Boris Johnson squawks in pain after he's bitten by an ostrich through car window

It didn't take the judges long to give our Headline of the Day Award to the Mirror. 

In fact they've knocked off early and gone down the pub.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "We’re above the chimbleypots!"

With the new Liberator out, it's time to spend another week at Bonkers Hall - and for once I'm posting Monday's entry on a Monday.

We find Lord Bonkers on one of his favourite perches...

Monday

“We’re above the chimbleypots!” exclaims my young companion, taking in the view. Yes, you find me on the roof of St Asquith’s with a Well-Behaved Orphan, he being more accomplished at shinning down a drainpipe to summon help than most of my acquaintances. 

For once, it’s not suspicion of the Elves of Rockingham Forest that has driven me up here – I know they claim to be able to turn base metal (i.e. lead) into gold, and also have a pretty shrewd idea where they find that lead, but they have not been seen selling their ‘gold’ jewellery around Rutland’s less salubrious car-boot sales lately. 

No, it’s the leader of His Majesty’s Opposition I’m on the QV for, as I deduced from her disobliging remarks about people who mend church roofs that she’s more the sort to rip them off. Well, we don’t want her trying any of her tricks round here. 

Fortunately, the afternoon proves uneventful, and I am grateful for the newspaper I brought to while away the time. As I turn a page, the orphan catches sight of a photograph of Nigel Farage and remarks: “Blimey! Was ‘is muvver frightened by a frog?”

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

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"The UK AI Action Plan quite explicitly encourages building up a greater tolerance for 'scientific and technical risk'. This is the language and ethos of venture capital investing, but with government funding: ”move fast and break things” on the path to AI dominance." Elke Schwarz says the British government has thrown caution to the wind in favour of an uncertain, speculative benefit.

Amanda Dylina Morse says youth workers can be powerful counters to figures like Andrew Tate and provide a positive example of manhood.

Andrew Pakes, Labour MP for Peterborough, introduces his co-operative housing bill: "Co-operative housing sits in stark contrast to the exploitative rental market or unaffordable home ownership, because the model gives power and control to the people who live there."

"In 1958 the Roman Catholic archbishop, John Heenan, was stoned while visiting a sick woman at her home off Netherfield Road; in 1967, prime minister Harold Wilson, a Merseyside MP, advised against Queen Elizabeth attending the consecration of the city’s new Roman Catholic cathedral for fear of a Protestant backlash. In the following year, Protestant Party candidates were again elected to seats on the city council." Ian Cobain on the evaporation of sectarianism in Liverpool.

Jeff Swim goes wandering through pagan Wiltshire with Richard Jefferies: "The Uffington White Horse ... showed me that paganism, as it is expressed in Jefferies, is an aesthetic of the process of walking the countryside and seeing things scurry in and out of view as you proceed, of seeing lines and figures take shape as you move with them."

At last! I've found a site celebrating cats in cinema and television: Cinema Cats.

BOOK REVIEW When We Speak of Freedom: Radical Liberalism in an Age of Crisis

This review appears in the new issue of Liberator.

When We Speak of Freedom: Radical Liberalism in an Age of Crisis Paperback

edited by Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood

Beecroft Publications, 2025, £15

When We Speak of Freedom, as a football commentator would put it, is very much a book of two halves. The first is historical, philosophical and a little quirky in its approach: the second has chapters by policy experts with concrete proposals for government action in their fields.

The editors, Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood, write that the project began over wine and sandwiches at the home of Elizabeth Bee and Michael Meadowcroft, where a small group talked of “contemporary politics, memories of liberal triumphs past, and our hopes for the future”. Their hope that the book is “suffused with the warmth, intellectual curiosity, and hospitality of that first meeting,” is met in many of the 20 chapters of this engaging collection

I had thought of writing an elegant essay that drew together the diverse themes of the book, but so diverse are they that I decided to go against every canon of reviewing and tell you what’s in the book.

One complaint: there’s no index. I’m sure the John Stuart Mill Institute, who publish When We Speak of Freedom, didn’t have the budget for a professional indexer, but Mill himself does pop up in many chapters, and it would be good to be able to compare what different authors have to say about the old boy. You can ask contributors to a collection like this to highlight the names they quote or discuss, and produce an index of sorts from that.

And so to the 20 chapters…

Michael Meadowcroft has expanded his introduction into a pamphlet – see the note at the end. Here he writes of a “crisis of democracy” and does not see its resolution coming from economic growth or any other of the policy prescriptions that dominate political debate. Rather, he looks to another Victorian sage, John Ruskin: “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration.”

Benjamin Wood looks to two Liberal heroes: Jo Grimond and Hannah Arendt. He sees them as students of Classical Greece who, inspired by a vision of the Greek city-state purged of slavery, sought a politics that is more human in its scale and less obsessed with getting and spending. Wood concludes in language they would approve: “Citizenship must mean more than a flag and a passport” and be “an invitation into a shared project of civic betterment.”

Helena Rosenblatt writes on Mill and On Liberty, reminding us that there’s more to it than the harm principle. She emphasises Mill’s championing of individuality and the flowering of character – both a long way from the atomistic individualism of which Liberals are often accused. Rosenblatt also writes of Mill’s awareness of social tyranny: he said, “the yoke of opinion could often be heavier than the law” – Liberal Democrat habitués of social media please note.

Christopher England and Andrew Phemister contribute a fascinating chapter on liberalism, land and democracy – Henry George, the Diggers and radical crofters are all there. My only regret is that they had to end so soon in the story, as issues like the quality of food, and access to the countryside for health, wellbeing and recreation, will only grow in importance. Let’s take this history as an inspiration.

Emmy van Deurzen looks at the tensions today between individuality and people’s need for community. These can give rise to individual mental health problems and to social problems, such as a widespread withdrawal from engagement in politics. She seeks a cure for both kinds of problems through political change and bringing more philosophy and psychology into our politics. Interestingly, both Mill and Hannah Arendt turn up here too.

Helen McCabe usefully reminds us that there is far more to Mill than On Liberty. She looks at his support for women’s suffrage, and for their liberation more widely, as well as his opposition to domestic violence. Then there is Mill’s advocacy of workplace democracy and producer cooperatives – causes that were still dear to the Liberal Party when I joined it, but are now little discussed.

Timothy Stacey offers a diagnosis of modern liberalism’s ills. He sees it as lacking “that je ne sais quoi that makes us fall in love with political visions”, and as inclined to fuel the divisive public debate that it hopes to dispel. His answer is that we should seek to foster liberal virtues. This I’m happy to agree with, even though I’m not convinced by the list of them he gives, as our view of ethics today is so dominated by rights, with the concomitant duty falling upon the state, that we offers little sense of what the good life looks like to a liberal.

Matthew McManus takes us back to Mill’s wider political views, finding in them an answer to our discontents under neoliberalism. He points to Mill’s support for worker cooperatives, a welfare state, representative democracy with universal suffrage, and his strong commitment to liberal rights. This he terms Mill’s “liberal socialism”, arguing rightly that its more useful to use the plural ‘socialisms’ than to see socialism as the monolith it once was.

From here on, the chapters are less philosophical and more devoted to particular policy areas and what Liberalism can contribute to them.

Edward Robinson on Liberalism and the environmental crisis is the first of these, and he commends three writers to us. First, Mark Stoll, an economic historian who has studied the British economist William Stanley Jevons – Jevons grasped in the mid 19th century that extractive industries would not last for ever and wrote about the moral implications. Second, Brett Christophers, who argues that energy cannot be produced and traded like a conventional commodity. Third, Dieter Helm, who argues that the marketisation of public goods has been a mistake.

Denis Robertson Sullivan argues there has been market failure and policy failure in the provision of housing, meaning government intervention is needed. Home ownership is in retreat, so there need to be policies for providing the sort of rented accommodation that people want. Banks and pension funds must be encouraged or forced to invest more in social housing, and there needs to be new urgency in the fight against homelessness, with government setting targets and publicising the progress made.

Stuart White looks for practical means to bring about the economy of cooperatives that Mill advocated. He discusses the role of trade unions and a sovereign wealth fund, and suggests, I think fairly, that modern Liberals are slow to recognise the existence of structural inequalities in society or the need to organise to challenge them.

Paul Hindley writes on spreading ownership through society, throwing in a good quotation from G.K. Chesterton: “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” He sees this spread as a way of countering the effects of insecure employment and an increasingly punitive welfare state, and repeats the traditional Liberal call for more taxation of wealth and less of income.

Gordon Lishman examines some dilemmas Liberals face around community, diversity and nonconformity. He doesn’t offer neat problems or neat solutions – in a way his point is that there aren’t any – but he is surely right to conclude that the decline of voluntary associations and the rise of the internet have made it hard to conduct community politics in the way that Liberals learnt to do in the 1970s.

Bob Marshall-Andrews looks at current and not so current challenges to civil liberties – there’s a lot about his opposition to his own party’s more draconian proposals in his years as a Labour MP between 1997 and 2010). He is very good on the way that governments generate fear in order to win support for repressive measures.

Andrea Coomber and Noor Khan write well about prison policy: “The cliff edge on which the prison system finds itself was not approached at speed, but one that we slowly but surely trudged towards.” They argue, unfashionably, that excessive punishment damages not only the individuals concerned, but also the fabric of society, and call for a reduction in the number of people in prison.

Vince Cable, like several other authors of these later chapters, looks to have been given more space. This may be out of deference to his standing or out of a belief in the importance of his subject of immigration. Vince writes very much with his economist’s fedora on, concluding that Enoch Powell was completely wrong about the social and political consequences of immigration, but that a rising population means we must face both our chronic inability to expand the housing stock sufficiently and our decaying infrastructure.

Ross Finnie takes us through Britain’s experience of federalism and looks at its possible future. He is billed as writing from a Scottish perspective, but much of what he has to say is relevant to England. How do we deal with this whale in the bathtub of British government? Ross is an enthusiast for devolving power to England’s regions, as Jo Grimond was before him, but it’s never been clear that the English share this enthusiasm. Still, as Ross points out, the idea has its English enthusiasts today.

David Howarth frames his proposals for constitutional reform as a way of easing Britain’s return to the European Union, or at least of making it possible. Since he wrote this chapter, events in the US have made us wonder how secure our present constitutional arrangements are. Would we have much defence against an executive that usurped powers that did not belong to it? You fear not, given Britain’s dependence upon the ‘good chap’ theory of government. We saw during Boris Johnson’s time at Number 10 what havoc someone who is not a good chap can wreak. As ever with David, his chapter is well worth reading.

Lawrence Freedman writes on Liberals and war, and those same events in the US make you wonder if his chapter should not have been placed first. Yet his conclusion holds: “After Iraq and Afghanistan, and because of Ukraine, there is less interest now in taking the military initiative in the name of liberal values and much more of a focus on the need to defend those values against aggressive states.”

And then Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood return to sum up the book’s arguments, quoting Wordsworth and William Morris as well as Mill.

Some will question the relevance of parts of When We Speak of Freedom – and I’m aware that those are probably the parts that appealed to me most. But I urge you to read this book. The Conservatives are showing us every day the gruesome fate that awaits a party that forgets its own history and its philosophy.

Pete Johnson and Joe Turner: Roll 'Em Pete

The first rock 'n roll record to hit the British charts was Rock Around the Clock in 1955, but that song owed an indecent amount to Move it on Over by Hank Williams from 1947.

And Roll 'Em Pete threatens to push the birth of rock back to 1938. Here's Larry Birnbaum:

"Roll 'Em Pete" may well be regarded as the first rock'n'roll record. Although earlier songs contain elements of rock'n'roll, "Roll 'Em Pete" is a full-fledged rocker in all but instrumentation ... Johnson's bass line is a simple Chuck Berry-like chug, and his furious right hand embellishments anticipate Berry's entire guitar style. Some of Turner's verses are the stuff that rock is made of ... But others are too mature for teenage listeners. 

If anything, Turner's brilliant phrasing and Johnson's breathtaking keyboard technique are too sophisticated for rock'n'roll; the music has yet to be formularised for mass consumption."

The new Liberator has landed - you can download it free of charge

The new Liberator - issue 428 - has been published and you can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

Here's a slightly blurred contents page to whet your appetite.

Alex Cole-Hamilton names three Highland seats the Lib Dems can win back in Holyrood election

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton says his party can “win back the Highlands” from the SNP at the 2026 election, and such a victory would be the “story of the night”.

That's a report from the website Ireland Live. (I know, me too.) And Alex went on to name three individual seats:

He said Lib Dem analysis of the general election results showed these three seats – Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch; Caithness, Sutherland and Ross, and Inverness and Nairn – all falling to the Lib Dems.

Referring to the incumbent MSPs, he said: “Kate Forbes, Maree Todd, Fergus Ewing. Three current and former SNP ministers.

“We are coming. We can win those seats.

“And conference, that would be the story of the night – Scottish Liberal Democrats winning back the Highlands.”

He also told the conference that other Conservative MSPs are set to follow Jamie Greene in crossing the floor - or "moving around the arc", as Andy Maciver terms it in the Spectator - to join the Lib Dems.

This is a development that wouldn't surprise Maciver either.

Tony Blair meets Phil Harding in 2003

One was a universally loved and admired figure: the other had been Pri...

You can see where this is going.

Hallaton: A Leicestershire village that was once a town

Hallaton is only a village, but it once had markets and the status of a town. I suppose in the end it could not compete with the medieval economic behemoth that was Market Harborough.

And it has a High Street (not a Main Street like most Leicestershire villages), which retains a distinctly urban feel. The sad thing is that today it does not have a single shop on it.

Still, look on the bright side: Hallaton still has a castle, a recently discovered medieval chapel that was devoted to an obscure saint who had a cult here, was the scene of the discovery of an Iron Age horde, a museum, a conical market cross and is the site every Easter Monday of a traditional bottle kicking match (a form of folk football) and hare pie scrambling - more details of most of these on the Council for British Archaeology site.

If the incomers of The Notswolds are to perish in a folk-horror reckoning, it may well be here. Meanwhile, these are some pictures of the village I took yesterday.

Jamie Greene MSP joins the Lib Dems after quitting Tories over "Reform-lite agenda"

I wrote a short post about Jamie Greene leaving the Tories and then went shopping. As soon as I did, he joined the Lib Dems and it was announced at the Scottish party's conference. So I have rewritten the post and given it a joyous new headline.

Jamie Greene, the West Scotland region MSP who resigned from the Conservative group at Holyrood yesterday over its "Reform-lite agenda" and "Trumpesque narrative", has joined the Liberal Democrats.

His move was announced at the Scottish Lib Dems' conference in Inverness this afternoon.

The STV News report on Greene's resignation from the Tories  says he warned that the party is "deserting the middle ground" in an effort to "chase the votes of Reform Party supporters" and "fringe right-wing" Scottish voters:

"The party now rests its hopes on a Reform-lite agenda that appeals to the worst of our society, and not the best. ...

"I cannot be part of a narrative which has become Trumpesque in both style and substance."

"Instead of proudly leading on equality, we now run the very serious and immediate risk of becoming once again the party of social division and morality wars."

Greene has been a West Scotland region MSP since 2016. His resignation is confirmation that the liberal approach that brought the Scottish Tories some success under Ruth Davidson is no more.

The danger for the Tories now is that the far-right voters they are chasing will still prefer Reform, while disenchanted liberal Tories will look elsewhere. In Greene's case, to the Liberal Democrats.

A pilgrimage to a lost holy well in Muswell Hill

Another walk with John Rogers. His blurb on YouTube runs:

A north London walk in search of Muswell Hill's lost holy well - the Moss Well, or Mossy Well, Mouse Well that gave its name to the area. A chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Muswell became a resort of pilgrims after a King of the Scots had been divinely directed there and was miraculously healed by the waters of the well. It is recorded as early as 1112. 

Our walk starts on Crouch Hill, goes down Crouch End Broadway, Park Road, Muswell Hill, Muswell Hill Broadway, Colney Hatch Lane looking for the first Wetherspoons pub, then Muswell Hill Road via Highgate Woods.

John has a Patreon to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

Hallaton Museum is housed in a tin tabernacle

I went to Hallaton today and found a tin tabernacle. It houses Hallaton Museum, which will be open in the afternoon at weekends and bank holidays from 21 April to 6 October.

This tin tabernacle was purchased in 1894 by the new rector of Hallaton, Canon Chetwynd-Stapylton, to serve the village for recreation and as a reading-room.

An unidentified local history book tells us:

His generous gesture failed to secure him a seat on Hallaton Parish Council and he subsequently recorded his disappointment in the Parish Magazine:

"I thought that I have established a fair claim to be accounted a good citizen of Hallaton. I have stood entirely alone in the erection of a Parish Room, at considerable cost, in furnishing, heating and lighting it and supplying it with newspapers, etc. as a reading room for two winters…"

Never mind, Canon Chetwynd-Stapylton, you had a great name.

Sherlock Holmes, Raffles and our Trivial Fact of the Day

E.W. Hornung, the author of the Raffles stories, was married to Arthur Conan Doyle's sister.

I learnt this from the latest episode of Shedunnit - a podcast I would recommend to anyone who enjoys crime fiction.

Boris Johnson to speak at the model for Bonkers Hall - and opera singers are up in arms

Boris Johnson is to appear at the Nevill Holt Festival in conversation with Andrew Roberts on 14 June. 

And you will be aware that it's a rare scholar now who denies that Nevill Holt Hall is the inspiration for Bonkers Hall.*

Thanks to the great Solar Pilchard on Bluesky, I find that this news has gone down badly with the nation's opera singers.

A cutting from Van Magazine runs:

Sudden Holt

Opera professionals were already pretty angry with the country house opera company Nevill Holt, which a few years ago made the rather sudden switch from supporting opera to a wider festival of music and arts, leaving singers and other professionals in the lurch. 

So when former prime minister Boris Johnson was announced as a guest speaker at the Summer's Festival - someone who oversaw a rough Covid for the opera sector, to say the least - many were furious. Ashley Beauchamp, a former head of music at Nevill Holt. had the following to say in the Instagram comets section:

Nevill Holt 2023: "Championing emerging talent continues to lie at the heart of Nevil halts ambitions across all strands of the festival's work."

Nevill Holt 2025: 🙃🙃🙃

I shall leave the final words to my mother, who would have been 94 on the day of Johnson and Roberts's event:

"You can't have a prime minister called 'Boris'.  

* Though you can add Rockingham Castle and East Langton Grange at least to the mix.

Responsible Child: When the facts come before the drama

The success of the Netflix series Adolescence, and my doubts as to how far it reflects reality, has put me in mind of the BBC television play Responsible Child from 2019. This showed how the legal system deals with a 12-year-boy who has helped his older brother murder their abusive stepfather.

Responsible Child was the first play directed by the BAFTA-winning documentary maker Nick Holt, who was interviewed at the time by Deadline:

Tell me how Responsible Child came about.

I was up in Scotland making The Murder Trial, probably for about 18 months in total, looking at various cases, and it was whilst I was up there that I saw a very young child, and I asked one of the lawyers, “Was that a witness?” She was incredibly young to be in a courtroom. And the sister of the accused, said, “No, actually that’s the accused.” 

I was quite taken aback by that. This child doesn’t look older than 10. And then I was told that actually, yes, there are trials for children of 10. And they’re put on trial as adults and they’re put on trial in front of juries, and they’re not part of the youth courts.

Then Holt came across the case of  Jerome and Joshua Ellis, who were 14 and 23 when they also killed their stepfather. The case was reported because the press overturned an injunction that banned them from naming either brother to protect the younger's anonymity:

And that’s what led me to being able to go to a trial and see one of these. It was extraordinary to see, and then I became very close to a legal team involved in that case, and started understanding all about what it’s like to work on these cases, what it’s like to work with young accused.

And he later says:

I’m no stranger to sitting through murder trials. I’ve sat through a great many in my time. But there was just something extraordinary seeing the focus of the entire room on a small child. There was just something so potent about the image of a child who could barely see over the witness stand, and subjected to examination, cross-examination.

And of course, you wonder about children, in general, is how much do they understand about what’s going on. How much of the case they understand, how much do they understand of what they’re saying, the consequences of what they’re saying, what’s being really asked for in what they’re saying? It’s an incredibly stressful situation and so, yes, it was extraordinary to see it first hand.

Holt also says that he told his story through a drama rather than a documentary because that's the only way you can bring one of these trials to the screen,

Responsible Child was screened just before Christmas 2019. It was widely praised and nominated for a BAFTA.

Then came the International Emmys. The play won its category and, remarkably, its young lead Billy Barratt* won Best Actor for a performance that was filmed just after this 12th birthday.  But even this was not enough to win Responsible Child a repeat.

* Trivia fans will be pleased to learn that Billy Barratt is the grandson of Shakin' Stevens (whose real name is Michael Barratt).

Prime minister's questions: Have the Tories given up?

Kemi Badenoch has a problem at prime minister's questions. Every time she attacks Labour on the economy, Keir Starmer simply has to hang the record of the last Conservative government round her neck to win the exchange.

But she has another, as the Guardian live politics blog pointed out. She lacks support from her own side of the House:

Towards the end of the session Greg Smith asked a question that backed up the Badenoch “jobs tax” critique. ... On its own, a single question like this is unlikely to make much impression. But half a dozen of them might.

(To be fair to the Tories, they did not get half a dozen backbench questions. They just got three, and the other two were devoted to Scunthorpe steelworks and the child killer Colin Pitchfork. There is a lottery to decide who gets called at PMQs, and maybe the Conservatives were just unlucky in their allocation this week. But maybe some of them are not bothering to bid for a question. In total just four Tory MPs spoke at PMQs today – exactly the same as the number of Liberal Democrats who got a question.)

You can get strange results from lotteries: the Tories did remarkably badly in the ballot for private member's bills held when the new parliament met after last year's general election.

But this lack of backbench questions may be a sign that the Tories have already written Kemi Badenoch off. Or it could be a sign they are simply demoralised. Or a sign they are too busy on Twitter reading the latest conspiracy theory from Elon Musk.

Whatever the reason for the Tories' lack of interest, it is telling that Josh Self chose to focus his piece about today's PMQs on the exchange between Starmer and Ed Davey on Trump and tariffs - and called it for Ed.

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"Part of this is down to the increasing centralisation of politics. The prime minister’s role has expanded dramatically over the decades, and cabinet government has been a fiction for a long time (Nigel Lawson claimed that cabinet meetings were the only time during the week that he got a rest). Even minor departmental decisions now have to be signed off by the centre and slotted into a communications grid." Sam Freedman on the rise and rise of political advisers.

Luke McGee suspects Putin is up against his biggest opponent yet - Trump's ego: "Trump clearly wants something that looks like a peace deal so he can show off what a great negator he is. If Trump now sees Putin as the block to a deal, that is a problem for Putin, as he has to make a choice between looking weak domestically or losing whatever goodwill he had with Trump’s White House."

"Yes, Pecksniff and Trump are bullshit artists of the highest order and neither ever experiences the least bit of remorse." Robin Bates argues that Charles Dickens, with Mr Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, anticipated Donald Trump.

Ray Newman watches Some People, which was made in Bristol in 1962 with a young cast including Ray Brooks and David Hemmings: "The church opened in 1956 and was typical of the space age houses of worship built on overspill estates all over the country in the post-war period. Unfortunately, though it looked astonishing, it was plagued with structural problems and was demolished in 1994, which only adds to the value Some People holds as a record of a time and place."

Benjamin Poore says that Shostakovich spoke truth to power - both Nazi and Communist - through his Babi Yar Symphony.

"Without any particular training, the animals - like human babies - appear to pick up basic human language skills just by listening to us talk. Indeed, cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do." Christa Lesté-Lasserre discusses a study that supports my view that cats are much cleverer than they choose to show us.

It's not teenage boys who form corrosive opinions because of social media: it's Kemi Badenoch

Embed from Getty Images

Kemi Badenoch doesn't have time to watch television, she told, Nick Ferrari this morning, but she does know one thing about Adolescence:

"The story which it is based on has been fundamentally changed, and so creating policy on a work of fiction rather than reality is the real issue."

She's referring to a story that has been spread widely by right-wingers on social media, which maintains that the Netflix series Adolescence is based on a real case where a black boy stabbed a white girl.

The race of the boy was changed, the story runs, because of wokeness - or perhaps a global conspiracy involving George Soros, Bill Gates and Gary Lineker.

But this story, like many you find on social media, isn't true.

Here's Jack Thorne, who wrote the screenplay for Adolescence, in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago:

At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn’t a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: "I think you should look into 'incel' culture."

So the series wasn't written to expose incel culture: it was used as a plot device to develop an intriguing situation.

This is the reason I've been a little worried by the impact that Adolescence has had. Do we know it presented a true picture? Or is there an element of moral panic about a new means young people have found of enjoying themselves?

In fact, this seems to be what Badenoch was trying to get over. But, as ever, her tone was petulant and unpleasant - as though she resented anyone questioning her at all. And she topped her comments with a big fat cherry of a baseless conspiracy theory.

So while I'm not sure whether we should worry so much about the way social media affects teenage boys, I'm certain we should worry about the way it has affected Kemi Badenoch.

The Nicotines: Mary Wana

This was on a Q Magazine sampler disc back in 1997 and I still think of it.

Pair of beavers released on the River Clun in Shropshire

BBC News reports:

Beavers have returned to a Shropshire river for the first time in 400 years.

The Severn Rivers Trust introduced a pair to the River Clun in the south of the county on Monday afternoon.

It hopes the pair will have offspring and can help transform the natural environment through their dam building.

The beavers have been released into an enclosure, but the story quotes Joe Pimblett, the chief executive of the Severn Rivers Trust

"If you're a nature lover and you've got an interest in the rural environment this is huge, this could be the precursor to beavers living here naturally in Shropshire."

The Clun rises near the hamlet of Anchor, close to the border with Wales. It flows east through the little town of Clun, before turnings south and joining the Teme just over the Herefordshire border in Leintwardine.

My photo shows the medieval bridge over the River Clun in the town on Clun.

The Lib Dems should terrify the Tories

That's the headline on George Eaton's New Statesman piece on the Liberal Democrats' ambitions for May's local elections - and he's not talking about Lord Bonkers' tactic of lurking outside rural polling stations in his gorilla suit.

Eaton has been talking to party "strategists"  - the insiders must have been taking a rare day off. 

He tells us they:

speak of "Project 312" - the number of councillors held by the Tories in seats they lost or narrowly won at the general election

He set's these forthcoming local elections against the results of the last general election:

At the last election, the Blue Wall was battered rather than toppled - but it could be next time. Of the Lib Dems’ 30 notional target seats, all but four are held by the Tories (and would fall with a swing of 8.8 points).

What puzzles Eaton is the Conservatives lack of concern at the Lib Dem threat. Last year the Conservatives lost 12 times as many seats to the Lib Dems (60) as to Reform (five).

He sees Kemi Badenoch's disparaging remarks about Lib Dems being the sort of people who repair the church roof as revealing a lot about her:

It was the kind of comment that makes you question whether Badenoch has any acquaintance with the Conservatives' traditional base. The Blue Wall is a land, as John Major once put it, of "long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers" and, one could add, of village fundraisers to fix the church roof. But Badenoch, too often trapped in an online filter bubble, has little feel for the Burkeans who cherish all of this.

But then, it seems to me, few Tories seem to have that feel today. Their politics are piped in from across the Atlantic and they spend more time online than they do in the community.

The Joy of Six 1341

A Very Public Sociologist has no time for Laura Kuenssberg's 'gotcha' style of interviewing: "Every time Laura Kuenssberg interviews anyone newsworthy, her goal is to generate "controversy" rather than shed light on a topic or, heaven forfend, produce a piece of journalism that might help demystify politics."

"The rapid rise of megafarms in Norfolk raises urgent questions about the cost of cheap food. Intensive livestock farming may meet demand, but at what environmental price? From water pollution to biodiversity loss, the evidence is stacking up against these industrial-scale farms." Owen Sennitt looks at the latest campaigning and legal moves.

"Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, was arrested early in the morning of Wednesday, 19 March, on two charges - one related to corruption and the other to terrorism. He released a video of himself shortly before the arrest, talking to the camera while nonchalantly adjusting his tie. 'Hundreds of police officers have arrived at my door,' he said. 'I entrust myself to the people.'" Helen Mackreath on Erdoğan's attempt to suppress his most dangerous rival.

Jon Stock, in his book The Sleep Room, tells the story of the psychiatrist William Sargant who, in the 1960s, used a combination of narcosis and ECT to "reprogram" troubled young women. Now his patients, including the actor Celia Imrie and the former model Linda Keith, are trying to piece together what happened. 

Sven Mikulec discusses the long rediscovery of Orson Welles's film Touch of Evil.

"The train begins by cantering over Shropshire farmland, beating out a lively jig. Eventually we reach Knighton — the station is in England, but its car park is in Wales. Beyond the border the landscape changes. Norman churches give way to Methodist chapels; cricket greens to rugby clubs." Oliver Smith takes the Heart of Wales Line from Craven Arms to Llanelli.

The History Man visits Lyddington Bede House in Rutland

Click on the image above to go to a short BBC film about Lyddington Bede House in The Notswolds Rutland.

The Bede House was originally a palace of the Bishops of Lincoln, but after the dissolution of the monasteries it was converted into almshouses.

This is a chance for me to remind you about the BBC Rewind site, which stuffed with good things like this.

Parents held for 11 hours over complaints about daughter’s school

Another story apparently involving overzealous policing, this time from the Guardian:

The parents of a nine-year-old girl have said they were held at a police station for 11 hours because they complained about their daughter’s primary school. 

Maxie Allen and his partner, Rosalind Levine, said they were arrested and detained on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property. 

The couple said they had previously been banned from entering Cowley Hill primary school in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire after criticising the school’s headteacher and leadership in a parents’ WhatsApp group, according to the Times.

Richard Bartholomew makes an interesting comment on this story over at The Dark Place - I've embedded his two tweets so you can see the long line of officers arriving.

The "no case to answer" outcome implies police had hoped to identify malicious intent by reviewing private electronic comms or getting the accused to incriminate themselves in interviews - i.e. they were trawling for evidence of a crime, rather than investigating an actual crime.

— Richard Bartholomew (@Barthsnotes) March 30, 2025

Jon Bon Jovi: Staring at Your Window with a Suitcase in My Hand

Fairly or not, I have Jon Bon Jovi down as one of those white American "let's raaq" artists that made us welcome grunge so much. But I've always liked this track because of the guitar sound.

I used to assume it had been sampled from some old bluesman, but I think the truth is that it's just Jon Bon Jovi playing with the help of a little recording wizardry.

Incidentally, Jon Bon Jovi was born John Bongiovi, and adopted his stage name so people would pronounce his real name correctly. Less spectacularly, Spencer Davies became Spencer Davis for the same reason.

Now The Bonkers Arms is in The Notswolds

Remember The Notswolds? There's another article on the concept, this time in the Evening Standard:

The Welland Valley is part of an area often dubbed 'the Notswolds' on account of it being as beautiful as the Cotswolds, but without the price tag. 

Residents of this stretch of south Leicestershire and north Northamptonshire flanking the River Welland will tell you there’s no comparison, though - it’s more picturesque, more accessible and more affordable.

As to exactly where the region is:

Debate rages over exactly where the Welland Valley starts and finishes, but the stretch between Market Harborough and Harringworth represents the "heart" of this beautiful area to Ellie.

Ellie is Ellie Upall from Three Goats, a company that owns three pubs in this part of the world.

One of them is mentioned in the article:

Convinced of its potential as a getaway spot for capital-dwellers, the Three Goats has invested £3m in The Nevill Arms, a boutique country hotel and pub in Medbourne, one of the Valley’s most iconic villages. 

"Medbourne epitomises this region," she says. "It has a brook, lots of stone and thatched houses, a village hall, a shop-cum-post office, a pre-school, a church and a sports club. 

"There’s a strong sense of community and many residents work from home or commute to London. Having Market Harborough and Uppingham nearby is a big bonus, plus you don’t have to travel too far to be in Leicester or Nottingham."

Ellie has noticed an upturn in visitors to The Nevill Arms on "scouting missions" ahead of potentially relocating here. "They’re always surprised how easy it is to get to," she says.

If, as most scholars maintain, Nevil Holt Hall is the model for Bonkers Hall, then Medbourne must be "the village" Lord Bonkers talks about and The Nevill Arms must be The Bonkers Arms.*

Of course, I was on to The Notswolds before it was fashionable. In a Guardian article from 2008, I quoted W.G. Hoskins on eastern Leicestershire: "a landscape of sharp hills, woodland, stone-built villages and many fine churches".

And I quoted Peter Ashley, who is mostly on Instagram these days:

On his blog Unmitigated England, the writer and photographer Peter Ashley describes one of his favourite Midlands locations, the lane that circles Cranoe church in a hairpin bend as it drops into the Welland valley: "I once used to say to companions on this road 'Look at this. You could be in Dorset. Or Devon. You'd never think you were in Leicestershire.'" 

But he has managed to raise his consciousness: "I have now realised what a fatuous remark this is. This is Leicestershire, and in fact very typical of the eastern side of the county."

* To be honest, I envisage the Hall being closer to the village than this. Bonkers Hall has an impressive drive, but I'm sure the pub is no more than a pleasant stroll away if you nip out of a back gate. The fact that there is is a secret passage from the Hall that comes out in the cellar of The Bonkers Arms strengthens the case for their not being far apart. A visit to The Bell Inn at East Langton, handy for J.W. Logan's home at East Langton Grange, will give you an idea of what I have in mind.

The Joy of Six 1340

Andrew Page wonders what the point of the Labour Party is. "I think it's ... fair to say that a lot of us hoped for better from Keir Starmer's Labour Party. Some - myself included - may naturally distrust their authoritarian and centralising instincts, but we expected a government that was more in touch, that was kinder and more socially responsible."

"Words like 'females', 'feminism', 'pregnant person', 'women' and 'underrepresented' - terms that describe the health and life experiences of women - are disappearing from federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control." Try as the Trump administration might, it can’t erase women, promise Kelsey Waits and Michelle Witte.

"This is how they kill free speech. It's not through Twitter suspensions or cancel culture. It's done the old fashioned way, just like they did it a century ago: With thugs in masks bundling someone into the back of a car." Ian Dunt on the left's rediscovery of the importance of free speech.

Guy Shrubsole says the government is right to hold major landowners to account for how they’re treating nature, and supports the newly established National Estate for Nature.

"Just like the cardinals make life-altering decisions for over a billion Catholics behind closed doors, so too do surgeons and doctors make irreversible decisions about intersex kids - without consent, shrouded in secrecy, motivated by fear and instability." Pidgeon Pagonis thinks the makers of Conclave ultimately lacked courage.

Katharine Quarmby is one of 363 authors owed money by Unbound, in her case over £5000: "That money, in the case of authors I have spoken to, was needed to pay rent; some have very young children in their care, others need to pay for care for loved older family members; I had taken time off work to recover from a major operation without worrying too much about money and was relying on Unbound keeping its word. Many of us have been owed money for many months now."