A steam locomotive leaving Loughborough Central

In Loughborough today in connection with a thing, I didn't have time to visit the preserved Great Central Railway.

But I did strike lucky when I crossed a bridge just south of Loughborough Central station.

Labour's weakening of local government will do nothing for voters' confidence in the political system

So Harborough District Council is to disappear, subsumed into a single authority for the whole of the county outside the city of Leicestershire. And Leicester is to be expanded to make the hole in the doughnut bigger.

City boundaries have to be expanded from time to time, but I'm not sure the areas Leicester is taking will be delighted. For some years there has been criticism that its elected mayor Peter Soulsby, now in his fourth term, is keen on prestige projects in the city centre, but less interested in bread-and-butter issues like litter and the state of the pavements out in the suburbs.

Meanwhile, the abolition of all the district and borough councils in the county can only make government feel more distant, and this at a time when our democracy is being challenged from within and without. 

I was in Loughborough today. It's a large town with a university, but it will soon lose Charnwood Borough, the council that looks after it and its hinterland. And Leicestershire, of course, is not the only county seeing huge changes.

This revolution in local government was not mentioned in Labour's last manifesto and there has been little debate about it since the election. It does appear to have been set in place because Labour has a vision for revitalising local democracy, but simply because someone has told ministers that there is an ideal size for a council and many are smaller than this.

I am reminded of a comment by Lord Bonkers:

I’m told that when a Labour junior minister discovered that councils are not All The Same Size, he started screaming and had to be sent home in a taxi. 

"His glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice": On being the monarch's second son

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Being the second son of a monarch is a difficult career, because you cease to be of use to the family firm – assuming your older brother has healthy children – when you are still young.

Here's Jonathan Parry writing about Victoria's second son in the London Review of Books in 2020:

The monarch’s younger sons in each generation are fated to follow the same trajectory. Few now remember Prince Alfred – except tourists visiting the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town who assume that its name is a misprint for ‘Albert’. 

In the 1860s Alfred, Victoria’s second son, named after the founder of the English monarchy and, as a naval cadet, the first official imperial tourist, became a global superstar. Aged 14 he visited the Holy Land, a year later he conquered South Africa, and before he was 20 he was seriously proposed as king of Greece. Polkas were written for him. At 23 he toured Australia and survived an Irish assassination attempt; soon afterwards he was fêted in New Zealand, Hong Kong and India. 

But his glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice, he married a haughty Russian princess, and he ended in forced exile presiding over his father’s German duchy.

Discuss with relation to the careers of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Prince Harry (as indeed Parry does).

Val Doonican: Elusive Butterfly

I chose this as a Sunday music video when Val Doonican died in 2015. I wrote then:

Val Doonican is worth noticing for two reasons.

First, because younger generations will have no idea how popular a figure he was in his heyday. The Val Doonican Music Show ran on BBC1 for more than 20 years. And it was the characteristically named LP Val Doonican Rocks, But Gently that knocked Sergeant Pepper off the top of the album charts.

Second, because this is one of the first singles I remember – a cover of the American version by the song's writer Bob Lind, it reached no. 5 in 1966. I can recall being a little disturbed by the idea of someone outside my window when I woke up.

Listening to it today it is a good song, but far less rich and strange than it did in my six-year-old imagination. And Doonican seems unsure whether to be American or Irish.

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Sam Bright explains what is missing from the Covid Inquiry PPE report: "Long before the pandemic struck, the governing party had established a fundraising system that handed influence to those with the fattest chequebooks. The Conservatives, and Westminster as a whole, created the conditions for the PPE scandal long before even the first whiff of Covid in Wuhan."

Andrew Page shares his thoughts on the reaction to the death of Ann Widdecombe: "It has been deeply depressing to see some people going much further than this and celebrating her death online. Quite apart from the cruelty shown towards her family and friends, there is something profoundly corrosive about a society in which the death of another human being becomes an occasion for applause because we happened to dislike their opinions."

"Whilst working in public libraries, I experienced several attempts to censor library stock including a parent wishing me to withdraw art books from the library’s shelves, because they featured paintings or sculptures of nudes. Books featuring Black people of note were the subject of complaints as well as those about political figures of the time. I had parents complaining about Judy Blume’s books, which were aimed at a teenage audience, because they featured girls going through puberty and parents who were divorced." Meg Gain on Reform-led Warwickshire County Council's proposal to censor what children read.

"Residential family assessment centres have become a major part of England's child protection and family justice system, yet surprisingly little is known about whether they improve outcomes for children and families." King's College London reports research by Mary Baginsky and Rick Hood.

Tim Adams says Jude Bellingham is channelling the spirit of Duncan Edwards, his 1950s Black Country counterpart.

"In 1951 he helmed an adaptation of Josephine Tey’s bestselling The Franchise Affair. In it, a teenage girl accuses two respectable women living in a remote country house of having kidnapped, beaten and starved her in an attempt to force her to become their servant. The movie starts on a remote highway with a wild thunderstorm, and the young girl (Ann Stephens) pops up in the middle of the road in a startling close-up." Self-Styled Siren praises the neglected British director Lawrence Huntington.

What would have happened if St Pancras station had been closed?

In 1980 the were serious proposals, and not for the first time, to close both Marylebone and St Pancras stations in London.

Jago Hazzard takes us through the plans and why they came to nothing. Before I go any further, let my suggest you like this video, follow him on YouTube and have a look at his Patreon page.

One thing he does not explain is how trains from the Midland Main Line would have reached Euston. There was no existing connection they could have used nor any obvious new one that could have been built.

I don't know what the London Amenity & Transport Association had in mind in 1980, but a post on RailUKforums tells us what British Rail had in mind when there were serious plans to close St Pancras in the 1960s:

The broad outline plan was that the Bedford Suburban services would be diverted from St. Pancras into Moorgate, much as it happened later with Thameslink. Main Line services were proposed to be diverted from Market Harborough over the now closed line to Northampton, and into Euston, with the lines involved electrified. It was also proposed at one point that the line between Market Harborough and Bedford would close, with Wellingborough and Kettering losing their rail services. 

For about four years the St. Pancras to Nottingham Newspaper traffic, and the remaining St. Pancras to Glasgow overnight service were diverted to run out of Euston over the Northampton to Market Harborough route, before reverting to St. Pancras around 1970 after the station at St. Pancras had been reprieved.

Several floors of the old station Hotel at St. Pancras, which had been in use as offices, were relocated elsewhere during the period when closure seemed certain. Even after it was reprieved there was a lot of vacant office space left empty, and walking about up there could be very spooky at times.

It's worth reading the whole thread there. Other contributors say Bedford to Market Harborough would have remained open or that only the line between Kettering (Glendon North Junction be be precise) and Market Harborough would have closed.

I like the idea, possible if the latter closure had taken place, of a regular semi-fast service from St Pancras to Leicester via Corby and Melton Mowbray.

Ben Maguire welcomes dissolution of multi-academy trust over discipline concerns

There have been a growing number of stories in recent years about extreme disciplinary regimes in schools run by multi-academy trusts.

One of these has come to a head today, with the announcement by the Athena Learning Trust that it will dissolve itself transfer its schools to other organisations. The trust runs nine schools across Devon and Cornwall.

Ben Maguire, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Cornwall, reports BBC News, welcomed the announcement saying it was "an important step for pupils and parents". 

The report also says:

MP Ben Maguire said he had met a number of concerned parents, students, trust representatives and Department for Education officials in recent months following reports of "serious issues relating to SEND provision and concerns around student punishments".

In February. Cllr James Ball, the deputy leader of the Independent group on Cornwall Council, who has a child at one of the schools, organised a public meeting for parents after almost 3,000 suspensions were handed out, external at Camborne Science and International Academy during the 2023/24 academic year:

Ball said he had been told children had been removed from the classroom for reasons including a pen running out, putting their hand up at the wrong time and for looking out of the window.

The flourishing of such unreasonable regimes suggests there is a lack of democracy in British education today. Cornwall Council had no power to intervene because MATs are governed from the Ministry for Education in London.

The Conservatives are embarking on another purge

With the Conservatives languishing at 19 per cent in the latest YouGov poll, Kemi Badenoch has decided she knows what her party's problem is. It's appeal is too broad.

So, according to both Conservative Home and the Spectator, a new purge of its membership and elected representatives is underway. 

Oliver Dean writes on Conservative Home:

In a move which properly began last Friday, Badenoch announced that only those who back the Conservatives’ commitment to scrapping net zero and leaving the ECHR will be approved as parliamentary candidates. Anyone who won’t fall in line will be blocked, or have the whip removed altogether.

And he has worked out why those 14 years of Conservative government were such a disaster. It was because of Liberal Democrat infiltration:

One of the most enduring puzzles of the 14 years of Conservative rule was that, too often, it would talk right but govern left. It would big itself up, but falter at close to every opportunity. 

The gap was not an accident. It was the product of a parliamentary party which had, over the years, taken in a number of MPs that were too wet for their own good. That had adopted their Liberal Democrat values and changed the colour of their rosettes to sky blue. 

It became so persistent a problem that one can only label them as an infestation amongst the Conservative benches.

"Infestation"? I think we're getting a glimpse into the seething darkness of the writer's unconscious there.

Meanwhile Steerpike in the Specatator is troubled that:

the likes of Amber Rudd, former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson and former West Midlands mayor Andy Street remain in the party.

 I have lived to see the Conservative Party - the Conservative Party - putting ideological purity before the ability to win elections.

All this, of course, is good news for the Liberal Democrats, who gained dozens of seats from the Conservatives at the last election because people had come to see them as too extreme. Becoming more extreme isn't going to help the Tories fight back there.

Let's leave the final word to Adam Bienkov:

The thing about Kemi Badenoch's purge of any Conservative member to the left of Enoch Powell is that she's so close to a Tory revival if she only realised it. All she needs to do is to lead a party that is not obviously mad and wait for Reform to crumble, but she can't even manage that

— Adam Bienkov (@adambienkov.bsky.social) 14 July 2026 at 09:44

Why stage plays need a character that screenplays don't

Alexander Mackendrick didn't just direct The Man in the White Suit: he wrote the first draft of the screenplay.

In his book Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, Philip Kemp quotes Mackendrick on the genesis of that screenplay. It began life as an unperformed theatre play by his cousin Roger MacDougall:

"I did something really wicked: I took Roger's hero and gave him a minor role, and pivoted the whole story around a secondary character, the one played in the film by Alec Guinness, to make a new story entirely. And Balcon liked it, and approved it. When I showed it to Roger he got very indignant, and said, 'My God, you might as well have cut the hero out altogether!', and I said, 'Yes, well, I did actually think of doing that.'"

Having got over his initial pique, MacDougall went along with the further disruption of his play, and with the total elimination of his hero. "Something I discovered then," he recalls, "is that there's a character you need in a play, but you don't need in a film, because the camera takes over from him. It's Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, it's Horatio in Hamlet. The camera becomes that character who holds it all together – the viewpoint character, if you like. You don't need a person to do it for you."

Next time I watch an old British film that's too obviously been adapted from a stage play, I shall try to work out which character should have been left out.

Plans to bring Leicester's Il Rondo back to life

The Leicester Mercury has a story, but doesn't know the half of it:

New live music venue hopes for former board game cafe in Leicester city centre

An empty unit in Leicester city centre could be given a new lease of life as a late-night entertainment venue.

Generic Leisure Ltd has lodged an application seeking a licence for indoor sports events, plays, films, and live and recorded music at the site at 22 Silver Street.

Former board game cafe be damned. This was once Il Rondo, where some of the top Sixties bands played, naming it as their favourite venue in the city. 

It's the large red-brick building in the thumbnail above – play the video to hear more about its history. 

For many years it housed a branch of the Italian restaurant chain Prezzo. That occupied the ground floor: I'm told the stage and dancefloor are still in place upstairs.

The Malcolm Arcade stands on the site of what was once The Royal Opera House, Leicester.

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"The world-renowned academic institution has nothing to say in response to a six-month investigation by Byline Times raising serious concerns about the safeguarding of students and foreign influence at Cambridge University." Nafeez Ahmed, Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu ask why.

"Over the last ten years the question of Irish unity has moved to the centre of the Irish political stage. This surprisingly rapid change has been driven by demographic and economic trends, to the advantage of Irish nationalists both north and south of the border." Patrick Cockburn reviews For and Against a United Ireland by Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride.

Kate Moore says we need more trees: "The sooner we plant trees – ideally in groups, as solitary trees are more vulnerable – and nurture them through the early years, the cooler we'll feel.  So, whether your garden is small or large, it’s time to plant trees to give you your own shaded, and naturally air-conditioned space."

Brett DeJager finds that school teachers are "worried about academic dishonesty but also about assessment, student reliance, critical thinking, misinformation and privacy. Those concerns point to a practical challenge schools now face: how to preserve meaningful evidence of learning when AI can produce polished academic work."

From psychiatric wonder drug, to CIA mind warfare to teenage menace. Grant McPhee looks at LSD use through its evolving coverage in British newspapers.

Jospehine Botting watches 21 Days, a film made just before Vivien Leigh took the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and as her affair with Laurence Olivier was blooming. It captures the pair falling in love and on the cusp of stardom, but its producer Alexander Korda thought it was not good enough to release.

The nearest beach to Leicestershire and Birmingham

 Warning issued as beach closest to Leicestershire shuts amid health fears

So ran a headline in the Leicester Mercury. I wondered where the nearest beach to Leicestershire is. Hunstanton? Skegness? 

But it is, of course, on Rutland Water.

The story is about the brief closure (it was reopened this morning) of the beach at Sykes Lane there because of dangerous levels of blue-green algae.

I took these photos some years ago at Whitwell Harbour, which is just along the coast but lacks sand.

Secret Birmingham has worked out that Rutland Water has the nearest Blue Flag beach to them too.

Council gives update on investigation into former Sheriff of Nottingham

Following dozens of nominations from oppressed serfs in Sherwood Forest, West Bridgford Wire wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood: Some Velvet Morning

The most 1967 track of all? More 1967 than David Hemmings Happens?

These random paragraphs from a Believer article by Madeleine Watts may explain what is going on:

Nancy Sinatra had, until the mid-sixties, been the favorite daughter of her famous father and a mediocre pop singer without a hit. Hazlewood changed that. He wrote “These Boots Are Made For Walking” for Nancy. He wrote “Sugar Town” for Nancy. And he wrote “Some Velvet Morning,” a song that Rolling Stone, The Daily Telegraph and other publications have called one of the greatest duets ever recorded.

Phaedra is a woman who loses her reason. In Euripides’ version of the story, Aphrodite compels her to fall in love with her stepson, Hippolytus—but Hippolytus spurns her advances. When Phaedra can no longer bear the guilt and the force of her feelings, she takes her own life. Full of fury, Phaedra leaves behind a note telling her husband, Theseus, that Hippolytus, has raped her. But Hippolytus never touched her.

Before Nancy, Lee Hazlewood was a cowboy of sorts. Born in Oklahoma to an oil wildcatter and a housewife, he grew up in Arkansas, Louisiana, and, finally, Texas. After serving in the Korean War, Hazlewood landed a job as a late-night radio DJ in Phoenix, Arizona. There, he started the label Viv, signing the twangy instrumentalist Duane Eddy and writing and producing tracks like “The Fool” for Sanford Clark and Al Casey’s “Surfin’ Hootenany.” In 1963, Hazlewood moved to Los Angeles and recorded his first solo record at Western Studios, Trouble Is A Lonesome Town. It was a concept album that told the stories of the residents of Trouble, hard-bitten songs laden with all the misfit character and southern gothic ennui of a Carson McCullers novel, and all the cheap sentiment of bad Hollywood Westerns. It sounded, and sounds, like nothing else. 

The velvet morning that is promised in Hazlewood’s song is predicated on the male vocalist being “straight.” But straight can mean a great many things.

Straight: Not crooked, direct, undeviating, in unbroken sequence. Of a person, well-conducted, steady. Of a drug-user, high.

In his essay 'Old Songs in New Skins,' Greil Marcus suggests, “One of the ways songs survive is that they mutate…. Sometimes this happens subtly, around the margins, in soundtracks or commercials. The song is moved just slightly off the map we normally use to orient ourselves – but in a way that, in a year or ten, may completely change how we hear it, what associations we bring to it. Pop songs are always talked about as the soundtrack to our lives, when all that means is that pop songs are no more than containers for nostalgia. But lives change and so do soundtracks, even if they’re made up of the same songs.” 

Gilbert Adair: The orphan has lost not only his parents but his status

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This post is about another essay by Gilbert Adair, but first a quotation from Sammy Going South by W.H. Canaway. If you've not seen the movie, this is a novel about a 10-year-old British boy whose parents are killed by an RAF raid on Port Said during the Suez Crisis of 1956:

Reminded by the scene he had witnessed, he thought, I’m an orphan! The idea intrigued him. He said aloud, "I'm an orphan!" savouring the words in the air. Then he said, experimentally, “My mummy and daddy are dead,” and wished he hadn't said it, for it made him feel sad. To say "I'm an orphan" sounded not sad, but – well, important. He repeated the words again.

In his essay 'Dr Barnardo's Orphans', Adair discusses this status once enjoyed by orphans:

The prominence accorded to the orphan by nineteenth-century novelists - not only Dickens, not only in this country - became in consequence rather hypertrophied when compared to his actual footing on the social hierarchy, both qualitatively and quantitatively; and, in a much-quoted witticism from The Importance of Being Earnest (Lady Bracknell's observation that the loss of both parents resembled 'carelessness'), Wilde, no devotee of Dickensian sentimentality, mocked what might be called the rampant orphanomania of the Victorians.

But, as Adair says, time moved on and the absence of war and disease meant there were no longer the waves of orphans there had once been. After the Second World War the term came to acquire a foreign, Third World connotation - Korean orphans, Vietnamese orphans. Meanwhile, Barnardo's was diversifying its childcare activities, moving far beyond just the provision of homes for orphans.

Adair, emphasising he means to respect to the children and that he is concerned only with their public image, says the result is that:

There now strikes one as something dated and irreducibly kitschy about an orphan: a Barnardo Boy reminds one of nothing so much as a Bisto Kid. In effect, the social specificity of a nineteenth-century orphan was contingent upon an uncompromisingly normative conception of society, from which he was therefore – if in this manner alone – not alienated, since he had been assigned a codified place within it, however luckless.

Today, or at least in 1986, when Adair's Myths & Memories was published:

When what would have been regarded until quite lately as unimaginable anomalies compete with each other for the attention of the sociologist, the social worker and the investigative journalist (single-parent families, lesbian mothers, test-tube babies), the orphan has lost not only his parents but his status.

It's worse than that. The Children and Young Persons Act 1969 sought to remove the stigma if criminality from children who broke the law and treat them like any other children who are in need of care. But its effect was to spread that stigma to all children in public care.

So it is thar, today, orphans being moved between care placements are likely to find themselves put in handcuffs. We have turned being an orphan into a crime.

Reader's Voice. So your diagnosis is that we have lost the concept of the "well-behaved orphan".

Liberal England replies: Precisely. But I can console myself that I did manage to slip the phrase into my book chapter on Oliver Twist.

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Toby Buckle argues that it's time for liberals to throw John Rawls under the bus. In his philosophy he guided the creed toward neutrality, but we can no longer afford that in the age of Trump .

"After huge reductions in first-time entrants and custodial sentences in the youth justice system in recent years, a smaller, more complex cohort of children remains. Their offending behaviours mask deep vulnerabilities including earlier childhood abuse and trauma, poor mental health, school exclusion and poverty. This cohort need stability and care to rehabilitate and change. Yet the custodial estate has seen an alarming deterioration in conditions in recent years, with two secure training centres, a young offender institution and the country's first secure school all closing on safety and quality grounds." Ann Graham on the need for reform in the treatment of children in custody.

Ekaterina Balabanova and Gemma Horton report research that finds the British press has undermined the European Convention on Human Rights over many years: "Arguably, the government’s current approach reflects some of this coverage: conceding ground on specific criticisms of the ECHR in order to salvage its overall legitimacy. But looking at the long history of press coverage, we suggest that this strategy will continue to erode legitimacy, rather than bolster it."

"On one level, perhaps, that is down to a regionally specific reluctance to seem overly expansive on certain topics ('No mysticism please, we’re British'). But I spend quite a lot of my time in a church context where talking about spiritual matters is normal, even encouraged – and, remarkably, even there very few are willing to open up; mundane matters swiftly return as the main subject of conversation whenever a spiritual matter comes up." Francis Young asks why we find it so difficult talk about numinous experiences.

"The football games we obsess over are the ones that tell a story." Natasha Chahal says this World Cup has been full of them.

Maysa Monção watches Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver: "More than the cab driver, the taxi is a character. It is the car that sees underground New York. It is the car that chases the scum of the earth: the pimps and hookers. From inside the taxi, there is a perspective of New York that must be eliminated. The marginalised inhabitants of New York don’t fit in Travis’s reactionary idea of a 'clean city'." 

Black market weight-loss jab factory found in stately home

Our Headline of the Day comes from BBC News. 

I noticed that Lord Bonkers was taking a keen interest in the finer details of the story.

Peter Knight on making sense of conspiracy theories

Professor Peter Knight gave this lecture on Making Sense of Conspiracy Theories at Gresham College, London, on 14 November 2024. You can download the full text, including academic references, from the college website: 

A common misconception is that belief in conspiracy theories is the result of a lack of accurate information or the circulation of mistaken information, whether accidental or deliberate. The assumption is that no one in their right mind would believe in such bizarre claims, unless they were the victims of a concerted campaign of deception and manipulation The idea is that people are fundamentally rational, and that they will adjust their beliefs when new evidence comes to life. And the implication is that if only we can transmit the correct information, then the mistaken belief will disappear.

But the reality in many cases is that misinformation doesn't turn people into conspiracy theorists. Instead, conspiracy theories often provide people with ready-made narrative justifications for identity positions they have already assumed. Although the usual picture of a conspiracy theorist is a loner, the process of developing conspiracy interpretations in online communities can give people a sense of community, purpose and belonging. Conspiracy theories need to be understood as collective, sensemaking narratives that help bolster worldviews, rather than as pieces of misleading information that alter individual beliefs.

Jonathan Coe on Kenneth Williams, sex and the Sixties

The novelist Jonathan Coe reviewed The Kenneth Williams Diaries for the London Review of Books when they were first published:

Williams found the perfect expression for his personality in the Carry On films – despite their superficially heterosexual orientation – and became such a cherished emblem of sexual insecurity for gay and straight audiences alike. 

For above all this series represents (and celebrates) a peculiarly English sexuality, one in which an addictive, almost obsessional interest in sex is combined with horror and gaucherie at the prospect of actually performing it. 

In this respect they preserve a far more accurate record of the sexual atmosphere of the Sixties than films of ‘swinging London’ like Blow Up or Darling, which offer adolescent fantasies of sexual freedom when the reality for most punters must have been closer to Carry On Camping, with Bernard Bresslaw and Sid James making a pathetic pilgrimage to a nudist camp in order to gaze longingly at the ‘birds’ – pop-eyed, helpless and fundamentally out of the running. 

What Williams and the leering, pickle-nosed James had in common, then, was their status as sexual spectators, mesmerised but fearful.

I remember being taken to see Carry On Camping at the cinema, when I must have been nine. 

But then I was taken to see Danny La Rue's Christmas show when I was eight. I was one of the children who came up on stage halfway through the show. For some reason, there weren't many children there.

Prince Harry visits hospital as brother William plays crazy golf and King Charles examines a penguin

This effort from Sky News, in which the Royal Family plays a starring role, wins it our Headline of the Day Award.

Norman Baker will not be happy with the judges.

Cromford Moor Mine and the legend of the Black Rocks

Assailed by hay fever, flying insects and stinging nettles, Gareth Icke is our guide for a walk in the hills above the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire/

With that setting, disused lead mines, white spoil heaps and unlikely-sounding local folklore, this video ticks a lot of Liberal England boxes.

For more like it, subscribe to The Walk on YouTube.

Gilbert Adair and when Jacques Derrida came to Loughborough

Today I thought of the writer Gilbert Adair, looked up his Guardian obituary from 2011 and found this gem:

He once told us on the arts desk of what had happened when he rang one of his publishers. "You aren't by any chance Red Adair," asked a secretary to whom his name clearly meant nothing. "No," he snapped back, "I'm unread Adair."

After I'd shared that on Bluesky, I dug out his book Myths & Memories, a collection of essays about and memories of British culture.

In one of the essays, 'Derrida Didn't Come', he writes about a conference at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that made an uneasy attempt to come to terms with literary theory:

The third tactic, and undoubtedly the most radical, is that, simply, of non-appearance. It has, I venture to suggest, become so axiomatic of these events for the most prestigious guests to fail to arrive that their absence now qualifies as almost an intrinsic part of their experience. Thus, at the ICA, neither Jacques Derrida nor Nathalie Sarraute, the two stars of the seminar, 'disappointed' our expectations, if one may so phrase it, by making an appearance.

Derrida did turn up sometimes. I know that because I once heard him give a paper to a literary conference at Loughborough University. And, thanks to a news story on the university website about an academic who later wrote a play about the occasion, I can tell you that this conference took place in November 2001. 

Besides the essays, Adair's book contains 400 random memories of news stories and popular culture from when he was young: 

70. I remember reading Nineteen Eighty-four when the year itself seemed to belong to some dim and unknowable future.

192. I remember the Danish musical humorist Victor Borge, each of whose one-man shows seemed a tremendously prestigious affair.

265. I remember Michael Fagin, the intruder who breezed into the Queen's bedroom.

355. I remember Fyfe Robertson.

If I were setting down 400 of my own such memories today, 15 years after his death, I might include:

1. I remember Gilbert Adair

Tory fury at VAT on school fees is all about social class

There was a story the other day about dozens of Labour MPs failing to mention the private schools they had attended in their Who's Who entries. I wasn't surprised by this: if I find it difficult to discover which schools a Labour MP attended, I generally assume they were privately educated.

But what was striking was the accusation by the Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake that 

"Their hypocrisy knows no limits. While they plot around the Cabinet table to impose this spiteful tax on education, many Labour MPs have been busy covering up their own private school educations. They have no shame in pulling up the ladder behind them."

Because it is a naked appeal to upper-class solidarity. If you benefited from an unfair educational system, it implies, you are duty-bund to ensure that people of your class can continue to enjoy that advantage.

In reality, there's nothing hypocritical about deciding that a system you went through yourself should be reformed or abolished. I'd say it is a sign of a mature intellect, and we expect the Labour Party, even the timid version of it we see today that never mentions social class, to believe in fairness.

But sending their children to private schools is what upper class people do. It's an important part of their identity. Question the practice, and the clang of closing ranks is resounding.

And that solidarity can take extreme forms, as Alex Renton discovered when he went public about the abuse he had suffered as a small boy at his expensive prep school:

The reaction to my story was immediate – and shockingly personal.  "You’re a class traitor," said one friend, whose son had just started at  Eton. I thought she might have been joking – but she wasn’t the only one.

A few days after publication I was at a smart Edinburgh art gallery  party, standing with a glass of free wine in a group of people I  vaguely know. "Don’t stand too close to Renton!" one of them, an old  Etonian businessman, suddenly announced, grabbing my arm. "He might put  his hand down your trousers!" Most of the group chuckled. 

You may disagree with Labour's imposition of VAT on school fees, but there's nothing hypocritical about the policy.

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"Progressive politicians must see social media as a means to an end. If they’re swallowed by social media, they’ll lose their moral core. What’s more – and much worse – making social media the training school of modern politics risks giving a megaphone to fascists and racists who are able to preach their gospel of hate to millions without interruption." Sam Bright on the curse of influencer-politicians.

Jack Dyson reports on the consequences of falling school rolls. One in three councils expect more than a fifth of primary school places will be unfilled next year. 

"We used to think AI-generated fiction would always be obvious, and we were not prepared. Over the coming years, agents, editors, and slush readers at every level are going to need to educate themselves on how AI writes." Bona Books inadvertently bought a short story written by Artificial Intelligence for an anthology of queer speculative fiction.

Jennifer Davey offers a short round up of football-related contributions to Hansard over the years.

Malcolm Pein, the English Chess Federation’s delegate to the game's governing body FIDE and a candidate for its next deputy president, is interviewed about the long fight to break Russia's political grip on chess: "Russia has basically hijacked FIDE – just go to the FIDE website and look at where the employees come from: Russian head of PR, Russian head of legal and so on."

"This is as much a novel of working class intellectualism (Hamer deploys a quotation from Macbeth without ostentation) as it is about the compromises of electoral politics. Shawcross and his children want comfort and security and health, but they also want the fruits of the knowledge and experience held by this culture that has turned them into marginal drudges of the machine age." With the accession of Andy Burnham imminent, Discontinued Notes looks again at the work of Howard Spring, 'the Dickens of Manchester'.

Paddington Bear: Slapstick, boosting Jeremy Clarkson's career and becoming our grim reaper

Paddington Bear is a couple of years older than me, so I had one of the books about him when I was a little boy. 

I quite liked the Paddington stories and certainly liked his friendship with Mr Gruber, who treated what was essentially a furry child as though he were an equal. Children really appreciate characters like that.

But you didn't have to grow that old before you started to find all the slapstick a bit babyish. And then there was the weak characterisation. The son of the Brown household was called Jonathan, and he added little to the action beyond saying "Crikey!" now and then. I was bound to notice that.

But the television and film adaptations have made the meh bear a huge cultural figure. Not only has he become the 21st century's grim reaper, conducting the dead to the underworld- more of that in a moment - he was also partly responsible for Jeremy Clarkson's television career.

Here's part of a post I wrote a couple of years ago:

Clarkson and the BBC go back a long way. All the way back to 1973, when as a 13-year-old, be played Atkinson in BBC Radio 4 serialisations of the Jennings books.

Then he went to public school, his fees paid from his mother's business making Paddington Bear toys. And the BBC was Paddington-friendly even before the animations with Michael Hordern's voice, because Michael Bond was a cameraman with them. So you got exclusive Paddington stories in your Blue Peter annual.

And, then, of course, the BBC's Top Gear made Clarkson a millionaire. A little gratitude wouldn't come amiss.

Personally, I'd have taken Paddington's marmalade sandwiches off him for that.

And his new role as our angel of death? Here's the abstract for Jennifer Riley and Matthew Hilborn's paper (Br)Exit pursued by a bear: Paddington's polysemic political power as the `new Grim Reaper':

Though hailing from distant “darkest Peru”, Paddington Bear has become a bastion of British identity. His critically-acclaimed films (2014, 2017, 2024), starring icons of British cinema, trade on nostalgic national tropes. This symbolic imbrication peaked in 2022, starring alongside Queen Elizabeth II in her Platinum Jubilee celebrations – and later becoming a symbol of collective mourning, materially and digitally, after her death. Paddington – endangered and repeatedly imperilled onscreen – thus became the Establishment’s new mor(t)al totem, what Douglas Davies would call a ‘paradigmatic’ figure ‘good to think’ in life, and in death. 

His incongruously cuddly ‘Grim Reaper’ became a globally recognisable meme. Yet, since symbols are malleable, and film-based memes subversive and satirical, Paddington has proved a provocative meme(nto mori). Analysing social media posts (X, Instagram) and the films, this article explores Paddington Bear the Grim Reaper as politically polysemic. 

If, following Robert Hertz, society grieves those ‘in whom it incarnates itself, and with whom it identifies itself’, Paddington’s mortal multivocality forces a reckoning. Whose lives – and deaths – are grievable? And which version of Britishness should Paddington embody: the polite, Establishment-aligned “Good Immigrant”, or the racialised, once-incarcerated refugee?

 I thought such wordp(l)ay had gone out of fashion in academia in the early Nineties: I do hope it's not making a comeback. Anyway, if you really want to, you can read the whole article online.

And if you didn't believe me about Jeremy Clarkson being in Jennings, here's a cutting to put your doubts to rest. 

Bankers have raised potential money-laundering concerns over transactions involving senior Reform UK figures

The Guardian reports that a host of transactions involving Reform UK's most senior figures, and some donations to the party, have led bankers to report potential money-laundering concerns to the National Crime Agency (NCA).

According to the newspaper, finance industry figures have raised at least four suspicious activity reports (SARs) relating to transactions involving senior figures in Reform. It names them as:

• One relates to a £1m donation made to Britain Means Business, a fundraising organisation for Reform UK, before the last general election. Half of the £1m was then transferred by Tice, as director of the company, to Reform UK. Renamed from Leave Means Leave, Britain Means Business is a company that is used to help fund Reform. The £1m seemingly came from the aristocrat and Reform UK donor Fiona Cottrell. In this instance, the Guardian understands bank staff were not satisfied that the funds had ultimately come from her. The NCA has sought help from a foreign partner agency to trace the original source of the funds.
• Two other SARs relate to a loan from George Cottrell to Tice. The loan was made shortly before Tice finalised a property purchase and made a party donation, and was not repaid until after those two transactions were completed, according to sources. George Cottrell is the son of Fiona Cottrell, and is a convicted fraudster, former deputy treasurer of Ukip and close associate of Farage.
• A fourth relates to the £5m gift from the Thailand-based businessman Christopher Harborne to Farage, which was first revealed by the Guardian in April.the 

The Guardian says Richard Tice, Reform's deputy leader, has declined to answer any of the questions put to him and, via lawyers, threatened to injunct the paper prevent the publication of these details.

Earlier this week, the same paper the Guardian revealed that the undisclosed and much-discussed £5m gift to the Reform's leader, Nigel Farage, from a cryptocurrency billionaire shortly before the 2024 general election had been reported to the NCA.

As far as Farage is concerned, this week is resembling the scene late in Shakespeare's King John where messengers arrive from all directions with bad news. And it's only Wednesday.

Later. The Guardian has published a second article with more details of the transactions in question.

Free: Wishing Well

The singles chart at the start of the Seventies, before glam rock's sparkly hands got around its throat, was an eclectic place and you sometimes found quite heavy bands like Free having hits.

And music moved on so quickly then that it's surprising to learn that Free's singer Paul Rodgers was in a school bond with Bruce Thomas of the Attractions. It feels like they should have come from different generations.

"Ahaarrrr!" A voiceover session from hell

One of my favourite podcasts is the Chelsea Fancast, which has kept me informed and entertained through my club's recent travails. Its two regular presenters are Stamford Chidge and JK.

Stamford Chidge, I worked out eventually after putting the clues together, is David Chidgey. He's a former television producer, a psychotherapist and the son of the late David Chidgey, who was Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh from 1994 to 2005, and the pilot of the Liberal Democrat spacecraft Bird of Liberty in the early years of Lord Bonkers' Diary.

JK is not such a mystery. He is Jonathan Kydd, son of the once-ubiquitous British film actor Sam Kydd and an actor, writer and voiceover artist in his own right.

In this short film, which has won many festival awards, he plays both the actor and the director in a voiceover session from hell.

And to prove that all rabbit holes join up eventually, he writes on his website that, when he was a boy, Alexander Mackendrick saw him several times for the title role in Sammy Going South.

Navigating for Change calls for more investment in Fenland rivers

A flotilla of boats will make its way up the Great Ouse from St Ives to Bedford this month to highlight a critical lack of investment in the river and in Britain’s inland waterways generally.

Organised by the Great Ouse Boating Association and Fund Britain’s Waterways, the Navigating for Change campaign cruise will take place from July 13-18, travelling some 25 miles along the Great Ouse.

The flotilla will stop at riverside towns including Huntingdon and St Neots before arriving at the Bedford River Festival on July 17

The cruise is intended to draw attention to the growing funding crisis affecting waterways managed by the Environment Agency, which is responsible for maintaining the River Great Ouse in a safe and navigable condition.

According to the organisers, the Environment Agency has identified an annual funding shortfall of between £6m and £11m across the Anglia region. They say that around 40 of the region’s 60 locks and weirs are approaching the end of their operational lives, with no capital renewal programme in place.

Campaigners argue the consequences are already being felt across the network. Navigation on the River Cam was suspended for more than 18 months during 2024/5 following the structural failure of two lock islands, with repairs estimated to cost £10m. Meanwhile Brandon Lock on the Little Ouse remains closed because of a lack of funding for repairs and channel clearance.

For more information on the flotilla and Navigation for Change, go to Towpath Talk.

The major parties should boycott Farage's dodgy by-election

Liberal Democrat HQ doesn't need much encouragement to ignore unpromising parliamentary by-elections these days - it's worryingly reminiscent of the Nick Clegg years.

But in the case of the Clacton by-election Nigel Farage has just engineered, we would be right to ignore it. We should not field a candidate.

And the other major parties shouldn't field one either.

In a move straight from the Trump playbook, Farage wants to turn his by-election into a people versus the Establishment election. He says the voters of his constituency should be the judge of his actions.

The people of Clacton can vote how they choose, but they have no power to overturn the rules the House of Commons has put in place to regulate the conduct of its members.

So if this is an attempt by Farage to dodge an inquiry into his exotic finances, it will fail.

Let him be opposed by boring Count Binface and a cast of assorted nutters. The major parties should have nothing to do with his by-election.

The Joy of Six 1544

"The plunder of children’s services by business is one of the big scandals of our time. Children’s homes, special schools and foster care services are increasingly run for profit. Almost every time a child is removed from their family, somebody, somewhere cashes a cheque." Martin Barrow looks at one company that received £500m from local councils last year for the care and support of children and young people.

Rory Jones finds that "England is beginning to develop a cooling divide, one in which access to protection from extreme heat increasingly depends on where people live, how much they earn and the type of home they occupy."

Does becoming a parent lead politicians to focus more on the future? Research by Chris Hanretty and Sarah Childs questions the assumption that it does: "There is no single effect of parenthood upon future focus: rather, parenthood affects men and women differently. Fatherhood causes a small increase in future focus sustained across a range of topics. ... Motherhood, by contrast, causes a decline in future focus.

"The exhibition showcased Freud’s lifelong fascination with human faces and figures, covering several different types of drawings – from pencil, pen, and ink portraits to charcoal works and etchings. In addition, several paintings were also included in the exhibition to illustrate the relationship between Freud’s works on paper and those on canvas." JacquiWine went to the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Sean Burns on Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, which bombed at the box office on release but is now recognised as a classic: "I was struck by how relevant Sweet Smell of Success seems today, when we’re seeing people who know better grovel and prostrate themselves for proximity to power on a daily basis, submitting to humiliation rituals live on cable news the way Sidney dutifully jumps to light Hunsecker's cigarettes."

Quentin Shaw on the miracle of glow worms and the threat to them from artificial light at night: "It is something of a mystery that glow worms came to be so widespread. Surveyors have noticed that the places where the beetles survive today are often sites of ancient human habitation. Perhaps people deliberately introduced them, to brighten their lives and to chase away the dark."