The Shropshire Star, and not for the first time, wins our Headline of the Day Award.
There's more about the scheme to improve the Abbey Foregate area of the town in a BBC News report.
Saturday, September 19, 2026
Lord Bonkers' Diary: Fifty Shades of Earl Grey
Wednesday
History is all the rage on the electric podcasts, so I have taken advantage of the papers in my library to write a revisionist biography of a leading Whig statesman. You wouldn’t believe what the fellow got up to!
I won’t say it’s racy, but I happen to know that the Well-Behaved Orphans have got hold of a copy of the manuscript and are loaning it out to my domestic staff at half a crown per chapter. “Coo!” one young inmate complimented me, “That’s the only book I know what falls open at every page, Lord B.”
So, if you fancy having a flutter on who’ll top the spring bestsellers list, back my forthcoming Fifty Shades of Earl Grey.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Earlier this week
Friday, September 18, 2026
The Joy of Six 1578
Sian Norris brings us a shocking story: "Domestic abuse victims in England and Wales are facing arrest when calling the emergency services for help, according to new data published by Women in Prison. The charity asked more than 500 women in the criminal justice system about their experiences of domestic abuse, with nearly a third saying they were arrested when the police or emergency services were called to a domestic incident, even when they were the victim of abuse."
Louise Balint-Kurti reports on the return of beavers to the Midlands and the environmental benefits they are already bringing.
"By not accepting that the Civil War was about slavery, then not only could the romantic underdog myth of the lost cause be successfully promulgated but also the Jim Crow laws could come into practice with little or no intervention for decades, and more recently the defence and promotion of Confederate statues and street names could continue." John Bleasdale maps the way Hollywood made the South look like a noble lost cause.
"These buildings range from palaces and religious buildings to two-storeyed houses and simple dwellings. They give the beholder some idea of what the 11th-century built environment looked like on either side of the Channel, even though the representations are formulaic, general impressions." Elizabeth den Hartog on what the Bayeux tapestry tells us about medieval buildings.
David Southwell, the creator of Hookland, answers 10 questions about his work. (David once gave my name to an inhabitant of the county who tried to assassinate Dr Beeching.)
Why Liberals must take power away from the media billionaires
Radical liberalism has always been in the vanguard of the centuries long march from rule by aristocratic elites toward greater democracy. Whether that was the great Reform Acts of the 19th century or the Universal Suffrage Acts of the 20th century.
But the final transfer of real power to the people has yet to be completed. Because for as long as the billionaire class own our media, they retain enormous power and control over our body politic.
When invited to address the George Soros Foundation, as director of the Climate Media Coalition, I stated that there was a fundamental flaw in liberal democracy.
That flaw is that we allow billionaires the freedom to buy up and dominate our media. You simply cannot have a free and fair democracy if the Fourth Estate is captured by the 0.001 per cent.
Liberalism has always sought to improve on the fairness of our democratic structures. Hence our commitment to written constitutions, institutional checks and balances and proportional representation.
But with fascism knocking at the door, there is now an added urgency for liberalism to free media ownership from the hands of the tiny illiberal billionaire clique.
Almost every aspect of our media in the UK is dominated by these illiberal media billionaires.
Indeed, many politicians have been afraid to even discuss the issue, due to the fear of their propaganda power, which can destroy almost any political career instantly. Almost every prime minister of the last half-century has been backed by the US/Australian media billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
When a newly elected member of the Liberal Democrats' Federal Executive in the early 1990’s, I was frustrated that the party never campaigned on European issues in European elections. So, when the 1994 EU elections arose, I asked if we could do so.
Back came the response from that we could not as Murdoch would trash the party, if we did so. I said if the most pro-European party was afraid to campaign on European issues in European elections, then if there ever was a referendum, we had already lost.
Since Brexit, the media billionaires replaced their war on the EU with a 24/7 war on climate protection and the ECHR. They wiped out what was left of the One Nation Tories, after switching their backing to Reform about five years ago and bullied Badenoch to becoming a Reform 2.0 party.
Their endless attacks on climate action have destroyed the cross-party consensus on climate. And their endless propaganda for Reform, fuelled their polling surge and won their first seats in parliament, where the billionaire media now treats them as the Official Opposition, whilst ignoring the LibDems.
Our estimate of the monetary value of these non-declarable propaganda donations is well over £200m.
Thus, we now have not one but two major parties in parliament, representing up to 50 per cent of the population in some opinion polls, which are far-right. Up from a tiny 3 per cent just five years ago.
If they win a majority in the next parliament, everything the climate movement and liberals have worked for over decades would be under threat.
So how should liberals act to end this existential threat to liberal democracy?
We need to complete the Great Reform Acts and legislate for the transfer of power from the media billionaires to the general public by passing a Media Freedom (Sovereignty) Act.
The Media Sovereignty Campaign has drawn up a proposed act that would do five things:
- ban foreign media ownership;
- restrict anybody from owning more than 20% of a national media outlet and no corporation can own more than one national media outlet;
- fund independent and local media with a social media levy on the tech billionaires;
- require national media to join a complaints authority that is independent of government and media owners;
- require dark-money funded think-tanks to declare donations in real time.
The Act already has been endorsed by Peter Oborne, Zack Polanski, Clive Lewis MP, Jonathan Porritt, Prof. Bill McGuire, Sir David King, Prof. Richard Betts, Sir Mark Rylance, George Monbiot and Prof. Hugh Montgomery.
The Campaign is hopeful that the Green Party Conference in October will adopt all five measures in the Act.
Our hope is that the Act will then be passed by the Liberal Democrats' Spring Conference in light of the urgent threat the billionaire-media’s promotion of far-right parties poses to liberal democracy. We are looking for Lib Dem constituency parties to submit the Act to the conference committee for selection to be debated.
This Act will enable the greatest transfer of real political power from the billionaire ruling cabal to the people, since the adoption of women’s suffrage. Liberals should be at the forefront of another Great Reform Act.
Donnachadh McCarthy is a Director of the Climate Media Coalition, co-founder of the Media Sovereignty Campaign and a former climate columnist for The Independent. He is the author of The Prostitute State: How Britain’s Democracy Was Bought. He is a former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats Federal Executive.
The Media Sovereignty Campaign can be contacted via its website, Bluesky or email.
Lord Bonkers' Diary: Meeting Count Binface in Westminster
Tuesday
Who should I meet in Westminster but Count Binface? Having long wished to talk to him like a Dutch uncle – Nick Clegg, incidentally, has a literal Dutch uncle – I invite him to lunch at my club.
There I tell him I have been through the Almanach de Gotha twice and can find no mention of a Binface family. I realise that inventing an aristocratic title for yourself makes it easier to cash a cheque, but if an Oxbridge comedian’s career has stalled, there are recognised ways for him to earn some money.
I urge him: “Either write a children’s book, man, or get the BBC to make you the chairman of a panel show.”
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Earlier this week
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Whatever happened to Connie Converse?
Connie Converse provided my music choice on Sunday. YouTube being YouTube, there are any number of videos about her disappearance in 1974 and what may have become of her afterwards.
I've chosen one of the gentler ones, which has been made by a contemporary woman musician, Victoria Shell, and is in part a response to her music. She has included some links to other resources on Connie Converse.
Council to help people 'correctly identify' potholes
BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this tale from Yorkshire, where a Sheffield City Council reports claims there is "confusion around what qualifies as a pothole"
Lord Bonkers' Diary: Wah-wah brass and boings on the timpani
And that, whether we like it or not, means it's time to set out on another week with Rutland's most popular fictional peer.
Monday
A productive morning at PieTown studios in Melton Mowbray. Having heard rumours (I do miss Freddie and Fiona giving me the inside track on the party) that Ed Davey is determined to spend the next election campaign as he spent the last – falling off paddle boards and wrestling gorillas in custard – I hit upon the idea of providing a musical accompaniment for his antics.
So, along with handpicked members of Earl Russell’s Big Band, I have been busy recording ascending and descending slide whistles, wah-wah brass and boings on the timpani. Add to this our arrangement of Benny Hill’s celebrated theme ‘Yakety Sax’ and you have a package that will confound the critics who claim Davey lacks the gravitas required of a leading national politician.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Elvis Costello: The Other Side of Summer
Elvis on the beach, and we're not talking Blue Hawaii here.
Wednesday, September 16, 2026
The foxes who visited London Zoo with deadly intent
Remarkable stuff from Robert Hanks in the London Review of Books for 21 October 2010:
On 18 March last year a fox, or foxes, found their way through a damaged fence into the penguin enclosure at London Zoo and slaughtered 11 rockhopper and blackfooted penguins. News of the massacre only appeared this weekend, after the Independent got hold of a report on the zoo from inspectors at Westminster Council; since 2007, foxes have also killed a flamingo chick, a chicken and two mara (which the Independent described as ‘rodents resembling small kangaroos’; they’re more like guinea pigs on stilts).
The papers were shocked by the news, though they had some difficulty putting their fingers on the reason. For the Independent, it was a story both about the need for London Zoo to invest more in its facilities and about the imperative to close down zoos altogether. For the Daily Telegraph, ‘The revelations are certain to reignite the row over urban fox numbers which was sparked earlier this year by reports that two baby girls were attacked in their home by a fox’ – and hence, as many commenters on the paper’s website spotted, it was really a story about the consequences of New Labour’s ban on foxhunting. The Daily Mail did better, wailing about a ‘bloodbath’ and a ‘trail of destruction’ but refraining for once from drawing moral conclusions.
Infiltration by foxes and other local predators is part of zoo life. It’s because of the foxes, apparently, that the Regent’s Park penguins now inhabit a somewhat drab, shallow-banked pond rather than Berthold Lubetkin’s elegant Modernist Penguin Pool: the Lubetkin pool was always bad for penguins (too small, poor air circulation, unyielding concrete surfaces), but its Grade I listed status made alterations impossible; the last straw came when a fox started raiding and the zoo wasn’t even allowed to put up chicken wire. In April this year a fox walked over ice to get to the flamingos at Helsinki Zoo, leaving 16 of them dead.
Coyote vs. Acme: "A warm and witty and weirdly moving film"
I went into Leicester yesterday to see Coyote vs. Acme – or "Coyote and Acme" as the lawyers are no doubt calling it.
As to my verdict on the film, I can't improve on the conclusion of Catherine Wheatley's review for Sight and Sound:
It’s a warm and witty and weirdly moving film, with a profoundly important seam of political satire running through it.
Audiences should be grateful to Ketchup for rescuing it from obscurity after it was shelved in 2023 by Warner Bros Discovery, allegedly as a tax-write off, and only offered to tender for distribution after a public backlash. It’s a nice story: the people and the independent taking on the big boys to save the day, and one that’s mirrored in the film's final twist.
And yet a matched pair of framing devices undercuts the film's own optimism: the use of The Clash’s I Fought the Law over the closing credits, and an opening title announces Ketchup as a subsidiary of – you guessed it – The Acme Corporation.
The Joy of Six 1577
Sam Bright says the government's indecision on how to meet the threat of Nigel Farage has cost us all: "Labour has been dismally slow at protecting politics from these predators – rebuffing calls in recent weeks for a cap on all donations, even from domestic sources. And now Reform’s war chest is bursting at the seams."
"In 2024 then mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham argued that net zero was 'the best chance we will ever have to reindustrialise the North of England, reduce inequality and close the North-South divide'." The mayor has had a promotion since then but what of his prediction?" Zachary Leader finds the reality has not lived up to the hype, but there are things his government can do to help.
"When the rain came, the earth in its baked state, was indifferent. Beyond thirst. Shut up from growing. Sculptural towers of cumulous cloud sailed north, into mute and tantalising lightning. The rain, and the return of the heat after, reanimated the only thing to wet the ground all summer: sheep’s urine. Undiluted and remaining on the surface, the smell of ammonia was sudden, heady and strong." Nicola Chester looks back on the extraordinary summer of 2026.
Rhian Jones on the pressure that the need to maintain an online presence puts on musicians.
Benjamin Riley investigates a "profoundly weird and concerning" American private school network: "As part of boot camp, Alpha School students apparently have their heart rates monitored as they watch recorded videos of their parents critiquing them. This activity takes place in front of their classmates, and students must keep their heart rates within 10 percent of their baseline to pass."
"It’s a pretty rotten old country on display here, with no end of respectable, well-spoken pillars of society turning out to be cheap little fakers and drug peddlers, using contemptible tricks such as pretending to be wheelchair-bound as part of a phoney persona." Discontinued Notes reviews Francis Durbridge's television thrillers.
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
The man in a coracle who retrieved the ball from the Severn for Shrewsbury Town
Shrewsbury Town's old ground at Gay Meadow stood beside the Severn, so loose shots could end up in the river.
This Nationwide report from 1975 is about the man who retrieved the ball when they did.
Work, play and creativity: Another column for the JCPCP
Work, play and creativity
An overexcited website selling business courses tells us:
It’s easy to play it safe. To follow the rules and optimise what already exists. In a world of constant change, sensible can feel smart. Until it stops working. You see, logic will get you to the starting line – but only creativity will win you the race.
That's why we believe creativity is the most valuable capability for growth. And it’s something that you can learn, practise and embed in every area of life.
And another devoted to resources for creativity says:
We learn when we play as children, in fact this accounts for most of our early learning. Play acts as a learning laboratory for trying out different internal models on an external world. This is not dissimilar to our traditional brainstorming sessions.
Does this mean that we can all regress into childhood and that making mistakes or behaving foolishly does not matter? Of course not. What we mean in this context is that a certain degree of chaos, learning from mistakes and not playing by the rules is acceptable.
The link between creativity and childhood play in adulthood has indeed been studied by psychologists, with Sandra Russ publishing a book confidently titled Pretend Play in Childhood: Foundation of Adult Creativity. But I wonder if children’s play is as anarchic as the business world makes it sound?
There are philosophers who saw play differently. Michel de Montaigne wrote that “it should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.” Nietzsche agreed, saying man’s maturity is “to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play”.
And if you don’t trust philosophy, listen to the young protagonists of Richard Jefferies’ Bevis: The Story of a Boy, which appeared in 1882 as a three-volume adult novel but was later repurposed as a children’s classic. The two boys explore the farms and reservoir around their homes with heads full of adventure stories, and everything they see or do has to be reimagined in the light of them. They even have to reimagine themselves:
“We ought to be something,” said Mark discontentedly.
“Of course we ought,” said Bevis. “Things are very stupid unless you are something.”
*****
W.H. Auden displayed a map of Alston Moor in the study of his home on Fire Island, near New York. The landscape of decaying lead mines it pictured had haunted his early poetry, and before that his childhood imaginings. Between the ages of six and twelve, he recalled, he devoted much of his waking thought to “the construction and elaboration of a private sacred world, the basic elements of which were a landscape, northern and limestone, and an industry, lead mining”.
There were, however, rules. His was a Meccano world, not a Minecraft one:
I decided, or rather, without conscious decision, I instinctively felt that I must impose two restrictions upon my freedom of fantasy. In choosing what objects were to be included, I was free to select this and reject that, on condition that both were real objects in the primary world, to choose, for example, between two kinds of water turbine ... I was not allowed to invent one.
He was faced with just such a choice between machines:
One type I found more sacred or “beautiful”, but the other type was, as I knew from my reading, the more efficient. At this point I realised that it was my moral duty to sacrifice my aesthetic preference to reality or truth.
The child was father to the poet, because you can see the same morality at work in Auden’s growing dissatisfaction with one of his most celebrated poems, “September 1, 1939”. He omitted two stanzas from its first publication and became increasingly dissatisfied with its conclusion that “We must love one another or die.”
"Between you and me,” he wrote to a critic in 1957, “I loathe that poem.” He found it too flattering both to him and to his readers, and changed its final line in later printings to “We must love one another and die,” but mostly he refused permission for it to appear at all.
******
So maybe children’s play is not the free-for-all its enthusiasts in the world of business courses assume but has rules that adults are too busy or sentimental to notice. And maybe they have got creativity wrong too.
The classic way of measuring creativity is the Alternative Uses Test which presents the subject with a simple object – a brick is a favourite choice – and asks them to think of as many uses for it as possible in a set time. But this seems a limited view of what creativity consists in. Isn’t it more social than that? As far as brainstorming works in business – and there seems a consensus that it’s not far at all – it’s not because someone in the room says something brilliant: it works because they say something silly, someone else turns it on its head and a third person realises that there might be something useful here.
Solitariness can be the enemy of creativity. In the days when my political party published a weekly newspaper, I would often find myself at our annual conference and being asked to write a column for it in a couple of hours, only to find that I didn’t have an idea in my head. The secret was not to sit there and think harder: it was to get away from the screen for half an hour and go for a wander around the trade stands and the stalls run by party groups.
I would have a chat with someone, pick up a piece of gossip from an old friend and a handful of leaflets about good causes. I might end up using little of what I had gleaned, but when I got back to the newspaper’s office the gears were whirring again and the column wrote itself.
GUEST POST Like a challenging computer game? Try the Government Digital Service
Mark Valentine tried hard to prove his identity, and the Government Digital Service tried hard to prevent him.
The other day I had to do business with the Government Digital Service (GDS). This is one of those jolly three-word English phrases that make the heart sink, like Family Fun Day, Rail Replacement Service, Celebrity Game Show and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I suspect I don’t need to issue a spoiler alert to tell you that the weakest spot, in a weak line-up, was in the word “service”. There isn’t any.
This claims to be a “beta” service. Apparently, this is IT speak for “here’s something we put together from four tin cans, a roll of wire and a clapped-out mellotron from the Moody Blues’ last album, now let’s try it out on the suckers”. But the GDS are being unduly modest. Actually, what they are offering is an “omega” service. It is the end of all things, particularly hope.
Neither worked. Repeatedly
To use their identity verification service, you have to try two things. One involves them taking control of your phone to photograph your passport. The other involves giving the government your bank account details. Despite certain misgivings, I tried both. Neither worked. Repeatedly. Nor did it work for several other people who tried it. Repeatedly.
But not to worry, there is a telephone support service. The icy voice of a woman who made Servalan sound like everyone’s favourite Auntie by comparison intoned: “We are experiencing high call volumes. Call back later.” They must be inundated with customers ringing them up to congratulate them on their wonderful system.
Never mind, you can also email them. Their reply was very quick. It had been devised by a machine that had cut-and-pasted random text from their website, Pilgrim’s Progress, Waiting for Godot and the lyrics to ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ by popular music group Middle of the Road.
I tried again. This time the reply, possibly from a near-human entity, was shorter. Had I tried rebooting? Funnily enough, I had, as this was the advice always offered to me by the young men with wispy ginger beards and smeared spectacles who always staff IT departments. If that doesn’t work, why not eff off it said. Well, it didn’t put it quite like that, it just referred me back to whatever benighted government department had started this whole fandango in the first place.
As support services go, the GDS one is rather like being offered a boa constrictor in lieu of a truss. It crushes the life out of you. But if you like a challenging computer game at an ultra ultra level, go for it.
A 15th piece of evidence
The reason I had to use the service was because an arm of government wanted to verify my identity. I was surprised by this request. The taxman has always seemed cheerful about who I am when clawing away a chunk of my income, the Home Office were delighted to confirm that I was who I said I was when I bunged them £90+ for a passport, the Ministry of Transport are positively delirious when I send them money so I can road-test their potholes for them, and the NHS are so convinced by my identity that they’ve devised a special Patient Access System whose chief purpose is to prevent me gaining any access to their services.
When I counted up, there were at least 14 ways in which my identity seemed to be fairly well established. And that’s not counting my membership of distinguished bodies, genuinely useful, such as the National Trust, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Friends of Arthur Machen and the Network of Ley-Hunters.
Faced with this battery of existing identity evidence, the government agency involved came up with the obvious solution. What was needed was a 15th piece of evidence. And the best way of getting that was via the GDS, because government IT projects are well known for their unblemished history of successful implementation and their blissfully happy customers. Even better, if for some completely unpredictable and unlikely reason the GDS didn’t work, they had a fallback. They would use the Post Office! This was because of course the Post Office also has an unblemished history of—well, etc.
At this point I became suspicious. There is a devious business model taking hold which imposes complex, hard to understand rules, and erects difficult, nigh impossible methods of complying with the rules. This then enables the lucky organisation to rake in the fines. For cases studies, see private car parks, railway companies, postal services and the NHS Prescription Service.
Perhaps this lot were in the early stages of implementing just such a wheeze. There was only one flaw in my theory. This would require them to exercise ingenuity, which, like competence and common sense, was not a quality so far especially conspicuous in their performance. Still, they might have stumbled on the idea by accident, in roughly the same way they conduct most of their business.
Head for the hills
Amazingly, when I visited the Post Office, in a last desperate gamble, the counter staff made their system work, eventually. You know your IT service must be bad when the Post Office can do it better. Of course, given recent history, I may yet find that I am prosecuted by PO officials for High Treason or Piracy on the High Seas and will need to conduct a fifteen-year campaign to clear myself.
There is an old Chinese proverb I have just made up which reads: “Count blessed the day when you hear from no official.” If you hear from the GDS, take my advice. Sell all your possessions, burn all your documents, change your name, and head for the hills. Preferably the Himalayas.
Mark Valentine is a writer living in Yorkshire. Please don’t ask him to prove it.
Monday, September 14, 2026
Mother Damnable and the curse of Camden Town tube station
Jago Hazzard takes us to Camden Town station and its curse: the most complicated junction on the London Underground.
Blame the witch Mother Damnable or Mother Redcap. The station was almost named after a pub that bore her name.
You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.
Write a guest post for Liberal England
I love publishing guest posts here on Liberal England. Have you thought of writing one yourself?
It could be on where the Liberal Democrats should go from here, on politics more generally or… anything really. Why not an article about a local campaign or quirky piece of history?
Please drop me an email if you'd like to discuss your idea first. I'd hate you to spend time on a piece I really wouldn’t want to publish.
Here are the last 10 guest posts on this blog:
- Lib Dems must be "Tough on billionaires, tough on the causes of billionaires" – Anselm Anon
- The Red Lion, Evesham, and the Warwickshire Avon – Peter Chambers
- Lord Summerisle obviously took the Liberal whip – Anselm Anon and Wighard of Canterbury
- To realise the health benefits of nature we must first admit we are part of it – Stuart Whomsley
- Political lessons from science fiction – Peter Chambers
- Councillor defection scores on the eve of polling day – Augustus Carp
- Why have the Lib Dems given up fighting most parliamentary by-elections? – Augustus Carp
- In praise of outgrounds: How cricket in small towns made a roaring comeback – Matthew Pennell
- Why has the HS2 project been such a disaster? – Peter Chambers
- Doctor Who: The most golden era? – Peter Chambers
The Joy of Six 1576
Alazne Mountjoy says women suffer because of the systemic misogyny in medical research and practice: "Women undergoing surgery are significantly more likely to experience complications, and even die, when the surgeon is a man as opposed to a woman. This is in conjunction with the fact that surgeons are overwhelmingly male, with fewer than a fifth of surgeons being female."
Anna Verhamme and John Britton, in a report for the Higher Education Policy Institute, say universities are their professional and support staff and then paying consultants more to provide these services.
"From Browne’s first instalment, featuring the character Sam Weller, sales for Pickwick rose and kept rising. Browne would go on to become Dickens’s principal illustrator, and Pickwick – helped enormously by his comic illustrations – became a literary sensation that revolutionised Victorian book publishing." Michael John Goodman looks at the relationship between Charles Dickens and his illustrator Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz') and reminds us how strange it is that we now publish Victorian novels without their illustrations.
"Chris Isaak has carved out a singular career doing one thing so hauntingly well, it’s become his signature. He’s built a cathedral from heartbreak and despair, lit by the flickering neon of 3 a.m. regrets, and its served him well for over four decades." James Kenney on Chris Isaak and the art of staying sad.
Sunday, September 13, 2026
John Pardoe, Margaret Thatcher and antisemitism in Finchley
The photograph above is captioned on Getty Images:
British Liberal Party politician John Pardoe with his wife Joyce, UK, 24th September 1964. Pardoe is standing against Conservative MP Margaret Thatcher as the Liberal candidate for Finchley.
And Pardoe did very well at Finchley in the 1964 general election, putting the Liberals into second place and recording a seven per cent swing against the sitting Conservative MP Margaret Thatcher.
A Jewish Chronicle article by Robert Philpot from 2017 gives an important reason for this achievement:
When Mrs Thatcher was selected as Finchley's Conservative candidate in July 1958, she inherited a seemingly impregnable majority of nearly 13,000. She soon discovered, however, that the Tories had a little local difficulty on their hands. At its centre were the constituency's Jewish voters who constituted a politically significant one-in-five of the electorate.
It stemmed from that most quintessentially middle-class of pursuits: golf. The previous year, a number of Jews – including Shirley Porter, then a young Liberal activist – had applied to join the Finchley golf club. Each had had their membership refused; not an uncommon occurrence at golf clubs at this time.
The club leased its land from the Tory-dominated borough council, and its officers included a number of prominent local Conservatives. Scenting an opportunity, two Jewish Liberals fought and won seats in Finchley’s wealthiest and most Jewish wards.
Upon her selection, a horrified Mrs Thatcher discovered that, while the club had swiftly caved in and agreed to admit Jewish members, more lasting damage had been done: in the next year's local elections, the Liberals made further advances. "The Jewish faith," she worriedly wrote to Central Office, "have allied themselves to Liberalism."
The golf-club scandal had come to symbolise a cloud of antisemitism which hung over the local Tory association. That was not altogether surprising given the attitude of Sir John Crowder, the retiring MP, who privately grumbled that the national party was trying to impose a choice between "a bloody Jew and a bloody woman" as his successor.
Mrs Thatcher was, she later recalled, upset that her new local association had been "tainted" by antisemitism and moved swiftly to repair the damage. She prioritised the recruitment of new Jewish members and invited Sir Keith Joseph, the Tories' rising Jewish star, to speak locally. Her efforts appeared to bear fruit: in October 1959, she increased the Tories' majority to over 16,000.
However, the Liberal bandwagon continued to roll. In 1962, the party made sweeping gains and a year later it seized control of Finchley town hall. Six of its 19 councillors were Jewish, including the new leader of the council and mayor. Drawing a parallel with the Liberals' recent dramatic by-election victory, the press dubbed Finchley "the Orpington of North London."
Mrs Thatcher knew exactly the source of her problems. "It’s the golf club… that’s where it all started," she told one journalist. Her finely tuned political antenna were correct: she held Finchley in 1964, albeit with a sharply reduced majority. However, Jews in the seat voted Liberal in considerably higher proportions than non-Jews, with Mrs Thatcher and the Liberal candidate, John Pardoe, each taking roughly 40 percent of the Jewish vote.
John Pardoe went on to become MP for North Cornwall in 1966 and represented the seat until he was defeated in 1979. In the Seventies he became the party's economic spokesperson and, along with David Penhaligon, one of my early Liberal heroes.
Shirley Porter, who died earlier this year, followed a different political career path.
Zoo advertises tickets for 'child predator tour'
BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this tale from Chester.
I am reminded of the glory days of Lord Bonkers' safari park at the Hall.
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