"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
I thought I had finished blogging for today, but this video is too good not to share with you tonight.
It's a BBC2 discussion from 1968 with Lady Asquith (better known as Violet Bonham Carter) and Lady Stocks. A young Joan Bakewell is in the chair.
They are talking about a television film about how women got the vote, and both take the view that it exaggerated the importance of the militant tactics of the Suffragettes at the expense of the role played by the wider Suffrage movement.
And Lady Asquith remembers defending her father, the Liberal prime minister, from attack by Suffragettes.
Lady Stocks was the cousin of Tim Brinton, a Conservative MP in the Thatcher era and the father of Sal Brinton, the former president of the Liberal Democrats.
I've also discovered that Lady Stocks's husband, a little-remembered philosopher called John Leofric Stocks, was the son of John Edward Stocks, who was vicar of Market Harborough from 1871 to 1884 and then of the fascinating St Saviour's in Leicester.
Dawn Butler lays bare the abuse that a Black female MP faces: "Followers of my social media know how bad it can be. I have a regular “block of the month” feature to raise awareness of the disgusting racist abuse sent to me every day – the N-word, “monkey” and “ape” are common insults. The deluge of abuse has a detrimental impact on my mental health, and on those around me."
"There is no reindustrialisation beyond heavily Government-directed industries such as defence and even pharmaceuticals without reversing Brexit. That will not be sufficient, but it is absolutely necessary. And yet, there is literally no mention of Brexit in the core arguments of Reindustrialising Britain." Anthony Painter reads a new collection of essays from Policy Exchange.
Milli Hill on David Walliams and his publisher: "It wasn’t until CEO Charlie Redmayne left Harper Collins in October 2025 and was replaced by a woman, Kate Elton, that decisive action was taken."
"Keynes was a liberal for our age: morally serious, hopeful for a better future, and yet reconciled to the expertly-executed compromises that must be struck to preserve a liberal order that is far more fragile than some would like to believe." Guillaume A.W. Attia says you should read John Maynard Keynes.
"It’s quite lonely and I hate this house because it’s so cold. I just wish I could speed up the process but I can’t. Some days I’m right on to it, and then other days I just can’t, because it’s very emotional – and I’m not really an emotional person." Stephanie Woods interviews four women about the ordeal of clearing a dead parent's house.
Francis Young looks at the importance of folklore to Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy.
I used to wonder why the Liberal Party had never talked about Wallace Lawler, Read the comments on this post and you will see why. I haven't dared raise the subject with Lord Bonkers.
The old boy is more on the ball with golf courses and terrorism. This is from the Guardian last month: "Seven people charged with vandalising Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf course in Scotland have been accused of malicious damage 'having a terrorist connection'."
Thursday
Dusk finds me wending my way to the palatial sett beneath the triumphal arch I had erected to celebrate the victory of Wallace Lawler in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election of 1969. My host, the King of the Badgers, is relieved that the drought has broken, as his fellow members of the genus Meles had been obliged to frequent the nation’s golf courses to find ground soft enough to dig for invertebrates.
Now, I have no quarrel with badgers on golf courses – they don’t wear loud plaid trousers or shout “Get in the hole!” – but some members have cut up rough about their greens being cut up. Then some fool decided that digging up a golf course counts as terrorism (that’s Labour for you), so things were threatening to turn ugly until the rain came.
Incidentally, if you are playing the 13th on the Royal & Decrepit’s links beside Rutland Water, aim for the sett in the centre of the 12th fairway: an iron shot down its throat will see your ball reappear inches from the flag on the green you are interested in.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
I wrote this in 2008 about a memory that was already more than a dozen years old:
Much Wenlock is not just the spiritual home of the Olympics. It also the venue for Festival at the Edge, which I attended a couple of times back in the 1990s.
Although it is chiefly a storytelling festival, my chief memories of it are musical. I heard a young Eliza Carthy play (with Nancy Kerr) and, best of all, I heard the Polly Bolton Band.
That year everything was running hopelessly late, and it was after midnight when the band (Polly Bolton, John Shepherd and Steve Dunachie) took the stage in the marquee. Everyone's breath was steaming in the cold air. The band played traditional folk songs and their own settings of poems by Kipling and A.E. Housman. Above all I remember Polly Bolton's wonderful folk voice.
Now, at last, I have found a recording by the Polly Bolton Band on YouTube. It's a setting, not of Kipling or Housman, but of a poem by their contemporary W.B. Yeats.
We British have a habit of turning military debacles into victories. The retreat from Dunkirk, for instance, has twice been the subject of a film (in 1958 and 2017) and also forms an important part of the action in Atonement from 2007.
But the Suez Crisis of 1956, whether because of the deceit it involved or its abject failure, has proved too shameful a subject for British cinema to tackle. This unsuccessful attempt to overturn Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, made together with France and Israel, and in particular the way we were forced to back down by a threat from the United States to spark a run on the pound, marked the end of British illusions that is could remain an imperial power in the postwar world.
So it’s notable that there is a British film that begins amid the British bombing of Port Said. But, of a piece with the doomed Suez operation as a whole, that bombing kills the parents of a 10-year-old British boy, Sammy Hartland. Finding no help in a suddenly hostile town, the boy sets off, with no concept of the distance involved, to walk to his only relative, an aunt who lives in Durban in South Africa.
Released in 1963, Sammy Going South was based on a novel of the same name by W.T. Canaway, who had quite a reputation in the Sixties and Seventies, and also had a writing credit for The Ipcress File (1965), but seems forgotten today.
Alexander Mackendrick
It was the first film that its director Alexander Mackendrick had completed for six years. After reeling off some of the best films Ealing Studios was to make – Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, Mandy, The Ladykillers – he went to Hollywood to make Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Though it now has a towering critical reputation, it bombed on release and Mackendrick was then taken off two pictures that he had begun to direct – The Devil’s Disciple and The Guns of Navarone.
Mackendrick, who badly needed to complete another film, then went back to work for his old Ealing boss Sir Michael Balcon (the grandfather of Daniel Day-Lewis), who was now the head of Bryanston Films. But there turned out to be a chasm between their views of what their adaptation of Sammy Going South should look like.
Balcon saw the story as a heartwarming tale of a young innocent's triumph over adversity, against the fantastic scenery of the African continent. Characteristically, Mackendrick's understanding was altogether darker: he saw it as "the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everybody he comes up against".
You might say that for Mackendrick, Sammy was another of the lethal innocents in whom he rather specialised – think of the chaos that Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers and Alec Guinness’s manic scientist in The Man in the White Suit provoke around them.
One result of these tensions was that Mackendrick’s original cut, which came in at over three hours, was reduced by Balcon to 128 minutes before release. The version that is shown from time to time on British television, and was released on DVD in 2010, is 10 minutes shorter still – no one seems to know quite when or why this further cut was made.
A surprising amount of the strangeness and cruelty that Mackendrick found in Canaway’s novel survived into what was marketed as a family film. Within the first 25 minutes, Sammy has lost both his parents, been seized upon by a pedlar who clearly has sexual designs on him, and then found himself handcuffed to the man’s corpse.
As he makes his way south, Sammy is variously helped or hindered by the adults he meets. After a trek across the desert, first with the pedlar and then alone, he is taken up by a rich American woman. He runs away from her when he finds she wants to take him north with her, and then falls in with a group of Sudanese Muslims returning from the haj.
The pilgrims’ leader, played by a stern Orlando Martins, is the only adult the boy meets in the early part of his journey who cares for him without selfish motives, but the boy abandons him for a Greek journalist who says he will take him to his aunt – and has ambitions to sell his story. The boy comes to distrust him and eventually runs away again.
Then, alone in the bush, Sammy is happened upon by a diamond smuggler played by Edward G. Robinson, whose performance and touching relationship with the boy will be what many viewers remember from the film.
It looks as though the boy will stay with him permanently, but Robinson’s camp is broken up by the authorities and Sammy makes his way to his aunt alone. Quite how he manages this is skipped over, but in the novel he travels by light plane and train, and still has to fight off a bounty hunter at Durban station.
How Sammy became too happy
The success or failure of the film obviously relied to a great extent upon the casting of Sammy, and Mackendrick thought he had struck gold in Fergus McClelland, the 11-year-old son of Northern Irish actor Alan McClelland who, among many other roles, was in the original cast of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap alongside Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim.
Mackendrick, quoted in Philip Kerr’s biography of the director, said of him, with alarming objectivity:
"He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting."
But something happened which explains why McClelland, who is convincingly ragged and itchy in his scenes with Orlando Martins, appears so happy and healthy when he meets Edward G. Robinson after trekking through the bush:
"But when he went out to Africa, he started having the time of his life. The unit adored him and, to my dismay, started to feed him ... he put on weight and there was no way I could stop it. So, instead of this hunted and abused child, who’s supposed to be starving and neurotic, you had a sturdy, stocky, well fed little character. A good actor, but the physique betrayed itself."
Mackendrick’s treatment of the boy during filming was as hard-hearted as his approach to casting. Appearing on BBC Radio Four’s The Film Programme in 2010, McClelland recalled the unit doctor telling the director at one point that he had to decide whether he wanted “a dead star or a live little boy”.
Some critics complained that McClelland’s acting was wooden until he met Edward G. Robinson, but this is not the first time a child actor had been blamed for following their director’s instructions. Preparing to shoot the film, Mackendrick had been to institutions to study traumatised and orphaned children, and this woodenness was what he saw in in them. McClelland was to go on acting for some years, appearing in both television plays and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so other directors appreciated his talents too.
Edward G. Robinson and Harry H. Corbett
Mackendrick faced greater problems than his young lead becoming too happy and well fed: Edward G. Robinson suffered a serious heart attack early in the filming of his role. The result was that many of his scenes with the boy were shot with the participants being on different continents.
Fergus McClelland was filmed in Africa, with Mackendrick reading the other part, and Edward G. Robinson in a studio in London, with Mackendrick this time reading the boy’s lines. It’s a mark of the director’s skill that these scenes are still so convincing and moving.
Another actor who deserves a mention is Harry H. Corbett, who plays Edward G. Robinson’s associate in the diamond smuggling game. Corbett had already made one series of Steptoe and Son, the classic BBC sitcom that was to make him a household name – soon every impersonator on television had to be able to take him off – but arguably blight his career.
Before Steptoe, Corbett was called “the British Brando” by some, because he was a Method actor, and was the star Shakespearian in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East.
Fergus McClelland later became a voiceover artist and a trainer in business presentation, so there are plenty of his videos to be found online. In one of them, he recalls that Corbett did not talk to the other cast members much, but was friendly to him – the boy was allowed to call him “H.”
Corbett told him that he didn’t plan on doing a second series of the comedy, but perhaps even one had fixed him in the public mind as Harold Steptoe and Harold Steptoe alone. One review of Sammy Going South referred to his “Steptoe accent”, as though it already counted against him as a serious actor.
Racial politics
The racial politics of Sammy Going South are muted: there is, for instance, no suggestion that by 1963 South Africa was a tainted haven for the boy to seek. Orlando Martins is allowed great dignity and Sammy is shown to need and appreciate his paternal authority. And, as a returning haji he appreciates that the boy is on a pilgrimage of his own.
Beyond Martins, however, there is no other substantial Black character in a film set in entirely in Africa. The men who work for Edward G. Robinson are at least shown as a benign presence, singing a lullaby when the boy wakes suddenly in the back of their jeep.
It is the Greek journalist who suffers the worst stereotyping, particularly from the British officials, who still administrate Robinson’s part of East Africa. Those officials are verging on the comic themselves, and this is certainly no celebration of British Africa.
The fact that Robinson has drawn for years on fuel dumps the Germans abandoned in 1918 suggests that the European presence in Africa is drawing to a close, something his character explicitly says. That wasn’t to stop Britain’s private schools turning out ideal types to run the Empire for two or three decades after it ceased to exist.
Sammy goes west
I can’t argue that Sammy Going South is a forgotten masterpiece, but it is better than its reputation and is interesting in so many ways. As a study of childhood trauma and recovery; as a document of the last days of the British Empire; and as a film by one of Britain’s best directors, who was soon to give up making films and devote himself to teaching instead.
The film was trimmed yet again for the US market, given a new title (the ludicrous, to my eyes, A Boy Ten Feet Tall) and a new soundtrack. Joe Dante even claims that this version is better than the original: I’ve not seen it, but the omission of most of Orlando Martins’s scenes makes that sound unlikely.
But I can at least show you the trailer for this version. I wonder if Steven Spielberg saw A Boy Ten Feet Tall: am I alone in being reminded of Empire of the Sun by the scene of the boy amid the bombing of Port Said?
I suspect this American version is closer to what Michael Balcon had hoped for from the shoot. Me? I mourn Mackendrick’s lost, darker three-hour version.
This should keep the literary types among you happy, though I doubt that Ofsted will be so pleased.
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.
"In the days that followed RNLI crew members found pictures of themselves strewn across social media. Online posts described the search and rescue workers as 'traitors', falsely alleging that they had housed asylum seekers and were moving them to secret locations. Some posts included volunteer’s addresses and phone numbers, putting them and their families at heightened risk." Nicola Kelly says the RNLI are heroes, not traitors.
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.)
In a guest post for Liberal England, Donnachadh McCarthy argues that its time for another Reform Act - one that would remove the power of the billionaire owners who dominate our media.
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.
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.
I don't know if Nick Clegg does have a Dutch uncle, but there must be every chance.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is another of the quarterly 'Sighcology' columns I contribute to the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.
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.
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.
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.
Anna Sabine, Liberal Democrat MP for Frome and East Somerset, has discovered what happens when a politician loses her voice: "There’s a thing about: do I seem weak now? Like, does this make me seem weaker? Which is another reason to be really clear: I will do national media, and I will carry on campaigning."
"The council’s constitution, which sets out how it is run, says it must have a cabinet and a leader at the top and this is required by UK law. The local authority is also required to have an elected member overseeing children’s services. The absence of this and the length of time the council has had no one in charge is what has led officers to make the highly unusual declaration the council is breaking the law." Edward Barnes reports from Oldham, where the elected councillors have failed to agree who should run the borough council after May's elections.
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.
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.
From an article on the BBC website by Thomas Hobbs:
Centring on an edgy, city-dwelling female protagonist unapologetically owning her sexuality, the brilliant song Roving Woman sounds like the work of a millennial musician. Evoking the smoky, airborne notes of a late-night Brooklyn bar, it contains lilting guitar harmonies that float in and out of focus like cascading cigarette smoke, while its melancholy vocal is reminiscent of popular contemporary folk musicians like Weyes Blood, Jessica Pratt and Angel Olsen. "Someone always takes me home!" the lead singer swoons.
Yet the truly remarkable thing about this track is it was actually recorded more than 70 years ago. Roving Woman isn't the work of some lo-fi singer-songwriter in their early 20s, but is in fact the forward-thinking creation of Connie Converse. She was a bedroom musician who wrote the bulk of her songs in early 1950s New York, years before Bob Dylan came on the scene and sparked a new singer-songwriter movement.
But she pulled back from her musical dreams at the turn of the 1960s and then, in 1974, aged 50, disappeared completely – never to be heard from again. It was only this century that this mysterious artist's work was rediscovered and has found a devoted audience, stunned by just how pioneering she was.
And:
Another one of Converse's fans is Martin Carr, the English folk musician and lead singer of the band The Boo Radleys, who has written several songs paying tribute to her. "Connie had a dramatist's eye – the ability to conjure a fully inhabited world from a single detail," he explains. "The fact that she named a song after a J.M. Synge play, or was capable of lyrics such as 'Spring seemed to linger in a little bunch of flowers he pressed into my hand', tells you she was reaching well beyond the American folk tradition."
Carr is also particularly impressed by Converse's guitar playing and believes it's extraordinary no matter what generation you come from. "Her guitar playing is phenomenal. I can't play her songs, they're too hard for me!" Carr enthuses. "Her playing reminds me of the way Paul Simon plays; orchestral arrangements for six strings. She was a true individual, an artist of no time."
The Grimond Society, a Liberal Democrat group that aims to build support for economic democracy and a more cooperative and mutualistic economy, gets a good write up on the Co-op News website.
It quotes the society's founder, Jack Meredith:
"The Liberal Democrats have always stood for the idea of liberty and freedom from poverty, from homelessness, from what Beveridge called the evils of society. And why would we stop at the ballot box? Clearly it makes sense that if we want to try and enrich people’s lives, and help them find meaning, why aren’t we supporting co-operatives more and being more vocal about them?"
The Liberal Party's support for economic democracy was one of the things that first attracted me to it. That support dwindled over the Alliance years, when the most you heard was support for employee shareholding.
This is a questionable idea – if things go wrong you can lose both your job and your capital – and behind it, I suspected at the time, was little more than a desire to make people work harder.
Since merger, we have heard little from the Lib Dems on the subject, so all power to the Grimond Society.
The aim of this website is to publish fresh material about both series, identify some of the filming locations and signpost visitors to the wonderful content that is already out there. This website is not a commercial endeavour and will hopefully be of interest to fans of both productions.
I have my dad to thank for my love of these series. He watched each episode beside me when they were first broadcast, but I understood only a little of what I saw back then. As an adult I have seen them many times and find them endlessly compelling and fascinating. The intricacies of the plot and the quality of the acting keep me coming back time after time.
Yes, I miss Paddy Ashdown. I miss his correspondence – those envelopes marked "Top Secret: Burn Before Reading" that arrived by every post – and I miss his company. Despite Ashdown's best efforts, I never could quite get my head around Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. "What exactly was Toby Esterhase up to?" I would ask him, and "So did old Smiley do right by Ricki Tarr in the end?"
Now Paddy is gone there is no one in the party to explain this to me. I tried asking Ming Campbell the other day, but he just told me Sir Percy Alleline was a fine upstanding fellow and that he wouldn’t listen to a word against him.
Zöe Franklin celebrates the 98th anniversary of the Equal Franchise Act, which gave women equal voting rights with men and calls for further reforms: "Today, barriers remain for women, disabled people, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and others who are underrepresented in public life."
Abandoning the triple lock on pensions is more likely to condemn today’s younger generations to an old age of poverty than help them, argues Mark E. Thomas.
Josiah Mortimer on a study that finds the introduction of mandatory voter ID has damaged trust in British elections, not improved it.
"It’s not hard to see the appeal of a creed in which worldly success is a sign of God’s blessing to uncontrollably rich individuals like Marshall. And for a church that has become smaller and older, it offers energy, confidence and – perhaps most importantly of all – money." James Bloodworth says the weakening of the Church of England has empowered a new evangelical elite that includes Sir Paul Marshall.
Melanie Bell examines the careers choices made by Julie Christie: "Always uncomfortable with stardom – which she later admitted she found ‘terrifying’ – her choice of films increasingly became a conscious decision on her part to exercise some control over her career, turning down high-profile roles in commercial cinema in favour of independent/auteur-driven projects with narratives that dramatised the contradictions of contemporary life, many of which were sharply gendered."
