Rebuild the Euston Arch

The admirable Jonathan Glancey is interviewed about this campaign in a podcast on the Guardian website.

Stanley Unwin's final television interview

This was first shown on BBC East in 2008. Deep joy to the eardroves.

Former Lib Dem candidate "weighed patient's breasts"

The Peterborough Evening Telegraph walks off with Headline of the Day.

Peacock, Market Harborough, to become a Pizza Express

Or so authoritative rumour has it.

The opening date is May or June.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Living with Mark Oaten

We have had my article on 20 years of Lord Bonkers (part 1 and part 2). Now it is time to pass another week at the Hall.

Monday

As a responsible landlord here on the Bonkers’ Hall Estate I never cease to be appalled by the low standards that pertain in the public sector. Yesterday evening I watched a documentary on the electric television about a family with six children living in a tower block in Barking, and watched it with manly tears in my eyes because those poor people had to contend with poverty, damp and a violent neighbourhood.

Worse than that, they had Mark Oaten living with them!

This morning I call the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and demand to speak to its Chief Executive. I am told he is “in a meeting”, whereupon I suggest with some force to the young lady at the other end of the line that he leaves this meeting and speaks to me forthwith. When he comes to the phone I demand that he send out the borough ratcatcher and have Oaten removed. As I write these lines, confirmation arrives from my spies in East London that this has indeed happened.

Six of the Best 22

1. George Kiloh is not a name I have come across before, but Birkdale Focus tells us all about him and the Liberal History Group's fringe meeting on the Young Liberal "Red Guard" of the 1960s.


2. Has Obama's presidency reached a turning point? Writing on Huffington Post, Robert Kuttner thinks so: "when the other party is out to destroy you, the search for common ground is a fool's errand."


3. Bignews Margate catches Bob Geldof "going off on one" over BBC coverage of allegations that some of the money raised by LiveAid may have gone astray when it reached Africa.


4. The best traditions of the Britblog Roundup are maintained by Redemption Blues.


5. It is hard to tell, because the article is not well written, but Liberal Conspiracy appears to have come out in favour of the government's scheme for compulsory national identity cards. I am proud to say that I was sceptical of that blog's intentions from the start.


6. Unman-Wittering Blog reminds us of the sheer awfulness of the charts in the middle of the 1970s by way of an analysis of Paul Nicholas's "Reggae Like It Used To Be".

More on the Thor nuclear missiles at Harrington airfield

Last month I wrote about my discovery that Thor nuclear missiles had been stationed at Harrington Airfield, only five miles from Market Harborough.

Yesterday I bought a booklet on the airfield. It deals mainly with its career during World War II, when it was the home of "carpetbagger" operations. These dropped men and supplies behind enemy lines in occupied Europe.

But it also gives more information on the Thor missiles:

In 1958, work began on building the Missile site at Harrington ... In late 1959 there was a demonstration by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The protesters met in Rothwell and walked to Harrington to voice their concerns over the building of the site. A truck driver, employed by St Ives Sand & Gravel, delivering building materials to the site told me that one time a CND protester lay in front of his vehicle and had to be forcibly removed by civilian police before he could enter.

In spite of the protesting, the construction of the site went ahead as planned. This included erecting a security fence, together with the necessary floodlights, which came on at dusk and stayed on until dawn every night the base was open. The lights were so effective, they were visible from the A6 at Finedon some 10 miles from Harrington airfield.

The booklet also contains the photograph above, which shows a missile being driven through the streets of Rothwell. The recent past is a very strange place.

Kingdom Hall, Market Harborough, demolished

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Kingdom Hall in Springfield Street, Market Harborough, and how it was about to be demolished.

Here it is this weekend. Gone.

Edward McMillan-Scott interviewed on The Politics Show

The newest Liberal Democrat recruit was interviewed with Nick Clegg for the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire editon of the BBC's The Politics Show.

Go to the BBC iPlayer and start at about 00:50.

Samantha Cameron and Sarah Brown: Leaders' wives or leaders' mothers?

she said ... he tended to make a "terrible mess" and was not good at clearing up after himself. She added it can be "quite annoying" when he fiddles with his phone and Blackberry.

"He's messy. He's noisy. He gets up at a terrible hour."

Mothers thinking fondly of their sons - the lovable little scamps - who are away at Cub Scout camp?

No, as you will have realised, this is Samantha Cameron and Sarah Brown talking about their husbands.

Back in the nineties heyday of sleaze, my own mother used to make a pertinent observation. When the wives of politicians who had been caught having affairs appeared with them in public to show they were standing by them, she said they were behaving more like their mothers than their wives.

Now that seems to be the case even when those politicians have been unfaithful. And so the infantilisation of society gathers pace.

Opinions on a question of commenting etiquette please

I have never published an explicit policy on comments, but I generally delete those that are spam, libelous or gratuitously offensive and leave the rest.

Recently, I also started deleting comments from a Labour supporter who was leaving comments having a dig at me on wholly irrelevant posts. But where he makes some effort to make his comment, however critical, relevant to the original post then I am happy to let it stand.

So what about the comment on this post? The post on his blog that it sends you to is certainly relevant to the debate, but he has made no effort to engage with what I say. He has simply posted a link.

I think this is bad form, but should I delete it?

What do you think?

Twenty years of Lord Bonkers: Part 2

Yesterday I posted the first part of my article marking the fact that I have been writing Lord Bonkers' Diary for Liberator for 20 years.

This second part looks at the literary and historical influences that led to the creation of Rutland's favourite fictional peer.

******

It didn’t happen quite like that, but as I have been writing Lord Bonkers’ Diary for 20 years – a fact that shocks me if not its readers – I thought it might be worth describing where the old brute really comes from.

Lord Bonkers has two kinds of roots: literary ones and historical ones. His most important literary forebears are two characters who were prominent in the years immediately before I started writing about him in 1990: Peter Tinniswood’s Brigadier and Stephen Fry’s Professor Trefusis.

The Brigadier was the hero of a series of books, beginning with Tales from a Long Room. These were written out of a deep love of English cricket and approached it with wonderfully creative humour. So the Brigadier lived in a village whose neighbouring landmarks included Botham’s Gut and Cowdrey’s Bottom, and he frequently mentions such eminent figures as E.W. “Gloria” Swanton and such literary works as Sean O’Casey’s “Juno and the Pocock”.

I came across these stories while I was a student at York through Robin Bailey’s readings on Radio 4 and immediately loved them. One day, I thought, it would be good to write something along those lines, but using the Liberal Party rather than cricket. This is what Lord Bonkers’ Diary was intended to be; indeed, when I read my early columns now I am embarrassed by just how much they owe to Tinniswood.

Professor Trefusis featured in Stephen Fry’s early appearances on Ned Sherrin’s radio programme Loose Ends and is quite arguably the best thing he has done. Through the character of an eccentric academic Fry made telling points and radical points about modern politics and society. One piece in particular, Trefusis’s talk on education, made a tremendous impact and has been mentioned to me by several people over the years. I hoped I could do something similar by using the persona of an Edwardian landowner.

There are other literary roots beyond these two. I had read very little P.G. Wodehouse when I started writing Lord Bonkers, though I was to read a lot of him in later years, but I was certainly aware of the world of Jeeves and Wooster. Equally, I did not see Viv Stanshall’s film Sir Henry at Rawlinson End until a few days before writing this article, yet I know all about its he hero and felt vaguely plagiarised when the Rutland brewer Ruddles started using him in its television commercials.

Other forebears are even more obscure. I loved the Uncle books by the Revd J.P. Martin when I was a boy and only recently did I notice that their hero, who lived in a castle, had lots of friends and adventures and was given to very public acts of philanthropy, bears a remarkable resemblance to a certain Rutland peer. And I recently discovered that Lord Bonkers’ habit of giving Important Concepts initial capitals comes straight from A.A. Milne and Winnie the Pooh.

So those are the character’s literary roots, but he has political ones too. When I started writing Lord Bonkers’ Diary early in 1990 I had been working in Leicester for 18 months and had gained access to the county record office and the university library. Between them they greatly increased my knowledge of the political history of Leicestershire and Rutland and of my own constituency in particular. I learned that Harborough had remained Liberal from 1891 to 1918.

The dominant personality in this history was J.W. “Paddy” Logan, a prosperous railway contractor who was a thoroughgoing Radical and Harborough’s MP from 1891 to 1904 and from 1910 to 1916. He is best remembered for starting a fight on the floor of the Commons and also ran a cottage home in the village of East Langton for the children of men who had been killed at his works. I am also certain that I discovered this after I had invented the Bonkers Home for Well-Behaved Orphans.

This unearthing of inspirations for Lord Bonkers after the event continued when I came across Sir Bache Cunard. He lived at Nevill Holt, the house I have come to regard as the model for Bonkers Hall, in the Edwardian era and devoted himself to hunting and decorative metalwork. His daughter Nancy was to scandalise later decades with her literary dalliances and left-wing sympathies: I expect she got it from the first Lady Bonkers.

Then there was Colonel Hignett, the Tory who had bought Logan’s estate on his death in 1922 and was, incredibly, still active locally when I became a councillor in the 1980s. I came across him several times and he had an unnerving habit of starting telephone calls with “Now, look here....” Fortunately, this was generally followed with “...if I can be any help, you let me know.” When the church roof at Church Langton needed repairing and the estimate from the builders proved too high (“They could put that where the monkey put the nuts.”) he organised the locals to do the job themselves and was filmed by local television as he directed operations up on the roof at the age of 90.

Incidentally, the story above about Lord Bonkers not recognising me the morning after an evening of generous and alcholic hospitality is true. It’s just that it involved Colonel Hignett and the older brother of one of my school friends when he was working for local radio.

A recent discovery is Evelyn Cheesman who began as a governess at Gumley Hall (another large house near Market Harborough that was demolished in 1964) and ended life as a famous naturalist who was most at home amongst the cannibal islands of the South Pacific. I feel sure that his lordship knew her well.

The historical roots of Lord Bonkers are really in the Harborough constituency in Leicestershire rather than Rutland (South West or anywhere else), but the more I write about him the more I am convinced that he is not my invention him so much as my discovery.

One day I really will reach the village and drink in the Bonkers’ Arms.

Zeep: Ghost Town

Just what the world has been waiting for: a reworking of the Specials song in bossa nova rhythm with new Portugese lyrics discussing the social divide in Rio de Janeiro.

Well it sounds great, and according to Crammed Discs has been given the enthusiastic backing of The Specials’ Jerry Dammers. Of all the Sunday videos I have chosen, it is closest in spirit to the very first: Rachid Taha's Rock El Casbah.

There is more about Zeep on their myspace page.

Five Years Ago: Terrorism does not threaten our way of life

From a posting on Liberal England made five years ago today. I think it stands up tolerably well:

"Destroy our way of life?" Think about it. Can you imagine Tony Blair going on the BBC and saying something like "The terrorist outrages of recent days leave me no alternative but to declare Britain a fundamentalist Muslim state"? Of course not.

Terrorists kill people, which is why they must be stopped. They do not threaten our way of life. The slaughter of 9/11 did not begin to undermine Americans' confidence in the rightness of their system of government. In fact it seems to have had just the opposite effect.

Perhaps we are more insecure in Britain. Certainly, there is something telling about the way that a terrorist attack on America has had such an effect on New Labour when we in Western Europe have been living with terrorism for decades.

There is a tendency to deny this history. People argue that present-day terrorism is something new because it attempts to kill as many people as possible. This has the perverse effect of playing down the crimes of the Provisional IRA and turning them into a cuddly 1970s' answer to the Kray Twins. "They was real gents. People was safe when they were planting bombs round here. They never touched kids. Well, technically they did...."

What can threaten our way of life, of course, is hasty legislation like the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Trivial Fact of the Day features Samantha Cameron

According to the Sunday Times, the Conservative leader's great-grandmother was Enid Bagnold, the author of National Velvet.

Brian Cox to vote Liberal Democrat

No, not the original Hannibal Lecter. I mean the physics professor and former keyboard player with D:Ream.

According to the Sunday Times:

Last week Brian Cox, who has pursued an academic career since the band split up, attacked Labour’s record on science funding and indicated he would vote Liberal Democrat at the coming election.

Guido Fawkes defends Lib Dem tax plans against the Fabians

Apparently Left Foot Forward has published a paper attacking Lib Dem plans to lift millions out of paying income tax by raising the threshold. It is written by Tim Horton from the Fabian Society and Howard Reed from the IPPR.

Guido Fawkes, who provides all the links you need, takes them to task.

As Our Lord said, and I think rightly, "joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance".

Twenty years of Lord Bonkers: Part 1

The new issue of Liberator is on sale at the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference in Birmingham. It includes an article celebrating the daunting fact that I have been writing Lord Bonkers' Dairy for 20 years.

I am posting it here in two parts. The second will be up tomorrow.

******

Twenty Years of Lord Bonkers

Jonathan Calder

Growing up in Market Harborough, it was hard to ignore Lord Bonkers. If you climbed any of the hills that ringed the town then the slender spire of St Asquith’s, the gaunt pinnacles of the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans and, most impressive of all, the towers, domes and follies of Bonkers Hall and its grounds, would dominate the view to the North.

Lord Bonkers himself was rarely seen in town, though his longevity – he had ceased to be Liberal MP for Rutland South-West as long ago as 1910, people said wonderingly – and his generosity to local charities were often spoken of.

That said, his incursion into the Market Harborough North Ward by-election of 1982 – and the subsequent court case – kept us in gossip for months.

As a teenager, armed with a water bottle and Ordnance Survey map, I cycled out to find Bonkers Hall many times, only to return defeated on every occasion. Those towers and domes seemed clear enough from a distance, but when you neared them strange things began to happen.

Rounding the final bend that would surely bring you face to face with the Hall, you found that it was not there after all but somewhere over your shoulder instead. Turn your bike round to complete the pursuit and the same thing would happen. The harder you pedalled towards the place, the more quickly it seemed to retreat.

I went away to university and to jobs in Birmingham and London, but always felt a nagging sense of incompleteness. So, years later, when my job brought me back to Market Harborough, I took up the quest.

And once again Bonkers Hall proved an elusive quarry. Until one thundery day when, exhausted by the search, I sat down under a tree at the side of the road and took out a copy of Liberator from my rucksack.

I must have fallen asleep.

When I awoke I found myself on a village green and there – beyond the stocks and the duck pond – was a thatched building with an unmistakable sign: The Bonkers’ Arms.

Waiting only for a hay cart drawn by a shire horse to pass, I crossed the road and stooped to enter the pub.

As my eyes had got used to the darkness I began to make out the names on the beer taps and the buxom barmaid (whom I now know to be called Hazel Grove).

“I’ll have a pint of Dahrendorf lag…”

“Don’t have that,” came a commanding voice from the corner. “I tried it once and I was going off like a pop gun all night.”

I looked over to see a brisk, ruddy figure in tweeds. Something about him was familiar. Was it from that cavalry raid on the Conservative committee room?

Got it! This was Lord Bonkers.

“Give the chap a pint of Smithson & Greaves instead,” he said, “and pull me another while you are at it, my dear.”

I sat down opposite him and we fell into conversation. In truth, it was more a monologue than a conversation and over the next two hours, punctuated by regular trips to the bar, I heard his views on Free Trade, Paddy Ashplant (“Sound, apart from Chinese Labour’), the decline of leg spin, the lily-livered attitude of the modern editor to threatened libel actions and the imminent return of the Liberal Party to power.

Then he saw my magazine.

“Liberator? I used to write for them in the old days, you know. They gave me the back page and I did a spoof diary in the guise of a jolly old Whig whose heart was in the right place but hadn’t quite got to grips with modern world.”

“Bakelite and so forth,” he added in explanation.

After that I pumped him for information on the early days of the magazine.

“Have you heard about our ‘schoolkids’ Liberator?” he asked. “Looking back, it was pretty radical stuff. A ban on Gregory powder, long trousers at 12, a Royal Commission on bedtime.”

Perhaps it was the Smithson & Greaves, but I found myself asking Lord Bonkers whether he would like to write for us again.

We got on famously after that. I was asked back to the Hall for dinner, we retired to the smoking room and a bottle of that most prized of Highland malts, Auld Johnston, appeared. Eventually, I was offered a position as his lordship’s literary secretary.

I awoke the next morning in a leather armchair with an awful hangover and a rough horse blanket thrown over me. For the sake of completeness I have to record that when he came down to breakfast Lord Bonkers had no idea who I was and saw me off the premises with his twelve bore.

Nevertheless, a letter bearing a Rutland stamp and confirming the job offer arrived a couple of days later...

Cartoon: David Cameron's policies

Howard's cartoon from yesterday's Liberal Democrat News.

Six of the Best 21

1. Liberal Democrat Voice is very proud of its new How Authoritarian is your MP? website.


2. With all due respect to Nick Clegg (may he live for ever) and Edward McMillan-Scott, the Lib Dem of the day is Anna Arrowsmith. Heresy Corner will tell you all about her.


3. Liberal Burblings has the video of David Cameron's bad hair day.


4. Don't bother asking Diamond Geezer, the sea-green incorruptible of London blogging, to promote your product.


5. The strange case of Steven Purcell is explained by J. Arthur MacNumpty.


6. Mike McSharry suggests that you visit the Harborough Museum on Saturday 20 March. Sensible man. I am not sure if that is him in the picture.