Good news about the Family Farm Tax

Farmers have been complaining for some time that the price of farmland has lost any connection with the income that be derived from farming it. And The Agri Brigade column in the new Private Eye suggests they have a strong case:

Average UK farmland prices have more than quadrupled this century, from just under £2,000 an acre to well over £8,000 an acre, according to statistics from land agents Savills. 

Over that time, farm profitability has remained poor, but farmland's IHT-free status drew many ultra-high-net-worth individuals into buying land as a convenient way of minimising their tax liabilities – the so-called "Jeremy Clarkson effect". 

By doing so, these buyers pushed up the price of farmland way beyond what many ordinary farmers can afford to pay for it (UK farmland prices are four times higher than those in France, for example).

For this reason, I argued back in January that it was the lack of inheritance tax on farmland that had caused causing farmers' problems.

But now, from the same Eye column, comes good news:

Evidence is emerging that the controversial withdrawal of 100 per cent Inheritance tax [IHT] relief on farmland is having the intended effects of cooling a previously overheated market and deterring those who are more interested in minimising their tax bill than producing food. ...

In 2025, the proportion of farmland bought by what Strutt & Parker describes as "lifestyle buyers" fell to 11 per cent down from 16 per cent the year before. At the same time, the proportion of farms bought by farmers rose to a seven-year high of 59 per cent. 

During 2025, the Knight Frank Farmland Index showed that bare agricultural land sold in England and Wales fell by an average of 5 per cent, the first time since 2017 that prices had fallen this much over a 12 month period.

The Eye speculates that, because they tend to represent the interests of their wealthier members, the National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association (formerly the Country Landowners Association) will continue to campaign against inheritance tax on farmland.

But I hope we Liberal Democrats will quietly drop our campaign against what, strangely, we called the "Family Farm Tax".

Andrew Wakefield, autism and MMR: A forgotten aspect of the affair

It's been called "perhaps the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years". On 28 February 1998 a research paper primarily written by physician Andrew Wakefield, was published in The Lancet. It suggested there was a link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) and autism.

As the Wikipedia article on the affair explains, that paper was later found to be fraudulent:

The fraud involved data bias and manipulation, and two undisclosed conflicts of interest. It was exposed in a lengthy Sunday Times investigation by reporter Brian Deer, resulting in the paper's retraction in February 2010 and Wakefield's being discredited and struck off the UK medical register three months later. 

In the paper, Wakefield fabricated evidence to suggest a new "syndrome" existed, which he called "autistic enterocolitis". Wakefield had been employed by a lawyer representing parents in lawsuits against vaccine producers, and had reportedly earned up to US$43 million per year selling diagnostic kits for the non-existent syndrome he claimed to have discovered. He also held a patent to a rival measles vaccine at the time.

What's now largely forgotten is that Wakefield was for a time a hero of... well, the sort of people who are now members of Bluesky.

Private Eye took up the idea of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and pursued it long after most of Wakefield's supporters (including most co-authors of Lancet study) had walked away.

Eventually, the Eye's editor asked his own medical correspondent to conduct what he optimistically termed a "peer review" of its coverage of the affair. You can read it online.

Stephen Brook, writing in the Guardian, was not impressed:

For a magazine that often accuses newspapers of "burying" corrections, the boot seems on the other foot this week as we have to wait until page 29 and after eight other articles from its In The Back section to get the Eye's take on the Wakefield verdict.

An editor, particularly of what is partially an investigative publication, has to be prepared to follow hunches and go against the consensus sometimes, but you hope their hunches will be good ones and that they change course when it becomes obvious they've backed the wrong horse.

But it wasn't just Private Eye that backed Wakefield: a television film was made for Channel 5 with him as the hero. Titled Hear the Silence it starred Juliet Stevenson as the mother of an autistic child and Hugh Bonneville as Wakefield. (You can find it online, but I didn't tell you that.)

Though some praised the acting and the drama, there was much adverse criticism:

Jon Joseph in The Times wrote "there are definitely no shades of grey" with Wakefield's assertions treated as if they are "a law of nature, like gravity". 

Of the supposed plot presumed to originate with the drug companies as a means to discredit Wakefield, Ben Goldacre wrote in The Guardian of its utter implausibility as the patent on the MMR vaccine had lapsed, it was now generic and no longer highly profitable.

I've written this, not to heap blame on anyone, but to recapture a surprising and largely forgotten aspect of the affair.

Vaughan Wilkins gives Queen Victoria's wicked uncles both barrels and Private Eye has more on Hakluyt

The spooky "strategic advisory" firm Hakluyt that occasionally features in Private Eye.

That was me blogging the other day. And today I bought the new Eye and found that it has featured again:

One of Keir Starmer's first appointments as prime minister in July 2024 was that of Varun Chandra, head of the Hakluyt intelligence consultancy, as investment and trade adviser (while he retained a stake in the firm, as revealed in Eye 1629).

and:

As Mandelson's appointment worked its way through the clearance procedure, with everything hanging on the Foreign Office permanent secretary, who should arrive in this role? One Sir Oliver Robbins, fresh from a stint at... Hakluyt. He duly took the view that what he described last week as a "borderline case" could be confirmed, no questions asked.

and

After Mandelson's sacking last September, Chandra was, remarkably, on the shortlist of three to take on the ambassadorship. Starmer was then reportedly persuaded that recent events perhaps indicated that a professional diplomate might make on a better choice ... In January Chandra was nevertheless given the consolation prize of becoming the PM's "special envoy" to the US on trade and investment to go with his existing role.

After that, the news that I think Vaughan Wilkins' granddaughter, who has published under the names Laura Powell and Laura Vaughan, has also written as Rose Wilkins may fall a little flat.

But let's get on to what this post was going to be about: a splendid reply by Vaughan Wilkins to a critic of his first novel, And So – Victoria, that was published in The Queen (23 September 1937).

l have read with amusement the letter in your issue of September 2nd, in which a simple-minded American correspondent upbraids me for saying unpleasant things in my novel And So – Victoria about the very unpleasant sons of George III. He – or she – chides me too for imagining conversations between historical personages. 

"Boston" obviously has merely a superficial knowledge of the family of George III, or he would not leap to the defence of a creature like the Duke of Cumberland. It is true that on that sinister person’s tomb the customary laudatory inscription is incised – but when he became King of Hanover, the first thing he did was to abolish the constitution. 

The Duke of York was a nasty, muddleheaded old man, whose mistress sold commissions in the army he nominally commanded. The Duke of Clarence was another muddle-head who unquestionably lived on the verge of mental derangement. The Duke of Kent was a pompous egoist and sadist. Let "Boston" read about the mock execution His Royal Highness staged in Canada; or in the Crevy Papers about his curious reactions to marriage. 

"Boston" thinks (does he or she really mean it !) that George III was a nice kind fellow because he made an allowance to the last of the exiled Stuart Princes "out of his own private income". George IV could –  and did – spend £300 on a single coat: he threw away hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pounds in building himself palaces that were both hideous and unnecessary. He raced; he gambled; he kept harems; he drank – not out of his income, but out of contributions which time and again had to be levied for him by the State, He intrigued against his father; he abominated his mother; he persecuted his wife; he tormented (and hated) his daughter; he betrayed his friends; he could not keep his word; he did not pay his bills. This is not a novelist’s imagination: it is a matter of record. 

Of course, I don’t know "for a fact the conversations that took place in the homes of George III sons”. But if "Boston" will not allow me to imagine them then I and every other historical novelist will have to shut up shop. The giants of the past, Dumas, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, must all incur "Boston's" displeasure. Anyhow, it is very odd to find a champion of the Hanoverian from the city of "The Tea-party"!

I suppose that when set against the depredations of the Hanoverians even Peter Mandelson begins to seem palatable.

Down a recherché rabbit hole: More on Vaughan Wilkins's family

One of this blog's more obscure heroes is Vaughan Wilkins, a now-obscure historical novelist who had quite a following from the 1930s to the 1950s. Through him, we discovered the spooky "strategic advisory" firm Hakluyt that occasionally features in Private Eye. That's because Wilkins's son Christopher was one of its founders.

Another of Vaughan Wilkins's sons is the artist William Wilkins. His daughter Laura has published fiction under the names Laura Powell and Laura Vaughan [and maybe under a third name too]. Powell and Vaughan are the middle names of her father and grandfather (who was christened William Vaughan Wilkins) respectively.

Vaughan Wilkins's only children's book, the interestingly of-its-period After Bath, was published in 1945. It is dedicated: "For Four Children with all my love: William, Christopher, Christine; and Richard."

So it looks as though he had at least one more child to investigate (that semicolon is intriguing), at least until the injunctions come in.

What does our campaign against the Family Farm Tax seek?

What exactly do we Liberal Democrats want from out campaign against the "Family Farm Tax"?

It's important we know, because The Agri Brigade column in the latest Private Eye suggests the government may be about to make some concessions on the issue.

These concessions, the Eye suggests, would raise the Inheritance Tax threshold on farmland from £1m to £5m (so, £10m for a married couple). 

This would mean that the tax would not be levied at all on anything that can sensible be called a family farm. At the same time, technical changes would see a higher tax take from larger estates. The proposals are contained in a policy report from the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation.

If this happens, I hope the Lib Dems will declare victory for their campaign and move on to other issues.

However, much of our campaigning has given the impression that we are against inheritance tax on land at all. It's hard to find anything countering that impression on the party's page on the Family Farm Tax – please let me know if you can.

Yet it is the failure to levy inheritance tax on farmland that has caused the problem that page complains about most. That is, that the value of farmland bears little relation to the income that can be generated from farming it. 

If we allow farms to be used as a tax shelter, then that will always be the case.

The Family Farm Tax and VAT on school fees are here to stay

The National Farmers' Union has decided to wind down its campaign against the imposition of inheritance tax (IHT) on farmland, reports Bio-Waste Spreader in the current Private Eye.

The union has concluded that its protests simply haven't worked, as the government has shown no sign of making any concession to its demands. More than that, the union has concluded that these protests have become counterproductive:

Demonstrations, particularly in Westminster involving hundreds of tractors, generated unfavourable headlines involving multimillionaire celebrities such as Jeremy Clarkson, who, as he stated in an article for The Times, bought his 1000-acre farm in Oxfordshire to avoid IHT.

Can we expect the Lib Dems to quietly forget their campaign against the Family Farm Tax too?

Meanwhile, opposition to VAT on private school fees has dwindled, as none of the dire consequences predicted (by the Lib Dems among others) for the move have come to pass.

I'm relaxed about our becoming the party of Middle England - it's where I've lived all my life - but maybe we're going to have to get better at choosing which battles to fight on its behalf.

Private Eye is still raising young men to run the British Empire

I'm fast coming to the conclusion that Private Eye's Literary Review is written by the idiot grandson of someone Ian Hislop was at prep school with.

Take his review, in the Eye last, of a biography of the man of letters Richard Blythe, who enjoyed a period of fame in the 1970s as the author of Akenfield:

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward flew into London with hopes of making Akenfield the movie. But Blythe preferred theatre director Peter Hall, who resisted suggestions to cast Jon Voight and shift the action to the US Midwest. 

In the end, his TV version featured an amateur local cast including Blythe himself playing a vicar and got 15m viewers in 1975. Private Eye paid tribute with Akenballs column and Princess Margaret declared herself a fan, one of the few who could understand the local dialect.

Behind the jocular claim that a regional accent is impossible to understand lies the ingrained belief that a Southern public school accent is normal and anything else is to be laughed at. 

As I said in an earlier post on this Eye column, if the author was aiming to hit the tone of a 17-year-old writing in his public school's magazine 50 years ago, then he scored a bull's eye. 

And behind the idea that Blythe's enthusiasms - liturgy, poetry, history, landscape - are something to be mocked, lies the fear that if a boy grows up with different views from his classmates, he will not be the right sort to take his place as a district commissioner in British West Africa.

Private Eye's investigations are a public service, but its humour and many of its columnists have been of a far lower standard for years.

Private Eye's Literary Review: "A 17-year-old writing in his public school's magazine 50 years ago"

As I usually point out before criticising Private Eye, to establish my credentials, I have bought every issue of the magazine since I went to university in York in October 1978. (Before that I couldn't, because no one stocked it in Market Harborough.)

The Eye's strength at the moment is its investigations. The humour, by contrast, increasingly feels like the product of a sausage machine: feed in the week's events, turn the handle and out it comes. And as for the columnists and regular features, they are often a source of weakness.

I've had a go at The Agri Brigade and Pseuds Corner in the past - the former, I will admit, has recently been very good on the NFU's (and the Lib Dems') campaign against restoring inheritance tax to any holding of farmland, no matter how large.

So let's turn to the Eye's Literary Review, which a couple of issues ago was on to something when, in the course of a review of Ali Smith's Gliff, it complained about the stereotyped and simplistic view of politics held by many literary types.

I love the coverage of culture in the London Review of Books, but I've not forgotten the regular contributor who complained in 2011 that George Osborne was trying to pay off the national debt in one parliament.

Literary Review complains of Sally Rooney and of a caricature Conservative minister in Alan Hollingshurst's Our Evenings. 

I've not read that book, but it's worth pointing out that Tory politicians have discovered the power of intentionally becoming a caricature of yourself. Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are the obvious examples to cite, but the first Tory to employ the tactic was Ann Widdecombe.

My reason for writing this post is the sheer awfulness of the column's conclusion:

In fact, the orthodoxies of the modern leftie novel are becoming just the slightest bit tedious, and this reviewer put down Glyff with the thought that, really, voting Conservative may have something to be said for it.

If the author was aiming to hit the tone of a 17-year-old writing in his public school's magazine 50 years ago, then he scored a bull's eye. But why would you want to sound like that? And why should we value the opinions on literature of someone who does?

Having a mate called Danny whose nickname is Danzo, "cuz he’s the king of Lanzo"

If you were lucky enough not to have come across this, er,  unique Guardian article 'The rise of Britishcore: 100 experiences that define and unite modern Britons', do not click this link.

It was suggested to me by on Twitter that the author must be the son of someone on the paper to have got it published.

The new Private Eye shows that was almost right: he's the long-term partner of someone there.

When the editor saw this article, the Eye goes on, she gave orders for it to be buried in the depths of the Guardian's website. But I recruited a team of professional cave divers to help me this afternoon, and we found it.

Why the New Yorker's article on Lucy Letby was blocked in the UK

The new Private Eye has an article on Lucy Letby that the magazine was unable to publish at the time of her second trial.

I don't know if there's anything in it that hasn't appeared in the press since that trial concluded, but it is well written and leads you disquieted about the prosecution and verdict.

During this trial, an article on the case on New Yorker site was blocked in the UK. Here the barrister Alan Robertshaw, whose legal videos I have praised before, explains why.

He also reveals some shenanigans over a jury member that threatened to derail the trial, though they turned out to involve what seems to be a malicious accusation.

Do wealthy evangelicals think there's a separate heaven for the privately educated?

You may know the story of Mary Whitehouse's fellow campaigner John Smyth QC. The new Private Eye reminds us:

In a purpose-built garden shed at his home in Winchester, Smyth administered sadistic beatings to his victims until they bled. When his criminal abuse was first revealed to church leaders in 1982, Smyth was hustled out of the country to Zimbabwe there he is set up his own network of Christian camps were at least 90 children were abused and one died.

And the Eye reveals that Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of those who funded Smyth's religious camps in Zimbabwe, even though "he had been warned he was up to no good".

As a young man, Welby helped at the Iwerne Trust's camps in the UK, and Smyth was a leading light of the organisation.

This link between them appears to have stymied the Church of England's efforts to investigate Smyth's activities. The church has now apologised 15 times for delays to the inquiry.

Four of Christ's disciples were fishermen, but to get invited to a Iwerne Trust camp you had to be a pupil at an exclusive public school. It makes you wonder if wealthy evangelicals hope there will be a separate heaven for the privately educated.

Anyway, the best guide to the Smyth affair is Bleeding For Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of the Iwerne Camps by Andrew Graystone.

No, Nimbys can't stop all housing development with just a petition

Listeners to the latest Private Eye podcast risk coming away from it believing it's possible to stop new houses being built on a local open space simply by getting up a petition.

I suppose it's London's domination of political media that leads to such odd beliefs being held by intelligent people,

The left is convinced that Nimbys stop all development. The right believes it's the planning laws that have that effect. Both are mistaken.

Come away from the capital to Middle England and you will find small towns surrounded by successive rings of new development and local council that are wary of turning down planning applications because of the costs they will pay if the developers win an appeal.

But holding simplistic beliefs means you needn't get to grips with deeper, harder questions. One example: is the security that people need when it comes to their home compatible with private landlordism?

And there are more such questions to be answered if you want to go in for a new building spree.

First, where will the skilled labour come from? The British building industry has long been complaining about shortages.

Second, how will you force developers to bring houses on to the market at a rate that reduces prices and thus their profits? Oliver Letwin is good on this.

These questions do sound difficult, so let's just mock Nimbys instead.

The Agri Brigade: Another pisspoor Private Eye column

Pseuds Corner isn't the only poor column in Private Eye: I was pleased to see the current issue has another letter from a reader criticising The Agri Brigade.

If the Eye has an, if you will, eyedeology, it is centred on opposition to the way big business is given vast sums of public money with little or no accountability for how it is spent. 

Yet this principle is reversed when it comes to agriculture, as The Agri Brigade is devoted to the idea that farming should be subsidised and that no one outside the business should criticise what farmers do.

It reminds me of the late Sir Richard Body's account of fighting a hopeless industrial seat for the Conservatives in 1950. He was taken to meet some farmers on the rural fringe of the constituency for a briefing on agriculture.

There he was told the line to take: British farming is the most efficient in the world, and that's why it deserves to be subsidised.

Ian Hislop inherited The Agri Brigade from Richard Ingrams when he took over as editor. If I remember rightly, under Ingrams it gave the point of view of small farmers - the National Farmers Union was seen as the voice of big farmers and referred to as No F***ing Use.

That touch of radicalism has been lost and these days it may as well be written by the NFU. Nor has it been free of the original sin of the Eye: public school snobbery. I remember The Agri Brigade finding Margaret Beckett's love of caravan holidays endlessly amusing.

I'd like to see an environmental column in the Eye that was written with the public good in mind, rather than the interests of one industry.

But then, as I have bought every issue of the Eye since I went to York in 1978 (you couldn't buy it in Market Harborough in those days), I feel I'm entitled to moan about it from time to time.

Why does "Back to square one" date from the early 1960s?

Barney Ronay often appears the Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. That's because he writes intelligently and allusively about football, and nothing reveals the Eye's roots among public school boys of the 1950s more clearly than that column.

For the Eye, being dismissive of football is still an important social marker - you prefer rugby, of course - and artistic or other esoteric interests are to be teased out of your classmates in case they affect their ability to run the Empire in later life. (As I once blogged, it took the public schools decades to notice the dwindling of the British Empire.)

I'm saying all this because I'm now going to disagree with Ronay, who tweeted today after the prime minister warned us all against "going back to square one":

"Back to square one" is a phrase from early radio football comms when paper with squares on was used to convey where the ball was. It meant passing back to your own defence. In an irony lost on Rishi all successful modern teams go back to square one constantly

I'm not convinced by the logic of this gotcha. With my philosopher's head on, as Glenn Hoddle would say, I distrust the idea that an expression's meaning is decided by its derivation, so that it can "really" mean something other than what we all think it means.

Because, as Wittgenstein wrote, "the meaning of a word is its use in a language". There's no hidden, 'real' meaning to be discovered. (Incidentally, my philosophy professor at York was called Ronald Atkinson. It didn't seem funny at the time.)

I also doubt this story about "back to square one" coming from its use in early football commentaries. The question of its derivation was once debated in the Guardian, and this produced a pretty convincing debunking from a George Brindley:

As a boy in the 1930s, I regularly listened to such broadcasts while following the movement of the ball on a football-pitch chart in the Radio Times which was divided into eight squares. Captain H B T Wakelam gave the commentary while Charles Lapworth would murmur "Square 3" . . . "Square 5" . . . as the ball moved about the field. Wakelam never mentioned the squares, and Lapworth said nothing else. The phrase "back to square one" was never used. 

On the 50th anniversary of broadcast commentaries in 1973, an article in the Radio Times credited the phrase to these commentaries, but one has only to look at the diagram to see that the phrase could have no relevance: "back" to one team would be "forward" to the other; the restart after a goal was never in square one; and a pass-back to goal could also be "back to square two", "square seven" or "square eight".

My hunch was that it came from Snakes and Ladders or a similar game, though even the meanest snake won't drop you back on square one. So I turned to the British Newspaper Archive, expecting to find lots of 19th-century examples.

But it turned out to be very rare in those days, and you are as likely to find "back at square one" or "back in square one" as the phrase we are looking for.

And there was absolutely no sign of the expression catching on between the wars, as we would expect if the theory about it coming from early football commentaries were true. I expect suspect we have found another instance of the rule that all popular etymology is wrong.

What really surprised me is that the expression took off in popularity at the beginning of the Sixties and has never looked back since. The Ngram below confirms this.

Should we be looking for a forgotten television quiz or radio panel game where "Back to square one" was a catchphrase? Because something at that time caused it to become suddenly popular.

What does the panel think?

"For me he's written that too well. If he'd just dashed something off, he'd have beaten the keeper."

"He's trying to compete at the top level and he's taken way too long over moving the game on. It's embarrassing."

Later. Thanks for to a reader for sending me the link to an edition of Balderdash and Piffle from 2006 that considers the derivation of 'back to square one'. It examines and rejects the football theory, as well as another about the phrase coming from the game of hopscotch. It finds a 1959 example of the phrase that mentions the game of Snakes and Ladders, but the fact the author has to spell out his meaning suggests the phrase was not much in circulation then.

Besides what interests me now is the reason for the sudden popularity of the phrase from 1970. I shall go back to the British Newspaper Archive for clues.

True Tilda, Private Eye and rendering dialect in print

When I was quoting from Arthur Quiller-Couch's True Tilda on this blog, I harvested them from the Project Gutenberg plain text version.

There you will find this introductory note:

This was one of the most enjoyable e-texts that I have prepared but also one of the most difficult. Many of the characters use the working class slang and dialect of 100 years ago and the author sticks to this consistently throughout the book. At times there seems to be as many apostrophes as characters!

This attempt to render dialect phonetically was still going strong in the 1950s and is wearing to the modern reader. I'm told the approved technique in fiction these days is to do with the odd phrase early on and then trust your readers to remember how that character speaks.

But it's still a live issue, as a letter in the current Private Eye shows:

May I be the 94th reader from "oop" north to take issue with your WhatsApp group writer's irritating phonetical spelling of the f-word in Lee Anderson MP's recent posts? It follows the trend of, presumably, RP-speaking writers to needlessly illustrate literally someone's accent.

Many northeners will read "fook" with the long "oo", obviously, so it's a bit weird for us.

The other thing with those posts, of course, is that WhatsApp posts are generally typed, so the delightful Mr Anderson would hardly with the the word phonetically, would he?

English is not a phonetic language, whatever your accent, so the idea that we assume a character has an RP accent unless otherwise indicated tells us something about our society.

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton by Richard Ingrams

Writing in the latest issue of the London Review of Books, Peter Howarth reviews a book on G.K Chesterton by the former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams.

Chesterton, who died 1936, was a journalist, controversialist, theologian and literary critic - his book on Charles Dickens is well worth seeking out for observations like this:

In such a sacred cloud the tale called The Christmas Carol begins, the first and most typical of all his Christmas tales. It is not irrelevant to dilate upon the geniality of this darkness, because it is characteristic of Dickens that his atmospheres are more important than his stories. The Christmas atmosphere is more important than Scrooge, or the ghosts either; in a sense, the background is more important than the figures. 

The same thing may be noticed in his dealings with that other atmosphere (besides that of good humour) which he excelled in creating, an atmosphere of mystery and wrong, such as that which gathers round Mrs. Clennam, rigid in her chair, or old Miss Havisham, ironically robed as a bride. 

Here again the atmosphere altogether eclipses the story, which often seems disappointing in comparison. The secrecy is sensational; the secret is tame. The surface of the thing seems more awful than the core of it. 

It seems almost as if these grisly figures, Mrs. Chadband and Mrs. Clennam, Miss Havisham, and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret. They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth

Though he was most at home with tight deadlines and in the pubs of Fleet Street, there hung about Chesterton a reputation for unworldliness. So much so that some of his Catholic co-religionists have urged his canonisation.

Peter Howarth writes:

The Chestertonians’ appeal eventually resulted in a six-year investigation by the diocese of Northampton into whether there was sufficient evidence of Chesterton’s ‘heroic virtue’ and of miracles arising from his intercession. But in 2019, the bishop announced that things would be taken no further: there was too much evidence of antisemitism and, surprisingly, too little of ‘a pattern of personal spirituality’ in G.K.’s life.

And according to Howarth, Richard Ingrams follows other modern biographers in seeing Chesterton's antisemitism as the result of the malign influence of his brother Cecil and Hilaire Belloc (who was briefly a Liberal MP):

After Auden discerned the pair’s ‘pernicious influence’ in his 1970 selection of Chesterton’s prose, biographers and commentators have discovered how much the resentful obsession with rich Jews and Liberal politicians was primarily Belloc and Cecil’s. 

Ingrams supplies detail about just how nasty the pair were to G.K., too. The witty debater and brilliant controversialist was, in private, incapable of resisting Cecil’s tests of his family loyalty or Belloc’s bullying demands for a pulpit.

I think I shall read Ingrams' book as I have always had a soft spot for Chesterton, though the idea that we can simply blame his antisemitism on other people sounds a little like wishful thinking.

And if you share my interest in G.K. Chesterton and Belloc's distributism, which is described by howarth as

a libertarian and localist politics that sought to evade socialist centralisation and capitalist wage-slavery alike by keeping as much wealth as possible at household level

then you could look at David Boyle's Back to the Land: Distributism and the politics of life.

Foreign affairs reporting at its finest

Embed from Getty Images

A letter in Private Eye complains that Lord Gnome's organ began a report on restrictions imposed by the Iranian government with the words:

The Iraqi government imposed widespread internet blackouts to try to contain the unrest that followed the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini...

This reminds me of the story about the subeditor working a freelance shift on a newspaper who called out: "What's your house style? 'Iran' or 'Iraq'?"

The new Private Eye: Just fancy that

This isn't a caretaker cabinet, it's a piss-taker cabinet.

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) July 9, 2022

Private Eye's Remote Controller is no cricket fan

It seems churlish to complain about an issue that covers the great Market Harborough bungalow mystery, but the Eye TV column this time is piss poor.

Take its author Remote Controller's description of Andrew Flintoff as "the last-but-one 'next Botham'".

The rest of us stopped talking about "the next Botham" almost 20 years ago when, er, Andrew Flintoff established himself as a test-class allrounder. 

He didn't stay at the peak of his form for many summers, but while he did he was a key member of the side. And because that peak included the classic 2005 Ashes series, Flintoff will be remembered for just as long as Botham will.

And then there is this gem about the series Freddie Flintoff's Field of Dreams:

This series is also disfigured by the BBC's belief that the most important scores in sport now are chromosome counts and position on the A-B-C1-C2-D-E scale.

If you love cricket you want everyone to be able to play it. Indeed, part of the Tory love of the game comes from the soothing picture of the Lord of the Manor and the labourer meeting as equals on the field of play.

And if you want England to do well you want wide participation too, because if the game is confined to the higher classes then there will be a smaller pool of talent to draw on.

But for Remote Controller maintaining privilege seems to be what matters. Because if we do nothing the game will be increasingly dominated by the products of private schools.

He must have loved the Noughties, when England tried Alex Loudon (Eton) and Jamie Dalrymple (Radley) before running out of ideas and being obliged to turn again to Graeme Swann (some ghastly comprehensive somewhere).

The Great Market Harborough Bungalow Mystery makes the new Private Eye

Rotten Boroughs in the new Private Eye has picked up the story about secrecy at Harborough District Council that I recently mentioned on this blog.

In that post I quoted the Leicester Mercury:

Harborough District Council came under fire last year over a decision to buy a bungalow, in Granville Street, Market Harborough, for £920,000 when property website Zoopla had it valued at an estimated £303,000.

The council said at the time the purchase was to enable an affordable housing development in the area at nearby Naseby Square. An internal audit into the Naseby Square scheme has now been completed but the council is refusing to share the findings with the majority of its elected representatives.

As Private Eye says, it's all very odd.