The Joy of Six 1081

If satire were going to bring the Conservatives down, it would have done so a decade ago. Still, it keeps our spirits up and Euan McColm is in good form here: "Plaudits, too, for Jacob Rees-Mogg, who hit the airwaves a day later. The secretary of state for business has created a character for the ages, part Christopher Robin, part 1950s hangman. Beneath a plummy and polite exterior lurks the terrifying stench of menace."

Harry Shukman reports from the Ukip conference: "Today, fifty members of Ukip fit into the function room of a country pub outside Skegness, and there are plenty of empty chairs. The guest list barely stretches onto a second sheet of A4. There is talk of policies and history and electoral success but the room gives off the impression of a village cricket AGM instead of a party that recently took four million votes in a general election. Without Farage and without Brexit, Ukip is bereft."

Lucy Scholes praises The Glass Pearls, a forgotten novel by Emeric Pressburger about a Nazi war criminal hiding in plain sight in the streets of Pimlico.

Robert Hugill enjoys an evening of queered 18th-century music.

"My father took the following photo of Baldwin’s Gardens in 1949. The view is looking down towards Gray's Inn Road. In the early years of the war, the area suffered from the impact of several high explosive bombs and the effects of these can be seen to the right of the street." Baldwin's Gardens runs from Gray's Inn Road to Leather Lane and is a street I remember from Liberator paste ups long ago. This is a typically interesting post from A London Inheritance.

London's first UFO was spotted over St James's Park and Bloomsbury by a well-known physician called Cromwell Mortimer in 1746. Ertan Karpazli has the story.