Sandra Gidley found alive!

Good news.

Sandra Gidley, the Lib Dem MP for Romsey and one of the pioneers of blogging at Westminster, has revived her blog Romsey Redhead.

A tribute to John Biffen

It comes from the Shropshire Star.

John Biffen was MP for Oswestry and then Shropshire North from 1961 to 1997.

Tim Garden

I was very sorry to hear of the death of Tim Garden. I met him when I was a member of the Lib Dem federal policy committee and found him kindly and approachable. He was one of the figures who, in recent years, have made the Lib Dem voice so authoritative on defence and foreign affairs.

Jonathan Fryer has written his obituary for the Guardian, and there is one in the Daily Telegraph too. There are also some tributes on the party's own website.

Tim Garden's blog remains on line.

The Whisperers

A dotty old lady imagines that all sorts of crimes are taking place in her neighbourhood and dutifully reports them at her local police station, where the officers smilingly humour her. Then she comes into some money - the proceeds of a robbery.

But it's not The Ladykillers. It's the film I taped from this week's Social Realism section in the BBC British film season.

The Whisperers is dominated by the central performance of Edith Evans, at once riveting and painful to watch. It is a revelation to those of us who remember her only as Lady Bracknell and as a game old girl on Parkinson. To those who do not remember her at all it is an education.

Taken as a whole, the film is another condemnation of those who dismiss British films as irredeemably cosy. It is one of the bleakest I have ever seen. Bryan Forbes did direct some extraordinary films in this era. You can almost forgive the mandatory appearance by Nanette Newman in every one of them.

Besides Edith Evans there is a late performance by Eric Portman. He even shares the screen in one scene with Leonard Rossiter - two of my very favourite actors together (see the picture in this posting). Rossiter steals any scene he appear in, and how ever good he is there is always a note of Rigsby in there somewhere too. Other good minor performances here come from Avis Bunnage, Gerald Sim and Robin Bailey.

Finally, to continue my new theme of the connections between realist films of the 1960s and On the Buses, you should note the appearance as a bad lot of Michael Robbins, who went on to play the long-suffering Arthur - the husband of Olive.

Don't build on the flood plain, darling

At the end of June - a couple of floods ago - I wrote about the Shropshire Wildlife Trusts call for an end to building on flood plains.

I have now found more about it on the Trust's website. And this rather nice photograph.

Praise for the Lib Dem stance on terrorism

Rupert George has an article on e gov monitor on the limitations of Gordon Brown's approach to combating terrorism. He writes:

The sense of “Britishness” that Gordon Brown wraps himself in is the old Tory cloth of a militaristic, proudly reactionary belief in strong government.

Liberal Democrats will be cheered by his conclusion:

The only political party attempting to fight the battle of ideas with terrorists are the Liberal Democrats. Nick Clegg’s forthright consistency on these issues deserves greater credit from the media. We need more voices challenging the myopic vision that refuses to tackle the issue seriously.

BritBlog Roundup 130

Tim Worstall has come off the bench (like a latter-day Ole Gunnar Solskjaer) to ensure that this week's selection of the best in British blogging appears.

Scots politicians lose their accents

From yesterday's Scotland on Sunday:

A study of the speech of major political figures has shown that senior Scots at Westminster have changed their accents to sound more akin to their English counterparts - dropping their pronounced Rs and changing their vowels.

Those who have altered their speech include Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Tory Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and Lib-Dem leader Menzies Campbell.

But there is one figure who has stood out against this process: Alex Salmond has not changed his accent despite two decades in the Commons.

Music fans will know about this. The Proclaimers issued their first LP - This is the Story - in 1987. It included the track "Throw the 'R' Away":

I'm just going to have to learn to hesitate
To make sure my words
On your Saxon ears don't grate
But I wouldn't know a single word to say
If I flattened all the vowels
And threw the 'R' away

News Stories of the Day

• Dawn French: I've nothing much to say but it's time I was in the papers.
• Don Foster: I've nothing much to say but it's time I was in the papers.

Jeremy Thorpe and the hovercraft

Liberal Burblings reminds us of the summer of 1974 and one of the most bizarre pieces of political campaigning you will ever come across.

See the comment from Paul Tyler too.

Balls to the Bilderberg Group

Leafing through the virtual Sunday Telegraph I discover the following:

Cabinet minister Ed Balls spent thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money attending a private meeting of one of the world's most powerful and secretive organisations.

Mr Balls, widely regarded as Gordon Brown's closest adviser, travelled to Canada for the four-day conference of the shadowy Bilderberg Group of businessmen and politicians when he was Economic Secretary to the Treasury.

The cost of the trip, in air fares, hotel bills and expenses is estimated at up to £5,000.

The group's rules insist that "all participants attend in a private and not an official capacity".

However, a Treasury spokesman said Mr Balls had attended "in his capacity as a minister" and confirmed that all expenses had been met from public funds.

And who has brought this junket to light? The answer is inevitable:

Mr Balls's attendance at the meeting was uncovered by the Lib-Dem MP Norman Baker, who said: "It's difficult to see why the public should pay for this. Mr Balls was not representing the Government, he was representing himself. He should be open and accountable to MPs who ask about it."

But it is hard to be quite so outraged when you read that:

Accommodation at the four-star Brook Street hotel in Ottawa, where the event was held in June last year, costs the equivalent of between £79 and £103 a night.

Can't the sinister group which runs the world do better for its members than that?

Guerrilla gardening

George Orwell once said that some things are true even though they are in the Daily Telegraph. Similarly, some people are in the right even though their cases are taken up by the Daily Mail.

On Friday the Mail reported the case of June Turnbull, a 79-year-old lady who has been voluntarily tending a public flowerbed in the Wiltshire village of Urchfont for eight years. Now she has been told by the county council that she needs three warning signs, a second person to act as lookout and a fluorescent safety jacket.

As the Adam Smith Institute blog says, "stopping people from improving their communities is the worst form of mindless top down government".

It also points you to the wonderful Guerrilla Gardening, which bills itself as "a growing arsenal for anyone interested in the war against the neglect of public space.

My dog's got two noses

How does it smell?

The BBC report doesn't say.

Baby Baby Spice

Congratulations to Emma Bunton on the birth of her baby boy.

Of course, she may find that motherhood changes her outlook on life:

" 'I really, really want' doesn't get, young man. I'll 'zigazig ah' you in a minute."

Correction of the Day

From the Guardian:

We suggested in a column (Is streaking antisocial or harmless British eccentricity?, page 2, G2, August 9) that a vulgar display of male aggression is not militated by humour. The intended word was mitigated.

Don't worry, you haven't missed a joke here. This is interesting because people usually make the opposite mistake by saying "mitigate against" when they mean "militate against".

Still, you would hope that people who write for or edit the Guardian would know the difference.

Summer of British Film: Social realism

Let's keep this brief. Another week in the BBC Festival.

Am I the only person to dislike Billy Elliot? It was one of my 10 most overrated films:

Scenes were stolen from other films, it showed the miners' strike without saying anything useful about it, the locations in London and the North East were all over the place, half the songs came from the wrong era.

Worst of all it patronised the working class. When newspapers set out to find "real Billy Elliots", they found several and each had received tremendous support from his family.

I might have added that it has ludicrous sexual politics. In order to show he is not gay Billy has to have a best friend who is not only gay but looks and dresses like a girl.

The one I am looking forward to is The Whisperers. It does not sound a barrel of laughs, but it features one of my very favourite British film actors: Eric Portman and Leonard Rossiter is in it too.

There is a full listing of the Social Realism films on the BBC website.

The Whisperers is on Monday 13 August at 1 p.m. (BBC2).

Iraqi interpreters update

Dan Hardie has written another posting.

The campaign to have these people given asylum in Britain is making progress, but Dan points out the danger that the government will appear to give in to this demand but cede little in reality.

He also points you to a barking mad article on Comment is Free.

The Leather Boys

This Summer of British Film is hard work, but I am keeping up so far.

I enjoyed The Leather Boys more than I expected. One of the reviews on the IMDB describes it as "an engaging hybrid of British 'kitchen sink' drama and American biker film," and that is about right.

It is the story of a couple (Rita Tushingham and Colin Campbell) who marry too young. They soon break up, and Campbell takes up with the engaging Dudley Sutton, who is more interested in motor bikes than girls. Sutton and Campbell lodge with the latter's grandmother, sharing a room and, indeed, a bed. Meanwhile Tushingham takes up with a young Johnny Briggs.

Tushingham and Campbell are reconciled in the course of an idyllic ride to Edinburgh and back, and Campbell parts painfully from Sutton. But when he arrives at Tushingham's house he finds Briggs has moved in with her.

He returns to Sutton and takes up his long-standing suggestion that they both sign on as ship's crew and go abroad. But in the pub at the docks he meets Sutton's friends and realises that he is a homosexual.

There is much to enjoy in The Leather Boys. Rita Tushingham gives a crackling performance - I believe that much of the dialogue between her and Campbell was improvised. He is hardly in her class as an actor, but you can argue that the callowness of his performance matches the character he is playing too.

Dudley Sutton is an interesting actor too. Of course, we know him best as Tinker from Lovejoy, just as we know Johnny Briggs as Mike Baldwin from Coronation Street. In smaller parts you will also see Betty Marsden from Round the Horne, Dandy Nicholls and Gladys Henson - a stalwart of the 1940s still going strong.

The most interesting thing about the homosexuality in the film is that Campbell's grandmother finds it quite unremarkable that two grown men should share a bed. Poverty must have forced this sort of intimacy upon many, which may explain why the working class was more prudish about nakedness as a defence against it. (Working-class boys who went to grammar schools often troubled that the changing rooms and showers required them to be "rude", as they saw it.)

Sutton is rather an appealing character - he does lots of funny voices and is nice to old ladies. Only in the final scene does stereotyping set in: one of Sutton's friends bears a worrying resemblance to Catherine Tate's character Derek Faye (although he , of course, is not gay).

There are some pleasing stills from The Leather Boys on the Reel Streets site.

George Galloway: Poplar not Blackburn

The BBC reports that George Galloway is to stand against the transport minister Jim Fitzpatrick in Poplar and Limehouse at the next general election.

Earlier speculation suggested he might stand against Jack Straw in Blackburn.

David Shayler: I am the Messiah

The Register reports:

Well-known former MI5 officer and 9/11 conspiracy theorist David Shayler has taken a further step along the path to fruitcakeville, suggesting to a TV news interviewer that he is the Messiah.

Describing an occasion on which he had been anointed by a mystic representing biblical figure Mary Magdalene, the confused ex-spook told More4 News:

"I felt a sense of peace, I suddenly realised why it had been how it had - why I seem to get such a strange deal from the universe, when I seem to be trying to tell the truth about everything."

David Icke is 55.