant brought them back to Somerset following his adoption as PPC for Yeovil. By then, they could most fairly be described as “repentant headhunters”: they still lopped fellows’ heads off but were Terribly Sorry about it afterwards. 

I never did find out how Ashplant won some of those early South Somerset District Council by-elections, and I’m inclined to think that is just as well.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

The board of Thames Water, Mauricio Pochettino and Nigella Lawson

See a young Paddy Ashdown on Talking Pictures TV this evening

Today is the fifth anniversary of Paddy Ashdown's death. I still mourn him as a man and a leader.

By coincidence, at 20.50 this evening Talking Pictures TV (Freeview Channel 82) is showing a short Look at Life film from 1964 about British troops in Sarawak. At one point we see a young Marines officer... Lieutenant Ashdown.

Talking Pictures has a free online catch-up service - TPTV Encore - where most of its programmes appear. In case this one doesn't, I've added an excerpt from the film above.

Later. The film will be on TPTV Encore until 29 December - search for 'Trouble-shooters'. You have to register with the site, but it it's free to use.

Paddy Ashdown didn't have a British passport when he died

Embed from Getty Images

"I was a passionate European, I still am and so was Paddy. In fact when he died he didn’t have a British passport. He had an Irish passport - like John Le Carré, who was a friend. I can’t tell you how much that saddens me."

In 2021 Jane Ashdown, the widow of the former Liberal Democrat leader, gave an interview to Seth Dellow for the Marshwood Vale Magazine. She talked candidly and emotionally about her life in and around the world of politics.

Listen to the interview.

The Joy of Six 1158

"Basic Income was proposed by Paddy Ashdown as a fundamental component of his Radical Agenda for the 1990s, a book published in the late 1980s. It is liberal because it recognises the agency of the individual and their contribution to society. A Basic Income, he said, 'gives security to each individual', and will also 'liberate power in the hands of the citizen'." Jane Dodds is encouraged by the success of a Basic Income in Wales and dismayed by Liberal Democrat backsliding on the policy.

Richard Sanders on the way the 2017 general election has been written out of Labour Party history because it does not fit into the narrative promoted by the party's current leadership.

"A very senior insider told me that there ‘has never been any proper management and accountability of the project. There have been constant changes to the specification with no understanding of the cost implications’. Remarkably, there is no overall budget, the business case has not been reviewed despite the changes in specification and rises in costs and the accounting is carried out, bizarrely, in '2019 prices’ - a subterfuge to disguise the soaring expenditure." Christian Wolmar explains why HS2 is costing so much.

Sarah Bakewell recommends five book on existentialism.

"Last year, I joined a group of intrepid plant hunters descending into the depths of the last remaining bomb site in the City of London. We climbed all the way down into the hole until we reached the level of the platforms of what was formerly part of Aldgate East Station, until a V2 bomb dropped nearby in the Second World War." That was The Gentle Author blogging in 2018.

"Typically set in a sprawling country house and populated by a cast drawn from the landed gentry and the well-to-do, 'Golden Age' detective fiction is not the most obvious genre in which to find two of the country’s leading socialist intellectuals." The Society for the Study of Labour History recalls G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, whose 28 detective fiction novels and four collections of short stories helped the publisher Collins achieve great success with its Crime Club imprint.

Adam Dance aims to recapture Yeovil for the Lib Dems

Yeovil Liberal Democrats have chosen their prospective parliamentary candidate for the next general election.

It is Adam Dance, who runs his own gardening and landscaping business and is a Somerset councillor. He holds the public health and equalities portfolio on the Lib Dem-run authority.

Mike Hewitson, the chair of Yeovil Lib Dems, told Somerset Live:

"We are thrilled to have selected Adam as our candidate for the next general election. Adam is a passionate local community champion who makes things happen. He brings real world experience, common sense and hard work to his campaigning. 

"Adam has a long track record of winning elections for us in Somerset and our team looks forward to campaigning alongside him to win the Yeovil constituency at the next general election."

Yeovil, of course, was the seat represented by Paddy Ashdown between 1983 and 2001, and by David Laws between 2001 and 2015.

Its current MP is the Conservative Marcus Fysh, who faces a struggle to be confirmed as the party's candidate in Yeovil.

Did Ed Davey take a page from Paddy Ashdown's playbook?

So let me shout it, yet again: if you want to boost our economy, you have to repair our broken relationship with Europe.

Conference, you don’t need me to tell you what a disaster the Conservatives’ botched deal with Europe has been for our country. You see it every day in your communities: The businesses strangled by red tape. The farmers, fishers and factories, unable to sell to their customers on the continent. The empty shelves in local supermarkets. 

It’s why we campaigned against it. Why, when Boris Johnson brought his terrible deal to Parliament, when even Labour supported it, Liberal Democrats stood alone and voted against it.

And why now Liberal Democrats are the only ones with a real plan to fix Britain’s trade. To tear down the Conservatives’ trade barriers, rip up their red tape, and rebuild the ties of trust and friendship with our European neighbours.

I'm not sure about that "yet again": Ed Davey has been notably quiet on Europe. And there's nothing here that he couldn't or shouldn't have said when he became leader in 2020.

But I'm glad he said it today. The rapturous response in the hall tells you that this is what the party wanted to hear.

In fact, I suspect a deft piece of party management here.

I am reminded of my first Liberal Party Assembly at Bournemouth in 1984. Paddy Ashdown, the dashing new MP for Yeovil, had already made a name for himself by opposing the deployment of US cruise missiles in Britain.

But in the run up to the assembly there had been strong rumours that he had agreed a compromise position with the party establishment.

So when he rose in the hall to speak against cruise, there was an ecstatic reaction.

You can read about that assembly and the defence vote in the New York Times.

I am pleased to see that the Times report mentions Liberator, because Bournemouth 1984 was our finest hour. 

We were the lead item on the BBC evening news because, under the heading 'Should Steel go?', we had printed betting odds on who would become the next Liberal leader, along with a pithy description of each MP.

And the bit about 'Liberal delegates arriving in Bournemouth' was illustrated with footage of me and Stewart Rayment strolling along the sea front.

Lord Bonkers 30 years ago: The rediscovery of Charles James Fox's left kneecap

It's the question that almost no one is asking, and I've put off answering it as long as I decently can, but it's time to find out what Lord Bonkers was saying in the December of 30 years ago.

A little context... In October 1992 John Major's government had announced plans to close almost all Britain's remaining coal mines. Demonstrations broke out in genteel places like Cheltenham and Paddy Ashdown joined John Smith in speaking at a trade union rally in London.

Over to Lord B.

Saturday

Quite the most striking development of recent weeks has been the new-found popularity if coal mining. Where once the best county families hastened to put their sons' names for Eton or Harrow, they now clamour to get them into Vane Tempest of Point of Ayr. 

Such has been the enthusiasm displayed that I spend the day giving serious thought to reopening Bonkers Main. I have seldom ventured down the pit of late, but during the last war it did prove a useful refuge for the choicer items from the National Liberal Club's cellar and some priceless relics of Whig statesmen.

Thus, though the Rutland coalfield was never among the most profitable, we may yet be cheered by the rediscovery of Charles James Fox's left kneecap.

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

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "Sir Percy Alleline is a fine upstanding fellow"

I was rather pleased with this entry, and then I realised what a narrow audience it would appeal to. It's people who loved John Le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or the television adaptation of it (but perhaps not the film) and who remember Ming Campbell's leadership of the Liberal Democrats and formed the same view of it I did.

As I explained recently, those letters from Paddy have their origin in The Goat Hotel, Llanfair Caereinion.

Wednesday

Yes, I miss Paddy Ashdown. I miss his correspondence – those envelopes marked ‘Top Secret: Burn Before Reading’ that arrived by every post – and I miss his company. Despite Ashdown’s best efforts, I never could quite get my head around ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.’ “What exactly was Toby Esterhase up to?” I would ask him, and “So did old Smiley do right by Ricki Tarr in the end?” 

Now Paddy is gone there is no one in the party to explain this to me. I tried asking Ming Campbell the other day, but he just told me Sir Percy Alleline was a fine upstanding fellow and that he wouldn’t listen to a word against him.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers Diary...

• He's looking down on us and not saying a word about it
• Jacob Rees-Mogg in the Og