I went to Lutterworth today and was taken by these four white horses on a grassed bank at the bottom of the town's main street, which climbs the hill from a bridge over the River Swift.
As the plaque says, they are the work of the artist and sculptor Graeme Mitcheson, who was inspired by Lutterworth's role as a staging post for the coaching trade in the 18th century.
The town council had the horses installed to mark the diamond jubilee of Elizabeth II.
Children from poorer families do worse at school. Nadia Siddiqui explains why and what can be done to narrow the gap in attainment.
Steff Aquarone makes the case for a minister for coastal communities: "Too many coastal towns face lower than average wages, poorer transport connections, seasonal economies, shortages of affordable housing and increasing pressure from coastal erosion and climate change. Despite their enormous contribution to our economy, our heritage and our identity, they are too often overlooked when national investment decisions are made."
"Growing up there in the early 60s, the countryside never seemed too far away. We kids were often out and about, playing in the woods, making dens and tree swings, watching cows graze in farmers' fields and scrumping in nearby orchards where Warwick University and Cannon Park shopping centre now stand. There were brooks to jump across (or fall into regularly in my case) and an old Roman ford near to the busy A45." Ruth Cherrington celebrates Coventry's Camley Estate.
Ben Duckett is puzzled that attendances for cricket's Hundred tournament are falling, despite the presence of more star names, reports The Sports Encounter. What he and the games administrators need to grasp is that British sports fans' attachment is to teams, not to individual players.
Claire Madge has been to see the Richard Dadd exhibition at the Royal Academy: "There is no moment of finding 'madness' in Dadd's work, whether it was completed before his breakdown or after. Even the eyes of his figures from scenes of Hamlet completed in 1840 and the strange fairies that ring a sleeping Titania from 1841 show an artist with an ability to capture the uncanny and one who could easily get lost in the detail even before his psychosis came to the fore."
What did become of Freddie and Fiona? What should the Liberal Democrats' new strategy be? Who will win the 2.30 at Wincanton? The answers to these questions will no doubt be revealed when next we visit Bonkers Hall.
Sunday
My long career in public life has convinced me of an important truth: a man who will cheat at golf will cheat at anything. It was therefore no surprise to me when President Trump – can that really be his name? – pressured the organisers to cancel the suspension of the American team’s star striker at the World Cup.
It’s beginning to look as though the Reform Party will have to pull a similar trick with the nation’s prison governors in order to field a full slate of candidates at the next election.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
BBC Sport wins our Headline of the Day Award.
Personally, I've not heard many complaints about foxes being overproud. They more often involve dustbins.
Here's an unexpected twist: the man who took the photograph of that "Making plans for Nigel" T-shirt is suing people – one N. Farage in particular – for using his work. It has, after all, been spread all over the internet.
Alan Robertshaw, whose videos I post here occasionally, takes the opportunity to give us a quick guide to copyright law.
My advice to fellow bloggers is to steer clear of photographs from the big agencies that cater for newspapers, because they will find you and invoice you.
A report on the Heritage Fund website explains:
The project brings together farmers, communities and young people to improve habitats and strengthen ecological networks across one of England’s most treasured landscapes. With almost £1m in development funding awarded and the potential for a further £8.9m in delivery funding, the project will support long-term stewardship while helping more people connect with nature and heritage.
Over the next decade, the project aims to work with more than 200 landowners across the Shropshire Hills, delivering four large-scale river restoration projects alongside 120 smaller capital nature restoration initiatives. Local communities and parish councils will be supported to deliver Shropshire’s Local Nature Recovery Strategy, while funded traineeships for young people will help secure the landscape’s future for generations to come.
Through Landscape Connections, fund has already invested more than £2.7m in development funding to projects in the Solway Coast and Marine area, the North Pennines, and Loch Lomond and The Trossachs, with the potential for almost £25m in delivery funding to follow.
Saturday
It was my old friend John Arlott who claimed that Manchester is the only city in Britain where they have lifeboat drill on the buses. No doubt the damp climate has encouraged its mayor to march on London to claim the crown – or at least the tenancy of 10 Downing Street.
Yes, there is something Medieval about the whole affair; it’s like an episode from a school textbook on the reign of King Henry VI Part 2.
What will this Burnham do when he gets there? I am told he is Sound on trams, which is to his credit, but hardly constitutes a programme for government. Were I to be asked – and my advice is often sought on such questions – I should counsel him to clip the wings of the Russian Bear, defend our universities (both ancient and modern) and give the scourge of Landlordism both barrels, but the Labour Party has always been in thrall to its social superiors.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
This a terrific lecture by Ian Christie, whose writings did much to bring the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger back to prominence.
His Gothic London begins with early Dickens adaptations, made because there was a ready public for them. And Dickens, after all, was a cinematic novelist before cinema was invented.
Then we go though Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper and the London fog to reach the early Hitchcock. The exoticism of Limehouse, with its opium dens and Chinese population, also figures.
Next we take in the Blitz and this blog's favourite topic of bombsites, before returning to Dickens in the shape of David Lean's peerless Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Carol Reed's 1970 film of Lionel Bart's Oliver!, says Christie, was the first colour adaptation of a Dickens novel.
And we end with some modern Gothic takes of London, including Death Line and From Hell.
The Guardian reports that Tice, the Reform UK MP for Boston and Skegness, received a loan of nearly £80,000 from Nigel Farage’s aide George Cottrell some months after he was elected parliament.
This transaction, says the newspaper's report, caused bankers to raise concerns with authorities.
In her letter to the commissioner, Lisa Smart wrote:
"Mr Cottrell is not merely a private acquaintance of Mr Tice, he is an official adviser to Reform UK and Nigel Farage (demonstrated by his use of Reform UK business cards).
"It is highly implausible that the loan would have been negotiated without their party political connection, given this is the central basis of their relationship."
The Guardian has also reported today that George Cottrell transferred $2m to his mother days before she made large donations to Reform UK.
"When social workers become involved with a family, the focus is often on parenting, safeguarding concerns or family relationships. But new research suggests that one of the strongest drivers of repeated involvement with children’s services is something more basic: whether families have enough money to live on." Rick Hood explains the findings of his research.
Jennifer Rubin Grandis confronts the systemic bias in academic publishing: "I’ve been studying sexism in academic medicine since 2019, and I’ve learned from countless interviewees that my experience as a woman in medicine is common. Women are rarely mentored well—in fact, when they ask for advice from senior faculty, they’re often discouraged from submitting their papers to high-impact journals, despite making just as many scientific discoveries as men."
Boak & Bailey recommend pub crawling as a way of practising psychogeography.
"Few science fiction relationships stick in my mind better than the love/hate between Dr. Zachary Smith and Robot in the original 1960s version of Lost in Space." J.G. Follansbee on one of television SF's great double acts.
Friday
That Starmer fellow didn’t amount to much, did he? Cook, with her generous heart, always thought the best of him and refused to “listen to incinerations”; for myself, there’s an old Gypsy saying that holds… To be honest, I can’t remember what it holds, but I know it would be just the job here.
My sources in the Labour Party tell me that the man was never meant to be prime minister: the idea was that he would sit there like a stuffed haddock while Mandelson and McSweeney Todd purged the party of anyone who believed in what Labour used to believe in. Then, after an honourable defeat in the 2024 election, he would have made way so that “Streeting” they used to go on about could become PM next time round.
The moral is don’t appoint temporary leaders, as they may turn out not to be temporary at all. Vinnie Jones’s disastrous stewardship of the Royal Ballet should have alerted everyone to that danger.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
John Lennon once said: "I think the first English record that was anywhere near anything was Move It by Cliff Richard, and before that there'd been nothing."
It takes an American podcast to take Cliff and the Shadows (as they soon became) seriously: We Say Yeah!
The news that the Jodrell Bank telescope may soon be no more sent me back to a piece by Jonathan Meades:
Concorde was seen in the sky over West London for the first time in late June 1969. Less than a month later Neil Armstrong stepped from Apollo 11 onto the moon. The future had arrived. It was tangible, it was thrilling, it was now. We came to believe that we were all part of an adventure without end. This was just the beginning, the new beginning.
What we didn’t realise was that this was it. A peak had been achieved. The only way was down.
And from there I went to this television film of his on the same theme.
I don't agree with all he says here, but then what Meades offers in his work is not so much a set of beliefs as an attitude. And it's that attitude we love him for.
Here's Krzysztof Nawratek, senior lecturer in humanities and architecture at the University of Sheffield, writing in Times Higher Education:
I started my university career in Poland in 1988, a year before communism collapsed. I joined an underground anti-communist student association, went on strike and saw my hierarchical, conservative university slowly crumble.
However, even within the oppressive communist regime, Polish universities held on to one core belief: the university belonged to its academic community. Rectors and deans were elected. Senates and faculty councils had real authority. Leadership was temporary and accountable to those it served. The university did not belong to its managers; in fact, it’s hard to say if there was any real management at all.
When I moved to the UK in 2008, I expected universities not just to be more autonomous but more democratic. Instead, I found institutions that were independent from the state but whose autonomy lay with their executive teams and governing bodies, not with the university as a whole.
British universities are clearly part of the late capitalist system,1 and critics typically point to their neoliberal agenda and managerialism. But I think that description no longer fits. British universities are becoming not so much managerialist as authoritarian.
This might sound harsh but I am not talking about dictatorship. The atmosphere of fear and expected obedience reminds me of my time as a student in Poland but the reason I use the word authoritarian is more banal: leadership is immune to any actionable feedback from below. Consultation still exists but nothing anyone says can change the decision or remove those who made it.
This trend away from democratic decision-making towards managerialism and ultimately authoritarianism can be seen across British society, not just in universities, but in local councils, professional bodies and even sport.
At the heart of it lies the belief that democracy, discussion and consultation are inefficient, but that belief is mistaken.
As it's Karl Popper's birthday, let me quote again his greatest British populariser, Bryan Magee:
Before Popper it was believed by almost everyone that democracy was bound to be inefficient and slow, even if to be preferred in spite of that because of the advantages of freedom and the other moral benefits; and the most efficient government in theory would be some form of enlightened dictatorship.
Popper showed that this is not so; and he provides us with an altogether new and deeper understanding of how it comes about that most of the materially successful societies in the world are liberal democracies.
It is not – as, again, had been believed by most people before – because their prosperity has enabled them to afford that costly luxury called democracy; it is because democracy has played a crucial role in raising them out of a situation in which most of their members were poor, which had been the case in almost all of them when democracy began.
That comes from Magee's intellectual biography Confessions of a Philosopher.
Notes
Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt
Lon Milo DuQuette and Jim Bratkowsky
Weiser Books, 2026, £14.99
The year is 1900 and a young Aleister Crowley – poet, mountaineer and Cambridge chess Blue – is keen to learn the mysteries of London’s leading occultists, but he arrives in this fashionable circle to find it riven by a power struggle. The old guard of MacGregor Mathers and his wife Moina, who were real historical figures, are being challenged by a new generation that includes W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne and Bram Stoker.
Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt began life as a screenplay, which at one time came close to being shot with the late Alan Rickman as the lead. Its frustrating history is set out in a preface and, perhaps because of that history, this novelisation sees an eminent British director describing, to a young American who is also in the movie business, the action of a film about Crowley he has long planned but is now too ill to make. This extended dialogue takes place at a wake held for Crowley after his funeral in 1947 at the Marylebone home of two more real figures, Sir Percy and Lady Frieda Harris.
Percy Harris held Harborough for the Liberals at a wartime by-election in 1916, but was defeated there two years later after his Conservative opponent received Lloyd George’s coupon. He returned to Westminster as MP for Bethnal Green South West in 1922 and represented that seat until 1945, becoming one of Sir Archibald Sinclair’s most important lieutenants. Frieda Harris, his wife, was an artist and follower of Crowley who painted his famous Thoth tarot pack. After Sir Percy’s death in 1952 she moved to a houseboat in Kashmir and made a modest income from writing and artistic projects. When Matthew Taylor (now Baron Taylor of Goss Moor), the former Liberal and Liberal Democrat MP for Truro, who was adopted as a baby, traced his birth mother, he found that Sir Percy and Lady Frieda were among his great grandparents.
But it’s not just the Liberal trivia that makes this book fun. Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt, a work of fantasy that is firmly grounded in fact, paints an intriguing picture of an Edwardian London where men in wing collars and women in enormous hats believe the most extraordinary things. It’s a world not unlike the one G.K. Chesterton created in The Man Who Was Thursday.
Thursday
The orphans and Cook have taken to the cool of the caves for which Trescothick Bay is noted, but I am happy here on the beach even though I have left my sun hat back at the boarding house.
Today I have been thinking of Emlyn Hooson, an inspirational leader of our party in Wales and a source of wise counsel on any matter touching upon the Principality. His phone would ring at all hours and, more often than not, when he had answered the thing he would hear the words “Hooson, we have a problem.”
Later in life he revealed an unexpected talent for Association football, captaining Liverpool to three league titles and two European Cups. This led to his being invited to be a team captain on the moving television show A Question of Sport, where his duels with Binkie Beaumont kept the nation on the edge of its seat.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
A film about farming and the harsh winter of 1946/7. In particular, about the flooding that hit the Fens when the snow finally thawed and the efforts to recover from it.
Those floods form the background to Malcolm Saville's book The Luck of Sallowby. Here's his description of the fight against the floodwaters:
Now they were close against the wall they saw it was only a few inches higher than the rising water which stretched before them in a turbulent brown lake, whipped into waves by the gale. And these waves beat against the wall ceaselessly and the spray from them blew over the top and drenched the bags and settled in pools on the tarpaulins and made the blue clay slimy and almost unmanageable.
The sky was full of rain again but they knew now that even if it did not rain in the Fens the danger was coming from the water which fell many miles away in the Midlands and in Bedfordshire, and that the swollen rivers were still rushing down to the plain while the wind which fretted these floods into the banks, made a menace which it was very hard to fight.
So they worked on with them men, laughing and joking with them, until a shout and disturbance about fifty yards away broke the rhythm of their toil. They looked round to see that the water had found a weakness in the wall and was gushing through the cracks between the bags like a fountain. There was another similar leak nearer to them on their other side, and now the gangs plastered these leaks with clay without waiting to bag it.
As he says in an 'expert comment' issued by the University of Oxford's media people, we have built a world where parents are expected to be simultaneously working and present for family.
It's all good stuff, but I was struck by this sentence:
In the 1950s, 80 per cent of mothers in the UK stayed at home and the school run was part of their domestic routine.
My instinct was that the concept of the school run is more recent than that, and Google Ngram above suggests I'm right. It's use suddenly took off in the late 1990s.
And we didn't have much of a school run avant la lettre. In the 1950s, people tended to live nearer their children's school then fewer of them owned cars. Whether because of this lower level of traffic or because there was less fear of 'strangers', they were more relaxed about letting young children out on their own. So a school child would soon walk to school with friends or older brothers and sisters rather than their mother.
I can certainly recall that in the Sixties you would have died from embarrassment if you had been met from school once you had reached the age of nine.
You can't turn the clock back, but every change has positive and negative consequences.
Wednesday
They say these heatwaves will soon render the South of England uninhabitable, which is a bit of a facer seeing as we Liberals have worked so hard to ensure we don’t have MPs anywhere else. But don’t despair: the arid south of Rutland is simply teeming with life – human life included.
Of course, if the Home Counties do turn to desert it will require changes to the way we fight elections there, which is why, a couple of years ago, I invited some of the ALDC’s leading lights to an awayday at an oasis near Uppingham.
There I instructed them in the polite way to canvass bedouin, the correct tying of the kafiyeh and the use of camels in Focus delivery. It won’t be my fault if we fail to gain Runnymede and Weybridge next time round.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
