Razzall skedaddles

Tim Razzall has resigned as chairman of the Liberal Democrats' Campaigns and Communications Committee. ePolitix reports:

A party spokesman said Lord Razzall, the man behind the Lib Dems' election strategy for the past two general elections, was standing down because he felt it was "time for a change".

The spokesman said the peer had decided to step down now in order to give his replacement time to settle into the role before a possible snap election.

He said Lord Razzall would continue to advise party leader Sir Menzies Campbell, and nominations for his replacement will close on June 22.

So did he jump or was he pushed?

Some sources are obviously better informed than others. Today's Guardian Backbencher e-mail, sent out at 17:06, confidently announced:

Rumours that Ming has mercilessly sacked Lord Razzall from his post as Lib Dem campaigns chief are, the Backbencher hears, completely untrue.

Nat Watch is back

The Labour-inspired Nat Watch site has been relaunched.

John Reid at Sidney Street

The BBC reports:

Home Secretary John Reid has been accused of possibly putting efforts to deport foreign prisoners at risk after joining a series of dawn raids.

He watched a team of immigration officers raiding homes in London.

They were trying to arrest some of the foreign prisoners released without being considered for deportation.

Immigration experts and the Tories have raised fears the raids make it difficult for Mr Reid if he has to make decisions about deportations later.

All very reminiscent of Balfour's comment on Churchill's conduct over the Siege of Sidney Street:

"I understand what the photographer was doing but why the Home Secretary?"

Matthew Taylor and Miss Marple

Earlier this year I went on about Miss Marple at some length, arguing that the BBC adaptations starring Joan Hickson were superior to the recent ITV versions.

Now Will Howells has revealed a pleasing connection with the Liberal Democrats. The script for the BBC's Sleeping Murder was written by Matthew Taylor's father. (Matthew is Lib Dem MP for Truro & St Austell.)

A study of Ken Taylor's IMDB page shows that he also wrote the screenplay for Alfred the Great - a very 1960s realisation of the Dark Ages. So much so that it starred both David Hemmings and Michael York.

Margaret Beckett's caravan

Why are people (examples here, here and here) so bitchy about the fact that Beckett enjoys taking caravan holidays?

Surely this is one of the few endearing things about her?

Survivng members of the 1945 Parliament

This posting on The Snow in the Summer or So-So was also found via The Virtual Stoa. It was written on the death of John Profumo and says of him:

He was the penultimate surviving member of the 37th (1935-45) Parliament, having entered at a by-election for Kettering in 1940. The remaining member is Wing-Commander Ernest Rogers Millington, the Commonwealth (later Labour) MP for Chelmsford from January 1945 until the 1950 election.

Of the 1945 intake, only Michael Foot (Lab, Plymouth Devonport), Maj. John Freeman (Lab, Watford, subsequently to host Face to Face), David Renton (Nat Lib, Huntingdonshire), and Col. Douglas Dodds-Parker (C, Banbury), are known to survive. Lt. Edward Carson (C, Isle of Thanet) and Francis Noel-Baker (Lab, Brentford and Chiswick) may also still be amongst us.

Tim Collins? Bring it on

Iain Dale has been pondering who should be the Conservative candidate in the Bromley & Chislehurst by-election:

I have looked through the names on the 'A' List on ConservativeHome and I keep coming back to two names. Tim Collins and Laura Sandys. In this kind of situation I think Tim could be a good bet. He will be able to deal with the media, is combative as well as being tenacious.

Tim Collins? We should be so lucky.

For Collins played an honourable part in the crippling of the Conservatives as a political force. John Major made his famous Back to Basics speech at the 1993 Tory Conference. The Virtual Stoa (scroll down to 5 March) quotes an Alan Watkins piece on what happened next:

I heard his Back to Basics speech at the party conference and read it several times afterwards. It did not contain a single reference to sexual intercourse, whether expressly or by implication. It was all about reading, writing and arithmetic.

The sex bit was inserted by Mr Tim Collins, then the prime minister's spin merchant, who was asked by journalists whether the speech meant that Mr Major expected the highest personal standards from his ministers. Mr Collins replied that that was indeed what it meant. The trouble started from there.

The country owes Mr Collins a debt of gratitude. The CBE he was later awarded was scant reward for the service he had rendered to the nation.

Congratulations to the England selectors

Not a headline you read every day, but I think the England cricket selectors deserve some praise for their approach this summer.

Ashley Giles is injured. Instead of going for a bits-and-pieces player (Alex Loudon? Ian Blackwell) to bat at number eight and bowl a few token overs of spin, they have chosen Monty Panesar, who is the best young spinner in the country.

Simon Jones and Steve Harmison are injured. Instead of playing safe and picking a good county seamer like Jon Lewis to do a job on the green, early-season pitches, they have chosen two promising young fast bowlers in Liam Plunkett and Sajid Mahmood.

Alistair Cook came into the side over the winter and it immediately became clear that he was going to score thousands of runs for England. Instead of making him wait, they have kept him in the side at the expense of more experienced batsmen like Ian Bell or Robert Key.

Until a few years ago, the selectors would undoubtedly have made the more conservative selection in each of these cases. As it is they have done the brave thing and we have gone one up in the series against Sri Lanka.

The only complaint that we can have is the continued selection of Geraint Jones. The irony is that, while his keeping does seem to be improving, he is no longer scoring enough runs. Chris Read or Matt Prior must get a turn soon.

David Cameron the NeoCon

Last week I wrote approvingly about an article by Matthew Parris. I quoted what he described as an extract from a speech by William Hague:

The parallels with the rise of Nazi-ism go further ... If only, some argue, we withdrew from Iraq, or Israel made massive concessions, then we would assuage jihadist anger. That argument ... is as limited as the belief in the Thirties that, by allowing Germany to remilitarise the Rhineland or take over the Sudetenland, we would satisfy Nazi ambitions ...

We’re all in this together ... standing with those brave democrats in Iraq who are trying to rebuild their nation ... Should representative government ... take root in Iraq, [jihadists] will not only have been defeated in one key battle, they will also find that an alternative path has been established in the Middle East which gives its people the hope, prosperity and freedom they deserve.

And then I quoted Parris's comment that "This stuff is pure Pentagon".

This week Parris begins his column as follows:

A mistake appeared in this column last Saturday. Quoting remarks from a hog-whimperingly neoconservative speech about jihadism made at the Foreign Policy Centre in London nine months ago — a speech that compared doubters over the Iraq war with the appeasers of Nazism — I speculated that, though David Cameron himself had said little on this, he too was probably a hawk on Iraq. Calling the speech “pure Pentagon”, I attributed it to William Hague, now Shadow Foreign Secretary.

I apologise to him. I should have checked. Indict me of incompetence, however, but not of sexing-up my argument. Inadvertently I had sexed it down. The speech was Mr Cameron’s.

To thee I do present the merry month of May

Before the month is over, there is time to catch this page on the Common Ground site.

It is devoted to seasonal fruit and vegetables, seasonal dishes and observations of customs and the natural world for May.

Reading for Sunday

My usual recommendations:

• Tim Worstall's Britblog Roundup;
• The First Post's digest of the Sunday papers.

Labour's deputy leadership debate

And an impressive debate it is, with weighty contributions on both sides.

Here is Andy Burnham making a nuanced case for Prescott to continue in office:

"I feel very strongly that John Prescott has done an excellent job for this government and he has been an excellent deputy prime minister. He has my full support in the job."

Some, however, have put much thought into whom they should support in Prescott's place:

David Kidney, MP for Stafford, reported that he would back “whoever Gordon [Brown] wants”.

A E Housman and the Squeezy Lemon

The South Shropshire Journal has the story of the day:

Villagers were due to meet last night in a bid to halt a gay pop festival taking place in their parish.

Residents in Clungunford, Leintwardine and surrounding villages were expected to meet last night, Thursday, to discuss a licensing application submitted for the Squeezy Lemon Festival, which organisers want to hold on fields at Marlow Farm, outside Clungunford.

The vice-chairman of Clungunford Parish Council, Jonathan Roberts, says:

“Author A E Housman said Clungunford was ‘the quietest place under the sun,’ but if this is allowed to go ahead then it won’t be."

Agree with him or not, how can you fail to like a councillor who quotes Housman?

The verse Roberts has in mind is the 50th poem in A Shropshire Lad, which begins:

Clunton and Clunbury,
Clungunford and Clun,
Are the quietest places
Under the sun.

So Clungunford has to share the honour.

Incidentally, it is hard to resist the thought that Housman would rather have enjoyed the Squeezy Lemon Festival.

Nuclear power in Iran

Borrowed from Lenin's Tomb, who borrowed it from MRZine.

Ardent for a glimpse of James Chuter-Ede

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Face spotting

It’s one of the sights of London. The Commons division bell rings and hundreds of MPs stream out of their offices in Portcullis House, along the tunnel under Westminster Bridge Road and into the House to vote.

They make a sound like a coal train. And if you are going the other way at the time, they have much the same effect.

Famous faces whoosh past – Glenda Jackson, Boris Johnson, Stephen Byers. Faces you thought were long retired. Faces you recognise vaguely, if at all.

It must be like trainspotting in the good old days: a few crack mainline expresses amid a sea of shunters and tank engines. Perhaps small boys once waited here with notebooks, ardent for a glimpse of James Chuter-Ede or Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller.

But any trying it today would be shot as a terrorist, or shipped off to the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness, at the very least. So it’s a sight few people get to see.

When I met them on Monday the MPs were on their way to vote against John McDonnell’s amendment to the Armed Forces Bill. McDonnell was concerned the bill allows a maximum penalty of life imprisonment for desertion. He feared it might be used against soldiers with conscientious objections to serving in Iraq.

He did not convince many. The bill is less harsh than the present law, and the maximum sentence McDonnell would countenance was two years. Few saw this as adequate for an act of desertion that put lives at risk.

What really did for McDonnell’s amendment, though, was Harry Cohen’s support. Cohen sounds exactly like Lou in Little Britain. You can imagine him describing the Srebrenica massacre as “a bit of a kerfuffle in the Balkans”.

There were some MPs who did not have to join the charge from Portcullis House. They were the defence experts already in the chamber. Notable on the Tory benches was the former Army office Patrick Mercer. It is a rare treat for MPs to listen to someone who knows what he is talking about.

And on the Liberal Democrat benches it was good to see Nick Harvey as our defence spokesman. One of the most encouraging things about our new leadership has been his return to prominence.

More from Lord Bonkers

If you enjoyed Lord Bonkers' Diary you may want to explore the archive of earlier diaries on his own website.

Lord Bonkers' Diary

After posting details of the new Liberator yesterday I have received numerous letters asking me to post the whole of Lord Bonkers' Diary here. Although the letters are all postmarked Rutland and all in the same handwriting, I have decided to do what they ask.

A few words of explanation or new readers: I have contributed this column to each issue of Liberator since (gulp) 1990. Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West between 1906 and 1910, and remains a vigorous presence in Liberal Democrat politics.

He describes himself in Who's Who in the Liberal Democrats as:

Statesman, Soldier, Diplomat, Philosopher, Traveller, Industrialist, Author, Philanthropist and All Round Good Egg.

Don't worry if you don't understand all the references in the column: I don't get them all myself.

Anyway, here is Lord Bonkers' Diary from the June Liberator.

MondayA particularly full day. I enjoy a little rough shooting before breakfast: since hunting with hounds was banned, the Estate has been overrun with hippogriffs (as I predicted it would be in the House) and one has to keep the numbers down somehow. Then it is off to the cricket, for this afternoon sees the traditional season-opener between Lord Bonkers’ XI and the Elves of Rockingham Forest. It is as keenly contested as ever, and this year there is an unfortunate dispute over our opponents’ use of reverse swing (they attribute it to “high elven magic” and I to the surreptitious use of a bottle top). However, Malcolm Bruce and Lynsey De Paul see us home, and in any case it is prudent not to fall out with these fellows. After dinner the village bobby PC Heath (splendid fellow: no delinquent ear goes unclipped and one need only think of crossing the village high street to have the traffic stopped for one) drops by to tell me that he intends to stand for the deputy leadership of the Liberal Democrats.

TuesdayMatthew Taylor calls to see me and confesses that he is at something of a loose end these days. He holds no shadow portfolio and was defeated for the chairmanship of the parliamentary party by a schoolmaster from Chesterfield. I gently inform him that things often run this way with former child stars: Freddie Bartholomew’s career was never the same after he started shaving and Charlotte Church was booed when she came on against Ireland at Lansdowne Road. Just as I am remarking that Roddy McDowall enjoyed some renewed success when he took to going round in a gorilla costume, Taylor confesses his own plan to me: he is to stand for the deputy leadership of the Liberal Democrats.

Wednesday
I discuss our sudden embarras de richesses when it comes to candidates for the deputy leadership with Ming Campbell, who is still staying at the Hall and indeed shows no signs of leaving, and he reveals that he has a favoured candidate of his own. It is none other than my old friend Vince “Low Voltage” Cable. I ask the reason for his choice, and Ming explains that Low Voltage looks so like him that he will be able to take his place at many functions – up to and including Prime Minister’s Questions. “But what about the accent?” I ask. “This is the clever bit,” replies Ming, “Low Voltage spent years in Glasgow and he can do it almost as well as me.” I suppose Ming’s idea is that this will leave him free to stay at the Hall drinking my Auld Johnston and polishing his Jag (which is currently residing in my stables) whilst Elspeth imagines him hard at work in Westminster.

Thursday
To Richmond Park to meet a delegation of Bushmen and discuss their plans for returning the area to the wild. I know this scheme has caused some controversy in the newspapers, with the men of Richmond defending their traditional way of life – senior management positions at the BBC, owning West End galleries, merchant banking – but what about the women of Richmond? I should imagine they find prospect of hunting wildebeest from Ham to Mortlake, clad only in loincloths made from recycled Focus leaflets, infinitely more exciting – certainly, a spot of fresh air is just what their pallid, muesli-fed children need. We call upon Jenny Tonge in Kew to solicit her support for our campaign but she is out – event though I could swear I hear the wireless playing. Instead, after treating the Bushmen to tea and crumpets at the Maids of Honour, I visit Kew Gardens and take a few cuttings for Meadowcroft.

Friday
Over breakfast Ming mentions that he has put Harvey in charge of our defence policy. “I expect that he is on manoeuvres right now,” the eminent man of Fife adds. I hardly have time to remonstrate with him before leaping into the Bentley and heading for the gunnery ranges on Salisbury Plain at top speed. I arrive not a moment too soon. Some fellow with a promising moustache is showing Harvey over the army’s new pride and joy. “You just set the computer coordinates here,” he says, “load the gun and – Bam! – you can blow up anywhere you like.” “What, say, just for instance, Battersea Dogs’ Home?” Harvey asks with that dangerous gleam in his eye. “Of course,” replies the promising moustache. “Let me see. Battersea. TFG755634/98. There you are. We are pointing at the place now.” Just as Harvey is pressing the red firing button I throw myself upon the console and give the computer dial a wrench. There is a loud explosion and the shell heads for the English Channel. I later learn that I winged some wretched little foreign fishing boat, but in all modesty I can claim to have saved the day.

Saturday
It is time again for me to do my Focus round here in the Bonkers Hall Ward. I stand on the village green and have soon assembled a crowd of children – rather like that chap in Hamelin who did such sterling work with the rats. One by one the little mites collect their bundles of leaflets, giving me a sweet in return for the honour of being allowed to deliver them. When they have gone, I examine my trawl: an acid drop, three mint imperials, two jelly babies, four squares of chocolate (milk), a gobstopper, several boiled sweets of assorted flavours and – joy of joys! – a treacle toffee. Later I have yet another delightful dinner with Ming Campbell but decide that, even so, it is time I made a telephone call to a certain number in Morningside.

SundayTo St Asquith’s for Divine Service, where the Reverend Hughes is operating off his long run: “What sort of man should a leader be? Should he be an elderly Scotsman whose sole claim to fame is that, forty years ago, he used to run around the track in singlet and shorts while being chased by Jeffrey Archer? Or should he be some complete newcomer with a German name, a flash car and 27 houses? Or should he perhaps just possibly be a respected clergyman who has rendered faithful service both to this parish and to St Tatchell’s, Bermondsey for more years than most of you can remember?” Later, back at the Hall, I see the delightful Elspeth Campbell arriving at the front by taxi and Ming disappearing from the back through the kitchen garden.

Histories of abuse

Last year I contributed a chapter on "Histories of abuse" to the book Making and Breaking Children's Lives. This was edited by Craig Newnes and Nick Radcliffe and published by PCCS Books of Ross-on-Wye.

There is a review of the book by Paul Jefferis in the June issue of The Psychologist. He begins:

This book offers a challenging and stimulating perspectives on contemporary issues relevant to children's well-being and to child psychology. Calder's historical analysis of public awareness of child abuse, for example, identifies a form of collective amnesia on the subject and warns against complacency and inertia in child protection policy.

Liberator 310 is out

If you already subscribe to Liberator magazine, you should by now have received the latest issue.

Highlights include:

• Lib Dem MEP Graham Watson says "Bring back ideology";
• Parties must appeal to people's interests, argues Simon Titley;
• Stewart Rayment on the London council elections;
• All the regular features including Commentary, Radical Bulletin and Lord Bonkers' Diary.

Liberator has been published regularly since 1970 and is widely recognised as the leading journal for thought and comment among British Liberals. It has been the only outlet for political thought that has stayed open for business throughout the lifetime of the Liberal Democrats since 1988. It is essential reading if you want to know what is really going on in the party.

If you are a member or supporter of the Liberal Democrats, you can't afford to miss Liberator, so subscribe now! Send a cheque for £20 (payable to Liberator Publications), together with your name and full postal address, to:

Liberator Publications
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24 Alexandra Grove
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If you live outside the UK, details of how to subscribe can be found on the home page of the Liberator website.

Opting back into the state system

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned, favourably but in passing, that the independent Belvedere School in Liverpool was planning to enter the maintained sector as an Academy.

Today's Guardian has an article about this. The Belvedere has already taken part in an "open access" scheme which is "designed to open up its teaching to all on the basis of academic merit rather than ability to pay".

The person behind this scheme and the move back into the state sector under Academy status is Sir Peter Lampl. The Guardian says:

Lampl set up the Sutton Trust in 1997. At that time, the proportion of state school students at his old university, Oxford, had fallen from two-thirds when he was there in the 60s, to under half, while his school, Reigate grammar, was now, like other former grammar and direct grant schools, fee-paying.

"It became clear to me that these examples were symptomatic of a wider and significant decline in the opportunities available to bright children from non-privileged backgrounds," he says. "That was my motivation to introduce open access to the Belvedere."