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Michael Savage reports that journalists are self-censoring their reporting on right-wing protests, Donald Trump's administration and trans issues because of growing concerns about their personal safety.

"The magazine’s extensive output about Islam emerges from a coherent ideological viewpoint. Muslims are invaders. They don’t belong in this country. They don’t share our values and they threaten our public spaces. Any civic engagement by Muslims in Britain is suspect and should be resisted." Peter Oborne itemises the Spectator's rabid Islamophobia.

 Alistair Jones on the reorganisation of local government in Leicestershire: "Rutland is deemed too small to be a cost-effective council (although, personally, I remain unconvinced). Similarly, although more contentiously, the population argument was likely to see some expansion of the Leicester City Council boundaries. The question was going to be: how far? And now we know. There will be a significantly enlarged city council, and the remainder of the county and Rutland will form a single unitary authority."

In the latest move to censor US school libraries, one district is considering getting rid of them altogether. Erin Reed reports from Clay County in Florida.

"Both detectives were created or at least popularized by women; both possessed a typically female kind of intelligence that was easy to miss or dismiss. But the women who made them lived entirely different relationships to ownership and credit, and those relationships come through in the characters themselves." As the early Miss Marple and Nancy Drew novels are entering the public domain, Ellen O’Connell Whittet asks what comes next for the characters.

Rob Bagchi recalls the Joe Mercer's short, sunny spell as England's caretaker manager in 1974: "He gave them a blueprint for renovation that was disastrously ignored when the caution and anxiety he had temporarily banished returned with a vengeance."

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Peter Oborne reviews Sayeeda Warsi's memoirs: "For many years, Warsi devoted her life to the UK Conservative party. When she joined it two decades ago, it seemed to embody everything she believed in: family values, decency, tolerance, fairness, the rule of law. Slowly, the UK's first female Muslim cabinet minister's eyes opened. She came to realise that it wasn’t like that at all. In Muslims Don't Matter, she records the betrayals, the bullying, the abuse, the insults." 

"The nation’s bank clerks showed their gratitude for their extra days of rest by subscribing to a testimonial for Lubbock, who used their gift to fund two school scholarships." Kathryn Rix introduces us to Sir John Lubbock, father of modern bank holidays.

Will Young talks to Byline Times about the pressures of fame and the stories he believes are still to come to light about reality TV music shows. Me? I voted for Darius.

A London Inheritance reads London After Dark by Fabian of the Yard.

"Ellis’s torch could not illuminate the railway bridge, but he feared the worst. The railway line was about fifty metres from where he had stopped, so, leaping a barbed wire fence, he sprinted to the track and ran towards the locomotive, waving his torch." André Brett tells the story of New Zealand's worst every trailway disaster, which took place on Christmas Eve 1953.

"Homes would be adorned with ivy, holly and mistletoe, as well as laurel, conifers and bay. Yule logs burned and tapers were lit. Carolling was a popular activity that involved dancing as well as singing. Gifts would be exchanged during the festive season, but more typically at New Year rather than on Christmas day." Diane Watt on Christmas in the middle ages.

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Roz Savage explains why she has tabled her Climate and Nature Bill: "While I was out there, alone in the middle of the ocean, I witnessed the beauty and strength of the natural world first hand. I realised how utterly reliant we are on the health of our planet, and how vulnerable we are to the Earth’s changing climate." 

"It is certainly true that the two remaining candidates, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, stand on the far right of the party. Both make Margaret Thatcher, a famously right-wing Conservative prime minister, look like a sopping wet liberal. But anyone who thinks that the far-right capture of the Conservative Party means that the party is now irrelevant is deluding themselves." Peter Oborne warns Britain not assume that it's immune to global trends.

Gemma Gould tells the story of her journey as a child through the care system.

Stephen Parsons gives a detailed account of the challenge offered by LGBT students against the dominant culture among evangelicals that assumes the gay-affirming position is inevitably wrong.

"The city’s leaders were still determined to rehouse as much of the population as it could within the city and, in seeking to do so, the eyes of the leaders of the politicians and planners turned upwards! Glasgow was to embrace like no other city, high-rise housing development." Gerry Mooney on the rise and fall of Glasgow's Red Road Flats.

"We unexpectedly got the seal of approval from Morrissey. His nephew came to the gig in Manchester, met us backstage for a drink afterwards and told us he thought it was a nice thing to do, and the next day, Morrissey posted a photo his nephew had taken at the gig and put a message on his website thanking us, with the headline, 'If there’s something you’d like to try - Astley, Astley, Astley', which I thought was fantastic." Rick Astley sings The Smiths.

England's forgotten bowling genius Bob Appleyard in action

When Bob Appleyard died in 2015 I wrote a tribute to him. I'll quote most of it below, but the reason for this post is that I have found a clip of him bowling. I can't embed it here, so hurry over to YouTube. 

If I'm right, Appleyard is the bowler staring his run up at 0:20 and 1:37. You can also see the England bowlers Freddie Trueman and Johnny Wardle, who is the left-arm spinner. The tall bowler hitching his trousers is Philip Hodgson, who played only a few games for Yorkshire.

I believe it is from Sussex vs Yorkshire at Hove in August 1954, when the Southern county were made to follow on but played out time for the draw in what must have been a rain affected game.

If you want to learn more about Appleyard, I recommend an episode of the Oborne & Heller on Cricket podcast. Stephen Chalke talks about his experience of interviewing cricketers from an earliest generation, including Ken Taylor, Fred Rumsey and Appleyard.

And he also gave a long interview to Christopher Martin- Jenkins, which I have put at the top of this post.

Anyway, this is what I wrote nine years ago:

Appleyard's story is simply extraordinary. His development was held up by the Second World War, with the result that he did not make his debut for Yorkshire until he was 26, playing a few games at the end of the 1950 season.

The following summer, in his first full season in county cricket, Appleyard took 200 wickets for Yorkshire at 14.14 apiece.

But his health was already failing. The next summer he played only one game before being diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had an operation was not expected to live.

By 1954 he was fit enough to play county cricket again, and he took 154 wickets at 14.42, He made his England debut against Pakistan that summer, taking 5-51 in the first innings he bowled in.

His form won him a place on Len Hutton's historic tour to Australia in 1954-5. The Ashes were regained largely because of Tyson and Statham's fast bowling, but it was Appleyard, the stock bowler at the other end, who topped the England bowling averages.

After that his career began to decline. He played his last test in 1956, as he was displaced by the rise of Jim Laker, and injury meant that he was released by Yorkshire after the 1958 season.

In 152 matches for Yorkshire he had taken 708 wickets at 15.44 apiece, and in his nine tests he had 31 victims at 17.87.

Beyond the figures, Appleyard was a remarkable bowler in that he was able to bowl fast medium and off spin off the same run and apparently with the same action.

Appleyard's Telegraph obituary, to which I am indebted for the statistics in this post describes him as "one of the greatest bowlers of the post-war period".

But it continues:

There were judges in Yorkshire who were inclined to go further. The former England fast bowler Bill Bowes, for example, held that Appleyard achieved a level of excellence matched by only two other bowlers – Sydney Barnes and Bill O’Reilly – in the history of the game.

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The media must start holding Reform and Nigel Farage to account, says Hardeep Matharu. The normalisation of racism and dog-whistles will only get worse if the press continues to treat Farage as an entertaining figure representing the 'real views' of the British people.

Imran Mulla and Peter Oborne examine Rishi Sunak's worrying links with India's far right.

"Compared to similar size towns in the UK, Clacton has a limited heritage and cultural offer. It has a wonderful but very small museum space run by active volunteers in the public library. There’s room for about five visitors at a time, and it’s open just twice a week. Sadly, other venues where Clacton’s hidden heritage was celebrated have shut, such as museum dedicated to Pirate Radio which closed in 2016." Tony D. Sampson and Andrew Branch argue that Nigel Farage’s populism distracts from what people in Clacton are really proud about.

"Across the world there must have been so many of us who experienced a similarly uncanny sense of déjà vu upon reading Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time. That is because for those of us who come from “wounded democracies” or autocracies-in-the-making or downright dictatorships, Oceania was never some far-fetched dystopian land set in an unforeseeable future, but something closer, much more visceral. And frightening too. It was not even a prescient warning about where things might lead if politics went unexpectedly wrong. For us, Nineteen Eighty-Four was already here. It was already happening." Elif Shafak on the undiminished power of George Orwell's novel remains as powerful as when it w

Richard Williams pays a visit to Robert Wyatt in Louth.

The King's Cross district of London got its name from a memorial to George IV that everybody hated and which lasted only 15 years, explains Matt Brown: "The octagonal base survived two further years after the statue was removed. It served variously as a police station, beer shop and advertising space. When it was pulled down in 1845, few people mourned. Newspaper accounts of the removal were scarce and short."

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Paul Browne heard Oleksandra Matviichuk, the Ukrainian winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, address the Cambridge Union: "Perhaps the most chilling aspect of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine she described is the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children who have been abducted and sent to Russia for adoption and re-education. This makes Russian President Vladimir Putin, in her words, 'the biggest child kidnapper in the world'." 

Sian Norris and Sophia Alexandra Hall speak to a whistleblower about the impact on vulnerable young people of the increasing privatisation of foster care: "Andrew (not his real name) told us that, during his time working at a number of Independent Fostering Agencies, he was alarmed by their business model approach, with carers seen as profit generators and staff incentivised to get more children into care. Foster carers were referred to as 'gold bars', while children were 'treated like commodities'." 

Better the United Arab Emirates owning the Telegraph than Paul Marshall, argues Peter Oborne.

Maria Popova introduces us to the pioneering Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd: "Shepherd does for the mountain what Rachel Carson did for the ocean - both women explore entire worlds previously mapped only by men and mostly through the lens of conquest rather than contemplation; both bring to their subject a naturalist’s rigor and a poet’s reverence, gleaming from the splendor of facts a larger meditation on meaning."

Caroline Davies enters a Dickensian world and talks to those who recover bodies from the Thames

"I investigate reports of big cats in Suffolk, I've received over a hundred of these over the past seven years. But while seeking testimony on Suffolk big cat sightings, a surprising number of unsolicited accounts of encounters with the phantom East Anglian hellhound Black Shuck seem to come my way." Matt Salusbury on the persistence of folklore.

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Peter Oborne reminds us that British Muslims were the first to suffer from bank account closures, but nobody protested.

The Pipeline looks at the decision by Shropshire Council to grant planning consent to a local housing development in the near setting of the nationally important Old Oswestry hillfort.  It fears that by raising the bar on what constitutes “harm” to the setting of a heritage site, the decision puts every such site in England at risk from insensitive developers.

"Why should Dartmoor remain the only place in England where wild camping is (lawfully) possible? If we accept that being able to rest in modest comfort is an essential feature of open-air recreation, then that implies that this right should apply to all our national parks (whose statutory purpose is partly to provide exactly that) – at bare minimum." Jon Moses says we need a national right to roam.

The late Dorothy Rowe chooses five books on lying and dispenses much wisdom in the process: "If you understand that all you ever see or know is the constructions of your brain and that everything is a guess, then you can’t escape uncertainty. You could be wrong and that is frightening."

Simon Perks has finished c

"It wasn’t just about the liquid itself, but the experience. The feeling of being in the presence of someone who really cared about the heritage, the orchards, the fruit and the story the drink told. It was utterly magical." Gabe Cook celebrates role in the revival of traditional cider and perry.

Being Geoffrey Boycott on a podcast

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My favourite cricket podcast is Oborne and Heller on Cricket, which can be hard to find if you don't know about it as its home is The Chiswick Calendar. As the name implies, that's a site devoted to this desirable London suburb.

In October, it had as guests Geoffrey Boycott and his co-author Jon Hotten, who between them have produced the book Being Geoffrey Boycott.

As the extensive summary on the podcast's page for this edition explains:

Geoffrey and Jon explain the scheme and origins of their “book of two halves”. Geoffrey’s is a detailed first-person diary from memory of every one of his Test innings from 1964 to 1982, undertaken at the behest of his wife Rachael in pandemic lockdown at their home in South Africa. 

Matt Thacker at the publishers Fairfield (like Jon a past guest on the podcast) had the idea of submitting it to Jon to respond to each passage, explaining its background and deepening the reader’s understanding of Geoffrey’s life and feelings at the time. 

Geoffrey had rejected Jon’s first effort (for making him sound like a stage Ee-Bah-Gum Yorkshireman) but after some conversations between them and more advice from Rachael Jon’s later drafts had grown on him (and he had cancelled his threat to run him out.)

Listening to this podcast, you are reminded what a riveting speaker on the game Boycott can be. Here he does without his gimmicks - there's not a stick of rhubarb or granny's pinny in to be heard - and, thank God, he does not have to contend with the puerile teasing of Jonathan Agnew.

It reminds you that Boycott is respected around the world as a broadcaster and batting coach.

Nor is he as stubborn as he's painted to be. He went ahead with the book at his wife's urging, even though he continued to have doubts about the idea.

And I was interested in his verdict, as a close friend of Brian Clough, on Dave Peace's The Damned Utd, as reported by his co-author:

"It's a brilliant novel, but it's nothing like Brian."

Geoffrey Boycott: an intelligent and surprisingly subtle man.

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Peter Oborne explains how British journalists have become part of the Johnson government’s fake news machine.

"He comes across as motivated by an anarchic curiosity, ready to trash his current political vehicle and possibly to break up Britain just to see whether anything interesting and useful results." James Meek on the strange ideology of Dominic Cummings.

Jennie Rigg has personal experience of the poisoning of Britain's political discourse.

"Posters have already appeared announcing the birth of 'Manc-hattan'. But the truth is we are a long way from that uplifting skyline. This is more like something you’d see on the outer ring road of a third-tier Chinese city." Oliver Wainwright says Manchester has sold its soul for luxury skyscrapers.

Hannah Jane Parkinson suggests the #WagathaChristie affair shows that surveillance is no longer the preserve of the private investigator.

Leicestershire's new opener Hassan Azad has been on a long journey from Karachi via Mansfield and a quidditch injury, reports Yas Rana.

Charles Kennedy, Iraq and the Chilcot Report

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The new issue of Liberator contains this article by me on Iraq and the Chilcot Report. It was written in haste  and owes an indecent amount to Peter Oborne and James Graham, but I wanted to have my say n an event that continues to haunt British politics.

Disgraced in the Desert

“We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there.” Tony Blair put it more elegantly when assuring George W. Bush that “I will be with you, whatever,” but this order, given to Christopher Meyer when he became Britain’s ambassador in Washington by Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell, conveyed the essence of the relationship that led to disaster in Iraq.

It was entirely reasonable of Tony Blair to associate himself closely with President Clinton when he first became prime minister. Here was a popular and successful politician with views notably similar to Blair’s own.

But the Blair inner circle’s insistence that Meyer became so unhealthily close to the US had its roots in Labour’s long years in opposition to Margaret Thatcher and John Major. With the Thatcher years dominated by the Cold War and arguments over the British deterrent and the deployment of American weapon systems on British soil, Labour struggled not to be painted as unpatriotic.

Blair overturned all that, and it drove the Conservative Party mad. You can see this in their reaction to Charles Kennedy’s brave speech in the Commons before action in Iraq began. Their outrage was surely a mask for their anger that Labour had usurped their role as America’s staunchest ally. Somewhere there too was the jealously of a younger boy who fears he has lost the friendship of an older, cooler boy because the latter has allowed someone else into their gang.

Ill-suppressed excitement

Blair, the new boy in the gang, certainly saw it that way. In his book DC Confidential, Christopher Meyer records that the new prime minister “pulsed with ill-suppressed excitement” during his first official visit to the US. That excitement continued when George W. Bush was elected, no matter how crass his views and actions.

As Peter Oborne reminds us in his book Not the Chilcot Report, in January 2002 Bush startled his allies by naming Iraq, Iran and North Korea as "an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world":

Iraq, he claimed, had been plotting for more than a decade to develop anthrax, nerve gas and nuclear weapons. As a supporter of "terror", it might well provide these to terrorists. 

In fact, there was no evidence to support this last claim: not only was Saddam Hussein ideologically opposed to al-Qaeda, but he wouldn’t allow it to operate in his territory. 

Regardless, the United States now set about seeking allies for an attack on Iraq. Thus, Bush invited Blair and his family to visit him at his family ranch in Crawford, Texas that April – nearly a full year before the invasion. 

Most unusually, there were no advisers present and no notes were taken. 

Oborne goes on to piece together what he thinks was said at Crawford.

Bush, he argues, told Blair he was committed to regime change in Iraq. Blair expressed strong support for this, but said he would need to find cover under international law by seeking support from the United Nations. Well-placed observers, claims Oborne, also believe that he also made a private pledge to commit Britain to war.

The real Chilcot Report sets out the background to this meeting. On 12 March 2002, just weeks before the Crawford summit, Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser David Manning had a conversation with Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser. The prime minister, Manning told her, “would not budge in [his] support for regime change”.

Five days later, Meyer met the US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Meyer told him that Britain "backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option". And on 25 March, just before Blair’s meeting with Bush, the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sent him a memo.

To provide legal cover and a plausible pretext for war, said Straw, Blair needed to present his objective as the elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, rather than regime change. On this analysis, Hans Blix and his weapons inspectors were dispatched to Iraq in the hope that Saddam would deny them entry and provide a pretext for war.

Oborne concludes that Blair committed himself to regime change – and agreed to support US military action – during that secret meeting at Crompton.

Blair’s response to this widely made charge is strange. On the one hand he maintains that war in Iraq really was caused by fear of Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons, yet whenever he makes the moral case for that war, he does so entirely in terms of regime change. So the end he denies seeking before the war was fought is not the one he uses to justify it.

To listen to Blair now you would imagine that, in those febrile weeks before war began, he argued that we must take action in Iraq to overthrow Saddam’s dictatorship. I love to see tyrants overthrown, their statues torn down and their prisons broken open to public gaze. If you are not a pacifist, such action must sometimes be an option if the tyranny is extreme enough and the prospects of success are strong enough.

But that was not the case Blair made. The first bombs fell on Iraq on 20 March 2003, buy as late as 25 February he told the Commons:

"I detest his regime but even now he can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully." 

Blair frequently implies that there was no middle position between doing nothing about Saddam and invasion. The truth is there were many things we could and did do against Saddam before we went to war in 2003. There had been two separate no-fly zones in Iraq since the first war in 1992.

Tony Blair today cuts a tortured, Christ-like figure, albeit one with a peculiar orange hue and multi-million pound annual earnings . It is hard to resist the conclusion of the Guardian journalist Mike Carter:

A colleague just said to me: “if Blair hadn't toppled Saddam, he'd be doing his PR for him now.” Scary thing is, that's probably true 

The war was a disaster for the people of Iraq, not least because the victors had no plans for running the country after it was over beyond disbanding the Iraqi army and civil service.

Imperialist nostalgia

Though British participation was buoyed by imperialist nostalgia – we flattered ourselves that we understood the Arab world in a way the Americans never could – we were not prepared even to count the number of Iraqis who died under our rule. As a result the independent website Iraq Body Count was set up. It now estimates there have been more than 250,000 deaths from the war and the violence that engulfed the country afterwards.

Besides the Iraqi people and Blair’s reputation, progressive politics in Britain have suffered because of the dishonest way the country was led into war in Iraq. Look at the disputes between the Corbynistas and the rest of the Labour Party today. The former use the cry of “Iraq”” as a means of silencing their opponents in the way that previous generations of far-leftists used “Fascist!” So it is that, because of her support for war in Iraq, a mainstream Labour figure like Angela Eagle is branded a “Tory”.

Nor have the Liberal Democrats escaped the baleful legacy of Iraq. Because the party lacks strong intellectual foundations, often seeming to be shored up by a combination of support for Guardian editorials, leaflet distribution and general benevolence, we find it hard to explain how it is that we differ from moderate Labourites. We have a tendency so seize upon policy questions where we are in the right, such as Iraq or identity cards, and elevate these into insurmountable peaks of principle.

You would never guess from all the praise for Charles Kennedy and his courage in the face of that heckling from the Conservative benches that he had originally been wary of opposing the war in Iraq and was rather bounced into opposition by the wider party.

Writing five years after the event, the Liberal Democrat blogger James Graham recalled the opposition from the party’s big-wigs after a motion he and Susan Kramer took to the Federal Executive, calling on the party to oppose the war and on members to join the Stop the War demonstration, was passed:

Senior figures in the party did everything they could to stop any aspect of this motion from being implemented. They point blank refused to put anything up on the party website … They wouldn’t link to my site. 

Then: with less than a week to go before the demo itself, Kennedy was asked a direct question by David Frost on live television and, bottling it, turned volte face and said he would be “very happy” to go on [the demonstration]. 

Suddenly we got our link on the front page of the party website, publicity in Lib Dem News (which until that point had been relegated to the letters pages) and the full weight of the party’s campaigns and press departments behind us. 

Yet even then Kennedy remained obsessed with having it both ways. Notoriously, his Hyde Park speech argued meekly that he was “not persuaded” of the case for war and demanding that Parliament be allowed a vote (it was; the troops went in). 

In my experience those party big-wigs were never much interested in Liberal Democrat News, but that was how James saw it.

Our finest hour

Charles Kennedy’s opposition to war in Iraq is now established in the popular mind and the party’s own mind, as our finest hour. But we do need to be sure what lessons we draw from that.

We are not a pacifist party, so in what circumstances would we support military actions abroad? Must there be United Nations support for it. Must we be part of a wide international coalition? Must we be sure of success? We need to decide.

And those who oppose such action need to be clear why they do so. I did detect a conscious rerunning of the debate on Iraq by those Lib Dems who opposed what turned out to be near token action against ISIL forces in Syria.

 It is too late for the people of Iraq or for Tony Blair’s reputation, but the rest of us need to learn from the wretched affair and be clear about which lessons we need to learn.