2019
Lord Bonkers questioned the Liberal Democrats' fondness for giant orange diamonds.
2018
I announced that I had discovered this anthem for Brexit...
2017
A general election campaign was underway and I posted the top 20 Lib Dem targets, based on the results in 2015. We were to win seven of them, plus one from outside the list - Layla Moran in Oxford West and Abingdon. Trouble is, we also lost five of the nine seats we held.when the election was called.
2016
I posted a video of the Great Central - Nottingham, which I once described as a bit of a mystery to us in Leicestershire - "Rather like the Eastern Roman Empire."
2015
Lord Bonkers gently mocked Norman Lamb's claim that his friends were urging him to stand for the Lib Dem leadership.
2014
I wrote about Leicester's mysterious Humber Stone and quoted a local history site on the subject:
“Boy drew creature that stood beside his bed” was a Leicester Mercury headline as recently as 1980, when a 10-year-old boy, living close to the Humber Stone, had constant “visits” from a devilish entity. It was, apparently, a creature with a goat’s head and long curving horns, a man’s body and cloven hoofs. After drawing it at school, the boy’s teacher asked what it was. “I don’t know, miss”, he said. “It’s the thing I sometimes see at the end of my bed”.
2013
Michael Gove, I argued, had been talking nonsense about the history of school holidays. They have nothing to do with the farming calendar.
2012
Lord Bonkers discussed the governance of Rutland: "We now live as an anarcho-syndicalist collective – albeit one consistent with our most ancient families continuing to enjoy full possession of their landed estates."
2011
A by-election was taking place in Leicester South and I explained why Zuffar Haq was the perfect candidate for the constituency:
He grew up and went to school in the constituency – even in the short time I was with him we came across the father of someone with whom he had been at Lancaster Boys (the school that featured in Gareth Malone’s series “Boys Don’t Sing”). I also heard him slip into Punjabi to speak to an elderly Asian voter.
He was to come second in the contest, which must count as a remarkable achievement.
2010
I celebrated some wayside discovers made in the Northamptonshire village of Maidwell. They included the remains of a footbridge over the former Market Harborough to Northampton railway line.
2009
Government and foods companies were conspiring to denigrate home cooking, or so I argued:
Personally, I find that cake pleasingly old fashioned. White icing, with a cherry on top. It's the sort of cake children scheme to win in the Beano and the Dandy.
2008
In House Points, my weekly Liberal Democrat News column, I looked at Labour and poverty:
For everyone loves children. Even the Daily Mail loves children. At any rate, it loves very young children with fair hair. And if you don’t love children, maybe keeping their parents out of poverty will lessen the chance that, high on glue and SunnyD, they will twoc your new motor.
2007
I celebrated the Middlesex opening pair of Hutton and Compton: "That's Ben (grandson of Len) and Nick (grandson of Denis)."
2006
"Lib Dems should drop their collectivist approach to education and ensure that respect for individual differences is central," I argued in an article for the Guardian's website.
2005
In his The Amateur Poacher he records that his early interest in the natural world had a strong sporting component, but that he came to see things differently.
With his finger on the trigger he "hesitated, dropped the barrel and watched the beautiful bird" and:
watching so often stayed the shot that at last it grew to be a habit ... Time after time I have flushed partridges without firing, and have let the hare bound over the furrow free.
2004
I mourned the death of Geraint Howells:
He was MP for Cardigan from 1974 to 1983 and for Ceredigion and Pembroke North from 1983 to 1992, and was known to Lord Bonkers as the Big Friendly Geraint.
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