Man in Ally McCoist tree dispute takes matter to Scottish Government

The Herald wins our coveted Headline of the Day Award.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A nation holds its breath

It's been an eventful week with Lord Bonkers, but let me recover my breath and acknowledge a couple of debts.

The idea of Andy Burnham employing a sealed tram came from Andrew Crowther on Bluesky. The list of Labour grandees recalled by Starmer also comes from Bluesky. It was involuntarily contributed by Brynley Heaven, who once wrote a guest post here. I had intended to use the idea but substitute my own choice of names. When it came to it I couldn't improve on his list.

Bad writers borrow, darling, but good writers steal.

Sunday

News reaches me that Labour is taking its rout in the local elections badly. Starmer has drafted Hazel Blears, Nick Raynsford, Ruth Kelly and Ernest Bevin to freshen things up, but there are rumours that Andy Burnham is approaching Euston in a sealed tram. 

Will whichever of the Millipede brothers it is who is left throw his hat into the ring? Will Starmer face them down? A nation holds its breath.

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

Earlier this week...

• A cloud passes over the sun
• In return for a chunky donation
• Drinking gin with Matron
• Bouncing through custard on a Spacehopper
• Too close to the wicker hare
• The Procurator Fiscal at Dingwall

Grace Dieu: A railway, a canal and a priory in ruins

This video takes us to Thringstone in west Leicestershire to walk the disused Charnwood Forest Railway, which once terminated at Loughborough Derby Road station. It's a walk I've thought of doing myself.

There are glimpses of the short-lived Charnwood Forest Canal, which also ran towards Loughborough,  though not quite far enough to reach the River Soar, so it was connected the wider canal system by a wagonway.

And then we reach the ruins of Grace Dieu Priory. The Friends of Grace Dieu will tell you all about them.

The poet Wordsworth writes:

Beneath yon eastern ridge, the craggy bound,

Rugged and high, of Charnwood’s forest ground,

Stand yet, but, Stranger, hidden from thy view

The ivied ruins of forlorn Grace Dieu,

Erst a religious House, which day and night

With hymns resounded and the chanted rite.

Mel and Sue and Akbar Shamji

From the latest Popbitch email:

Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, London Falling, is the buzziest read of the summer so far.

(In case you've missed all the column inches, it’s the one about the mysterious death of a 19-year-old whose pretence of being the son of an oligarch entangled him in a dangerous underworld.)

Akbar Shamji, the baddie on the run who might know what happened to Zac Brettler, has another claim to fame, we're told.

He starred in panto at Cambridge Footlights with Mel and Sue, of Great British Bake Off fame.

My advice to the police, if they want a Footlights alumnus to help them with their enquiries, is to keep a close watch on conventions of TV quiz hosts and celebrity children's authors. He's bound to turn up at one or the other before long.

Searching for Normal by Sami Timimi

This review appears in the new Liberator – issue 435. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

Searching for Normal: A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress and Neurodiversity

Sami Timimi

Vintage, 2026, £12.99

Many years ago, through my then day job, I encountered the ideas of professionals who challenged the dominant account of serious mental health problems. It was wrong, they argued, to see these problems as caused by one or more of a collection of discrete mental illnesses. The term “schizophrenia”, for instance, now describes a quite different set of symptoms from those it did when it was coined in the 19th century, and despite all the advances made in neuroimaging, physical signs that would allow schizophrenia to be securely diagnosed remain as elusive as ever. And homosexuality ceased to be a mental disorder in the US in 1973, not because of any scientific discovery, but because of a vote among psychiatrists. Of those eligible to take part, 21 per cent said it was a disorder, 32 per cent said it wasn’t and 47 per cent failed to return their ballot paper.

Because the charge is often made, it’s worth emphasising that critical professionals don’t seek to minimise the suffering of people diagnosed with mental illness. What is true is that they are more likely to look for the causes in people’s life experiences, such as abuse, discrimination and poverty. They find the most useful question to ask a new client is not “What’s wrong with you?” but “What’s happened to you?” They also recognise that the treatments often prescribed, from psychoactive medication to electroconvulsive therapy, are not without distressing side-effects.

These critical mental health professionals are a heterogeneous group, but it’s fair to number the psychiatrist Sami Timimi among them. He writes well about what he calls the “mental health industrial complex (MHIC)” – which is in part what we used to call Big Pharma – and how it affects society:

Problems that are socio-political can easily be converted into problems that are psychological. The devastating consequences of discriminations, together with the persistent and pervasive inequities in society, are turned into mental disorders that need mental health care rather than political action. The diminishing boundaries for normal also mean that, over recent decades, the MHIC has continued to benefit from billions in revenue through individualising and psychologising mental suffering.

Where Searching for Normal will be controversial for many is that Timimi includes conditions like ADHD and mild autism in this analysis. Again, he is not denying people’s problems: one of the best things in the book are his case studies of young patients. (They are composites to protect individual clients’ confidentiality) They bring home that each person’s difficulties and suffering are different and that giving a patient one, two or half a dozen diagnoses – and some do receive that many – tells you little about them or what is likely to help them. 

Yet it is undeniable that both ADHD and mild autism are fluid concepts. ADHD has gone from a condition affecting small boys, whose symptoms sounded very like a list of those things about children that most irritate adults, to one found in both sexes and in adults as well as children. And, in online discourse though not psychiatric manuals, from one characterised by inattention to one that can equally well be characterised by paying too much attention. Who, we need to ask, is to say what too much attention is? The neurodiversity movement promised more acceptance of differing personalities, but it too often seeks a medical diagnosis for anyone who differs from an ever-narrowing and ever more stereotypical idea of what is “neurotypical”.

I was pleased to see that in looking at alternative frameworks for helping people, Timimi commends the Power Meaning Threat Network, which was published in 2018 by a group of clinical psychologists and service-user campaigners. He describes it as providing “a way of helping people to create more hopeful stories about their lives and the difficulties they have faced or are still facing, instead of seeing themselves as blameworthy. Weak, deficient or ‘mentally ill’.” It has its roots, to return to my old day job, in a project I once helped to initiate.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The Procurator Fiscal at Dingwall

It was a very opportune telegram for the old boy. I'll say no more than that.

When I was on holiday in Scotland years ago there was a story on the local TV news about a man who had gone for a walk in the hills and dropped dead. It ended with the words "... and the Procurator Fiscal at Dingwall has been informed." I have always remembered what an august personage he sounded.

Saturday

Two weeks have passed since that Friday’s Unfortunate Events. It happened that I received a telegram the next morning that begged me to lend my experience to our campaigns in the Highlands of Scotland, so I had my bags packed and was off to my Scottish home at Brig O’Dread at once, leaving strict instructions for the village green to be thoroughly cleaned. (Fortunately, I know some former associates of Violent Bonham Carter who are acknowledged experts in the field.) 

When I reached the Land of the Mountain and the Flood, I wasted no time in taking to the doorsteps. There I received a great reception, but took the precaution of wearing a false moustache over my real moustache lest I attracted attention and someone reported me to the Procurator Fiscal at Dingwall. 

Yesterday’s results showed that I was able to tip the balance as my summoners had hoped, but it would be ungenerous of me not to pay tribute to the part in my success played by Alex Cole-Hamilton.

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

Earlier this week...

• A cloud passes over the sun
• In return for a chunky donation
• Drinking gin with Matron
• Bouncing through custard on a Spacehopper
• Too close to the wicker hare

Magnus Grimond remembers his father's Orkney elections

Here's a video of the Liberal leader Jo Grimond voting in the 1964 general election. It's unused footage shot by British Pathé, so there's no commentary, and the little boy with Grimond is his son Magnus (not Michael, as YouTube says).

Magnus Grimond recently wrote an article about his memories of Orkney elections in the Sixties and Seventies for Frontiers:

My father would ... go around all the islands to hold meetings, which were mostly in rather draughty parish halls, with the odd Calor Gas heater if you were lucky.  A few committed souls would generally show up, but I know on one occasion in Hoy my father faced an empty hall. 

He had primed Gerry Meyer, editor of The Orcadian and stringer in Orkney for the Press Association, with a copy of the speech to be distributed to the national papers. He must have rung Gerry to say that he couldn’t give the speech but it could still be sent out, to which he was told that if the words hadn’t been spoken he couldn’t possibly give it out. 

My father claimed that he therefore had to deliver his speech to an empty hall – or possibly to a few Blackface sheep.

The Joy of Six 1524

"You will know them. They are in every policy working group, every conference fringe, every strategy call. They are the people who hear a proposal for genuine economic reform and say 'that’s outside the Overton window' as if they have ended the argument rather than ducked it. They treat the boundaries of current political acceptability as load-bearing walls, when in fact they are furniture, and we are allowed to move them." Liberal Democrat Tom Reeve introduces us to the Overtons.

"Since 2021, Ellison’s personal foundation – the Larry Ellison Foundation – has donated or pledged at least £257m to the Tony Blair Institute, making it a think tank like no other in the UK. Ellison donations have helped it grow to more than 900 staff, working in at least 45 countries." Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin take us inside the Tony Blair Institute and introduce us to its main funder.

Steve Webb says the triple lock cannot last forever, but scrapping it now would trigger a retirement disaster.

"What happened to the master con man? For one thing, as the former reality show star should know, people get bored. The same old Trump shtick gets tiresome; the public's patience with his excuses wears thin. They have heard all the lies, all the Biden blame-shifting, all the 'two weeks away' deadline-shifting. It’s stale." Jennifer Rubin says Donald Trump is losing his grip on US voters.

Chloe Duteil, Daniel Cumming and Jon Winder look back to how London, Paris and New York coped with past heatwaves: "When seeking outdoor relief, most 19th-century New Yorkers headed to the beach – the city is an island, after all. But by the 20th century, they were also planing block parties with plenty of ice from corner store bodegas. On occasion, they also cracked open fire hydrants – a relief strategy that has become a classic trope of New York City summers."

Morgan Jeffery talks to people from Film is Fabulous!, the organisation that recently found, preserved and screened two lost Doctor Who episodes.

Sarstedt Brothers: Chinese Restaurant

Produced by Tony Visconti, this was released as a single in 1973 and should have been huge. It wasn't.

I didn't hear the song again until they invented the internet. If I hadn't had such a strong memory of the line "the men from Mars in their Japanese cars" I might have feared I'd imagined the whole thing.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Too close to the wicker hare

When I had the idea of Freddie and Fiona buying a cottage in the village, I couldn't resist it even though I sensed things might not go well for them. But never did I dream it would end like this. 

Friday

To the village green for the lighting of the Beltane bonfire. As the kindling catches and dusk falls, I survey the crowd of excited villagers. Why are there so many elves amongst them? No one listened to me! The bonfire is too close to the wicker hare. Oh, the voices of the children! “Sumer is icumen in, loudly sing, Cuckoo! Groweth seed and bloweth mead, And springeth wood anew, Sing, Cuckoo! Sing, Cuckoo.” 

Who are these two on their phones amid the throng? “It’s a sort of rabbit thingy.” “It so quaint! Did you get my redraft of the media relea….” “Go back,” I yell to them. “Get away!” Who has seized the pair? Damn this smoke, I can’t see anything. Who are these imps running through it? “Sumer is icumen in. Sumer is icumen in.” What’s that screaming? “Sing, Cuckoo!” The terrible smoke and crackling of the flames. “Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ!” “If you celebrate him, obvs.”

I disappear into the Bonkers Arms for a gentleman’s measure of Auld Johnston. You need a stiffener after an experience like that.

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

Earlier this week...

• A cloud passes over the sun
• In return for a chunky donation
• Drinking gin with Matron
• Bouncing through custard on a Spacehopper

Dog shoots woman with shotgun at Nebraska convenience store

Well done to the Guardian for winning our Headline of the Day Award with this story of everyday life in the United States.

The judges rejected the argument that the only thing that will stop a bad boy with a gun is a good boy with a gun.

How David Lean's Oliver Twist broke the law

Embed from Getty Images

Here's a remarkable thing. Between 1933 and 1963, it was illegal in Britain for a child under 12 to appear in an entertainment production on stage or on screen. And that explains the following press cuttings.

Here's the Weekly Dispatch, 9 November 1947:

One of the best-kept secrets of the British film industry is revealed at last by producer Ronald Neame’s announcement that John Howard Davies, cast as Oliver Twist Cineguild's screen version of Charles Dickens’s famous novel, has been playing the part at Pinewood Studios for the last four months. [John Howard Davies was nine.] 

the Evening News, 25 February 1948:

I am able to reveal to-day the name of another of those juvenile lawbreakers who act in films under the age of fifteen: Carol Reed, who finishes directing The Lost Illusion” to-day. gives me permission to say that the important part of the small boy who becomes involved in a murder case has been played for the past two months by Bobbie Henrey, an attractive eight-year-old with blond wavy hair. [The Lost Illusion was retitled The Fallen Idol before release.]

and the Birmingham Mail, 16 November 1951:

It is three months since watched a scene being shot on the floor at Pinewood Studios for the new Dirk Bogarde thriller Hunted. The unechoing spaces of a sound stage have their own special atmosphere especially when carpenters and jobbers are silenced for shooting but on this occasion the sense of hush was almost tangible. 

It was in fact hush-hush for through a door at the back of the set – a typical transport drivers' cafe halt – came Dirk Bogarde and small blond child. At my elbow a whisper informed me that no mention could made of the boy: not until the film was finished completely cut and polished ready for screen.

That is the way the law or rather the evasion of the law works in the British film industry Child actors are not supposed to do this work therefore as far as everyone but those intimately involved the making of the film are concerned they do not exist I think 1 am right in saying that the law prohibits the employment of children under 12 years of age. And here was 6½-year-old Jon Whiteley in middle of perhaps the longest screen role a child has ever attempted.

And, come to think of it, though there were popular British child stars in the years before these three productions – Elizabeth Taylor, Freddie Bartholomew, Roddy McDowall – they made their films in Holywood.

In 1948 it had been expected that an amendment to the Cinematograph Films Act 1938 would relax the rules on young performers and remove the need for this subterfuge, but it was unexpectedly ruled out of order by the speaker.

I've even seen it suggested that the very public search for an Oliver Twist was designed to reassure the authorities that the producers were intending to cast an older boy, when they had already chosen John Howard Davies, the son of a well-known scriptwriter. The story goes that one of the production team had seen him when he was invited to dinner by the boy's parents.

There were a few prosecutions for employing child actors, but for the most part the 1933 law was ignored until it was superseded by the 1963 Children and Young Person’s Act. You can read more in article by Richard Farmer.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Bouncing through custard on a Spacehopper

Another of those forgotten passages of Liberal Party history that the old boy so enjoys recalling. 

I am beholden to regular guest poster Stuart Whomsley for including Ed Davey, a Spacehopper and custard in a message to me, though they appear here in a slightly different arrangement.

Thursday

The other day I told Ed Davey the story of Norman Wisdom’s brief leadership of the Liberal Party in the 1950s. At our lowest point, we hit upon the idea of inviting a star of stage and screen to take the reins and, though there was strong support for Anna Neagle from local associations in Sussex, the choice fell upon Wisdom. 

At first the newsreels and newspapers loved his antics, as he tripped over his own feet, slid down ladders and fell into the water. But public taste is fickle, and it wasn’t too long before one heard complaint about Wisdom’s lack of seriousness – his, if you will, lack of wisdom. Even so, he might have held on as leader for longer were it not for an unfortunate incident involving Princess Marina and a whoopee cushion. 

After that, I was asked to lead a deputation to Clement Davies to ask him to resume the leadership. I won’t pretend that Clem wasn’t Rather Put Out by recent events, but as all good Liberals will, he put the party first. 

For the avoidance of doubt, I wasn’t threatening Davey with the return of Gloria Swinson: I was suggesting that a man can be seen bouncing through custard on a Spacehopper once too often. Did he take the moral I intended? Time will tell.

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

Earlier this week...

• A cloud passes over the sun
• In return for a chunky donation
• Drinking gin with Matron

Remembering the wonderful Flick Rea

I was very sad to hear of the death of Flick Rea today. Flick was was leader of the Liberal and then Liberal Democrat group on Camden Council from 1986-2005 and 2014-2020. She was awarded an MBE in 2013 for her services to the borough.

After Flick retired she was made an honorary alderman, and you can see the speech she gave on that occasion in the video above.

Her Wikipedia entry reveals that Flick was a direct descendant of Sir Robert Peel and that she joined the Liberal Party in 1970. She fought her first election in her beloved Fortune Green ward in 1980, coming third in a by-election, and was first elected to the council in 1986.

Flick was also a great friend of Liberator and the Liberal Revue.

That Wikipedia entry talks about Flick's career in the theatre before she discovered politics, Flick trained at RADA, leaving in 1958, and worked in repertory theatre Salisbury and Oldham. By the early Sixties she was using the stage name Felicity Peel.

On the screen, she appeared in an episode of The Avengers and the film A Kind of Loving.

I once talked to Flick about her time at RADA and remember her mentioning two of her fellow students. One was Susannah York, and the other was a young man from a prosperous family who proved not to have the talent for a stage career and, after a couple of terms, went back to work in the family business in Liverpool.

His name was Brian Epstein.

The Joy of Six 1523

Niamh McIntyre had been investigating the spike in racist AI videos aimed at British surfers: "It is often young, entrepreneurial men from south Asia. They tend to have zero interest in UK politics, but the content they create often boosts far-right talking points in Britain and contributes to the increasingly hostile atmosphere for immigrants and British Muslims. They’re part of a booming cottage industry producing commercial AI slop."

Joshi Hermann advises us to stop looking for "Burnhamism". He's bee reporting the mayor of Greater Manchester for six years and has never been able to locate it.

"The culls were not only cruel: they were ineffective. Thousands of badgers died, yet bTB [bovine tuberculosis] rates in cattle remained high. But rather than end the cull or re-evaluate the policy, the government decided to roll it out to even more parts of the country." The Hunt Saboteurs Association welcomes the end of England's badger cull, which has seen nearly 250,000 animals, shot or trapped.

"It is not often I get angry, but a recent encounter with a standing stone has really annoyed – and shocked me." The Urban Prehistorian condemns the treatment of the Bogleys Stone of Fife.

Melanie Williams has been researching Muriel Box, Muriel Sly and British women scriptwriters in general. "Medical comedy was all the rage in the fifties – from Doctor in the House to Carry On Nurse – but it seems an honest comedic look at pregnancy and childbirth may have been a little too far beyond British cinema’s comfort zone at the time."

The long career of E.J. "Tiger" Smith as Warwickshire and England's wicketkeeper, test umpire and batting guru is considered by Giles Wilcock.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Drinking gin with Matron

I may have got the idea that Matron is too fond of gin from Sheila Hancock, who played Miss Hannigan that way (to Stratford Johns' Daddy Warbucks) in the first London production of Annie.

Wednesday

I was sad to see my fellow hereditary peers expelled from the Lords. I am not affected by the recent change in the law because mine is a Rutland peerage and thus I am guaranteed lifelong membership of the House under the provisions of the Treaty of Oakham. I forget quite when it was signed or who signed it, but I have a copy – indeed the only copy known to exist – safely locked away in the Library here at Bonkers Hall. 

And so to my Home for Well-Behaved Orphans, where excitement is running high at the prospect of Friday’s Beltane bonfire. How sweet their voices sound as they practise their songs! Though I have to say that in my young day folk songs were about chaps setting off on May mornings, with the occasional drowned sailor thrown in. 

I don’t know if the Wise Woman of Wing has been drinking gin with Matron again, bringing some of her lore with her, but the words the little inmates sing are alarming: The Unquiet Grave would count as light relief in their company.

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

Earlier this week...

• A cloud passes over the sun
• In return for a chunky donation

The Shortest History of Ireland by James Hawes

This review appears in the new Liberator – issue 435. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

The Shortest History of Ireland

James Hawes

Old Street, 2026, £15

Teachers tried to tell you many things when you weren’t listening properly, but here’s some history they really didn’t teach you at school. James Hawes tells the story of Ireland from the earliest times to the present day in a way that is constantly surprising and enlightening. I shall first urge you to read this book and then share a few of its most startling insights.

One of the keys to understanding Ireland is that it was never part of the Roman Empire and was thus spared the dislocation that the rest of Europe suffered when that empire fell. Christianity came to Ireland, but it was assimilated into what was in many ways a highly developed Iron Age civilisation. So in the early Medieval period, when Ireland’s population was half of England’s, not the tenth it is today, Irish scholars were prized across Europe, but their independent ways increasingly met with disapproval from thde church authorities in Rome.

The first colonisers of Ireland were not English but French. The Normans who took land there had not troubled to learn English to speak to the serfs they brought with them, but they did learn Gaelic so they could talk to their neighbours. The result was that those Normans soon adopted Irish customs, while the serfs saw many attractions in deserting their positions and becoming Irish. This consistent tendency of settlers to turn Irish frustrated the English Crown’s ambitions: when England finally turned a serious imperialist gaze on Ireland in 1546, the only part of the country it controlled was Dublin. Elizabeth I’s court astrologer John Dee, incidentally, emerges as the first person to have talked of a British empire.

We English tend to see Ireland as sectarian, but the truth is that we exported it there. It was Protestant England that was sectarian, and it saw people who turned Irish as traitors. It was this attitude that explained the massacre of the garrison at Drogheda, and there were plenty of more extreme figures back at Westminster cheering Cromwell on. This was an England, as Hawes reminds us, that did not care that neither William III nor George I could speak English. The only thing that mattered was that they were not Catholic.

In the 19th century Britain spent a fortune trying to turn Ireland into a landscape of small Protestant farmers. The ruins of unwanted Anglican churches across Ireland are a reminder of this doomed project, while the payments to these uneconomically small arable farms. in what had historically been cattle country, were a heavy burden on independent Ireland until it joined the European Economic Community and its Common Agricultural Policy in 1971.

Finally, Hawes shows that the Catholic dominance of Irish society was a post-independence creation and did not fully establish itself until 1937. This dominance, with its satanic trio of institutions – industrial schools, mother and baby homes, Magdalene laundries – was the work of Éamon de Valera, the politician who dominated the first 50 years of the independent Ireland, and Archbishop John McQuaid of Dublin. Hawes likens de Valera, with his control of the press and closeness to the church, to one of the authoritarian leaders who flourish in Eastern Europe today.

And the book ends on an optimistic note: not even Brexit has slowed the economic and social forces making an eventual reunification look increasingly likely.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: In return for a chunky donation

Another day with Lord Bonkers. Do I detect The Plot here?

Tuesday

In answer to an appeal for material for the Beltane bonfire, I call at a publisher’s warehouse that is simply choked with hardback copies of Boris Johnson’s memoirs. They are only too pleased for me to take them off their hands – in return for a chunky donation to the Home for Distressed Canvassers at Herne Bay, of course. 

I shall add them to the usual Liberal Democrat policy papers and some Morello trees that have been felled in my orchards. That should make a jolly blaze! The important thing is not to build the bonfire too near the hare.

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

Earlier this week...

• A cloud passes over the sun

Aiye-Keta: Afro Super

Here's Steve Winwood in 1973 playing what came to be called "world music" more than a decade later.

"Aiye-Keta" (which means "the third world" or "the third life" in Yoruba) was a collaborative project between Winwood, who plays guitar and keyboards, the percussionist Remi Kabaka and Abdul Lasisi Amao, who plays saxophone and flute.

Remi Kabaka, who died last year, played with John Martyn, Hugh Masekela and, on Rhythm of the Saints, Paul Simon. He is the father of Remi Kabaka Jr, the drummer and producer of Gorillaz.

Abdul Lasisi Amao died back in 1988. He was a founder member of Osibisa, the London-based group that did much to bring African music to the wider world.

Together they produced one album of Afro jazz-rock. Perhaps because Winwood's name was not on the cover, it failed to sell. Later, if it was remembered at all, the project became confused in people's minds with the Jamaican reggae band Third World.

For me, they produced perfect music for weather like this.

The lesser known parks of Desborough 2: The Pocket Park

Yesterday I discovered another park in Desborough. A couple of years ago it was Millennium Green: this time it was the town's Pocket Park.

It lies beside the Rothwell Road, but there are a couple of other entrances. I found one of them by wandering some back streets. You never know what you will find if you do that in London suburbs or small Midland towns.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A cloud passes over the sun

The new Liberator is out! It's issue 435 and you can download it free of charge from the magazine's website. In it you'll find the usual mix of article, reviews and Radical Bulletin – the section that tells you what's really going on in the Liberal Democrats. 

And that means it's time to spend another week with Lord Bonkers. It's happens to be Beltane week, which has always been a big deal in the Church of Rutland.

Monday

“They’re back,” says a fellow patron of the Bonkers Arms, “I’ve seen them.” “What I don’t understand,” says another, “is whether they’re husband and wife or brother and sister.” “Or both,” interjects a third. I did warn Freddie and Fiona, but here we are. 

Conversation then turns to the number of elves seen around the village lately: “It’s almost like they’re looking for something.” “Or someone.” I saw the Elves of Rockingham Forest gathering herbs by moonlight in my own holts and hangers when I was on the QV for poachers. Well, that’s what they told me and it’s best to keep in with these fellows. 

Talking of which, they won’t have forgotten F&F’s enthusiasm for “privatising elf”, as they thought they heard, at my Christmas party. I look out at the village green, where the giant Beltane wicker hare is fast taking shape, and a cloud passes over the sun.

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

The Ivanhoe Line west of Coalville is disappearing fast: Here's what's left

Ever since I was a councillor in the Eighties, the reopening to passengers of the line from Leicester to Coalville, Ashby and Burton upon Trent has been high on the agenda of transport campaigners in the East Midlands.

Which makes this video following the line between Coalville and Burton concerning. No train has run west of Coalville for a couple of years and, as a result, that section of the line is rapidly being reclaimed by nature.

This is doubly worrying because, though what people in Coalville want is a train to Leicester, it is this section between Coalville and Burton that the authorities now talk about reopening.

Anyway, thanks to Our History Underfoot. Like and subscribe. my children. Like and subscribe.

The Joy of Six 1522

"Why, if the homes are unregistered and therefore illegal, are English councils still placing children in them? And how can the system be reformed so this doesn't continue to happen?" Noel Titheradge investigates a continuing scandal.

James Meek looked at housing in Andy Burnham's Manchester om the eve of the last general election: "Burnham presides over a scale model of a future Starmer Britain, one where a social democratic leader full of genuine desire to mend the broken, over-marketised public realm is hamstrung by lack of resources and constrained by fear of frightening away the wealth-holders. Like England, Greater Manchester has its richer south, the Cheshire fringes where the golfing set and superstar footballers live, its great main city of hedonism and cranes and sky-high rents, and its decapitalised, struggling northern towns."

Rachel Dixon on the revival of the River Mease (rises in Leicestershire, flows through Derbyshire and joins the Trent in Staffordshire) by the communities on its banks.

"Old buildings give places a uniqueness that cannot be imported, exported, or copied. They contain distinctive details and period-specific materials that carry forward long-standing building traditions and preserve something intangible at first glance – the touch of time." Anita Straub makes the case for conserving historic buildings.

Daniel A. Kaufman distinguishes the 13 different social media personalities.

"The falling-off of the last few chapters is due to the need to fill the three-decker’s third volume, but that must surely be forgiven when Bevis and Mark and Frances make their winter ride through the ice-floes of The New Sea in the final stunning paragraphs." Brian Alderson pays tribute to Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies.

Mutant 'super pigs' breeding at uncontrollable levels in nuclear fallout zone

Congratulations to the Daily Star. Thanks to a nomination from a Liberal England reader, it has won our Headline of the Day Award.

Liz Crowther played Lucy in a 1967 adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was first adapted for the screen in 1967 by ABC Weekend Television. I was reminded of this when I watched the first episode of A Very Peculiar Practice on BBC4 last night and Liz Crowther was in the cast.

That's because Liz Crowther played Lucy Pevensie in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1969. Broadcast in ten 30-minute episodes, the series was written by Trevor Preston and directed by Helen Standage. According to Wikipedia, only the first and eighth episodes have survived, along with an audio recording of episode 7.

But there is some good news: half of episode 8 has found its way on to YouTube – in two parts. If you click on play above, you can watch a short section in which Liz Crowther features. 

Liz Crowther, the daughter of the comedian and Crackerjack ("Crackerjack!") host Lesley Crowther, trained as a dancer when she was a girl and has long been a highly regarded stage actress. 

Because of her success in the theatre, her 21 episodes as Sonia the Radio West receptionist in Shoestring has turned out to be her most substantial screen role. I discovered this adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and her part in it when researching a post on Shoestring earlier this year.

What do we Lib Dems offer the voters Zack Polanski has won over?

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It's easy for a Liberal Democrat with a good memory to find Zack Polanski irritating. His story that he stood for his local council as Lib Dem because he cared about proportional representation, but then joined the Greens because he found he agreed with them more, doesn't square with what we recall of him.

He didn't just stand for his borough council, he also stood for the London Assembly and was dead keen to be our candidate in the 2016 Richmond Park by-election. His complaints when he wasn't selected filled Lib Dem social media for ages afterwards.

In fairness to him, my best researches have found no trace of any democratic process behind that selection: Sarah Olney seems to have been simply announced as the candidate. If this was the case, it was understandable, as the party had found itself without a single woman MP after the carnage of the previous year's general election.

There was little sign of Polanski the eco-populist in those days. Here he is writing on Lib Dem Voice right after that election:

I want a leader who is proud of our Government record, who doesn't have blinkers about where we failed to communicate effectively with the electorate whilst still being immensely proud of what Nick and our colleagues achieved in office.

Well, we can all change our minds – in fact, politics would be better if more people changed their minds – but maybe the thread of continuity between old Zack and new Zack is that both are very good at judging what his audience wants to hear.

Again courtesy of Lib Dem Voice, you can also watch Polanski's performance at the conference rally from 2015 – his speech starts at 24:55 and then, you've been warned, there's music.

The media's attempted gotchas against Polanski – his council tax, his failure to vote and, most worrying if justified, his claimed professional qualifications – don't seem to have deterred voters, but they do suggest a rather disorganised individual.

What they should spend more time asking Polanski, of course, is where the substantial policies to support his rhetoric are and why he so rarely talks about the environment.

But however irritated we Lib Dems feel, a significant section of the electorate feels sympathy with his views. And they are voters – young, urban and radical, but without ancestral loyalty to Labour – that a Liberal party should be winning over.

Writing in the London Review of Books, James Butler gives a kinder account of Polanski's progress, suggesting that his journey is typical of that also taken by many of his new voters:

Polanski’s political journey – he started out as a Liberal Democrat – is sometimes framed as opportunism but in fact reflects the often radicalising economic experience of millennials now approaching middle age. 

Many of the instinctive policy positions of Green supporters are the common sense of a decade ago: opposition to austerity, borrowing for infrastructure, rent control and social housebuilding. 

But the environment has changed: borrowing is harder, energy supply unstable, inflation a drag, wages miserable; the world is less stable, chaos and conflict are inevitable. There is an opportunity to frame a coherent Green politics in response to this moment – an egalitarian politics of public affluence and energy sovereignty – but it cannot be a cargo-cult Corbynism.

What do we Lib Dems have to say to people radicalised by their economic experience over the last 10 or 20 years? Providing a good answer to that question will be key if we are again to be able to win seats outside the affluent South of England.

The Reform councillor who wants to turn Eccles into the "UK's Dubai"

The Manchester Evening News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

"Ambition? I had ambition once," remarked one of the judges.

The Joy of Six 1521

"Look at our responses to three of Labour’s flag ship pieces of legislation: the Employment Rights Bill, Great British Energy and taking the railways into public ownership. On each of these pieces of legislation, the Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons abstained on them. Why? I gather we attempted to amend each of them, but how? I could not tell any voter whether the Lib Dems supported or opposed Labour’s landmark legislation on employment, energy or transport, because I genuinely have no idea." Paul Hindley convicts the Lib Dems of timidity.

Sacha Hilhorst has interviewed Reform voters and she found them much more progressive than you think: "While it is true that Reform is building its base in former mining and manufacturing areas, the local people who can be won over to progressive politics will only be convinced by being less like Reform, not more. Winning in post-industrial England requires connecting with its popular radicalism."

"MPs who support the change have called for the bill to be brought back in the new parliamentary session, which begins on May 13. They have reportedly been joined in their demands by almost 200 peers in the Lords." Daniel Gover looks at the plans to reintroduce the assisted dying bill at Westminster.

Mark Urban on the effect decades of cuts have had on the BBC and its workforce.

Joy O'Toole introduces the work of Ngaio Marsh, one of the four Queens of Crime: "While she followed many of the same rules of the Golden Age-mystery genre, Marsh focused more on characterization and literary technique than plot. Inspector Alleyn is from an aristocratic family and well educated, like Sayers' Peter Wimsey and Allingham's Campion, but he’s a professional policeman and more down to earth."

"I think you have to decide for yourself whether both the Sufi and the Catholic aspects of Burton are equally represented; the freethinker is not. The outside of the it carries very clear Christian and Islamic symbolism in the shape of the cross and the crescents and stars. Inside the story is more complex." Mathew Lyons takes us inside the explorer Sir Richard Burton's mausoleum in Mortlake.

Alexander McCall Smith on publishing novels in serial form

Occasionally a writer will still publish a novel in instalments as the Victorians did. In the preface to his 44 Scotland Street, Alexander McCall Smith describes the genesis of the book in his meeting Armistead Maupin at a party in California. Maupin had originally published the first five of his celebrated Tales from the City books in this manner. 

On his return to Scotland, McCall Smith wrote an article about this meeting in The Scotsman, saying it was a shame that newspapers no long published serialised novels. The newspaper’s editorial staff took up the implicit challenge and, over an optimistic lunch, he found himself agreeing to publish a novel in that paper's pages in daily instalments:

The real challenge in writing a novel that is to be serialised in this particular way – that is, in relatively small segments – is to keep the momentum of the narrative going without becoming too staccato in tone. … Above all, a serial novel must be entertaining. This does not mean that one cannot deal with serious topics, or make appeal to the finer emotions of the reader, but one has to keep a light touch.

When the serial started to run, I had a number of sections already completed. As the months went by, however, I had fewer and fewer pages in hand, and towards the end I was only three episodes ahead of publication. This was very different, then, from merely taking an existing manuscript and chopping it up into sections. The book was written while it was being published. An obvious consequence of this was that I could not go back and make changes – it was too late to do that.

McCall has now written written 17 volumes in this 44 Scotland Street series, but I don’t know if he published any in serial form beyond the first two.

The Walker Brothers: No Regrets

By 1975 the Walker Brothers had got over the evening when they had their shirts ripped off in Market Harborough.

You can tell this single is from that era because of the gratuitous guitar solo. 

Call for police patrols at Agatha Christie beach

Our Headline of the Day Award goes to BBC News. 

The judges tell me that a housemaid and a retired colonel have already been poisoned, and that Miss Marple fears there will be a third murder.