Yes, I think it probably has.
The speaker is Ian Leslie, author of John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.
To be fair, as football managers say, just before this he and the other contributors do set out why the career of the Beatles makes such a compelling story.
It didn't last long, the group had the same four members all the way through and, because they broke up early, we still think of them as young and at the peak of their powers - there was no slightly disappointing 1973 album.
"The Conservatives are defending a high watermark, a freakishly good result for them in 2021 created by the short-lived vaccine bounce that put wind in their sails for a few months." Matthew Pennell previews tomorrow's local elections.
Commenting on the suicide of Virginia Giuffre, Emily Maitlis says "We have to believe women while they’re alive."
City Monitor asks why Britain has let trams fall by the wayside: "People won’t leave their cars at home until there is an efficient, reliable and comfortable alternative. Trams provide that alternative. No other form of public transport allows you to travel about town smoothly and quietly, doesn’t emit noxious exhaust fumes, doesn't need a parking space, runs so frequently that you don’t even need a timetable – and actually enhances the urban environment."
Johnny Meynell explodes a popular myth about the 1970 FA Cup final: "No show-jumping took place at Wembley Stadium in the days, weeks, or even nine months before Chelsea took on Leeds United for the right to lift the FA Cup on April 11."
"It’s a surprise to arrive in Bexhill, prepared to take a look at one of the most famous examples of English modernism, the De La Warr Pavilion, all white walls, glass and steel, and to encounter a group of buildings with a whiff of the Mughal empire about them." Philip Wilkinson visits the Sussex coast.
Before Martin Johnson came along, the boxer Jack Gardner was Market Harborough's most famous sporting son. He beat Bruce Woodcock in 1950 to win the British and Empire heavyweight titles, and for most of 1951 held the European title too.
When Gardner retired from the ring in 1956, he took up farming locally. He died in 1978 aged only 52.
A second local British heavyweight champion is seen in the film: Reggie Meen, who grew up down the road in Desborough and held the title from November 1931 to July 1932.
And the Colonel Symington who presents Gardner with a watch is a member of the Market Harborough soup-making dynasty.
Thanks to the Leicester Evening Mail for the next day, I can tell you that this dinner was held on Thursday 7 December 1950 in "Symington's recreation room". This was in the corset factory in the centre of town owned by the other branch of the family.
With the local government elections taking place on Thursday, here’s a quick appetiser – a snapshot analysis of recent defections amongst local government councillors.
It’s long been my contention that defections, suspensions, resignations and flouncings out might be telling us something significant about the morale in local party groups, which surely must have an impact on their campaigning abilities.
However, it’s been a complicated few months in the Byzantine world of local government defections of late – so much so that it’s probably best to consider the numbers for the year to date, rather than just provide an update since my last review for Liberal England (posted 2 March).
In total there have been 256 identifiable incidents of councillors changing their political allegiances since the New Year, resulting in the following net changes:
I expect that most people at Christmas would have forecast an increase in the number of defections to Reform, but who would have guessed that it would be the Labour Party that would have suffered the greatest number of losses? Not losses to Reform, to be sure, but fractures within party discipline, and the actions (and inactivity) of the Labour Government at Westminster have led to pressures that could not be contained inside several Labour council groups.
Additionally, in the special category of 'Being Suspended from the Group', ex-Labour councillors lead the field by some distance. The main problem areas for Labour appear to be Nottinghamshire (particularly Beeston), Stockport, Tameside, Dudley and Wakefield, all areas where they have lost at least three councillors. In Beeston, depending on how you count them, it’s somewhere in the region of 19 to 21.
The Conservative groups to have lost three or more councillors appear to be Durham, Kent, Mid Suffolk, North Northamptonshire, Oldham and Tamworth.
For the Liberal Democrats, the only group to see more than three defections was Buckinghamshire, with some sort of personality dispute leading to the loss of five councillors, all in the Aylesbury area.
There have been 37 instances of straight swaps between political parties. That’s rather high, because usually defections are to some manifestation of Independent, although that move in itself is often a precursor to a subsequent attachment to a new political party.
The 37 'straight swaps' consist of 26 councillors moving from Conservative to Reform, 3 from Labour to Conservative, 2 from Labour to Reform, 2 from Labour to Green, 1 from Labour to Lib Dem, 1 from Lib Dem to Conservative, 1 from Lib Dem to Labour, 1 from Lib Dem to Green and 1 from Green to Conservative.
Another factor to consider, which might be hiding in plain sight, is the number of resignations from the Council before the end of a standard four year term – are the by-elections we see always for reasons of ill health or work commitments, or is it really because the group leader has a bit of a Napoleon complex? Sadly, for this category, there’s no way of burrowing into the truth behind the press releases - but there might be a story there as well.
Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.
No, the name's not something out of Lord Bonkers' Diary: as this video shows, it really existed. The school was at Tixover Grange, which is near Stamford but in Rutland.
I have seen something of Wilfred Pickles lately, because Talking Pictures TV repeated the situation comedy For the Love of Ada. I watched it on the grounds that anything with Irene Handl in it was worth seeing.
It proved to be gentle and likeable - I can see why it ran to four series and a cinema film. Pickles himself strolled through it rather like a North Country Kenneth Horne.
Pickles (1904-78) had a remarkable career. As a young man in Halifax in the 1920s, he was a keen amateur actor and a friend of another actor from the town, Eric Portman. He joined the BBC North Region as an announcer, and was to become the first national BBC newsreader with a regional accent.
According to an old BBC page:
This was not an early attempt at appealing more to the general public, but actually a move to make it more difficult for Nazis to impersonate BBC broadcasters!
After the war he acted in the West End and on television and radio. He found greatest fame as the compere (with his wife Mabel) of the quiz show Have a Go. In the Fifties it attracted an audience of 20 million for each episode, making him a national figure.
You may remember Pickles playing Tom Courtney's father in Billy Liar, and he seemed to be a jobbing television actor through the 1960s. For the love of Ada ran from 1970-1 and the film came out in 1972.
Tom Crewe writes about 19th-century photography in the London Review of Books - Camille Silvy was an early and fashionable practitioner of the art:
The apparent sombreness of most Victorian sitters has fostered many modern myths, the most common being that their expression is a product of long exposure times, which required people to remain tense and still. In fact, exposure times were already short by the 1860s, especially if the light was good, and later in the century almost instantaneous.
Victorians kept their mouths shut largely because the conventions of portrait photography were those of the painted portrait: you didn’t smile for Reynolds, so you didn’t smile for Silvy. (Sometimes people did. We even have a photo of Queen Victoria grinning, though she didn’t know she was being snapped.)
And later he quotes some top Victorian snark:
William Moens, a gentleman photographer travelling in southern Italy in 1865, was kidnapped by brigands along with his clergyman companion. One man was to be set free to raise the alarm and the ransom, and the two friends drew straws. Moens lingered in captivity for 102 days before paying £5100 for his freedom.
When he shortly thereafter produced his two-volume English Travellers and Italian Brigands: A Narrative of Capture and Captivity, the Pall Mall Gazette hoped the brigands’ next victim would be "a gentleman of greater literary ability".
As ever, the Victorians prove to be less Victorian than we imagine.
Ed Davey gets a good write up in the Guardian today and is not afraid to sound optimistic about Thursday's local election:
According to Davey, the general election trend of less ideologically minded Conservative voters fleeing a party they see as overly weighted towards populism and culture wars has shown no signs of slowing under Badenoch.
"People who were lifelong Conservatives haven't forgiven them, they're not impressed by the leader, and some are put off by this talk of some sort of arrangement with Reform," he said.
And:
While Davey is making no predictions, he is scornful about Farage’s success thus far in building up a Lib Dem-style on-the-ground army.
"This is just anecdotal, but Reform have tried door-knocking one or two places, and they got such a hostile reception from quite a lot of doors, they quickly give up. So they’re not fighting the campaign that we do."
The Guardian correspondent, Peter Walker, make a good point when he says these elections are different for the Lib Dems. We are used to winning council elections as a way of building up strength so we can eventually make a realistic challenge for the Westminster seat.
But on Thursday we will be hoping to strengthen our grip on many of the seats we gained at last year's general election by getting more councillors elected there.
Let me end with a word in support of Ed Davey's stunts for the media. They show that the party has grasped that if the media can get good photos or video from an event, they are much more likely to cover it.
I remember the EU referendum campaign, when the Leave campaign showed much more awareness of this than Remain did. In fact the only thing I can remember from the Remain campaign is George Osborne threatening to put everyone's taxes up.
As Walker says:
Days before the local elections, with Kemi Badenoch demanding apologies over gender identity and Nigel Farage complaining about mental illness diagnoses, Ed Davey was quietly getting on with what he perhaps does best: having fun.
In a converted shed near Stratford-upon-Avon, the Liberal Democrat leader was joking with photographers as he made chocolate truffles alongside Manuela Perteghella, his party’s MP for the formerly true-blue constituency.
"Both sides of the culture war profited from caricatures of Francis as Pope Woke. The reality was less clear-cut. He distrusted the liberal impulse to make the church a vague, hand-wringing Roman branch of the human rights campaign. His positions on war, free-market exploitation and climate change were all in the mainstream of Catholic Social Teaching, though articulated with unusual directness and clarity. His interviews often gave the impression that he thought the church’s hang-ups about sexuality were just that - symptoms of an un-Christlike clerical trend to flee from real humanity." James Butler on Pope Francis.
Eliza Apperly examines how Hilter's favourite film director, Leni Riefenstahl, spent a lifetime covering up her central role in the Nazi propaganda machine.
"The story of the divide between the right and left brain has become one of the most cherished ideas in psychotherapy. It shows up virtually everywhere we look, branching into a myriad of techniques and approaches, creating an entire ecosystem." But, ask Pascal Vrticka and Ana Lund, is there any truth in this story?
Keith Frankish remembers the philosopher Daniel Dennett: "Dan didn’t see philosophy as a specialism remote from everyday life or distinct from the work of scientists. He saw it as an attempt to see how science and everyday reality fit together - how a world of subatomic particles obeying strict physical laws could at the same time be a world of free, conscious agents, with thoughts, hopes and dreams."
The Digital Dickens Notes Project allows you to explore the working notes Charles Dickens kept as he wrote his novels in monthly or weekly installments. In as few as 19 pages per novel, his notes are concise, dynamic records of Victorian serial composition.
Hignett bought East Langton Grange, Logan's old home, in 1935, and was still around 50 years later when I got involved in local politics here. He was a Conservative of the old school.
I thought of him when Kemi Badenoch made her invaluable (to us) remark about the Liberal Democrats being the sort of people who repaired your church roof. As I once recalled here:
I came across him several times and he had an unnerving habit of starting telephone calls with "Now, look here...". Fortunately, this was generally followed with "...if I can be any help, you let me know."
When the church roof at Church Langton needed repairing and the estimate from the builders proved too high ("They could put that where the monkey put the nuts"), he organised the locals to do the job themselves and was filmed by local television as he directed operations up on the roof at the age of 90.
"Of all the bands I saw in those days, they were the ones who impressed me the most. They had this small public address system, one of the smallest I had seen and were very unassuming on stage, and then this spotty kid on the organ suddenly opened his mouth and screamed "I LOVE THE WAY SHE WALKS..." and launched into an old John Lee Hooker number. Gosh - my mouth fell open and I felt a chill down my spine! That was the night I discovered Rhythm and Blues for the first time."
A TES story from 2017:
YouGov asked 2,060 British adults whether a list of things that have disappeared from British life “should or should not be brought back once Britain leave the EU”.
In total, 27 per cent said that corporal punishment in schools “should be brought back”.
However, there was a big difference in support for the idea between Remain and Leave voters.
Forty-two per cent of Leave voters wanted to see the return of corporal punishment compared to only 14 per cent of those who voted Remain.
Corporal punishment was outlawed in state schools in 1986, but remained legal in independent schools until Parliament overwhelmingly voted for a full ban in 1998.
A TES poll in 2008 found that one fifth of teachers supported “the right to use corporal punishment in extreme cases”.
The two most influential philosophers who worked in Britain in the last century were Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Russell, thanks to his pronouncements on everything from sexual morality to geopolitics, was a public figure. Wittgenstein, by contrast, was a slightly mysterious figure even to his fellow philosophers.
Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889 and died in 1951. When I took my first degree in Philosophy (1978-81) he was still a dominating figure in the discipline - many papers began with one of his aphorisms. So I was rather proud that my report on our Philosophy of Mind option said I was "not dazzled by Wittgenstein".
Here John Searle and this blog's hero Bryan Magee discuss Wittgenstein's ideas. This is an episode from Magee's 1987 series The Great Philosophers, and proof that there are nothing wrong with talking heads if they have something interesting to say.
Tim Bale explores the motives that led David Cameron to call the EU referendum and the subsequent impact Brexit has had on the Conservative Party.
Laura Laker asks why the BBC published 22 negative articles on a 300m bike lane in Somerset.
I always knew that photo of Craven Arms fire station would come in handy.
I blogged the other day about the threat to the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal. Here is a more hopeful story: the restoration of its Crumlin Arm, which once linked the canal to Newport and its docks.
That Wikipedia entry makes it sound enticing:
The canal started at a basin in Crumlin and ran through the villages of Newbridge, Abercarn and Cwmcarn now under the A467. The canal then reached Cwmcarn lock now under the grass at the end of the present canal.
The canal crosses the Pontywaun aqueduct and follow the side of the mountain above Crosskeys and Risca this section is the longest lock-free pound on the system until the Fourteen Locks. The canal descends the fourteen locks and turns sharp along the hill side. The canal now flows next to the M4 into urban Newport to Barrack Hill tunnel (now disused and culverted).
The rest of the canal through the city is lost beneath modern roads and buildings. The Kingsway dual carriageway follows the route of the canal to the now-filled-in Old Town Docks near the Transporter Bridge.
The Crumlin Arm was abandoned in 1962 and had long been in decline before that.
This video is from the excellent Court Above the Cut YouTube account.
It puts me in mind of a Liberal England post from New Year's Day 2016:
Today in someone's review of the year I came across an interview Nick Clegg gave to the Evening Standard on the eve of the general election:
Looking back at the campaign, it is the comic moments he remembers. For instance, his first visit was to a hedgehog sanctuary, with Paddy Ashdown. Ashdown muttered under his breath to Clegg: "When I was in the Special Boat Service we used to eat hedgehogs."
No wonder Ed is keen to repair our relations with the hedgehog community.
That said, if you do have it in mind to eat one of the creatures, my old post will tell you how to cook it. Blame Malcolm Saville.
Fil from Wings of Pegasus has been looking at what exactly it is that we hear in the Eurovision Song Contest final.
The rules now allow a prerecorded backing track, and that track can choose to use pitch correction and autotuning as an artistic choice. And guess what? Everyone makes that choice.
That in itself is worrying, but what Fil uncovers here is that, for some songs, the backing track contains a fair part of what we think is the lead vocal.
So it looks as though Eurovision isn't particularly interested in enforcing its own rules.
Fil has disappeared down this rabbit hold because he has discovered just how widespread the use of this technology now is. A lot of music sold as being 'live' is nothing of the sort.
He began these videos by analysing the technique of musicians like, to take a purely random example, Steve Winwood.
I shall resist the temptation to quote it in its entirety, and give you just a taste:
Enid Blyton is perhaps like The Beatles. Certainly she was massively globally successful and subsequently went through dips of critical and popular appeal, before becoming established again as a recognisable global brand whose enormous material success insists on being endlessly reproduced and extended.
I rather enjoy drawing this parallel partly because I know many Beatles devotees will prickle at the thought of any similarities in artistic merit between the two and partly because Lennon himself poked fun at the Famous Five in his ridiculous ‘In His Own Write’ book.
In hindsight I wonder if The Comic Strip were as much inspired by Lennon’s parody as anything. Certainly there is a similar smug assumed ‘cleverness’ that irritates me more in my fifties than it did in my late teens or early twenties. Others continue to find it charming, of course, and that is their prerogative.
In this imagined realm of children’s authors as 1960s pop groups then, if Blyton might be The Beatles, who would Malcolm Saville be? Certainly not The Stones and definitely not The Who. The Kinks perhaps?
Certainly I see Saville as doing something similar to The Kinks in terms of attempting to capture a world (specifically an England) that is dissolving even as they record it. There is too a shared sense of knowingness that what is being lost is in itself partially illusory. They both, at their best, mourn a mediated Englishness.
There's much else about the two authors in the post, which reminds me a little of an article I wrote for the Guardian website years ago.
The writer of Unpopular Culture like Saville's Rye books bests, whereas I'm a Stiperstones man. And he has written at least two other posts on Saville.
There's one on Jane's Country Year, which was Saville's favourite among his own books and shows the influence of Richard Jefferies' Bevis.
And a recent one on, amongst other things, one of the last of Saville's Lone Pine stories, Rye Royal.
This time the theme of the issue was Georges - they've already done Davids. I wish I'd thought of including George Eliot.
Georges on my Mind
The future George I and his wife Sophia Dorothea fought all the time. He once pulled out her hair and throttled her until she lost consciousness – her life was saved by attendants who intervened. When George inherited the British throne, he had already forbidden his 11-year-old son, the future George II, to see his mother or even mention her name. When he came to England from Hanover, the younger George revenged himself by scheming with his father’s enemies at Westminster.
George II and his wife both hated their son Frederick, Prince of Wales, and he obliged them by dying before they did. It used to be believed that his death was caused by a cricket ball, but sadly the story has been discredited.
It was Frederick’s son who inherited the throne, as George III. The theory that his madness was due to porphyria is as out of fashion as Fredrick’s cricket injury, but whatever the cause of it, he was still clear-headed enough to see through his son. George IV enjoyed a dissolute life but not his father’s approval, and left no legitimate children.
Thanks goodness none of this enmity has come down to our present-day Royal Family.
******
The uncle of Boy George used to be the priest at our local Catholic church, Our Lady of Victories. I heard that from a taxi driver who had it from two nuns, so it must be true.
******
There’s a photograph of boys from a Liverpool primary school on the beach during a 1951 holiday on Isle of Man that surfaces regularly on social media. Two are instantly recognisable: John Lennon has pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and next to him a smiling Jimmy Tarbuck has adopted a boxer’s stance. Perhaps because he is younger, the boy on the other side of Lennon is not so easily recognised, but he is Peter Sissons. A friend of Paul McCartney’s at secondary school, he grew up to be an eminent television reporter and newsreader.
Sissons recalled a meeting with a third Beatle, George Harrison, in the days when he was reading ITV’s News at Ten:
I got a phone call on the news desk and the receptionist said “George Harrison is here to see you”. I went down to reception and there was George with most of the Hare Krishna people from Oxford Street. The place was full of these men in saffron robes and in the middle was George in a rather way-out sort of hippie suit. He said to me, “Peter, I’ve got a terrific story for the news, it’ll be the lead story, you’ve got to put it on the news tonight.”
I said: “Terrific, what is it?”
He said: “Peace.”
I said: “Hang on, where?” He said: “Just peace, it’s a great thing, you’ve got to put it on the news.”
I explained there had to be a bit more to it than that to make the lead on News at Ten. We parted on very good terms and off they went banging their tambourines.
******
George can be a surname too: there’s Bobby George, Charlie George and probably George George too. But the most famous such George was once Henry George.
After he died while fighting the New York Mayoral election of 1897, says a contemporary report:
Thousands upon thousands of people waited in the streets from early morning to obtain places in the seemingly endless line that drifted past the candidate whose strange and premature 'election' had thrown the politicians into confusion. Sobbing women lifted their children to look upon the face of the 'martyr'. Tears became contagious, and rough men sobbed without shame.
Another reckoned New York had seen no comparable demonstration of popular feeling at the death of a public man since Abraham Lincoln had lain in state at City Hall.
Henry George achieved this extraordinary fame, not as a politician. but as an economic theorist. People argue over whether he or Karl Marx have sold more books, but there’s no doubt that George sold millions. Reading groups of working people were founded to discuss his ideas.
At the heart of those ideas were the beliefs that land was the ultimate source of all wealth and that, as the song goes, God gave the land to the people. It followed that the proceeds of rents on land and the minerals beneath it should be taken in tax by the state. This, he argued, would remove the monopoly power that allowed landlords to exploit wage earners and make possible the abolition of other taxes.
Henry George’s ideas still have their advocates, but his most tangible legacy is a board game. A follower of George’s, Elizabeth Magie, and her friends invented The Landlord’s Game. When she patented it in 1904, she said it was designed to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences".
The Landlord’s Game evolved into Monopoly, a celebration of rapacious landlordism that has done more to lay bare the tensions underlying family life than anything since the early work of Salvador Minuchin.
It happens that I reached the finals of the British Monopoly Championships in 1977. They were held on top of the nuclear pile at Oldbury-on-Severn power station – the Electricity Company, you see. It may have been only a promotional event for Waddington’s, but I managed to wangle the time off school.
I won two games on the first day to become one of the last twelve players. In the semi-final, I built hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane – they’re not the best sites to develop, but the dice fall how they will. My anticipation grew as my main rival moved round the board towards them. Suddenly, he had drawn a ‘Go to Jail’ card and, safe from my West End rents for three turns, he went on to win the game.
You have to hand it to Henry George and Elizabeth Magie: they had foreseen the Britain of the 1980s.
"The media keep reporting that Abrega Garcia was mistakenly or wrongly deported. I get the impulse - journalists ... want to give readers a sense of the injustice. But all of those men were deported wrongly, because they were all denied due process." Jonathan Larsen says the US Democrats must stand up for everyone’s rights.
Sajia Ferdous argues that AI is inherently ageist, which can be costly for workers and businesses.
"It took nearly a decade for officialdom to acknowledge beavers had spread throughout the Tay catchment. When they did, they tried to round them up - to re-extinct them. But Taysiders - many of whom had grown fond of watching them work at dusk - wouldn’t have it. When Scottish Natural Heritage laid traps, some said that locals took to peeing on them, so their scent would warn off the beavers." Adam Ramsay recounts how his parents' adoption of beavers has transformed their upland farm into a rich, biodiverse haven for birds, mammals, fish and amphibians.
"The poor boy looks utterly miserable, as if he wants the ground to open up and swallow him. Or - better - swallow his dad." Sam Wollaston asks why children's football brings out the worst in parents.
Leigh Singer celebrates Annie Hall: "Diane Keaton had co-starred in [Woody] Allen’s two previous films, Sleeper and Love and Death, establishing herself as a deft comedian with a kooky sensibility and offbeat comic timing. But these roles were largely foils for Allen’s protagonist. Annie Hall, however, tailored specifically for her by Allen, is far more substantial."
Our congratulations go to: Alistair Carmichael, Chris Coghlan, Will Forster, James MacCleary, Helen Maguire, Mike Martin, Manuella Perteghella and Cameron Thomas.
Helen Maguire, the party's defence spokesperson, told Politics Home:
"I will wear this retaliatory sanction as a badge of honour - as will my Liberal Democrat colleagues also placed on Moscow’s blacklist."
Six peers have also been sanctioned by Moscow, among them the Lib Dems Jeremy Purvis and Julie Smith.
She was his homely land. The moon made her trees more important for their shadows than for themselves, picked out the silent rivers in quicksilver, smoothed the toy pasture fields, laid a soft haze on everything.
But he felt that he would have known the country, even without the light. He knew that there must be the Severn, there the Downs and there the Peak: all invisible to him, but inherent in his home.
In this field a white horse must be grazing, in that some washing must be hanging on a hedge. It had a necessity to be itself.
He suddenly felt the intense sad loveliness of being as being, apart from right or wrong: that, indeed, the mere fact of being was the ultimate right. He began to love the land under him with a fierce longing, not because it was good or bad, but because it was.
I love this, but have to admit it would have been better if they'd found somewhere to plug in their instruments.
The other day I used Bluesky to pass on some of Lord Bonkers' table talk:
Lord Bonkers writes: What all this nonsense about Katy Perry and "the first all-female space crew"? I well recall that a British rocket took off from Woomera 56 years ago almost to the day. Its crew? Marguerite Patten Helen Shapiro Pat Coombs Marion Mould on Stroller
— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) 14 April 2025 at 17:13
[image or embed]
Think of this as a sort of free extra from the old boy - a Patreon you don't have to pay for. (That is unless I'm short of inspiration for his next diary, when it will appear there too.)
But who, I hear you ask, were Marion Mould and Stroller?
Marion Mould won the silver medal in the individual show jumping at the Mexico Oympics of 1968. I remember her as Marion Mould, though she must have been Marion Coakes at the time, as she did not marry until the following year.
And Stroller was her horse, or rather her pony. It was rare for ponies to compete in top-level show jumping, but he and Marion won 61 international competitions together.
Oddly, I don't remember hearing much of Marion Mould in the early Seventies, when show jumping (it seems so unlikely now) was a huge television sport. My memory may be at fault, or perhaps she did fade from the scene.
But you can see her above in the third episode of the fourth and final season of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
My memory of that fourth series (the one made without John Cleese) is of watching it each week, willing it to be funny, but being disappointed every time.
Watching this episode today it doesn't seem so bad to me - if you like Python then you will like this. Perhaps the individual sketches are allowed to run on too long, but it's not as weak as I remember it.
And this little selection featuring Marion Mould is certainly funny. Show jumping obstacles did get overblown like this when the sport was at the height of its popularity.
Welsh Liberal Democrat MP for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe David Chadwick has challenged the Welsh Government, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Natural Resources Wales over plans to limit the water supply to the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal.
The Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal relies heavily on water abstractions from the River Usk, which runs alongside the canal for much of its length, providing over 80% of the water required.
The canal was originally exempt from rules governing abstraction from the Water Resources Act 1991, but in 2017 this exemption was removed. Now, Natural Resources Wales are looking to enforce limits on how much water may be abstracted from the Usk. ...
The Canal and River Trust now has to pay for the extra water they use to keep the canal alive, but do not have any new income to pay for it with the annual cost possibly in excess of £1m a year.
That was posted on the Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe Lib Dem's website a month ago, and there does not seem to have been any breakthrough in the talks between the authorities involved.
A couple of days ago Nation Cymru quoted Mark Evans from Glandŵr Cymru, the body that looks after canals in Wales:
"Our charity acted to safeguard the much-loved canal over the summer months, with additional water purchased from Welsh Water. This is whilst an affordable long-term solution is found - which will need the collective help of Welsh Water, the Welsh Government and Natural Resources Wales.
"As an emergency measure we have diverted money away from planned maintenance and repairs across our canal network to secure a water supply this summer. However, it isn’t sustainable for our charity to bear this cost alone."
Given that the canal is now more than two centuries old, you wonder whether its continued health is now as important as that of the River Usk. We don't begrudge protecting the Norfolk Broads because they are flooded medieval peat workings.
Anyway, I ought to declare an interest here. The picture above shows the canal at Llanfoist Wharf near Abergavenny, and I had a very happy week's holiday with a cousin of my mother's at Llanfoist when I was 14. That week is in part responsible for my love of the landscapes of the Welsh border.
The canal around Llanfoist and its tramways were the setting for Alexander Cordell's novel The Rape of the Fair Country - a sort of poor Welshman's version of How Green Was My Valley.
John Curtice previews the local elections for the Mirror this morning:
The local elections on May 1st take place in unprecedented circumstances. Never before have both Labour, whose current average poll rating is just 24%, and the Conservatives, on 22%, been so unpopular at the same time. Both are struggling to keep pace with Reform, narrowly ahead on 25%.
British politics was once a two-horse race between Conservative and Labour. Now it is a fragmented five-way battle. Even the Greens (9%) are at a record high in the polls, while the Liberal Democrats (14%) are a force once more.
And the most encouraging part?
In taking votes from the Conservatives, Reform could simply help the Liberal Democrats, who always do better in local elections than in the national polls, take key seats from Kemi Badenoch’s party, such as in Oxfordshire. Despite the party’s current unpopularity, even Labour might pick up some Tory seats too, with Nottinghamshire a key target.
BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.
The judges pointed out that there's more on the efforts to save this wonderful bird at Curlew Action.
Shorts penalty for 6½ft boy
Social services officials are investigating the case of a 16-year-old, 6ft. 6in. boy who was told to wear short trousers as a punishment in a remand home.
An inquiry was demanded by the boy’s solicitor, Mr Peter Marron, who told the juvenile court at Leicester on Tuesday that his client was “ humiliated and degraded” by the experience.
Mr Marron claimed that the punishment led to another incident at the home in which an officer said he was assaulted. For this the boy was certified as "unruly" and spent seven days on remand in Leicester prison.
The Daily Express, which is the only other paper I can find covering the story, adds some details. The boy ("a West Indian") was punished for leaving the remand home without permission to see his solicitor.
When I came across this story, I dragged up vague memories of the incarceration of boys in adult prisons being a cause for concern - the sort of thing they made editions of World in Action about.
And I was right. Here's a Commons debate from October 1975 in which a new clause was added to the Children Bill at its second reading.
Step forward health minister Dr David Owen:
The House knows that the number of remands to Prison Department establishments of juveniles charged with a criminal offence and certified to be of so unruly a character that they cannot safely be committed to the care of the local authority, has risen steeply in recent years.
The number of receptions to prisons of boys aged 14 to 16 rose from under 2,000 in 1971 to more than 3,500 in 1974. The number of certificates issued in respect of girls rose from under 100 in 1971 to nearly 250 in 1974.
The sending of these young people to Prison Department establishments and in particular in the case of girls and some boys to establishments in which adult prisoners are held has rightly attracted growing and widespread criticism.
The pipeline from the care system to the prison system was certainly working well 50 years ago.
Then there was Owen's shadow, Norman Fowler:
A year ago I went to Wormwood Scrubs prison, which some hon. Members may remember is a special security prison with extra security precautions.
However, another wing of Wormwood Scrubs housed the borstal allocation unit for the southern part of England. The boys who were sent there stayed three or four weeks whilst it was decided what borstal they should be sent to.
Many of them went not to a closed borstal but to an open borstal. Although the boys were obviously kept separate from the adult prisoners, it could have hardly have failed to get around that they were being kept in prison. Twenty-five per cent. of them slept three to a cell.
It is a scandal that children should be kept in prison. It is even worse if they are kept in prison when they are awaiting trial or sentence, because we are dealing with children whose guilt has not been determined or whose eventual sentence will not necessarily be a custodial one.
And the first Labour backbencher to speak? - he referred to Fowler's "very fair and welcome comments". That was Robert Kilroy-Silk.
The party hopes the fund will reach £1m this year to help step up production of campaign materials and digital ads to counter Reform in key areas where the Lib Dems are already strong locally. It believes it is best placed to neutralise the threat posed by growing support for Reform in counties including Devon, Cornwall and Shropshire.
The funds come on top of £1m already donated to the party so far in 2025, which is highly unusual for the Lib Dems so far out from a general election.
Jonny Crawshaw, a Labour councillor from York, wrote:
A cursory look at the published accounts of the many multi‑academy trusts (Mats), which now control at least 80% of state secondary schools in England, shows an explosion in chief executive pay, with many new ancillary roles – chief finance officers, executive headteachers and trust performance directors – also adding to “central services” bills.
Many of these roles didn’t exist a decade ago, yet they leach millions of pounds each year out of the classroom and into the bank balances of the disproportionately white, middle‑class men who fill them.
Take my home town of York as an example: where once the 63 state schools were maintained by a director of children’s services on circa £110,000 and an assistant director of education on circa £80,000, we now have six Mats whose focus is increasingly drawn outside the city boundaries.
Together they now employ six CEOs on salaries ranging from at least £130,000 to more than £160,000, six CFOs and several executive heads, and sport a combined wage bill for “key management personnel” that exceeds £7m – money the former education authority could only dream of.
Meanwhile, more than a third of the city’s schools remain under the local authority.
Crawshaw concluded that this and Mats' lack of public accountability are the "real scandals" that need to be addressed in education.
The photo here is of a York primary school. It's a Church of England school, so not part of any new-style Mat. I've chosen it because it was the first polling station where I served as a teller for the Liberal Party. This was in the city council elections of 1980 - our candidate, the late Julian Cummins, narrowly failed to win.
I saw Jethro Tull at the National Exhibition Centre in 1987 and we were cracking jokes about them being old then, yet here is a track from from the album, Curious Ruminant, that they released last month.
Ian Anderson's voice has aged, but they still sound like Tull. In fact they sound more like Tull than they did for some of the 1987 concert - that was the era when Anderson had been listening to too much Mark Knopfler and rather fancied himself as a guitar hero.
Most importantly, judging by the comments left on YouTube, the band's fans are delighted with the album.
Others may detect a decline from Tull's glory years, but then all bands tend to sound tamer if they last for years.
And it's not just that they are getting older and running low on inspiration, it's that what music you can make is in part determined by the music that has gone before you and the music other people are making at the time.
On holiday in Shropshire last summer, I picked up a secondhand copy of Joan Aiken's The Cuckoo Tree and was reminded how enjoyable her children's books are.
The Cuckoo Tree was the fifth of the Wolves Chronicles. This film, made by Puffin Books to promote Aiken's work, talks about the genesis of the first four and also shows you Aiken's home.
There's lots more about the writer and her books on The Wonderful World of Joan Aiken.
Thanks to a sharp-eyed Liberal England reader, the Guardian wins out Headline of the Day Award.
They are alive to the trap Lib Dems have walked into in the past of adopting a technocratic tone and blandly telling the public every issue is a "bit more complicated" than it seems.
One senior figure says the Lib Dems are trying to do something quite unusual for a progressive centre-left party in making a broader emotional argument about why the public should pick them.
This source says that approach runs through the stunts but also through the focus on care and the party leader's personal connection to the issue.
Presenting a plan that looks different to the status quo is another way to try to stand apart.
It's why there has been a focus on attacking Donald Trump and talking up the EU recently, two areas left unoccupied by the main parties.
Rob Powell, Sky New's political correspondent, looks at the Liberal Democrats' strategy in the current local election campaigns.
Tellingly, he finds it natural to see this as being integrated into the party's strategy for national elections - something that has not always been the case in the past.
His article is certainly worth reading:
At times, party figures seem somewhat astonished the Tories don't view them as more of a threat, given they were beaten by them in swathes of their traditional heartlands last year.
The Inland Waterways Association was formed in 1946, but it was not until the 1950 Festival of Boats and Arts, held in Market Harborough, that the campaign to save the inland waterways really became established as a national crusade. The festival is generally thought to be the tipping point of the waterways revival, triggering the mass-participation on a volunteering spirit which is still unique in the world.
To celebrate the 75th anniversary of that event, a festival will be held at Foxton in Leicestershire on Saturday 7 June and Sunday 8 June.
Market Harborough canal basin is no longer suitable to host such events, but it will be visited by a cavalcade of boats on the Saturday. You can find full details of the event on the IWA Harborough 75 website.
The festival is supported by the IWA Leicestershire Branch in partnership with the Canal and River Trust, the Old Union Canal Society, Harborough District Council and Foxton Museum.
You can read more about the 1950 event on the festival website, and there are a couple of posts on this blog that may interest you:
The photo at the top shows the boatwoman Sonia Smith, who was to marry her fellow waterways campaigner Tom Rolt, at the 1950 festival. And, yes, the Robert Aickman who met Market Harborough UDC was the writer of ghost stories.
