And that means it's time to spend another week with Lord Bonkers. We begin with a visit to his famous charitable enterprise, the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans. An orchard doughty, incidentally, is rugged club whose name was inspired by Sue Doughty (or Orchard-Doughty), the Liberal Democrat MP for Guildford from 2001 to 2005.
Monday
A Well-Behaved if breathless Orphan arrives at the Hall. “Matron says it’s that Generic man off the television and he wants to paint over our murals and you’ve got to come,” is the burden of his message. Stopping only to summon a brace of stout gamekeepers with orchard doughties, I hurry to the Home.
The murals – some say they’re the work of our own Joshua Reynolds: others detect the hand of the Dutch Master van Mierlo – depict famous scenes from Liberal history for the edification of the young inmates. There’s ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’, ‘The Confusion of Andrew Newton’ (he has travelled to Dunstable in search of Norman Scott, but found no trace of him there) and ‘Tony Greaves Pretending to Have Lost the Line to London to Avoid Endorsing David Steel’s Leadership’.
I burst in to find Robert Jenrick holding a pail of whitewash in one hand and wielding a brush with the other. “You don’t want to make this place too attractive,” he counsels me, “or children will get themselves orphaned so they’re sent here.” I have him driven from the place, and for the first time understand why the Tories plumped for that Badenough woman instead.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
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