Getting the bubbles into a Wispa

For once some news from the Welsh Liberal Democrats that doesn't involve Lembit Opik.

Writes David Cornock on the BBC website:

The party has appointed "deputy spokespeople" in the run-up to the Welsh assembly elections in May to ease the burden on assembly group leader Mike German's top team.

Among those promoted is Veronica Watkins, the new deputy spokesperson on science and the environment. She is well qualified for the (unpaid) post, having once played a key role in the introduction of bubbles into the now defunct Wispa chocolate bar. She also happens to be married to Mike German.

A slow news day in Shropshire?

From the Shropshire Star:

Former Spice Girl Mel B today denied she was planning to leave her Beverley Hills retreat for a new home in Shropshire.

Denial is just a river in Egypt

Frank Furedi has a new essay on the Spiked website. Billed as the first in a series on "Really Bad Ideas", it looks at the current popularity of the concept of "denial".

As he writes:

Disbelief in today’s received wisdom is described as ‘Denial’, which is branded by some as a crime that must be punished. It began with Holocaust denial, before moving on to the denial of other genocides. Then came the condemnation of ‘AIDS denial’, followed by accusations of ‘climate change denial’. This targeting of denial has little to do with the specifics of the highly-charged emotional issues involved in discussions of the Holocaust or AIDS or pollution. Rather, it is driven by a wider mood of intolerance towards free thinking

Good stuff.

Discovering Malcolm Saville

At last, I am not the only blogger interested in this children's author, best described as "a thinking child's Enid Blyton".

Now there's Harry on Crooked Timber too.

Good news from North Wiltshire

Good news for the Liberal Democrats, at any rate.

James Gray MP has been reselected to fight North Wiltshire for the Conservatives after a particularly unpleasant row within his local party.

There have been boundary changes in this part of the world, where the most promising Lib Dem target is now the Chippenham seat. Nevertheless, the amount of bile spilt and the prospect of an independent Conservative standing against Gray must make it a great deal more interesting for us now. See the comments on this Liberal Review posting for more details.

Lembit: Latest love shock

Thanks to the Guardian.

Paul Channon and The Winslow Boy

Iain Dale reports that the former Conservative cabinet minister Paul Channon has died.

Time, I think, to uncork one of my favourite trivial facts. Channon was the dedicatee of Terence Rattigan's play The Winslow Boy, as this article confirms:

Rattigan began writing the play in July 1945 while Great Britain was in the midst of a General Election which would oust Winston Churchill, the hero of the war, from office. We know Rattigan was enthusiastic about the theme because he read portions of the work in progress to his close friend, the well-known man about town, diarist and Conservative MP, "Chips" Channon. His reaction was encouraging. Rattigan finished the play in just six and half weeks and dedicated it to Channon s young son, Paul who would later be a member of Mrs Thatcher's government.

As I recall, the dedication said something like "In hope that he will live to see a world where this play's moral will not have to be pointed." Whether Mrs Thatcher quite brought this about, I shall leave you to decide.

Later. Channon's Telegraph obituary gives the dedication as "in the hope that he may live to see a world in which this tale will point no moral".

North Wiltshire Tory selection latest

The row over James Gray's attempt to keep his Commons seat is becoming almost unbearably sordid.

The Daily Telegraph reports:

The wife of a Conservative MP who left her for another woman has attacked her husband for belittling her fight against cancer.

Sarah Gray, the wife of the North Wiltshire MP James Gray, has written to the Conservative leader David Cameron to say she was "deeply hurt" by her husband's behaviour after he left her for Philippa Mayo, 44, a mother of three and fellow countryside campaigner.

Mrs Gray, 51, said she had been forced to respond after her husband had claimed she had merely had treatment for "pre-cancerous cells."

Gray's future will be dicided by the result of a ballot of local party members, which will be announced tomorrow.

How Chris Huhne won the leadership election

Last year's Lib Dem leadership election was noticeably light on policy discussion, but two issues did achieve some prominence. On each of them the party now supports the line taken by Chris Huhne and opposed by Ming Campbell during that election.

The first issue is environmental taxation, which forms the centrepiece of the new economic policy adopted at last year's Conference in Brighton. Chris Huhne supported this strongly during the leadership election, but Ming was far less convinced - as I pointed out at the time.

The second issue was the setting of a deadline for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq. This was the subject of a clash between Huhne and Campbell during the special Question Time programme that the BBC organised during the campaign. As its website reported:

The Lib Dem leadership challengers have clashed over when British troops should be pulled out of Iraq.
In a BBC Question Time debate, Simon Hughes and Chris Huhne pushed for troops to leave by the end of 2006.
Mr Huhne said he knew from his time in business that deadlines were the best way of ensuring things happened.
But Sir Menzies Campbell, who does not want to set a firm deadline, countered, saying: "There are 8,500 lives at stake. This ain't business."

Perhaps this is not such a surprise. Ming Campbell's appeal to the party and to the voters has never relied strongly upon his command of policy detail. It has always relied more upon his personal qualities - particularly gravitas (or "bottom", as they used to say in the 18th century). Such ideas as there were during the leadership campaign came largely from the Huhne camp.

But issue 309 of Liberator magazine (.pdf file downloadable from here) gives another clue to what was going on. The magazine's Radical Bulletin section wrote:

But how was Huhne to carve out a platform distinct from his rivals? Those present at the leadership hustings in East Grinstead found out when Lord Oakeshott, appearing on Huhne's behalf, for some reason chose to announce his campaign secrets from the platform.
He said a group of backers had looked for "wedge issues" that would get the relatively unknown Huhne noticed. They lighted on withdrawing troops from Iraq, not renewing Trident and a greater environmental emphasis as areas on which they could challenge Campbell and, presumably, win some supporters over from Hughes.
Oakeshott did not say that these issues were particularly dear to Huhne, merely that they were chosen from their ability to attract attention.

Yes, there was an element of calculation to the Huhne campaign. But I suggest the issues that would help the third candidate in a Lib Dem leadership election have a lot in common with those that would help the third party in a general election.

Which is why the Huhne line has become the Lib Dem line on two of the three issues he identified.

Leave Them Kids Alone

A site campaigning against the fingerprinting of children at school.

Dial M For Merthyr

More Welsh film titles than you can shake a stick at.

Did illegal eavesdropping change the course of the Lib Dem leadership election?

No.

But politicalbetting.com thinks it is worth asking the question.

No. 10's secret e-mail system

Guido Fawkes and BlairWatch have the details.

I don't know how shocked we should be, but it all helps to add to the sense of crisis engulfing this government. And that has to be a good thing.

Snailbeach District Railway

A group has been set up to restore this narrow gauge railway in the wilds of Shropshire. It has, of course, its own blog.

The line never carried passengers while it was operating, but the group intends to do so if it is reopened.

For the history of the SDR, see the Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, from which I borrowed this rather fine image.

Later. But now read this.

No New Trident

The Lib Dem Peace and Security Group has set up a site to boost its campaign to commit the party to opposing a replacement for Trident. The vote will take place at the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference in Harrogate.

I have always been something of an agnostic on this issue, and don't have the time to comment in depth today, but there is some thought-provoking material on the new site.

John Prescott and Sir Anthony Eden

I have referred a couple of times to the story that, when Eden took a cruise after his resignation over Suez, his cabin steward was a young John Prescott. Even so, I feared that it was a little too good to be true.

The pleasing truth is that it really did happen. To learn more, read this page on the BBC website or listen to Prescott at Your Service on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday 31 January at 11 a.m. or Sunday 4 February at 1.30 p.m.

Eaten by Missionaries

Iain Sharpe tells me that his blog has woken up. It is well worth a visit.

He writes:

it’s harder to start blogging again once you have stopped than to keep going when you’ve started.

Oh dear.

Working my way back to you

Blogging remains light - and is likely to do so for a while - because of continued family problems. The same is true for my other writing efforts. But we'll get there.

On the bright side, a letter has flooded into Cowley Street asking what has happened to my House Points Column in Liberal Democrat News.

So someone has noticed.

Correction of the Week

This effort from Monday's Guardian deserves to be remembered:

A rigid application of the Guardian style guide caused us to say of Carlo Ponti in his obituary, page 34, January 11, that in his early career he was "already a man with a good eye for pretty actors ..." This was one of those occasions when the word "actresses" might have been used.

That was the week that was

Apologies for the lack of updates since Monday. I did warn you. Here are some meaty stories that came up during my absence from the blogosphere...

From politics.co.uk:

Former home secretary David Blunkett has admitted that anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos) are not working and are seen as a "badge of honour" by some youngsters.

The Sheffield Brightside MP was asked if he still had faith in the measures that, although introduced two years before his time at the Home Office, he championed. He replied: "Not wholly."

From Hot Ginger and Dynamite:

the priority and ordering of the stories on Newsnight last night was bizarre in the extreme. The lead story was a hack job by Michael Crick, along the lines of “On the day that the Tories launch a campaign for more success in the North ... a Conservative activist was found to have sent an email to a Conservative Councillor in Bradford, in which he called the local Labour Party Chair a cripple”. 

This may have merited a story in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, but to lead Newsnight with it was very curious. To place that story ahead of the dawn arrest of the Prime Minister’s Director of Government Relations in connection with sale of honours, which seems likely to be the greatest scandal of the Labour Government, is shocking.

From Guido Fawkes:

Guido is given to understand that the police have recently discovered an evidential "smoking gun" and that they are now more confident that this will all see the light of day at the Old Bailey. There is increasing confidence that the CPS will be compelled, by the evidence, to bring prosecutions.

The denizens of Downing Street can huff and puff all they like, but their house is coming down...