"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
Because of her performance as top board for the England women's team at the Chess Olympiad in Samarkand – she played all 11 rounds, recording six wins, four draws and one loss – Bodhana Sivanandan has qualified as the youngest ever holder of the women grandmaster title.
This video lists her many other achievements, except one: she is now two-thirds of the way to the full international master title, which is open to both men and women. This is the grade below grandmaster status.
There is already talk of how soon she will play for the open England team at the Olympiad. I note she already has a good line in glares for her opponents; this will stand her in good stead when she becomes a full grandmaster.
Peter Chambers mixes science fiction with computer games, the numerical simulation of history, computer games and a take on political warfare.
The term 'psychohistory' originated in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. He started writing this in the 1940s, and after a long gap following the first three books continued to the end of his life. They sold very well.
Psychohistory is the concept that the future of societies can be predicted – in outline – given a lot of data and a lot of computer power. At the time in which Book 1 was set, a Galactic Empire existed and its bureaucrats recorded more or less everything. Asimov was quite clear that he borrowed heavily from the Roman Empire. There were no Jedi nor Sith.
Book 1 was simply called Foundation. It was a collection of short stories that had been published in magazines. The Galactic Empire was falling and a bunch of academics wanted to preserve a kernel of knowledge. They established a sort of college on an obscure planet and had it chartered as a foundation.
They used psychohistory to map out the future and selectively interfere using forms of political warfare. Their planet mutated into a sort of mayoral republic: first a city state, then a nation state. Rome again. The mayors were portrayed a bit like New York City mayors. They used the predictions of the academics to operate a strategic plan. Sometimes they used propaganda, false religion, economic warfare or covert operations. It is reminiscent of the Cold War.
Book 2 was called Foundation and Empire. The principal tale concerns the last gasp of the old Empire and its best general, who might look like Scipo Africanus in certain lights. The Foundation deal with the Empire by essentially doing nothing. They manoeuver on the periphery and let the Empire become snarled in its internal politics in the centre. It reminds me of Imperial China around 1890.
The mercantilists become rich, and are a rising power. The imperialists become divided, and are a falling power. The second tale concerns a unique individual who could not be predicted by the old-school politicians. His name is not Donald, but nothing he does lasts and he does a lot of damage.
Book three is called Second Foundation. The old academics knew that psychohistory was only approximate, and there would be a residual error. There might also be random errors, such as Not-Donald. They founded an invisible college to deal with this, with the best computer – the Prime Radiant (data science!) – and new intuitive powers. Also whole food, fresh air and exercise. They fixed a few glitches. Manifest Destiny was back on. Also suburban life and atomic powered cars. Quite the Sixties.
Book 4 is called Foundation’s Edge, but it could be called Third Foundation. Asimov seemed to reconsider his vaunted Trilogy and find it wanting. He invented a third power, which was aware of Empire, First Foundation, and Second Foundation. And it could meddle. But it wanted independent verification. Affirmation.
It viewed the Empire as now dead, the First Foundation as clunky as the Soviets were – coal, oil, steel, and ships – and the Second Foundation as some sort of computer-bound outfit with too many PhDs and too little wisdom. The book tours around and then ends. More books follow, but do not really matter: the characters were rubbish and the settings only sketched. They all sold well.
Almost everybody who read Foundation wondered if psychohistory could be real. Could Immanuel Kant be right that "we could reason together"? Could rational modern planning smooth out the economy and herald "an end to boom and bust"? Could we have five-year plans?
Obviously the whole concept was incredible. Impossible. Philosophically a category error of misunderstandings. Besides, the compute that would be required would be unheard of and the Data far too big. Where could it all be stored? It was pie-in-the-sky. OK, so a cloud. Most people with a STEM degree would have looked out the window, scoped it out and shaken their heads.
Until Peter Turchin. Around 2005. Peter discovered that there was data from early modern England, the Han and Tang China, and the Roman Empire that related population, state stability, growth, food production and the state of social elites. He called subsequent studies cliodynamics – the dynamics of power. These seemed to be related in dynamical oscillations across decades. The behaviour predicted can be quite interesting, such as "elite overproduction".
Dynamical means that the model predicts output from previous
data using update rules (e.g. parents have children, surplus leads to more
surplus). I first learned about dynamical models from the game Yellow RiverKingdom that came with the original BBC Micro. This was a port of the 1968
mainframe classic Hamurabi .
These games have the player as the manager of
an agrarian society next to a river. You must manage population pressure, food
production, famine, flooding, bandits, and social unrest. At first it is
difficult to avoid instability: over-population, famine, flood deaths and so
on.
So I looked at the BASIC source and wrote out the dynamical equations. Drew
a few graphs. Used the game as a simulator. Soon I had stabilised society –
with some effort – by raising the counter-bandit activity. The deaths of
soldiers on counter-bandit patrols stabilised the runaway population explosion.
Having done that, I found it easier to modify the BASIC code to make this
easier to automate – Psychohistory in action!
The more alert reader might
notice a similarity between counter-bandit patrols and having foreign wars of
choice. As a tool of policy. You can – if you want – export instability. Second
sons and all that. It might be more responsible to change your 'War Department'
to a 'Ministry of Defence', and put more effort into foreign aid and
exporting stability. This avoids what it called blowback.
The New World warns that Rupert Lowe is coming for your parents: "Lowe’s success exemplifies how Facebook has weaponised the anxieties and concerns of millions of Britons to drive its increasingly older, isolated users into unreality."
"Monday’s judgment ... means that unless the client agrees to release the material, those private conversations are now beyond the regulator’s reach. This is particularly bad news for the SRA’s ongoing attempts to tackle SLAPPs, the abusive legal actions used by the rich and powerful to shut down scrutiny." Nathaniel Peutherer analyses a judicial ruling that threatens efforts to curb Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.
"He has no visible tattoos, no shaven head, no black overcoat or jackboots. No hood, no Confederate flag and no Nazi images appear in the background as he sits in front of a screen for a recent Zoom interview. Instead, the soft-spoken Christian school teacher and pastor of ... sporting a neatly trimmed beard, was dressed in a charcoal suit and sat in front of a fish tank that seemed straight off the set of Pixar’s Finding Nemo. Then he began talking about Jews." Bob Smietana watches the rise of America's Jim Crow theobros.
Sarah Ward explains trauma-informed care in schools: "Strict zero-tolerance approaches to behaviour are not in line with the ethos of trauma-informed care and practice. It can encourage the interpretation of certain behaviour as defiance rather than distress."
"We also have another appearance by James Wentworth Day, who was quite appalling on the previous release and doesn't really add much beyond being a handy reactionary-for-hire to add 'balance', a broadcasting illusion we can now see in action 70 years ago." Discontinued Notes reviews a selection of TV programmes presented by Daniel Farson in the late 50s and early 60s that focuses on social change.
Andytoknow introduces us to New Holland, a railway village on the south bank of the Humber, and in particular to New Holland Pier station, where trains met the ferry that made the crossing to and from Hull.
I missed seeing the Old Etonian David Goodhart as one of the leading Trots on campus at York by a couple of years, but time moves on. Having spent the Blair years in very Blairite jobs, he is now an increasingly right-wing social and political commentator.
He took part in the latest edition of BBC Radio 4's Free Thinking last week, and his award-winning effort came in a contribution bemoaning the number of social science and humanities academics that begins at 21:36:
"What is 40 percent of 250,000? It's more than 100,000."
Goodhart also appeared convinced that Jean Baudrillard had argued that 9/11 didn't take place.
Our Trivia Desk has asked me to point out that he is the nephew of the late Liberal Democrat peer Willie Goodhart.
Yesterday evening Christine Jardine, the Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West, published a statement saying she would not be the party's candidate in the seat next time.
I have written to my local party to let them know I shall not be standing as the Scottish Liberal Democrat candidate for Edinburgh West at the next election, following the recent decision by some of the local party.
I have informed them that although I am able to request a ballot of the membership, it is with a heavy heart I have decided not to pursue this. I do not wish to expose anyone to more tension and division.
I shall continue to represent my constituents with the care I have always sought to bring over the last nine years.
It has been, and remains, an honour and a privilege to represent this part of the city, and to work with our fantastic communities.
This development has been met with surprise on social media and amid the picturesque ruins of what we used to call the blogosphere. For myself, I think it's a great shame, as Christine has been a good Liberal and a good campaigner.
The Independent thinks it knows what lies behind it:
Allies of Edinburgh West MP Christine Jardine have told The Independent that she has decided to not stand at the next election as a Lib Dem because she was being forced out in favour of an ally of the party’s Scottish leader Alex Cole-Hamilton.
And Andrew Page, reminding us that Christine is a former journalist and will have chosen her words carefully, draws attention to the fact that this statement leaves her all her options open:
I note that she does not say she will not stand in the next General Election, only that she will not stand as the Scottish Liberal Democrat candidate.
Make of that, as he says, what you will. His observation does at least explain my careful choice of headline.
As Lord Bonkers mentioned, or tried to mention, this track in his foreword to the latest Liberator Songbook, I thought I would investigate a little.
Olivia Rodrigo turns out to have followed the well-worn path from Disney child star to adult performer. Fairly or not, that always raises questions about whether the artist has that intangible quality, "authenticity". Even Steve Marriott worried that his evenings on stage as the Dodger in Oliver! somehow counted against him as an adult.
But Rodrigo co-wrote Brutal when she was 17 and is has said she is more interested in being a songwriter than a pop star.
Her couplet:
I'm so insecure I think That I'll dies before I drink.
reminds me of America's dread of underage drinking.
That's something we are increasingly importing, and the Guardian appears enthusiastic about the use of biometric scanning to carry out age checks
I once wrote a nostalgic column for the Leicester Mercury about the days when we were more relaxed about the subject. Then teenagers could go into pubs, they drank beer and had to behave themselves: now they drink sprits or white cider in bus shelters.
Anyway, I'm pleased to find Lord Bonkers being sympathetic to a song about teen angst, even if his prescription for it may well be a cold shower and a brisk Focus round.
Daniel Thomas has been charged with criminal damage and failing to disclose the PIN for his phone, so far, at least, disappointing those who hoped he would be charged with piracy.
I take an interest in such matters because a relative of mine was one of five men charged with piracy in 1894.
These was not, as I have been given to claiming, the last prosecutions for piracy in Britain, because five Grimsby trawlermen were convicted under the Piracy Act as recently as 1966.
Still, the story of the five Tollesbury men charged with piracy, my relative Stephen Appleton among men, is worth telling, and Helen Matten told it in issue 172 (December 2020) of The Essex Family Historian.
The great rivals of the Tollesbury fishermen were their counterparts from Burnham-on-Crouch. And a particular grievance among the Tollesbury men was that the Burnham fishermen would take the culch – broken shells, stones and gravel which formed the surface of an oyster bed – from their beds at Brightlingsea.
Helen Matten writes:
Many threats to stop them had been issued, but one day in 1894 things came to a head and this instance of ‘Piracy on the High Seas’ was reported; "In the assizes in Witham on Tuesday twelve fishermen of Tollesbury were charged with acts of Piracy, and with assaulting two Burnham mariners, putting them in fear of their lives, and of stealing their 'ships’ cargo' of culch, 'the goods and chattels of our Lady the Queen'. Two hundred men from Tollesbury turned up at the court, along with 100 from Mersea and ‘several’ from Burnham.
The prosecution admitted that the Tollesbury ‘pirates’ were not of the general idea of pirates seeking ships to plunder, but nonetheless who, disputing the right of the Burnhamites to plunder their culch, had boarded the boats armed with sticks and shovels, thrown the ‘cargo’ back into the river and threatened the men to go in after it if they did it again”.
The judge, to put it mildly was not sympathetic to the prosecution. Matten quotes the Essex County Standard:
The Judge opened the trial by stating "a charge of piracy on the high seas … one might suppose it was a charge of a very serious character … and I was very surprised to find in this County of Essex five persons committed for trial on such a charge." He went on to say "it seems to me a very great waste of time."
And in his summing up he said he had never known an English jury to be asked to find a man guilty of felony on such evidence as this.
Not surprisingly, the jury acquitted the fiver Tollesbury men.
Matten says the result was received by applause in court. Reading contemporary newspaper reports, an atmosphere of hilarity seems to have reigned in court because of the presence of so many supportive spectators and the attitude of the judge.
I also liked the authentic Essex reply of one of the Burnham skippers when he was asked if the Tollesbury men boarding his craft looked like pirates: "I thought they looked a rum lot."
My mother's mother's family came from Tollesbury, and my Tollesbury great grandparents were a Carter and a Gurton. The Appletons married into both families, and I remember I remember paying a visit to Stephen Appleton's granddaughter in the village with my mother when I was a little boy in the Sixties.
Tollesbury was my mother's happy place. She went to stay with relations as a girl during the war because London was being bombed, and my head is full of the sayings and characters she spoke of ever afterwards.
One thing she said was that, if all else failed, the fishermen would "goo five-fingering" – that is, catch starfish that they could sell to farmers as fertiliser. So I'm pleased that Helen Matten mentions this.
As well as a Tollesbury pirate, I may also be related to a 19th-century Tollesbury cannibal as his mother was a Carter from the village. (Content warning: gnawing.)
"Watching him involved engaging a kind of cognitive dissonance: this desperate, thin man was the same person as a sweet 6-year-old saying he wanted to learn about the moon; a handsome 20-year-old studying Physics in Oxford flirting with the camera; a 48-year-old who had realised that the research he was still passionate about had hit a dead end." Jude Rogers on 70 Up.
Ferdinand Mount has no truck with the idea that Britain has always welcomed refugees: "The usual narrative of the Peasants' Revolt describes John Ball and Wat Tyler's march to London, Ball's sermon at Blackheath ('When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?') and the brave conduct of the young Richard II. We don’t often hear about the massacre of the Flemings in Cheapside on 14 June, though it was at the heart of the revolt and an episode of frenzied violence. According to a contemporary chronicle, the rebels 'beheaded without judgment or trial all the Flemings they found, so that mounds of corpses were to be seen in the streets'."
Norman Baker looks at why politicians deny climate change and champion fossil fuels.
"The more I encountered these stories where political and emotional commitments seemed irreconcilable, the more I began to ask: what was life like for those who found themselves inescapably drawn to someone they shouldn’t be?" Alison Garden leads a project building an archive of oral histories documenting mixed marriage in Ireland.
"If you believe he was an imposter, then you believe he was the son of a “boatman” from Tournai, forced to play the role of Richard, Duke of York. If you believe he was Richard, Duke of York, then he was actually the rightful heir to the English throne." Sophie Bacchus-Waterman is writing a biography of Perkin Warbeck.
Animation Obsessive takes us behind the scenes of the classic Bugs Bunny cartoon 'What's Opera, Doc?': "At a cost of $35,510 (almost $430,000 today), it was spendier than most Warner cartoons. It took seven weeks compared to the standard five. To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards."
I've a habit of digging up forgotten disasters and scandals from old newspapers, but a couple of British caving disasters that I've come across have proved to horrible to write about.
The BBC News Surrey page, however, has turned up a potential caving disaster from February 1954 that had a happy ending – the cutting is from the Bradford Observer for the 15th of that month:
The Westhumble cave, located in the North Downs near Dorking, was once mined for its chalk.
In February 1954, four adventurous youngsters – including Fred Topliffe – from London wanted to explore the site.
Pete Brown, from Dorking Museum, told Secret Surrey that the 15-year-old was interested in geology.
"He and his friends came well-equipped with helmets, torches and boots," he added.
"While they were exploring, they suddenly heard a rumble and the whole cave roof collapsed."
Brown said Fred was nearly completely covered and could only move his fingers and toes.
Fred Topliffe emerged alive because a fireman named Bert Bullett spent nearly two hours dangling upside down, clearing rubble from on top of him. He was awarded the British Empire Medal for his efforts.
Did his lucky escape put Fred off caving? Not exactly:
Fred, who is now 88-year-old and lives in Oxfordshire, recalled: "The moment I feared I might not get out was immediately after the collapse.
"Once the rescue operation began, I felt much more confident that I would be rescued."
Despite his terrifying experience, he continued to be involved in cave exploration.
He was a co-founder of the Chelsea Speleological Society, one of the country's top caving groups.
Fred later joined the British Antarctic Survey on Signy Island, where he worked as a meteorological observer and studied snow petrels and Weddell seals.
"One of my proudest achievements is climbing out of a deep crevasse unaided in the Antarctic," he said.
When asked why he enjoyed cave exploring, he said he "couldn't explain the appeal", comparing it with the desire some people have to climb mountains or venture into unchartered places.
As far as I know, this foreword appeared in the new Liberator Songbook on sale at Brighton. It's not perhaps his lordship's most seminal work, but I'm posting it here for completeness and so I don't lose it.
Besides, he's reminded me that my rent falls due on Lady Day.
Talking of Liberator, you can download the latest issue for free from the magazine's website. And, while you're on there, why not sign up to be notified each time a new issue drops?
Bonkers Hall
Rutland
Tel. Rutland 7
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Home Counties. I’m never happier than when toying with a macaroon in a tea shop in the shadow of the North Downs. But don’t you think there should be more Liberal Democrat MPs from other parts of the country? It’s not as if they’re labelled “Here be dragons” on the map. Well, the upper Welland Valley is, but that is an exception.
To encourage the party’s bigwigs to widen their horizons, I’m going to suggest some songs from these neglected areas that could be included in this songbook next year. We appear to be doing Terribly Well in Scotland, but perhaps less so in Wales. So let’s hear the Eurovision winning Boom Bangor Boom (but not that ancient Welsh anthem Cwm Sixth).
From the North East of England, we could have Earth, Wind & Fire’s Boogie Sunderland, and from Lincolnshire Roxy Music’s Louth is the Drug. We hold North Norfolk, of course, but it would do no harm to slip Cromer Chameleon in there too.
From Shropshire comes The Wham!’s Clun Tropicana, and from the North West Olivia Rodrigo’s Bootle and Billie Eilish’s Bury a Friend to attract the young people. Do I surprise you, reader? I didn’t get to mastermind the RutBeat movement of the Sixties without keeping up with the hit parade, you know.
Finally, it’s worth noting that “Market Harborough” can be substituted for “California” or “San Francisco” in any song title where they appear. So we have Market Harborough Dreaming, (I Left My Heart) In Market Harborough and The Move’s Market Harborough Man.
So I ask you now to join me in a chorus of Market Harborough (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).
Here's something sad that I had missed: Jock Gallagher died in May of last year at the age of 87. I've not found an obituary for him, but there was a news report in the Daily Express.
I knew Jock in the days when I helped with the production of the issue of Liberal Democrat News that was put together during the Liberal Democrat's autumn conference – one year I copped for all the desktop publishing work.
My reward was that I got to chat to two other people who pitched in to help: Adrian Slade and Jock.
I talked Cambridge Footlights with Adrian Slade, who went down in history as the man who auditioned Peter Cook. I once blogged what he said about Cook:
He said Cook was the funniest man he had ever met and that you would spend all evening with him laughing and then not be able to remember a word he had said the next day.
Adrian also said, however, that being a revue performer – putting on a hat and a funny voice for a two-minute sketch - is not the same as being an actor. And he agreed that sometimes with Peter Cook it showed.
With Jock, I talked about The Archers, which he had been responsible for when he was head of network radio at Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham.
When he took on that role in 1971, The Archers was in the doldrums and the BBC was debating whether to bring it to an end. Jock managed to modernise it without upsetting its existing fans too much. Hence a Daily Record article from 2017 that described him as "the Scot who saved the most English series on radio".
I once tried a theory popular with a long-defunct group called 'The Archers Anarchists' on him, and Jock confirmed that Brian had murdered Adam when he was a boy – they never got on – and buried him somewhere on Home Farm without Jennifer noticing. Who this "Adam" they have now is, God alone knows.
It was remembering these happy days in the Lib Dem News broom cupboard at conference that led me to look Jock up last week and find that he had died. Adrian Slade also died last year, and I am very glad that I knew them both.
Tom Gordon, Liberal Democrat MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, argues that we must stop avoiding the subject of student finance if we are to win back younger voters.
Margaret Hartmann reports that Trump's interference in the plans for his White House ballroom has produced a design that is a menace to public safety: "McCrery informed the White House that Trump’s ballroom design did not meet fire safety codes, which require the majority of guests to be able to quickly exit through the main entrance during an emergency ... The architect also pointed out that alternative emergency exit routes out of the building were insufficient, and that there was little in the design to prevent a kitchen fire from rapidly spreading into the event space on the floor above."
"We want children to become physically competent, but we also want them to become confident decision-makers, good communicators and effective collaborators. We might want them to learn how to deal with mistakes, take responsibility and work things out for themselves. None of this is guaranteed simply because a child participates in sport." Children’s sport is great at keeping them busy but, asks Jose Castro, are they learning?
"Born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlin in Moravia, before becoming a triply displaced refugee boy. Having been taken to Singapore as a two-year-old, two days before the Nazis invaded, he was to speak his first words, in Czech, in East Asia, but was soon to forget his mother tongue. Aged four he was again on a boat, this time to Bombay, two days before Singapore fell to the Japanese. So many of his earliest memories were of Darjeeling, in British India, where his mother met Major Kenneth Stoppard, marrying him in Calcutta, before they traveled to Southampton and then Derbyshire, where the young brothers Petr and Tomas became anglicised as Peter and Tom Stoppard." Sunder Katwala reflects on the shifting identity of the playwright Tom Stoppard, who died last year.
Amy Louise Burney says it doesn't have to be Jane Austen. She suggests five other 18th-century writers with whom TV could have a wonderful love affair.
"This is the early 1960s and the physical changes taking place in the city centre, wrecking balls and cranes visible in many shots, mirror wider societal upheaval. You suspect that when Liz (Julie Christie) gets off her train in London, the world will be in colour, not monochrome." Graham Rickson on John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963).
I remember Trevor Bailey talking about Ken Farnes, but I don't think I've ever seen film of him before today.
Farnes stood 6 feet, five inches tall, which made him a giant in the 1930s. In that decade he took 690 wickets at 21.45 for Essex and Cambridge University.
He also played 15 tests for England between 1934 and 1939, taking 60 wickets at 28.64.
Cricket Web has a good article about him, and describes his last days:
Farnes joined the RAF and trained as a pilot, largely in Canada, and returned to the UK in 1941 where he was killed on the evening of 20 October 1941 near Chipping Warden in Northamptonshire.
He had been based there for a month, readying himself for the job of flying Wellington bombers. He had wanted to be a fighter pilot but his height prevented that.
On the evening of his death he was taking his first unsupervised night flight as a training exercise. A landing went wrong and Farnes was killed instantly.
And for trivia fans:
He was single at the time of his death and had never been married, although it seems he had found his life partner, a divorcee whose only daughter went on to marry the film critic Barry Norman and who retained into old age fond memories of the man she believed would have been her step father but for that tragic night.
A Shropshire campaigner says the River Teme should be granted legal rights because it has become "unwell".
Inspired by the way the River Wye has become the first river in the UK to be given cross-border rights covering it from source to sea, Sam Jones has started a petition which has so far been signed by more than a thousand people.
"Over the years I've seen decline. I've been a swimmer, kayaked in the past, I'm an angler… you notice things around you.
"It's 30 years since it's been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest... we ought to bring the focus back to what we have on our doorsteps.
"As an angler, you see changes to insect hatches, there's less rising trout, there's fewer roach… invertebrate changes, biodiversity changes along the riverbank."
The Teme rises south of Newtown in Powys, then flows through Knighton, Ludlow and Tenbury Wells before joining the Severn south of Worcester. It forms the border between England and Wales for several miles around Knighton.
I'm not sure how a river would enforce its rights, and think our moral thinking is impoverished if we express it only in terms of individual rights. But if this move will help improve the health of the Teme, I can't find it in my heart to oppose it.
I am surprised to see Lord B. inviting a Labour peer to lunch at the Hall. Time was, he would have hunted him with hounds over the hills of High Leicestershire.
Cook is pleased I am being “economical – like they are in the church sometimes” by inviting a Labour peer over for lunch.
“You must be worried about that Burnham fellow,” I remark to him as he fields the gravy boat. “Starmer always went AWOL when there was trouble, and the new man seems no better. Perhaps you should use that new alert system of yours to ask people to look in their garages and sheds in case he’s hiding there.”
“Yes, he hides just like Starmer did,” admits my guest, “but there’s one important difference: Burnham is hiding In The North.”
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Let's travel far from Brighton and the Liberal Democrats's autumn conference to an hour-long discussion of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, a book published in 1972.
I read it just after I had taken A-level History and found it more interesting than anything I had read about the 17th century while studying for that. Somehow it fitted together with Jethro Tull's album Songs From the Wood to form a ruralist, traditionalist strand in my politics that I have never quite been able to expunge.
If Hill was a revisionist historian then Ann Hughes, the guest on this podcast, is a post-revisionist. While she happily admits that his book contains all sorts of good things, she is sceptical of its central Marxist thesis.
The discussion, as the YouTube blurb says, includes these topics:
Did Hill invent the idea of the English revolution?
How did the radicalism of the 1960s affect Hill's approach?
Was Winstanley an anarchist?
Was the English Revolution the beginning of modernity?
This is worth a listen if you have any interest in the 17th century or the history of radical political ideas in England.
This seems a good place to mention Conrad Russell. He was a romantic in politics, but not in his work as an academic historian - he was certainly another post-revisionist.
Reviewing a book like Hill's, he would be generous: what was valuable in it would be drawn out, but he would move on to express some doubts about it and gently edge the reader back towards more mainstream thinking.
"Later he announced that the party are now in favour of cutting fuel duty by 10p, a policy that has not been agreed by conference and one that flies in the face of our commitment to tackling climate change. The Deputy Leader, Daisy Cooper also launched a new economic policy in her speech, which, once I had got hold of it, appears to be largely sensible, however, that too has not been approved by conference and it also talks about tax cuts." Peter Black reports from the Liberal Democrats' autumn conference in Brighton.
George Monbiot asks why lawbreaking on our roads isn't just visible, but designed to be seen.
"It had been intended that Lloyd George would go with Lord Kitchener to Russia in order to 'see in what way the Ministry of Munitions could best help' to remedy Russia's shortages. Had he done so, then he would have been aboard the armoured cruiser Hampshire, which on 5 June 1916 struck a recently-laid mine off the Orkney Islands. The weather was foul, and she went down in twenty minutes, taking 749 men with her." Charles Stephenson writes on Ireland, Churchill and Lloyd George.
"For more than seventy years after the war ended, the town elected only left-wing mayors. And yet, ever since 1957, when Rachele reclaimed her husband’s corpse, Predappio has relied on Mussolini for its living." Dani Garavelli visits the village where the Italian fascist dictator was born.
"I wanted to understand why so many people read her, and why they stopped. But I also knew that her life story was like a bonkers telenovela – with suicides, plane-crashes, wartime heroism and royal intrigue – and that during her lifetime she had presented it in a carefully curated way, which could now be interrogated." Matthew Sweet is interviewed about his biography of Barbara Cartland – and an ill-advised attempt to watch 700 episodes of Crossroads.
Rebecca Hutcheon discusses why the places we love in books – the Brontës’ Haworth, Jane Austen’s Bath, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex – can never quite be found in real life.
I tried telling the old boy that the Port of Dover has its own police force, whose relations with the Kent force has at times been opaque, but he was determined to give it both barrels this time.
Saturday
I am disgusted at the events in Dover. We used to know how to deal with these Blackshirt types – come to think of it, I believe there’s still a Wellington bomber in an outbuilding of some farm or other on my estate. I shall have it serviced, repainted and put at the disposal of the Chief Constable of Kent, who currently appears to have his priorities out of goose. No wonder Violent Bonham Carter staged his “spontaneous” bank jobs in Kent, though I don’t think even he was given a police escort back to the borders of London.
In its way, though, the scene I encountered atop the White Cliffs back in the summer disturbed me more. A small group had dropped their trousers (or lifted their skirts) and were displaying their bare buttocks to the English Channel. When I asked what the dickens was going on, I was told it was a coach party of BBC staff, there to demonstrate the corporation’s abhorrence of the asylum seekers who arrive on this stretch of coast in small boats.
Said party seemed to be very much Auntie’s second XV – I recognised a minor Dimbleby, someone who may have been Moira Anderson and that was all. It would never have happened in Lord Rieith’s day, not least because, as I recall, he was very much against buttocks.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
As is traditional in a dry summer, Our History Underfoot has been to Ladybower Reservoir to see what remains of Derwent village have been revealed by the receding waters.
In a second video, he wonders at the many people who claim to have seen the steeple of Derwent church standing proud above the waves when they are not old enough to have done so. It was dynamited in 1947, partly because visitors had taken to swimming out to reach it.
Proof that the historical record is wrong? No, just another reminder of the fallibility of human memory.
Were Freddie and Fiona burnt alive in a giant wicker rabbit on the village green at Beltane or not? It looks as though the Sisters know more than they're letting on.
Friday
One does meet the most interesting people in Westminster. This morning it is the man who puts up the shelves at 10 Downing Street. With our new prime minister shelving so many of the plans he once boasted of, business has never been better for him. He is so flush that he stands me a drink, which I think very sporting of him.
Being in Westminster, I think of Freddie and Fiona, particularly when I pass the tree behind which I used to hide if I suspected they wanted me for something. So, when I arrive back at the Hall, I hurry to the hills of High Leicestershire and the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes to ask the Mother Superior if she knows what became of them.
She is noncommittal, but as she lights our cheroots, she recalls that they mentioned something about “travelling to Tibet to find themselves”. I point out that Tibet is Very Hard To Get To, so you’re unlikely to be there when you get there.
Better, I suggest, to look somewhere like Corby, which has good bus links, including an hourly service from the stop opposite the Bonkers Arms.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
We’ve all enjoyed the regular resignations, defections and disgrace of Reform UK councillors, but the party actually gained councillors from by-election victories and defections, between May 2025 and May 2026. But now, as the latest post from the indefatigable Augustus Carp shows, the tide has turned for them.
The kaleidoscope of local government has continued to twist since the local elections in May, and with it a number of political allegiances have changed. Sometimes a councillor’s defection has little impact, but clustering in some authorities has led to significant weakening in control. For the first time since I started paying any attention to this phenomenon, all political parties have suffered a net loss of councillors, to the benefit of Independents and a number of new Localist groups.
Mark Pack’s website, which diligently catalogues the various defections, expulsions, resignations and arrests of Reform UK councillors, provides a lot of entertainment value, particularly for the type of person who likes watching slow-motion car crashes. But why isn’t anyone paying the same sort of attention to the Labour Party? In terms of defections, ReformUK has lost 48 councillors since the local elections in May. Labour has lost 42 – a similar number, which has received almost no publicity whatsoever. In both cases, there have been a number of councillors in the same political group who have gone at the same time, presumably for ideological rather than just personal reasons.
Seven Labour councillors have gone in Luton, four in Neath, four in Colchester and three in North Tyneside. In Luton, it’s reasonable to assume that the losses from the Labour group were significant in allowing the Lib Dems to form a new minority administration. (But to be fair, the situation there is complex, and the resignation of a senior Lib Dem complicates matters further.)
Four Independents have joined forces with the Conservatives in Braintree, but one has gone the other way. Four of the councillors in Sevenoaks who left the fold in May 2025 to form the West Kent Independent Group have now drifted back. Three others have left the party in Fife
The big losses for Reform UK have been in Durham (8, or maybe 9 councillors, including a suspension) and Plymouth (6) but four have joined in North East Derbyshire and three in Flintshire
For councillors flying off in all sorts of different directions, have a look at Worcestershire. The Conservatives are unchanged, with two coming and two going, taking at face value their assertion that the national suspension of one of their number doesn’t apply locally. Likewise the Lib Dems are unchanged – one in and one out – but ReformUK are down three. The situation is similarly unclear in some of the District Councils covered by the County.
Across the nation, in the 18 weeks since the local elections in May, the net changes for the number of councillors defecting or getting themselves suspended is:
Conservatives -6
Labour -44
Lib Dem -15
Greens -4
Nationalists -1
ReformUK -48
Independents +118
Let’s see if conference season causes any more movement.
Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.
I thought I had finished blogging for today, but this video is too good not to share with you tonight.
It's a BBC2 discussion from 1968 with Lady Asquith (better known as Violet Bonham Carter) and Lady Stocks. A young Joan Bakewell is in the chair.
They are talking about a television film about how women got the vote, and both take the view that it exaggerated the importance of the militant tactics of the Suffragettes at the expense of the role played by the wider Suffrage movement.
And Lady Asquith remembers defending her father, the Liberal prime minister, from attack by Suffragettes.
Lady Stocks was the cousin of Tim Brinton, a Conservative MP in the Thatcher era and the father of Sal Brinton, the former president of the Liberal Democrats.
I've also discovered that Lady Stocks's husband, a little-remembered philosopher called John Leofric Stocks, was the son of John Edward Stocks, who was vicar of Market Harborough from 1871 to 1884 and then of the fascinating St Saviour's in Leicester.
Dawn Butler lays bare the abuse that a Black female MP faces: "Followers of my social media know how bad it can be. I have a regular “block of the month” feature to raise awareness of the disgusting racist abuse sent to me every day – the N-word, “monkey” and “ape” are common insults. The deluge of abuse has a detrimental impact on my mental health, and on those around me."
"There is no reindustrialisation beyond heavily Government-directed industries such as defence and even pharmaceuticals without reversing Brexit. That will not be sufficient, but it is absolutely necessary. And yet, there is literally no mention of Brexit in the core arguments of Reindustrialising Britain." Anthony Painter reads a new collection of essays from Policy Exchange.
Milli Hill on David Walliams and his publisher: "It wasn’t until CEO Charlie Redmayne left Harper Collins in October 2025 and was replaced by a woman, Kate Elton, that decisive action was taken."
"Keynes was a liberal for our age: morally serious, hopeful for a better future, and yet reconciled to the expertly-executed compromises that must be struck to preserve a liberal order that is far more fragile than some would like to believe." Guillaume A.W. Attia says you should read John Maynard Keynes.
"It’s quite lonely and I hate this house because it’s so cold. I just wish I could speed up the process but I can’t. Some days I’m right on to it, and then other days I just can’t, because it’s very emotional – and I’m not really an emotional person." Stephanie Woods interviews four women about the ordeal of clearing a dead parent's house.
Francis Young looks at the importance of folklore to Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy.
I used to wonder why the Liberal Party had never talked about Wallace Lawler, Read the comments on this post and you will see why. I haven't dared raise the subject with Lord Bonkers.
The old boy is more on the ball with golf courses and terrorism. This is from the Guardian last month: "Seven people charged with vandalising Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf course in Scotland have been accused of malicious damage 'having a terrorist connection'."
Thursday
Dusk finds me wending my way to the palatial sett beneath the triumphal arch I had erected to celebrate the victory of Wallace Lawler in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election of 1969. My host, the King of the Badgers, is relieved that the drought has broken, as his fellow members of the genus Meles had been obliged to frequent the nation’s golf courses to find ground soft enough to dig for invertebrates.
Now, I have no quarrel with badgers on golf courses – they don’t wear loud plaid trousers or shout “Get in the hole!” – but some members have cut up rough about their greens being cut up. Then some fool decided that digging up a golf course counts as terrorism (that’s Labour for you), so things were threatening to turn ugly until the rain came.
Incidentally, if you are playing the 13th on the Royal & Decrepit’s links beside Rutland Water, aim for the sett in the centre of the 12th fairway: an iron shot down its throat will see your ball reappear inches from the flag on the green you are interested in.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
I wrote this in 2008 about a memory that was already more than a dozen years old:
Much Wenlock is not just the spiritual home of the Olympics. It also the venue for Festival at the Edge, which I attended a couple of times back in the 1990s.
Although it is chiefly a storytelling festival, my chief memories of it are musical. I heard a young Eliza Carthy play (with Nancy Kerr) and, best of all, I heard the Polly Bolton Band.
That year everything was running hopelessly late, and it was after midnight when the band (Polly Bolton, John Shepherd and Steve Dunachie) took the stage in the marquee. Everyone's breath was steaming in the cold air. The band played traditional folk songs and their own settings of poems by Kipling and A.E. Housman. Above all I remember Polly Bolton's wonderful folk voice.
Now, at last, I have found a recording by the Polly Bolton Band on YouTube. It's a setting, not of Kipling or Housman, but of a poem by their contemporary W.B. Yeats.
We British have a habit of turning military debacles into victories. The retreat from Dunkirk, for instance, has twice been the subject of a film (in 1958 and 2017) and also forms an important part of the action in Atonement from 2007.
But the Suez Crisis of 1956, whether because of the deceit it involved or its abject failure, has proved too shameful a subject for British cinema to tackle. This unsuccessful attempt to overturn Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, made together with France and Israel, and in particular the way we were forced to back down by a threat from the United States to spark a run on the pound, marked the end of British illusions that is could remain an imperial power in the postwar world.
So it’s notable that there is a British film that begins amid the British bombing of Port Said. But, of a piece with the doomed Suez operation as a whole, that bombing kills the parents of a 10-year-old British boy, Sammy Hartland. Finding no help in a suddenly hostile town, the boy sets off, with no concept of the distance involved, to walk to his only relative, an aunt who lives in Durban in South Africa.
Released in 1963, Sammy Going South was based on a novel of the same name by W.T. Canaway, who had quite a reputation in the Sixties and Seventies, and also had a writing credit for The Ipcress File (1965), but seems forgotten today.
Alexander Mackendrick
It was the first film that its director Alexander Mackendrick had completed for six years. After reeling off some of the best films Ealing Studios was to make – Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, Mandy, The Ladykillers – he went to Hollywood to make Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Though it now has a towering critical reputation, it bombed on release and Mackendrick was then taken off two pictures that he had begun to direct – The Devil’s Disciple and The Guns of Navarone.
Mackendrick, who badly needed to complete another film, then went back to work for his old Ealing boss Sir Michael Balcon (the grandfather of Daniel Day-Lewis), who was now the head of Bryanston Films. But there turned out to be a chasm between their views of what their adaptation of Sammy Going South should look like.
Balcon saw the story as a heartwarming tale of a young innocent's triumph over adversity, against the fantastic scenery of the African continent. Characteristically, Mackendrick's understanding was altogether darker: he saw it as "the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everybody he comes up against".
You might say that for Mackendrick, Sammy was another of the lethal innocents in whom he rather specialised – think of the chaos that Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers and Alec Guinness’s manic scientist in The Man in the White Suit provoke around them.
One result of these tensions was that Mackendrick’s original cut, which came in at over three hours, was reduced by Balcon to 128 minutes before release. The version that is shown from time to time on British television, and was released on DVD in 2010, is 10 minutes shorter still – no one seems to know quite when or why this further cut was made.
A surprising amount of the strangeness and cruelty that Mackendrick found in Canaway’s novel survived into what was marketed as a family film. Within the first 25 minutes, Sammy has lost both his parents, been seized upon by a pedlar who clearly has sexual designs on him, and then found himself handcuffed to the man’s corpse.
As he makes his way south, Sammy is variously helped or hindered by the adults he meets. After a trek across the desert, first with the pedlar and then alone, he is taken up by a rich American woman. He runs away from her when he finds she wants to take him north with her, and then falls in with a group of Sudanese Muslims returning from the haj.
The pilgrims’ leader, played by a stern Orlando Martins, is the only adult the boy meets in the early part of his journey who cares for him without selfish motives, but the boy abandons him for a Greek journalist who says he will take him to his aunt – and has ambitions to sell his story. The boy comes to distrust him and eventually runs away again.
Then, alone in the bush, Sammy is happened upon by a diamond smuggler played by Edward G. Robinson, whose performance and touching relationship with the boy will be what many viewers remember from the film.
It looks as though the boy will stay with him permanently, but Robinson’s camp is broken up by the authorities and Sammy makes his way to his aunt alone. Quite how he manages this is skipped over, but in the novel he travels by light plane and train, and still has to fight off a bounty hunter at Durban station.
How Sammy became too happy
The success or failure of the film obviously relied to a great extent upon the casting of Sammy, and Mackendrick thought he had struck gold in Fergus McClelland, the 11-year-old son of Northern Irish actor Alan McClelland who, among many other roles, was in the original cast of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap alongside Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim.
Mackendrick, quoted in Philip Kerr’s biography of the director, said of him, with alarming objectivity:
"He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting."
But something happened which explains why McClelland, who is convincingly ragged and itchy in his scenes with Orlando Martins, appears so happy and healthy when he meets Edward G. Robinson after trekking through the bush:
"But when he went out to Africa, he started having the time of his life. The unit adored him and, to my dismay, started to feed him ... he put on weight and there was no way I could stop it. So, instead of this hunted and abused child, who’s supposed to be starving and neurotic, you had a sturdy, stocky, well fed little character. A good actor, but the physique betrayed itself."
Mackendrick’s treatment of the boy during filming was as hard-hearted as his approach to casting. Appearing on BBC Radio Four’s The Film Programme in 2010, McClelland recalled the unit doctor telling the director at one point that he had to decide whether he wanted “a dead star or a live little boy”.
Some critics complained that McClelland’s acting was wooden until he met Edward G. Robinson, but this is not the first time a child actor had been blamed for following their director’s instructions. Preparing to shoot the film, Mackendrick had been to institutions to study traumatised and orphaned children, and this woodenness was what he saw in in them. McClelland was to go on acting for some years, appearing in both television plays and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so other directors appreciated his talents too.
Edward G. Robinson and Harry H. Corbett
Mackendrick faced greater problems than his young lead becoming too happy and well fed: Edward G. Robinson suffered a serious heart attack early in the filming of his role. The result was that many of his scenes with the boy were shot with the participants being on different continents.
Fergus McClelland was filmed in Africa, with Mackendrick reading the other part, and Edward G. Robinson in a studio in London, with Mackendrick this time reading the boy’s lines. It’s a mark of the director’s skill that these scenes are still so convincing and moving.
Another actor who deserves a mention is Harry H. Corbett, who plays Edward G. Robinson’s associate in the diamond smuggling game. Corbett had already made one series of Steptoe and Son, the classic BBC sitcom that was to make him a household name – soon every impersonator on television had to be able to take him off – but arguably blight his career.
Before Steptoe, Corbett was called “the British Brando” by some, because he was a Method actor, and was the star Shakespearian in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East.
Fergus McClelland later became a voiceover artist and a trainer in business presentation, so there are plenty of his videos to be found online. In one of them, he recalls that Corbett did not talk to the other cast members much, but was friendly to him – the boy was allowed to call him “H.”
Corbett told him that he didn’t plan on doing a second series of the comedy, but perhaps even one had fixed him in the public mind as Harold Steptoe and Harold Steptoe alone. One review of Sammy Going South referred to his “Steptoe accent”, as though it already counted against him as a serious actor.
Racial politics
The racial politics of Sammy Going South are muted: there is, for instance, no suggestion that by 1963 South Africa was a tainted haven for the boy to seek. Orlando Martins is allowed great dignity and Sammy is shown to need and appreciate his paternal authority. And, as a returning haji he appreciates that the boy is on a pilgrimage of his own.
Beyond Martins, however, there is no other substantial Black character in a film set in entirely in Africa. The men who work for Edward G. Robinson are at least shown as a benign presence, singing a lullaby when the boy wakes suddenly in the back of their jeep.
It is the Greek journalist who suffers the worst stereotyping, particularly from the British officials, who still administrate Robinson’s part of East Africa. Those officials are verging on the comic themselves, and this is certainly no celebration of British Africa.
The fact that Robinson has drawn for years on fuel dumps the Germans abandoned in 1918 suggests that the European presence in Africa is drawing to a close, something his character explicitly says. That wasn’t to stop Britain’s private schools turning out ideal types to run the Empire for two or three decades after it ceased to exist.
Sammy goes west
I can’t argue that Sammy Going South is a forgotten masterpiece, but it is better than its reputation and is interesting in so many ways. As a study of childhood trauma and recovery; as a document of the last days of the British Empire; and as a film by one of Britain’s best directors, who was soon to give up making films and devote himself to teaching instead.
The film was trimmed yet again for the US market, given a new title (the ludicrous, to my eyes, A Boy Ten Feet Tall) and a new soundtrack. Joe Dante even claims that this version is better than the original: I’ve not seen it, but the omission of most of Orlando Martins’s scenes makes that sound unlikely.
But I can at least show you the trailer for this version. I wonder if Steven Spielberg saw A Boy Ten Feet Tall: am I alone in being reminded of Empire of the Sun by the scene of the boy amid the bombing of Port Said?
I suspect this American version is closer to what Michael Balcon had hoped for from the shoot. Me? I mourn Mackendrick’s lost, darker three-hour version.
This should keep the literary types among you happy, though I doubt that Ofsted will be so pleased.
Wednesday
History is all the rage on the electric podcasts, so I have taken advantage of the papers in my library to write a revisionist biography of a leading Whig statesman. You wouldn’t believe what the fellow got up to!
I won’t say it’s racy, but I happen to know that the Well-Behaved Orphans have got hold of a copy of the manuscript and are loaning it out to my domestic staff at half a crown per chapter. “Coo!” one young inmate complimented me, “That’s the only book I know what falls open at every page, Lord B.”
So, if you fancy having a flutter on who’ll top the spring bestsellers list, back my forthcoming Fifty Shades of Earl Grey.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
