AC Torino and the Superga air disaster of 1949

Today's news has been full of accounts of the Munich air disaster, which took place 50 years ago on 6 February 1958.

Somehow it all feels longer ago than that, with the primitive flying conditions and the modest lifestyle of the players. Yet, as I have heard Bobby Charlton point out, Duncan Edwards would have been only 30 in 1966 and might well captained England in that World Cup.

But Munich is not the only football-related air disaster. In May 1949 the entire AC Torino team died when their plane crashed just outside the city as they returned from a friendly match against Benfica. The picture shows the memorial to the victims at Superga, where the crash took place.

Other sporting teams to perish in disasters, as chronicled on the BBC's h2g2 site (a forgotten forerunner to Wikipedia pioneered by the author Douglas Adams), include the US figure skating team in 1961 and amateur boxing team in 1980.

Emily Davison and the King's horse

Yesterday Ros Scott wrote about Emily Wilding Davison:

Whether or not she intended to kill herself under the King’s horse at the Derby we’ll never know, but the extent to which she was prepared to suffer for what she believed in still amazes me.

There’s a cupboard in the depths of Parliament which has a link to Emily Davison – she spent the night of July 13th 1911 hiding in a tiny room next to the Chapel. This was the night of the census and it enabled her to give the House of Commons as her residence.

This is probably not the time to recall Lord Bonkers' comment (from, gulp, 1991), but I will do so anyway:

I recall the distinctly frosty reception I was given when I turned up at Greenham Common with my bell tent to lend my support to the ladies camping there. This is an injustice that still rankles, for I was always a staunch supporter of women's suffrage. Was I not the first to salute the courage of Miss Emily Davison in throwing herself under the King's horse at Epsom - even though I had managed to back the beast at distinctly favourable odds?

Headline of the Day

The Harborough Mail had high hopes of:

Farm blaze wrecks mulching equipment

But it had reckoned without the Shropshire Star:

Rogue pie seller sentenced

Petition against Tony Blair as President of Europe

Thanks to No Right Turn ("New Zealand's liberal blog") for pointing us to European Tribune:

As rumours circulated concerning Tony Blair's interest in the post of President of the European Council (newly created by the Treaty of Lisbon), a number of posters here at European Tribune expressed alarm. It was quickly clear that, on this collaborative site which includes members from all over Europe, opposition to Blair's candidature was unanimous, and the idea of a petition was mooted.

Over the last few days, on the basis of Melanchthon's initial draft, the text of the petition was discussed and translated into, in all, nine languages (with more to follow), and a website set up to host them: fast work, and a genuinely European initiative!

Go here to read and sign the petition.

I start a column for the New Statesman website

Those nice people at the New Statesman have asked me to write a fortnightly column for their website. The first column was posted earlier today.

It is designed to fall somewhere between this blog and Lord Bonkers:

These days I don’t go into Shrewsbury much: just the occasional trip to buy paraffin, candles or ammunition. But I used to go more often and would sometimes meet Derek Conway, who was then the town’s MP.

BritBlog Roundup 155

Shows Westminster Wisdom.

The Ghost Goes Gear again again

Important news: I have found another clip from this seminal 1966 film on Youtube.

Unless the Spencer Davis Group were in the habit of playing gigs in their pyjamas, that is.

See the other clips here.

Roger Daltrey: Say It Ain't So Joe

Years ago I heard a song called "Say It Ain't So Joe" and was haunted by it, but had no idea who it was by. Then they invented the internet and I discovered it was written and sung by Murray Head.

Murray Head is the older brother of the actor Anthony Head of Buffy fame. He appeared in two prominent British films - The Family Way (1966) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) - and achieved fame as a singer in 1984 with "One Night in Bangkok" from the Benny, Bjorn and Tim Rice musical Chess. But he is better known in France, where he enjoys a high reputation as a singer and songwriter.

There is a recording of Murray Head singing "Say It Ain't So Joe" on Youtube, but it is audio only. So I have chosen a performance of the song by Roger Daltrey instead; it is almost by The Who, as Keith Moon and John Entwistle are playing on it too. In any case, Daltrey's interpretation of the song is very close to Head's.

Imaginative Parallel of the Day

Well done Jonny Wright, writer of Hug a Hoodie, for this comment on Gavin's Gaily Gigest:

The Premiership is a bit like the London music scene in the 18th century - loads of foreign talent on display (Handel, for a start!), but we don’t produce much of our own.

Derek Conway on his son Freddie

From BBC News:

He would go up and down like a fiddler's elbow while he was away.

Muff Winwood and Sparks

I knew that if I posted enough Sunday music videos I would be able to start finding trivial connections between them.

Go back a few weeks and I chose "This Town Aint Big Enough for the Both of Us" by Sparks. And if you read the history of that song you find this:

Ron Mael and Russell Mael were shocked when producer Muff Winwood and the Island Records company thought “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both of Us” was a single. Muff Winwood added the gunshots gimmick in studio and bet his friend Elton John that this song would be a Top 5 hit in Great Britain. Elton John bet no, and lost.

And a couple of weeks ago we saw Muff Winwood as the bass player with the wicked facial hair in the video of "I'm a Man" by the Spencer Davis Group.

Muff - real name Mervyn but known as Muffin after the popular mule of the time - gave up playing when his brother Steve left to form Traffic. He took a job with Island Records and went on to have a distinguished career on the business and production side of music.

It sounds as though Muff decided it was not worth trying to compete with his younger brother as a musician. But, as Spencer Davis tells it, he also owed his entry to the music business to Steve's precocity:

I found a band in the northern suburb of Birmingham, called Erdington. There was a kid playing keyboards and his name was Steve Winwood. His brother Muffin was also in the band. So, I recruited Steve into the band. I didn't care whether Muff came along or not.

But, there was one problem. Steve was underage, driving-wise. So, I said, "That's okay. I'll come and get you." But his brother jumped to the fore, ever sharp and said, "I will switch from guitar to bass and I have a driving license and I will bring him." So, there was the bass player and the two brothers.

More from Steve Winwood soon. I am coming round to the idea that he is the greatest genius British pop has produced.

House Points: The Leicestershire eco town

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News.

Eco incongruity

In Midland England W. G. Hoskins described eastern Leicestershire as “a landscape of sharp hills, woodland, stone-built villages and many fine churches”. The Stoughton Estate is good example of this. Defra’s website says it provides ideal walks and suggests you enjoy the pasture beside the River Sence.

Stoughton has been owned by the Co-operative Wholesale Society since 1919. It had a dairy herd until the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 and now grows wheat, oil seed rape and spring beans. It is also home to the Co-op’s ‘From Farm to Fork’ project, which gives primary school children a better understanding of where their food comes from. Since September 2005 over 3,000 have visited Stoughton under the scheme.

But there may not be many more. For Stoughton is one of 57 places around the country being investigated as possible sites for the government’s shiny new ‘eco towns’. Late on Tuesday night Edward Garnier, the Tory MP for Harborough (and my own constituency member), secured a short debate on Stoughton and eco towns in general.

He explained that Harborough district is already due to take 7,000 new dwellings, yet the Co-op’s proposal is to build a settlement twice the size of Market Harborough, its largest town. (Incidentally, the Market Harborough has great potential as a unit of measurement. “That new estate is a quarter of a Market Harborough”, people could say. Or: “It’s a great city – at least ten Market Harboroughs.”)

And, said Garnier, the plans have never been debated in Parliament or by Leicestershire county council, Harborough district council, Leicester city council, Oadby and Wigston borough council, the East Midlands regional assembly or the East Midlands Development Agency.

In the past, when the Co-op tried to develop Stoughton as a “new town”, the plans were thrown out. But no one is sure of the extent to which the prefix “eco” will get you around current planning law. At the end of Garnier’s debate we were little wiser. The minister responding to the debate was Ian Wright, the urchin who won the Hartlepool by-election for Labour a few years ago. Just as he got into his stride, the Deputy Speaker called time.

So enjoy Stoughton’s landscape while you can.

Greg Mulholland calls minister "an arsehole"

The Yorkshire Evening Post reports:

A Leeds MP could be forced to apologise to after he called a government minster an "a***hole" and stormed out of a debate.
Speaker Michael Martin is today investigating Greg Mulholland's outburst, made yesterday during a fiery debate in Westminster Hall - the second Commons debating chamber.

Mr Mulholland was enraged after health minister Ivan Lewis refused to let him intervene into the discussion about the funding of hospices.

The Leeds North West MP, a Lib Dem health spokesman, had earlier spoke passionately about "inequalities" in hospice funding.

You can find a transcript of the debate in Hansard, which is equally coy:

Mr. Lewis: The only partisan contributions made during the debate were made by the hon. Members for Cheadle (Mark Hunter) and for Leeds, North-West (Greg Mulholland). They turned it into a party political issue. They talked about a real-terms cut in the amount of funding for hospices based on those figures. That was absolutely opportunistic and disgraceful.

Greg Mulholland: Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Lewis: Will the hon. Gentleman be writing a blank cheque to the hospice movement? Is he saying that if the Liberal Democrats ever formed the Government, they would meet all the hospice costs at 100 per cent. recovery? Of course not, but that is the impression that Liberal Democrat Members always give when contributing to debates.

Greg Mulholland: Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Lewis: We are all fed up with it. I return to the substantive issues.

Greg Mulholland: Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Lewis: I will not give way.

On regulation costs, I shall consider the question of the consultation that the Healthcare Commission is undertaking—

Greg Mulholland: He’s an a*******.

Mr. Lewis: —and the nature of regulation costs. That was not very parliamentary language.

Lembit's Leicester lookalike

The Powys County Times reports the existence of "the only official Lembit Opik lookalike in the UK".

His name is Neil May and he lives in Leicester.

The newspaper goes on:

The only problem is Neil's never had a booking, the demand for a Lembit lookalike just doesn't seem to be there – yet.

"To be honest, this is the first phone call I have ever had," he told the County Times.

Jeremy Beadle dies

Jeremy Beadle has died aged 59. There is an obituary on the BBC site and a tribute from the Lib Dem Norfolk Blogger.

For my own part, I have always regarded the first screening of Beadle's series Game for a Laugh as a milestone in the coarsening of British life in the 1980s. The celebration of the SAS's role in ending the Iranian embassy siege (they even interrupted TV coverage of the snooker) was another.

Still, nil nisi bonum and all that. And he really did do a lot for charity.

Vince Cable, Northern Rock and fascism

From The Devil's Kitchen:

I am wondering whether anyone else has noticed the similarity between Vince Cable's comment on Northern Rock, that "(t)he taxpayer is standing behind the taxpayer and we have a private sector solution without private money as well as nationalisation of liabilities and losses and privatisation of profits" and Gaetano Salvemini's description of Italian fascist economic policy, that "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."

FT blog questions media silence on Lee Jasper

From the Financial Times Westminster blog:

A growing number of pundits are wondering why the mainstream press aren't writing much - if anything - about Lee Jasper. The London mayor's race adviser has been subjected to a stream of allegations made by Andrew Gilligan, the investigative reporter, in the Evening Standard.

Kate Hoey, MP for Vauxhall, was fuming to me the other day at how the story was being ignored by papers including the FT.

I did write a news story last night but it was spiked at midnight by one of my editors (mainstream media gatekeepers).

The moles of Wellington

Somehow I get the impression that it is a slow news day in Shropshire.

Under the heading "Mole explosion" hits area, the Star reports that a

once neat and tidy patch off Rose Crescent in Wellington, a favourite for dog walkers, is now estimated to have 50 molehills.

The Mayor of Telford & Wrekin, Councillor Miles Hosken, has described it as an “explosion of moles” and wonders if the numbers of the animal should be curbed.

Monica Drinkwater, who has lived in Rose Crescent for 26 years, said she had never seen anything like it before, adding: “There has to be about 50 molehills there. I can see them from the house."

Note too the "Mole factfile" and pro-mole comments from readers, one of whom claims to be a mole himself.

Around the Lib Dem blogs

Duncan Borrowman suggests a way of making life easier for a couple of Tory MPs, in the light of Nigel Waterson's widely publicised difficulties today:

I am surprised to see that he lives in Beckenham - a long way from the Sussex coast. Meanwhile Jacqui Lait, the Tory MP for Beckenham is married to the leader of East Sussex Council, Peter Jones. Their home is in Rye, near to the Sussex coast.

Maybe they could arrange a house swap?

Meanwhile, Norfolk Blogger points out that at least one Conservative MP still believes in student grants:

Student grants, which started their decline before being abolished by Labour, were constantly criticised by the Tories when in power because they saw students being subsidised to earn a higher income at tax payers expense.

So it is perhaps a real throwback that Derek Conway also appears to me to see his parliamentary allowance as a means of subsiding students, even if they are his sons.

And away from what I suppose we have to call Tory sleaze, The Real Blog (prop. David Boyle) asks some hard questions on the NHS:

What is it about the medical profession that it swallows the government's mores and attitudes so completely?

I've been wondering whether it is something to do with the way that New Labour has managed our public services that they have been encouraging this kind of inhumanity among the professionals who work there. Are they so desperate to balance the books that they are prepared to accept this slow withdrawal of care from anyone the state deems unproductive?

Lord Bonkers slams Iain Dale

Iain Dale has defended his silence on Derek Conway's travails in the following terms:

Derek Conway is a friend of mine. Anything I have to say about his conduct, I will say to his face.

Lord Bonkers remarks:

It happens that Haigh the Acid Bath Murderer was an old friend of mine, but that didn't preclude my writing a pretty stiff editorial on the case in the High Leicestershire Radical.