Even before today, Warsi was far from adored by Tory activists, many of whom resent being lectured by an unelected peer.What kind of Conservatives are these? Being told what to do by an unelected peer should give any consistent Tory a little erotic thrill.
during the Easter and Summer breaks, as this was the only time Pevsner could afford to take out from his other commitments, he would travel around the countryside in a car driven by his wife Karola. They would drive from dawn until dusk with Pevsner scribbling on a clipboard, then that same evening Pevsner would write the first draft.Clearly, Karola took Fox Street, Rothwell, at to fast a lick for him to spot the town's Congregational Church.
The Cabinet Office has appointed a senior Whitehall communicator to a newly-created role as Nick Clegg's head of comms.In September of last year I blogged about an Institute for Government report that suggested Nick needed more civil service support in his role as deputy prime minister.
James Sorene, currently the Department of Health's head of news, will also act as the embattled Deputy Prime Minister's spokesman.
The role will involve working with Clegg's political spokesman James McGrory and chief of staff Lena Pietsch.
A little of Lord Bonkers' table talk from luncheon today...I met that fellow Cameron the other day. He was out with a posse of Conservative party workers delivering leaflets on behalf of one Kashif Ali.
"I see you're not taking this Saddleworth by-election too seriously," I ventured.
"Why do you say that?" he replied, indicating his armful of leaflets and all the helpers behind him.
"Because you are in Melton Mowbray, man."
If you ever needed a PMQs to brush away the last morsels of festive cheer, then this was it. Every question and answer came laced with some sideswipe or other, and it made for a scrappy exchange between the two party leaders. Both struck blows against each other, but both were also guilty of errors and mis-steps.And that is about right.
Writing on Liberal Democrat Voice, Mark Pack reviews Which Way's Up by Nick Boles.Firstly this poll itself has the potential to change the result. By demonstrating to supporters of the coalition that the Liberal Democrats the best placed to beat Labour, it could encourage Conservative tactical voting for the Liberal Democrats. Against that is that the Populus data suggests there is already a substantial amount of Conservative tactical voting for the Lib Dems, and there would need to be truly massive tactical voting to make up the large Labour lead.He goes on to examine that record in by-elections held during the last parliament.
Secondly, there were a substantial amount of former Conservatives and Liberal Democrats who said don’t know or refused to give a voting intention. Overall, 24% of 2010 Tory voters did not provide a voting intention to Populus, a third of 2010 Lib Dem voters did not. ICM found a very similar pattern. While these voters have the potential to make a difference, remember they are already factored into ICM and Populus’s topline figures, as they assume a proportion of them will vote for the party they did last time (in the case of Populus it reduced the Labour lead from 19 points to 17 points).
Finally I wanted to look a the record of by-election polls, which has the reputation of being somewhat patchy.
We don’t have detailled tables from Survation, the third company to produce a poll for Oldham East and Saddleworth, so we can’t draw any firm conclusions about why their poll showed the Lib Dems doing much better.
Lord Bonkers comments exclusively for Liberal England:I had my doubts when I saw him carrying a placard saying:
"NAH THEN, NAH THEN, WE DON'T WANT NASTY EMISSIONS IN THE ATMOSPHERE NOW DO WE?"
A two-disc deluxe version of the 1970 Traffic LP John Barleycorn Must Die is to be issued next month.John Barleycorn Must Die is the Traffic album that almost never was but which is now commonly regarded as their definitive work. By 1970, still only 22, Steve Winwood had already served time at the heart of The Spencer Davis Group, as a founder member of Traffic album, and with the supergroup Blind Faith. What started out as Steve Winwood’s solo debut, originally to be called Mad Shadows (a title later filched by Mott The Hoople), John Barleycorn Must Die became Traffic's third and most fully realised studio album.Two songs from the LP have featured here as Sunday music videos:
Originally a project where Steve Winwood planned to play every instrument himself, he began recording in the Autumn of 1969. Then, after taking time out in January 1970 to participate in Ginger Baker’s Airforce, Winwood returned to his solo album in February. The next piece to be committed to tape was ‘Glad‘, a jazz influenced instrumental based upon a piano part that Winwood had been toying with for some time. With the input of Jim Capaldi’s drumming and Chris Wood’s saxophone, the piece took upon a new lease of life. “It was obvious to all of us that we should really give Traffic another go,” said Winwood soon after. John Barleycorn Must Die was the album that Traffic had always threatened to make and where they truly fulfilled their promise. It was released in July 1970 and was a Top Five album in America, easily their most successful album there, reaching No. 11 in the UK.
In support of the album, Traffic toured America where their shows at the Fillmore East, New York, on November 18th and 19th were taped. A scheduled Live -November 70 album, mixed down from the Fillmore East, was never released. These much bootlegged recordings are now officially released for the first time on Disc Two of this new deluxe edition of John Barleycorn along with alternate takes of ‘John Barleycorn Must Die‘, ‘Stranger To Himself’ and ‘Every Mother‘s Son‘.
Dr Helen Elsom, who died on 17 September aged only 52, was a pioneering classical scholar who moved from academia into hi-tech industry while pursuing a parallel career as a music critic.
Dr Elsom came to King’s College from the East End of London. She obtained first class honours in Classics in 1979, completing her PhD on the Roman novelist Apuleius in 1985, having also gained an MA from Princeton University in comparative literature.
From 1984 to 1987 Dr Elsom held a Research Fellowship at Clare College, before embarking again for the United States to take up an assistant professorship in classics at Cornell University.
Dr Elsom was one of a small group of British women classicists who sought in the 1980s and 1990s to bring feminist thinking to bear on classics and put the study of women in antiquity at the centre of the subject.
She also wrote a superb study of the relationship between the New Testament and Greco-Roman literature.
The early 1990s were, however, a very difficult time in academia, especially in the humanities. Undeterred, Dr Elsom defied the supposed gulf between the humanities and the sciences by launching herself into a new career as a technical writer in hi-tech industry, in which role she eventually returned to Cambridge.
Of very wide cultural interests, she wrote extensively on music, taking a particular interest in Handel’s operas. Her reviews - always both sharp and measured - appeared mainly online, where they achieved a wide following.
She was also involved in politics as a staunch Liberal.
Helen will be missed mainly, however, as a loyal friend whose pointed insights into people and events, often expressed with acerbic wit, were tempered by great kindness.
The days just fly past. Another week at Bonkers Hall draws to a close.
The penultimate day of our week with Rutland's most celebrated fictional peer.
An agreement was drawn up for certain buildings at Rothwell Cross 'to be executed to the plot’ drawn by the mason William Grumbold of Weldon. The leasing of extensive properties in Rothwell by the Tresham family, who had their mansion at the nearby Rushton, is a good example of a wealthy landowner taking control of and promoting his local town, as had been the origin of many of the county’s market towns and villages in the medieval period and would be repeated by the Hatton family at Weldon in the 17th century.
The building was started shortly after 1587 but, as with Tresham’s Lyveden New Beild, the market house was never completed and it still lay as a ruined state in 1719 when drawn by Tillemans. In the late 19th century it is recorded that the main use of the ruined building had for a long time been primarily as a lock up, while the stocks and whipping post had stood immediately adjacent.
A subscription amongst the gentlemen of the county raised money to repair the dilapidated building in 1827, the remaining money being used to present an engraving of the building for inclusion in Baker’s ‘History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire’. It was not however until 1895 that the market house was finally roofed over, by J. A. Gotch.And well done to William Grumbold of Weldon, who wins Name of the Day posthumously.
"Alastair Cook is precisely the type of English cricketer that Australians dislike … He's so proper. So English," Sydney's Daily Telegraph opined this week, launching not so much a backlash as the continuation of an ongoing and perennial front-lash.
We shouldn't be surprised at this. For a start it's true: Cook is proper and English. In his resplendent indolence he resembles a groovily skinny-jeaned minor royal cousin. But mainly it isn't surprising because of one inescapable fact: there has never been an England team in any sport that has managed to be both successful and popular.I suspect that Ronay knows his job and that this cringing, self-hating reaction to success goes down pretty well with Guardian readers. But it is an aspect of the left in general, and his newspaper in particular, that I find increasingly unattractive.
David Boyle was taught by Christopher Jefferies, whom the tabloids originally made chief suspect in the murder of Joanna Yeates. On The Real Blog he writes: "As the days wore on, and he remained in custody, and the column inches grew, I came believe that those civilised values were under attack, maybe not so much by the police – I don’t know what was going on in their investigation – but by the rest of society, and by my own profession."
22:41 You join me in the Library at Bonkers Hall.