The Joy of Six 1527

"In the Wigan constituency, which has always been Labour-held but where Reform picked up 24 out of 25 seats in last month’s local elections, the governing party’s by-election message is focused squarely on Burnham. It is a cartoon of his face emblazoned across leaflets and Correx boards, along with the words “ANDY FOR US”. Labour branding is limited, pretty much, to what is legally required." Sienna Rodgers takes us inside the Labour campaign in the Makerfield by-election.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley interviews Gisèle Pelicot, whose courage transformed the debate around abuse, about survival, reclaiming confidence – and shutting down the tools of sexual exploitation.

Flip Chart Fairy Tales notes the end of the right's state-shrinking dream: "Far from Brexit being the cue for the Thatcher revolution’s last phase, it may mark the end of it altogether. ... It’s no wonder the small-staters are so exercised. They have now realised that tomorrow belongs to someone else."

"When you launch a product that's designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn't that you haven't told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them." Brian Phillips nominates the 40 most rage-inducing problems in tech.

JacquiWine praises Rumer Godden's novel The Battle of the Villa Fiorita: "I loved this evocative, immersive read, a psychologically astute exploration of the impact of a woman’s adulterous affair and subsequent divorce on her two adolescent children, fourteen-year-old Hugh Clavering and his younger sister Caddie, who is almost twelve."

"Born in 1918, Denys Fisher was raised in a railway carriage in a field in Leeds in a family full of inventors, free thinkers, and social reformists with connections to women's suffrage." Eleanor Tait talks to Duncan Fisher about his father, the man who invented Spirograph.

Spencer Davis Group: Watch Your Step

The closing track of the Spencer Davis Group's second album, which was imaginatively titled The Second Album. It was Bobby Parker, a Black American artist, who wrote and first performed this song.

Professor Quatermass in Hemel Hempstead

Last night I watched Quatermass 2 on Talking Pictures TV – it's currently on the stations catch-up service TPTV Encore.

In the clip above you can see Professor Quatermass sweeping into the remote settlement of Winnerton Flats. In reality, it's the new town of Hemel Hempstead under construction.

The road we see him driving down is Galley Hill, the houses where he stops of ask directions are in Someries Road and the community centre is on Boxted Road. See Reelstreets for some now and then photographs.

This is of particular interest to me as I lived in Boxted Road as a small boy from 1964 to 1969. Everything was completed by then and I don't remember anything as temporary-looking as the community centre.

Not far from these film locations in Hemel Hempstead you will find a Quartermass Road and Quartermass Close. A misspelled tribute to the film? No, they have a darker origin.

Here's a report from the Derby Daily Telegraph for 17 July 1896:

A Girl Outraged and Murdered at Hemel Hempstead 

At six o'clock on Thursday night the dead body of a young girl named Quatermass was found by the side of lonely lane near Hemel Hempstead, Herts. There was every evidence that the child had been brutally outraged and murdered. 

A blow, apparently with a heavy, sharp-edged instrument, had been inflicted the back of her head. There was large pool of blood in the lane, and the body had been carried some 50 yards and hidden behind the hedge. 

The child had been Fields End Farm, Boxted, and was on her way home when attacked. No arrest has been made.

Note the name used in this early report: Quatermass. The girl's first names were Katharine Mabel or Katie.

It seems the family used or was called both Quatermass and Quartermass, but later reports, such as that from the inquest on the child where such things were presumably checked, used the latter form. And if "outraged" meant sexually assaulted in newspaper reports of the day, then the later consensus is that she was not attacked in this way.

There is a Fields End Farm nearby – indeed, I used to play there in the Sixties – but most reports, and the story was reported across the country, say that Katie had called at Boxted Farm because she was murdered.

No one was ever convicted of the killing. The shepherd who found her body was charged, but the case was thrown out early on as the evidence was deemed to weak to form the basis of a conviction.

I don't suppose Hammer Films knew this story when they sent Professor Quatermass to Hemel Hempstead, so it stands as a remarkable coincidence.

Two snorts and a smile: A new study of James Bryce reviewed

James Bryce was an academic who became a Liberal MP and then a diplomat – he served as Britain's ambassador in Washington from 1907 to 1913. He doesn't sound or look the sort of person to give rise to humour, but Jonathan Parry's review of a new study of Bryce for the London Review of Books won two snorts and a smile from me.

First snort (I have a dark sense of humour):

His schoolmaster father, a devoted geologist and botanist, taught him to observe the beauties of the natural world, believing that revelation and natural science were God’s complementary ways of communicating his love for mankind. He was killed in a rockfall while exploring above Loch Ness.

Second snort (some seats always have generated more casework):

He found the workload as MP for Tower Hamlets unmanageable, and escaped to a smaller constituency, Aberdeen South, in 1885.

The smile (I've always had a weakness for donnish humour):

Bryce’s book offered a comprehensive analysis of American political institutions, including state legislatures and political parties, and was founded on much reading and many interviews with Americans (Stefan Collini once suggested that his "genius largely consisted in an infinite capacity for taking trains.")

This is a good opportunity to recommend again Parry's recent short book Liberalism, which I reviewed for Liberator last year. 

He argues that we should not see thinkers like T.H. Green and L.T. Hobhouse as staking out a new path, which the Liberal Party then followed. Rather, they were attempting to systematise and justify what Liberal politicians and journalists were already doing and saying.

Michael Meadowcroft (1942-2026)

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Sad news on Liberal Democrat Voice this morning: Michael Meadowcroft has died at the age of 84.

His victory in Leeds West in 1983 – the first Liberal gain from Labour at a general election in decades – was one of the few high points of what was, in the context of the Alliance's hopes and ambitions, a deeply disappointing election night.

By then Michael already had a reputation as the Liberal Party's thinker – I remember the frisson when he turned up on the final day of a Union of Liberal Students conference in Leeds in 1979. His pamphlets for Liberator gave you some hope that there was still a coherent Liberal philosophy that was distinct from centrism or social democracy.

Michael was unable to hold Leeds West in 1987 and the West Leeds Dispatch summarises his later career:

Following his defeat he turned to journalism and was a columnist in The Times and The Yorkshire Post. In later years he wrote obituaries of political figures for both The Guardian and Yorkshire Post.

From 1990 he was a consultant to new and emerging democracies and for 26 years led or was a member of 50 missions to 35 different countries

His attempt to run a continuing Liberal Party after the foundation of the Liberal Democrats soon foundered, and he later joined the merged party. It's a mark of his forbearance that he never once objected to my purloining his name to give to Lord Bonkers' gardener.

John Rogers wanders the City of London’s passages and alleyways

I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons the "London isn't safe" propaganda has gained such a hold is that the city has changed so much in recent decades. I hardly recognise the skyline from the days when I worked there in the 1980s.

But maybe London has always been like that. Go back another 40 years from when I knew it well and you would find a very different cityscape of bombsites and ruins.

Still, a lot of "the old London" remains. In fact, I was surprised how much of it John Rogers found on this walk.

Here's his YouTube blurb.

Join me on a fascinating London walk through the City of London's narrow alleyways, passages and lanes, where many secrets of its past are revealed. 

We explore the rich London history, discovering historical plaques that mark sites like the Worshipful Company of Masons and Jonathan's Coffee House, a pivotal location for early stock market activity. 

This journey into hidden London offers unique facts about the city's enduring legacy from Roman London through Tudor London to the modern day.

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

The fault, dear Mandy, is not in your stars, but in yourself

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Someone once  asked Max Clifford: "Max, if you're so brilliant at public relations, why does everyone think you're a cunt?"

Similarly, I would like to ask Peter Mandelson why, if he's such a master of the dark arts, he's always being found out.

Perhaps the answer is to be found in this character sketch by John Crace:

Betrayal is Mandelson’s lifeblood. It’s there in his treatment of Wes Streeting. Poor trusting Wes. A man more used to stabbing others in the back. Wes looked up to Mandy. Treated him as a mentor. How did Peter repay him? By bitching about him being "pathetic" and going through an "early mid-life crisis". 

Then there’s Pat McFadden. Peter encourages Pat to confide in him. Gets him to say the government is directionless. That Keir is weak. That Labour MPs just go on about what taxes to raise so they can give welfare payments to others. Pat’s reward? To be dismissed in an email to Patrick Vallance as an insignificant lightweight.

Nor is Keir Starmer spared. There’s no sense of gratitude for the prime minister having taken a punt on him for the Washington job. For Peter that was no more than he had rightly deserved. The culmination of a lifetime’s brown-nosing the rich, the corrupt and the powerful. So Mandelson happily trash talks Keir to anyone willing to listen. "Rubbish in, rubbish out."

He doesn’t even bother to conceal what he's doing. He’s never happier than when he’s promoting discontent and division. Turns out he hates Labour every bit as much as the Tories do.

People who never use AI are very bad at spotting AI-generated text

AI use is seeping out of business and science writing and into the  world of literature. And that, says Malin Hay in a post on the London Review of Books blog, is a problem, because literary editors may be the worst equipped to spot text generated by it:

Experimenters in the US last year showed nine subjects a series of articles, half written by humans and half generated by ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models. Asked to guess which of the texts were human, the four subjects who rarely or never used ChatGPT in their daily lives scored "at a similar rate to random chance", while the five who used chatbots almost every day at work collectively misidentified only one in three hundred texts.

So how do you spot AI-generated fiction? Hay says familiar tells include a fondness for em dashes and for the formulation "not x, but y", which it has favoured since GPT-3. But at the start of her post Hay quotes three passages that use neither of these but still have a distinct whiff of AI.

She offers suggests some more sophisticated indicators of the use of AI fiction:

Some of the markers seem to be lexical: AIs like talking about sweetness, loudness, quiet, age and beauty. There is a lot of insisting in AI-generated texts, as well as a lot of promising, a lot of permitting and a lot of filling up. 

Another sign is the overuse of tricolons ("something neat, something pleasing, a quiet violence made beautiful"). And bots often leave out definite articles from phrases where they’re not strictly necessary: "Coffee and cocoa leaned wild", "rain in teeth" or, from later in The Serpent, "Sita became obstacle by existing."

There is a flatness or evenness to AI-generated texts: Wikipedia's guide to detecting AI says that LLMs "tend to omit specific, unusual, nuanced facts" and "replace them with more generic, positive descriptions". 

The strange thing about this evenness is that it isn’t usually couched in neutral language: "a flood that chokes but insists upon being swallowed" is violent, but not vivid. Even if you had your face shoved into a cake, it wouldn’t "flood" your mouth. The prosody is so smooth that you feel a lack of pressure despite the description of gross or vile acts; it rings hollow. It fills you with its nothing.

The Serpent is a short short by Jamir Nazir called The Serpent in the Grove which recently won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, only to give rise to suspicions that AI played a part in its production. You can read it and judge for yourself.

Incidentally, I have long been fond of parenthetic dashes myself, but use en dashes for the job on this blog. That's because em dashes tend to look clumsy in online text. 

This fondness dates back to the days when I wrote for David Boyle at Liberal Democrat News. I noticed that whenever I used brackets in my writing he struck them out, but he let dashes through.

The Joy of Six 1526

Daniel Katz report that the Makerfield by-election has become a poisoned chalice for Reform UK because of its choice of candidate.

"Over the past couple of decades, many progressives have found themselves in an awkward and novel position. As defenders of existing political institutions, as defenders of norms of civility and moderation, as technocratic policymakers shifting policies at the margin in response to past evidence." Ben Ansell argues that the left has ceded political radicalism to the right.

Lorna Finlayson defends universities as a 'space for exceptions': "The perception is that students and academics do nothing all day but doss around and mull over the meaning of life. It’s not really true – academics work on average far more than their contracted hours, while many students have developed concerningly puritanical tendencies – but, in my view, things were better when it was truer: people not only had a better time, but probably did better and more interesting work, when they were less pressured and given more slack."

Peter Jukes on the leaked documents that show the Kremlin’s influence machine now combines paid influencers, fake citizens and "cognitive strikes" to inflame tensions and shape European politics.

"Dead of Night exerted its greatest power through the manipulation of time. By sliding temporal planes over each other and curling events round to their beginning, the film found a fiendish new way to mess with a viewer’s head." Malcolm Gaskill praises Ealing Studios' 1945 portmanteau horror film.

"It’s hard to imagine so many being spooked by a soft-spoken woman who didn’t consume alcohol, smoke, or even drink caffeine, but in an industry so used to dominating over female singer-songwriters, dealing with a forthright black woman who had no intention to follow the rules probably sent a few industry bigwigs over the edge." Stephanie Phillips salutes Joan Armatrading.

Jill Sobule: I Kissed A Girl

When Jill Sobule died last year, GLAAD reported:

Sobule’s manager, John Porter, said in a statement to media: "Jill Sobule was a force of nature and human rights advocate whose music is woven into our culture. I was having so much fun working with her. I lost a client and a friend today. I hope her music, memory, & legacy continue to live on and inspire others."

Long before Katy Perry’s version, in 1995, Sobule released a song titled "I Kissed a Girl" and it hit the mainstream making history by becoming the first song with blatantly queer themes to break the Billboard Top 20.

And when Perry released her "I Kissed a Girl", Sobule said:

"As a musician I  have always  refrained from criticizing another artist. I was, 'well, good for her.' It did bug me a little bit, however, when she said she came up with the idea for the title in a dream. In truth, she wrote it with a team of professional writers and was signed by the very same guy that signed me in 1995. I  have not  mentioned that in interviews as I don’t  want to sound bitter or petty... cause, that’s not me. 

"Okay, maybe, if I  really think about it, there were a few jealous and pissed off moments. So here goes, for the first time in an interview: Fuck you Katy Perry, you fucking stupid, maybe 'not good for the gays,' title thieving, haven’t heard much else, so not quite sure if you’re talented, fucking little slut. 

"God that felt good."

She later had to be explain to outraged but dim Perry fans that she was being facetious.

"I invited guests to play with bomb in my garden"

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BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award:

Valerie, however, feels sorry to see it gone.

She says she stood the bomb by her shed so anyone who wanted to could look at it. "People used to think 'that's marvellous, where'd you get that from? Is it alright?'.

"They all used to play about with it and say it was a bit of a party piece.

"When anyone came around, I'd say: 'Do you want to see the bomb?'."

Victorian schoolboys were not at all Victorian

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Here's more grist for my theory that the Victorians were far less Victorian than we imagine.

In Uppingham the other week I picked up a copy of Gillian Avery's Victorian People. Here she is on the Victorian schoolboy:

Much was to be written of godliness and manliness in reference to the education of Victorian boys. But manliness as understood by the early and mid-Victorians did not include reserve and a stiff upper lip. This was a much later development. Both in reality and in fiction, there were frequent, unashamed displays of emotion in boys' schools. 

Boys wept and flung their arms around each other as they protested eternal friendship; they threw themselves on the ground and clasped their masters' knees as they expressed their penitence, the schoolboys at Wellington wept as they heard their headmaster's last sermon. Master and pupil would kneel together to pray for guidance, a headmaster and his staff sometimes wept during staff meetings if there was a difference of opinion, friendships between boys between master and pupil were of an intensity that would now be considered dangerous.

This must be borne in mind by the modern reader of Tom Brown and Eric. The scenes where the dying Arthur persuades Tom to give up the use of cribs in preparing his Latin; or where Eric, on his knees, "his blue eyes drowned with tears," implores the headmaster to show leniency towards his friend, are not extravagant inventions of the writers concerned, but were perfectly possible in the emotional climate of the mid-19th century.

The caste of mind we think of as Victorian did not flourish until the later years of the queen's reign and it reached its fullest development well into the 20th century. I suspect the British stiff upper lip reached peak rigidity as a reaction to the unthinkable losses of the First World War.

And if private schools were designed to produce men fitted to keeping up the British Empire, they went on doing so for years after than empire had ceased to exist.

Victoria reigned for almost 64 years, so applying her name as an adjective to describe a rapidly changing society across that period is a foolish thing to do. It's almost as silly as using the term "Elizabethan" to describe British society between 1952 and 2022 would be.

The suspicions of Beaver Hateman: Kate Summerscale on the Uncle Books

I read the first ‘Uncle’ book in the British Council library in Santiago, Chile, when I was about eight and my father was working as a diplomat in the city. I borrowed the next five volumes of the series in turn. 

I was delighted by Uncle – a millionaire elephant who wears a purple dressing gown, engages in savage skirmishes and is wildly generous to his followers – and he became more famous in our family than Babar. When we returned to England, I was amazed that no one seemed to have heard of him.

So wrote Kate Summerscale in The Complete Uncle, a collected edition of all six of the Revd J.P. Martin's books that was published in 2013.

It now fetches silly prices, just as the individual titles did before it was published. Which makes you wonder why the books have not remained in print.

Years before The Complete Uncle appeared, Imogen Russell Williams asked the same question in the Guardian, under the headline The Elephant Not in the Room:

Bizarrely, Jonathan Cape, the original publishers, don't want to reissue Uncle because the protagonist is rich, capitalist and deeply complacent, and therefore the books are "classist". But no one can fail to detect the gleeful humour and wry justice in the lampoons propagated by the Badfort tribe, even as they applaud the righteous wrath with which Uncle "kicks up" offenders 50 feet into the air. ...

Insurgent little pamphlets are dropped by Hitmouse from rickety biplanes: "TO ALL FREE CITIZENS: This is to announce that we have at last completed our plans against Uncle, the arch-bully, tyrant, and boaster!" Described by the Independent as "Animal Farm for pre-teens", Martin's sly ridicule of the imperious and pompous master of Homeward should be required reading for all baby Lefties.

With his hating book, where he writes the names of his enemies, and the skewers he uses as weapons, Hitmouse anticipated the modern journalist. But I will admit his Badfort News was my model when I wrote Focus leaflets.

Anyway, if you ever see one of the Uncle books at a reasonable price, snap it up. You will enjoy it.

I shall end by:

• admitting that Uncle was a subconscious influence on my creation of Lord Bonkers, though it took me years to realise it;
• sending you off to read my post on the discovery that the Revd J.P. Martin and Stanley Unwin, two giants of the British nonsense tradition, were both attached to Daventry transmitting station during the war.

Duncan Dunlop MSP on the failings of the child care system

Here's the powerful maiden speech on the Scottish child care system made by the Lib Dem MSP Duncan Dunlop. He was elected from the South of Scotland region, thanks to the more sensible electoral system that pertains north of the border.

The Joy of Six 1525

"Unlike Blair, he was deeply and passionately engaged in the current moment. He had not fossilised his world view. He was intellectually present. He spoke clearly and trenchantly about what populism is and the threat that it poses. 'They are careless of the strife they cause,' he said. 'They trade on grievances in our society. Where ills exist, they exaggerate them. They then blame those ills on minority groups of a different race or religion. It is ugly politics that deserves no place in our country.'" Ian Dunt says John Major is a better former prime minister than Tony Blair will ever be.

Hannah Fearn argues that there is no sudden epidemic of laziness: "What’s not being discussed at all is how young people are the hardest hit by huge external barriers to employment, however hard they want to work."

Stefan Collini examines the roots of Britain's higher education crisis: "The coalition government, the chief architect of this system, aimed to create a market among ‘providers’ which would be driven by the choices of students as ‘consumers’, with the aim of breaking the so-called 'producers' cartel' that had, allegedly, for so long enabled universities to protect their traditional practices."

"But when it comes to AI chatbots, the doctors have learned to proceed with caution. People may tolerate the idea of talking to a computer when booking a holiday or motor insurance but discussing something as personal as your health is quite a different matter." Rory Cellan-Jones on one GP surgery's mixed experience of introducing AI.

Gill Pain discusses what made Agatha Christie so successful: "There was noir Christie, a writer of disturbing, manipulative psychological fiction; comic Christie, a sharp and witty deconstructor of social mores; and uncanny Christie – a crime writer whose familiar voice has a curious knack of making the reader feel at home, while pulling the rug from under them."

"In order to attract puffins to the island, they created 100, lifelike weather resistant decoy puffins and anchored them to the cliffs. To make the illusion as convincing as possible, the team also installed solar powered speakers to blast continuous puffin calls out to sea to catch the attention of passing juveniles." Eva Cahill reports an ingenious attempt to attract puffins back to an islet off the Isle of Man where they once thrived.

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