A tribute to three border collies I have met while walking

If you like walking you’re going to meet a lot of sheepdogs. Fortunately, I like border collies – they are serious working dogs, yet they will lie on their backs at the slightest sign of fussing and wave their paws in the air. And, while I suppose I can imagine one nipping your heels, I can’t imagine a sheepdog perpetrating serious violence.

Before the Three Tuns in Bishop’s Castle was modernised in the Nineties, I used to go there with a friend and his young daughter. There were always a couple of old farmers in the front bar with their dogs, and she would join the dogs in front of the fire and lie with her arm around the neck of one.

So here are three of my walking encounters with sheepdogs.

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These days all accommodation seems to be on Airbnb and want you to book for a week, but when I started serious walking it was easy to find places to stay for one night and a lot of farms did bed and breakfast.

Every farm seemed to have an old sheepdog, who was largely retired and spent most of its days in front of the kitchen range, and one or more young dogs, who you were told would never be as good.

One such young dog – I think this was on one of my visits to the southern half of the Offa’s Dyke path or an early holiday in the Shropshire Hills – followed me the next morning, barking. Every time I turned round, he would drop low in the grass and become quite silent.

We crossed a whole field like this before I decided the game was more fun for him than it was for me. So I pointed at the farmhouse we had both come from and said as commandingly as I could manage: “Go back!” Which he promptly did. Did I mention that border collies are highly intelligent?

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I was walking near Market Harborough, and as I passed through the village of Marston Trussell, a sheepdog decided it would walk with me.

We continued for a while companionably, and just as I was starting to worry about how far he had come with me and wondering if I should take him back to the village, we reached a drive that led to a farm. He hared off up the drive: this was clearly where he lived.

The next thing I knew, the sheepdog had returned with a friendly young foxhound who he clearly wanted to introduce to me. Foxhounds being foxhounds, I left them with muddy paw prints on my chest.

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As I was descending some hill or other in Shropshire, the path I was on slowly became clearer, then wider and finally had hedges on both sides. Just at the point where it had indisputably become a lane, there was a tractor pulling a flat trailer coming out of a field.

There were several men on the trailer, and they waved a greeting as it pulled out into the lane. Just as it set off down the hill, a sheepdog jumped from it. The dog proceeded to walk down the lane, keeping pace with me, until we reached the farm at the bottom.

He was perfectly friendly about it, but I couldn’t escape the conclusion that he had been seeing me off the premises.

Robert Smyth Academy has a house named after J.W. Logan's Suffragette daughters

My old school the Robert Smyth Academy, as it's now called, produces a Welcome to Your New School brochure. In it we learn:

Pastoral care and guidance is at the heart of our school system. Your child will join one of four established college groups and this community will include key staff who will support their progress through school.

Is the brochure aimed at pupils or parents? Anyway, these colleges sound like the houses the school had in my day.

And the good news is that one of the colleges is called Logan College:

Logan college is named in celebration of the lives and work of local sisters Isobel and Nora Logan, who were both heavily involved in women’s rights and suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Isobel and Nora were daughters of this blog's hero J.W. Logan MP.

See The Phoenician Scheme and shame the critics

I went to the pictures today. It's  sign of the time that the Phoenix Cinema and Arts Centre in Leicester is now closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but it was buzzing today. There was a bigger audience for The Salt Road than my choice, The Phoenician Scheme.

It's a funny film, much funnier than the reviews had led me to expect. Maybe the problem was that critics found it natural to compare it with Wes Anderson's other films and find it wanting. But the only other film of his I'm certain I have seen is Moonrise Kingdom.

Yes, there was a lot of formalism around, but you can ignore that and still enjoy the movie. I didn't bother to spot the numbers in Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers, but that didn't stop me being engrossed in the film.

Equally, I am old enough not to have recognised half the people contributing cameo performances, and I will admit to not being enthused by Benedict Cumberbatch. Richard Ayoade as a charming revolutionary guerrilla leader was good though. I was reminded of the way Terry Gilliam cast Michael Palin, the nicest person he knew, as the torturer in Brazil.

So it's three and a half stars from me and you should see it.

The Joy of Six 1365

Neal Lawson offers seven reasons the left keep losing.

Two British journalists have recently been taken off the air, apparently for questioning foreign politicians in a manner that displeased them. Ann Moody reports on the strange disappearance of Belle Donati and Sangita Myska.

Futurism on fears that AI may eat itself: "As CEOs trip over themselves to invest in artificial intelligence, there's a massive and growing elephant in the room: that any models trained on web data from after the advent of ChatGPT in 2022 are ingesting AI-generated data — an act of low-key cannibalism that may well be causing increasing technical issues that could come to threaten the entire industry."

"The city may be emptier than ever of children and families, but tables at sought-after restaurants are still booked up weeks in advance." Anna Minton says gentrification is emptying London's schools.

"One of our course participants summarised this point as follows: 'With philosophy, people care about what I think. Nobody listens when you’ve been in prison. Everything you think is wrong, rubbish, you’re nothing.' Another was even more direct: 'Hated school, dropped out at 11, can’t read, can’t write. But I can do this.'" Jim Chamberlain reflects on his experience of teaching philosophy in prisons.

The Gentle Author visits Dr Johnson's house in Gough Square, EC4.

Scantily-clad barrister who appeared at Shrewsbury Crown Court hearing in no trousers gets stern telling-off from judge

The Shropshire Star wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Many thanks to the reader who nominated this one. You know what I like.

In praise of Graham Kerr, The Galloping Gourmet

OK, he's cheesy and the colours are very early-Seventies. But it seems to me that Graham Kerr is rarely given the place he deserves in histories of television cooking.

Because he made it fun and he made it aspirational. Before Kerr, you'd watch the terrifying Fanny Craddock showing you how to prepare a dinner party for your husband's boss and his wife (with the unspoken implication that your husband might lose his job if you didn't get it right.)

Kerr, by contrast, would show you film of an overseas restaurant he and his wife had visited, tell you what they ate there and then cook it for you himself. This was television for the first generation to take their holidays abroad and his show, The Galloping Gourmet, was hugely popular in Britain.

The restaurant in the video here is in Sussex, but as the Galloping Gourmet was made in Canada, that was overseas to the show.

And Kerr cooked with wine, cracked jokes, drank wine during the show (or at least pretended too) and laughed if things went wrong. Here he even cooks with oysters and lobster - imagine how luxurious that seemed in a show made between 1968 and 1972.

One part of Kerr's usual method is missing here: he usually pulled someone out of the audience (usually a woman) to enjoy the dish he had just cooked with him.

I'm sure Keith Floyd watched Kerr, and I've heard Rick Stein say that he worked on one of the shows Kerr made in Australia or New Zealand before The Galloping Gourmet made him famous around the world.

Kerr, who was born in England and didn't move to New Zealand until his mid twenties, is still with us at the age of 91.

Market Harborough's new friendship park opened today

Market Harborough's new Friendship Park was opened today by Cllr Peter James, the chair of Harborough District Council.

He cut a ribbon to declare the park open and celebrate the hard work of the community who have helped create it.

He told the Harborough Mail:

"I am thrilled we have been able to turn a space that was overgrown into a community park. It brings flowers, trees and wildlife into the heart of the town, which are so important for people’s sense of wellbeing and is destined to become a much-loved place for everyone."

The Mail has a video and photographs of the event.

I notice the park was open late this afternoon and took these photos myself.

You may recall that for some reason this project roused the Conservative opposition to fury. Mr Whelband is now their group leader.

One of Boris Johnson’s ex-wives to urge radical steps to correct Brexit mistakes

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The human rights lawyer Marina Wheeler KC, reports the Independent, has announced she is writing a book urging the prime minister to go much further in his Brexit reset mission and build closer relations with Brussels:

Ms Wheeler’s publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, said her book would compare her ex-husband's Brexit deal to a divorce settlement.

"Like a court order in a divorce, the Brexit deal contains our bare legal obligations", they said.

"Yet as dangerous forces gather and global technologies stoke animosity, we have a wider duty. If Britain and Europe can’t work together, what chance do democracy and the rule of law have?"

Marina Wheeler was married to Boris Johnson between 1993 and 2018. She was widely credited with reigning in Johnson's baser political instincts during his time as Mayor or London.

By chance, yesterday I came across an account of Boris Johnson's first wedding in All the Wide Border by Mike Parker:

In 1987, Johnson married his first wife Allegra Mostyn-Owen at Woodhouse, her family estate 5 miles east of Oswestry. He arrived for the ceremony with no suitable trousers or shoes, lost the wedding certificate, misplaced the ring and told off-colour jokes in his speech. His wife later described the wedding as "the end of the relationship instead of the beginning".

Council feared backlash if Jodie Marsh kept lemurs

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The case continues.

Conservative Home contributor calls for Tory/Lib Dem pact

Someone on Conservative Home has come up with a bright new idea to save the Conservative Party.

It's a pact with the Liberal Democrats.

Peter Franklin, an associate editor on UnHerd, has noticed the straits the Tories are in:

Poll after poll shows Conservative support on less than 20 per cent.

Thanks to the cliff-edge effect in the electoral system, we’d lose most of the 121 seats we clung on to last year. In short, we’re on the brink of extinction as a major political party.

And a pact with the Lib Dems is his recipe for saving them.

Why should we Lib Dems throw away our hard-regained credibility to help our ancestral enemy? To avoid splitting the anti-Reform vote and letting Farage in.

But that's student politics. Online politics. Not the real world. 

Political parties cannot gift their support en bloc to another party. Voters are more complicated in their views and more independent than that.

The Tories are going to have to save themselves. And judging by the comments below Franklin's article, I don't fancy their chances.

The Joy of Six 1364

"We are not yet a year on from the appalling events in Southport and the violence which followed. That violence was largely based on misinformation and lies and a campaign of mendacity which polluted social media. ... It is in this context that Merseyside Police took the virtually unprecedented step of identifying the ethnicity of the suspect within hours of the incident taking place - a 53 year-old white British man, local to the Liverpool area." Lewis Goodall says the far-right voices complaining about this decision by Merseyside Police are the same ones that made it inevitable.

Fintan O'Toole explains why, despite widespread buyer's remorse about Brexit, Nigel Farage is the rising figure in UK politics: "Brexit was a terrible solution to the problem of English identity. It did nothing to allow ordinary people to 'take back control' of their lives. Its only achievement has been to wipe about four per cent off Britain’s GDP."

"Something strange is happening in England. There are more children in care and fewer people waiting to adopt them. In 2024 there were 83,630 in the care system, a 23 per cent increase from 2014. Simultaneously, between 2013 and 2023, the numbers of “approved families” dropped by 60 per cent." Martha Gill looks at the reasons why prospective parents are no longer queuing up to adopt children in care.

James Breckwoldt argues that unaffordable housing has helped to sink the Conservative Party.

"More so than any of Hitchcock’s prior works about the lengths men will go to satiate their twisted appetites, Frenzy marks a new echelon of sexual sadism in his filmography." Steph Green looks back to 1972 and Alfred Hitchcock's brazen British homecoming film.

Olivia Rutigliano enjoys the wit and wisdom of Dorothy L. Sayers: "I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking" (Have his Carcase, 1932).

Joni Mitchell: The Last Time I Saw Richard

One day you wake up and find you own¹ albums by Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. You don't remember buying them, but they are there. Congratulations, you are a grown up.²

The Last Time I Saw Richard is the final track on Joni Mitchell's Blue, and is the best song about disillusionment I know.

Notes

1. Of course, young people don't own any music, as one day they may discover to their cost.
2. What does this tell us about Canada?

Searching for what was once Dinting Railway Centre

Dinting is a station on the Glossop line from Manchester Piccadilly and was also on the Great Central's Woodhead route from Manchester to Sheffield¹ before that closed in 1981. Between 1968 and 1990 a nearby locomotive shed was home to the Dinting Railway Centre, where you could often find famous locomotives like Blue Peter and the Flying Scotsman visiting.

The LeiceExplore YouTube channel has rebranded as What Once Was, but offers the same high-quality nosehs around industrial and historic sites. Subscribe and like away.

Here the two Steves discover the site of the railway centre and Dinting viaduct, before exploring the station, part of which has been disused since the closure of the line to Sheffield.

Notes

1. The Woodhead route is the longest lost railway that I travelled on, ahead of March to Spalding and Market Harborough to Northampton.

Conrad Russell on Bertrand Russell (with a pinch of Carly Simon)

In the 1 September 1988 issue of the London Review of Books, Conrad Russell reviewed Alan Ryan's "political life" of his father Bertrand Russell.

Here is a little personal reminiscence from that review:

My father’s situation in 1918 was not an enviable one: he was 46, and had just lost his job, suffered imprisonment and social disgrace, and was facing the failure of his marriage. He had, in effect, no inherited money left, and, it must have seemed, a very bleak future indeed. 

Many men have broken under stresses no greater than this, and that the writing which came out of it should sometimes have been done for effect is no more than, reasonably, we should have expected. 

His situation in 1941 was no more enviable: he was trapped in the United States by the outbreak of war, unable to get himself into England or his money out of it, again dismissed from an academic job in disgrace, and in difficulties even for money to pay the fare into New York to meet a publisher. 

I can still remember the day when Simon and Schuster came to lunch (and my own bewilderment that they turned out to be a single person), and the overwhelming relief in the household when they happily departed. The result was The History of Western Philosophy.

The whole review is worth reading. Conrad names the two greatest changes of his father's last time as the way it became safe not to be a Christian and the relaxation of sexual morality.

On a more trivial note, the publishing firm of Simon & Schuster was founded in 1924 in New York. The Simon was Richard L. Simon, who was the father of the singer and songwriter Carly Simon, but I don't suppose it was he who called on the Russells.

Alasdair MacIntyre: The philosopher who broke up the Beatles

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The Guardian obituary by Jane O'Grady brings out the importance of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last week:

"Imagine," runs the opening of After Virtue, "that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe", that science and science teaching have been deliberately abolished, and only charred pages, disconnected scientific terms and meaningless incantations remain.

This, said MacIntyre, is our current moral situation. ... All we have are "the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance is derived". This is why we regard moral argument as "necessarily interminable"; we do not even expect to reach consensus. Should we prioritise human rights and/or the general happiness, individual choice and/or the general will, hedonism and will-to-power and/or compassion and self-abnegation?

MacIntyre saw the way forward as a return to Aristotle and a view of ethics that concentrates on the character and moral virtues of individuals rather than rules or consequences when determining ethical actions. 

It's a form of ethics that might be able tell you how you should live your life, which is the greatest question in the field, yet one that many other views insist they cannot answer. I remember one of my lecturer's at York saying that when she started out, studying moral philosophy meant slogging through numerous papers on the meaningless of ethical language.

But MacIntyre has another claim to fame, as reported in Christopher Kaczor's memoir of him (it was in my last Joy of Six):

Alasdair often joked that his most significant achievement was breaking up the Beatles. Conventional wisdom holds that Yoko Ono played a key role in the end of the band. 

In 1966, MacIntyre lived in the same apartment complex as Yoko. One day, she came to MacIntyre’s apartment and asked to borrow a ladder that she needed for her upcoming art show. It was at this art exhibit that John Lennon met Yoko. 

Lennon recounts, "There was another piece that really decided me for-or-against the artist: a ladder which led to a painting which was hung on the ceiling. It looked like a black canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it. This was near the door when you went in. I climbed the ladder, you look through the spyglass and in tiny little letters it says 'yes.' So it was positive. I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and ... it said ‘yes.’ ...  I was very impressed and John Dunbar introduced us."

Lennon mentions the ladder MacIntyre gave to Yoko three times. Without the ladder, would Lennon have been so impressed with the art exhibit? Without being so impressed, would he have asked to meet Yoko? If Lennon had not met Yoko, would the Beatles have broken up?

Britain's worst road traffic accident took place 50 years ago today: The 1975 Dibble's Bridge coach crash

Today, 27 May, is the 50th anniversary of Britain's worst road traffic accident. In it, 32 coach passengers and their driver lost their lives when a coach lost braking power while descending a steep hill in North Yorkshire and crashed through the parapet of a bridge at the bottom.

The passengers, all women, were on a day trip from the town of Thornaby-on-Tees in North Yorkshire to Grassington in the Dales.

Strangely, I have no memory of hearing about this disaster on the news at the time, nor have I ever heard it referred to since. It's odd how some such events are remembered and others quite forgotten.

There aren't even any photographs of the aftermath of the crash on the Getty Images site, where I look for such things. So instead I have added a video made for Thornaby Town Council in 2019.

As it explains, the design of coaches has changed out of recognition since 1975, partly as a result of this accident.

The crash site is less changed though. It had been the scene of a similar bus crash in 1925, and the video tells of two cyclists who died here in separate incidents more recently after failing to negotiate the bend at the bottom of the hill.

Later. BBC News has an article today marking the anniversary.

Lincoln Seligman, who is interviewed in it and in the video above, was a barrister at the time of the crash and is now a sculptor. He was also a godson of Edward Heath - his father was a Conservative MEP and a strong supporter of Heath's leadership.

Guardian editorial heaps praise on Ed Davey's "moral clarity rooted in lived experience"

Does anyone read newspaper editorials? I never got the habit. But this one from tomorrow's Guardian in praise of Ed Davey's approach to politics is something else:

The Lib Dem leader wants to rewrite British politics – not with the language of crisis, but that of care. In a Westminster hooked on “tough choices” and resistant to compassion in policy, he offers something rare – moral clarity rooted in lived experience. He understands that care is not a luxury to be considered after the economy is “fixed”. It is, he says, the core economy. His new book is both memoir and manifesto, containing a call to abandon parliamentary introspection and recentre politics around mutual support. ...

Rooted in real life and years helping constituents through a broken system, his authority on care is hard-won. The UK has 6 million unpaid carers – 1.7 million work more than 50 hours a week. The NHS would collapse without them. Yet many carers are met not with help, but hurdles – denied adequate respite and treated as invisible. This paper’s investigation into the scandal over carer’s allowance payments revealed a brutal bureaucracy punishing vulnerable people. It’s not just neglectful. It’s insulting.

Sir Ed’s proposal – to assign every family in need a named carer and social worker – is modest, sensible and overdue. He’s also had enough of the care reviews. Who can blame him? Since 1997, there have been 25 commissions, inquiries and white papers. Now ministers want Louise Casey to take three more years for a review into adult social care. He says it’s enough to make you cry.

A TV adaptation of The Box of Delights was broadcast in 1962

An old edition of the Hypnogoria podcast put me on to this. 

Praising the new, expanded edition of Philip W. Errington's book Opening The Box of Delights, it mentioned he had discovered that ITV broadcast an adaptation of The Box of Delights in 1962.

The Amazon blurb for Errington's book mentions "The 1962 ITV Story Box adaptation of The Box of Delights." This enabled me to find it in this listing of the next day's television from the Halifax Evening Courier, God bless its woollen socks, for 8 November that year.

Story Box appears to have been a programme for schools.

Services must share information better when children are at risk

Writing for Lion and Unicorn about the film No Room at the Inn and the death in 1945 of the foster child Dennis O'Neill, which inspired the play on which it was based, I said:

Sir Walter Monckton’s inquiry found what every such inquiry has found since: a need for different services to work together more effectively.

Could it be that government has finally noticed? 

Here's Jacqui Smith - Baroness Smith of Malvern, now a minister in the Department for Education  - speaking during the Lord's committee stage of the government's Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill:

My Lords, since the very first inquiry into the tragic death of Dennis O’Neill in 1945, we have seen time and again that poor information-sharing lies at the heart of serious child safeguarding failures. It is a persistent and deeply troubling issue, and if we are serious about protecting children, we must be serious about fixing this.

I think there has been in this group of amendments with respect to this clause a pretty strong consensus around this House on that point.

The Joy of Six 1363

"The idea of progression in prison is seductive but unachievable. Too many prisons are struggling to get men out of their cells for even an hour a day, there is little or no opportunity for education or work, the food is stodgy and there’s too little of it, contact with family is intermittent, and violence prevalent. How such a prison could possibly encourage people to go to non-existent work to earn early release is just pie in the sky." Frances Crook finds that David Gauke’s sentencing review tackles prison overcrowding but fails to challenge the system’s core flaws or offer a true path forward.

Lewis Baston says the Liberal Democrat by-election win in Sutton on Thursday underlines the trouble  that London’s Tories are in.

"The region that was the birthplace of rail has fallen behind Europe and the world when it comes to high quality rail network that meets the needs of the current age." Rob Naybour argues that it’s high time the cities and towns of the North of England were better connected.

Christopher Kaczor on the importance of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntryre, who died last week: "MacIntyre emphasised that the study of ethics cannot be separated from history, for it is an understanding of historically situated practices within communities that is needed to make sense of moral judgments. 'We should, as far as it is possible, allow the history of philosophy to break down our present day conceptions, so that our too narrow views of what can and cannot be thought, said, and done are discarded in the face of the record of what has been thought, said, and done,' he wrote in A Short History of Ethics."

Sean Wilentz takes us back to the winter of 1965/6 and the making of Bob Dylan's album Blonde on Blonde.

"From the opening it has precision, style and wit, as well as a dash and sparkle that is all its own, and it doesn’t matter if future readers know nothing about his relatively fleeting fame, because this book’s not about a famous person – it’s about someone who wants to be famous." Lissa Evans recommends Emlyn Williams’ autobiography George.

The loss of the Lagik at Sutton Bridge on the River Nene

Photo: Maritime and Coastguard Agency

As the first one has proved surprisingly popular, here's a second post about a cargo vessel being grounded in the River Nene.

Back in 2000, reports Lincolnshire Live, a ship named the Lagik, carrying a cargo of 2250 tonnes of steel products, attempted to berth at Sutton Bridge, a few miles downstream of Wisbech, with severe consequences:

The 92 metre-long German-owned cargo ship entered the swinging basin at the port to be swung before it could berth, but within seconds it began to ground following "inappropriate manoeuvring."

It's bow ... grounded at a distance from the opposite bank equal to the ship's length and once a tide caught the ship's stern ... it was effectively 'wedged' in position.

Later that same day (December 13, 2000), a combination of the weight of its cargo and the falling tide caused the ship to break its back and settle further into the river with each tide.

The Lagik blocked the River Nene ... and this led to closure of Wisbech port in Cambridgeshire for 44 days.

The Lagik could not be recovered whole, and was cut in three pieces where she lay by salvage experts. The only good news is that they managed to prevent serious pollution of the river.

A swinging basin appears to be a harbour's equivalent of a winding hole on the canals and allows a ship to be turned in little more than its own length.

I captured the mouth of this swinging basin on my visit to Sutton Bridge in 2009 - you can see it in the photograph below.

If you think the Nene is a narrow river to have inland ports like Sutton Bridge and Wisbech, you may be surprised to know that ships used to dock even further upstream.

The Victoria County History for Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely says:

As recently as 1938 a sea-going vessel, the Constance H, sailed as far as Peterborough, clearing Guyhirn Bridge by 1 inch. In 1951 some sea-going barges, laden with corn, sailed from the Thames to Peterborough. 

Raymond Lefèvre and his Orchestra: Soul Coaxing

It's summer in the late Sixties and you're out for the day on a coach or in a car with plastic seats that children have to peel themselves off carefully at journey's end. This is playing on the radio and it tells you you're going to have a good time.

For this was an era when optimism was still the default register - Jonathan Meades once wrote that the future happened briefly in 1969. 

As I discovered long ago, Soul Coaxing is an orchestral arrangement of the song Âme Câline by Michel Polnareff. Lefèvre's skill here is to make you wait just long enough that you are hungry for the main theme each time it returns, but don't get impatient with the piece as a whole.

Soul Coaxing was everywhere once, and was used by Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg as a theme tune or to fill the airwaves while DJs changed over.

GUEST POST Forget your two-horse race: Increasingly it's a cavalry charge

Augustus Carp wanders off from his usual subjective enquiries into councillor defections to consider some objective examples of real voters casting real votes for real candidates in the recent local elections.

If you are a regular reader of this site, you are probably well aware of the iniquities of our election system. You don’t need a lecture from me or, probably, anyone else on the subject, but you might like to consider some of the more unusual results thrown up in the recent county council elections.

To set the scene, in order for a candidate - or party -  to succeed using the current system, the procedure for nearly the last 100 years has been to engineer public opinion to regard the contest as being between just two parties. 

That way, Party A can tell the voters that it’s a straight contest between them and Party B, and that it’s the duty of the electorate to recognise that a vote for Party C is a wasted vote. Verily, “It’s a two horse race!”, say the leaflets, and no other considerations are required.

However, the political world is changing, and changing rapidly. The number of two-horse races has declined, to be replaced in some contests by veritable cavalry charges, with a handful of candidates all vying for the voters’ attention with almost equal success. There are some extraordinary examples from 1 May.

Some 1405 contests took place for the English County Councils. Remarkably, in 32 contests, five candidates all managed to get over 10 per cent of the vote. 

In some cases, the result was still clear. For example, in the Leamington Milverton Division of Warwickshire, the Liberal Democrat got 53.5 per cent, with four other candidates getting 14, 13, 12 and 10 per cent. In Bedwardine (Worcestershire) Reform won with 41.5 per cent, the other candidates getting 24, 14, 10 and 10 per cent. Clearly, the winning candidates had a solid core of support. 

But what about Heavitree and Whipton Barton in Devon? There the Green won with just 26.2 per cent of the vote, the others getting 25.6, 25.4, 12 and 11 per cent. Or over in Alphington and Cowick, in the same county, where Reform won with 26.8 per cent but two other candidates both got over 25 per cent? 

How do people still justify the use of First Past the Post elections, particularly for local government elections, which produce results like those?

However, the Joint Prize for the Most Indecisive Result has to be shared by Bierton, Kingsbrook and Wing Division in Buckinghamshire, and Truro, Moresk and Trehaverne Division in Cornwall. There, six candidates all managed to get over 10 per cent of the votes each. 

The Conservative in Buckinghamshire won with 26.5 per cent of the vote, and the Lib Dem in Cornwall won with 18.9 per cent - not so much a ringing endorsement as an indication of grudging tolerance.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

The refloating of the Baltic Arrow on the River Nene near Wisbech

That Norwegian guy with a container ship in his front garden has reminded me of an incident on the River Nene last summer.

On 25 June the Baltic Arrow ran aground with its cargo of timber just downstream of the port of Wisbech, blocking the river navigation.

You can see it being refloated in the video above, and because safety standards are so much higher on railways and waterways than roads, you can read the Marine Accident Investigation Branch's report on the incident online.

The Joy of Six 1362

"For centuries, this country has been synonymous with segregation - by class, education, manners, dress, accents, leisure habits and housing. Since the early 1980s, when Thatcherism began to erase the more integrated and equal postwar Britain, these ancient divisions have been compounded by a further polarisation in incomes and between regions." The least integrated part of British society isn’t immigrants but the elite, argues Andy Beckett.

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling finds that the whole of Trump's team hated Elon Musk: "'Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!' a typically mild-mannered Bessent was heard shouting after Musk as they charged down the halls of the West Wing."

Nick Hilton spends a day out at The Podcast Show.

"VAR was introduced with the promise of increased fairness and accuracy. What it has delivered instead, in the case of implementing the off-side rule at least, is an artificial sense of certainty. Football fans and officials have allowed themselves to believe that a line drawn on a screen - based on a particular video frame and assumptions about body positioning - can objectively implement the offside rule down to the millimetre." Kit Yates challenges the belief that technology can enforce football's laws in a way that is both definitive and fair.

A London Inheritance goes in search of the southern entrance to the Tower Subway: "When Tower Bridge opened on the 30th of June, 1894, use of the Tower Subway collapsed. With Tower Bridge, there were no shafts to descend and ascend, no damp, gas lit tunnel to walk through, and the new bridge was free."

"With more people monitoring swifts, we are learning that swifts are less faithful to each other than previously thought. If pairs should arrive back at similar times they may quickly reunite, but if they arrive days apart swifts may be more likely to look for new mates." Jonathan Pomroy watches a tentative courtship in his garden.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

I love publishing guest posts on Liberal England, whether they're on politics or wider culture.

I'm happy to entertain a wide range of views, but I'd hate you to spend time writing something I really wouldn't want to publish, so please get in touch first.

These are the 10 most recent guest posts on Liberal England:

• When Syd Barrett met Nick Drake - Rob Chapman
• Councillors changing party: Christmas update - Augustus Carp
• Old Carp's Almanack: Councillor defections in 2024 - Augustus Carp
• How Dune anticipated Deep Seek - Peter Chambers
• Defections of local councillors have doubled in 2025 - Augustus Carp
• When Doctor Who saved us from the gaping inferno - Peter Chambers
• How a radio station saved my life - Mark Howson
• 256 local councillors have changed party allegiance since 1 January - Augustus Carp
• Dad’s Army and the decline of the Conservatives - Anselm Anon
• The state of our canals - and canalside pubs - today - Peter Chambers

Colpeper does receive a blessing in A Canterbury Tale after all

I think I've gained a new understanding of my favourite film. Most commentators take their mark from Mr Colpeper's answering to a question at his lecture:

"These ancient pilgrims came to Canterbury to ask for a blessing or to do penance."

They observe that, while Alison, Peter and Bob travel to the city to receive their blessings, Colpeper goes their to do penance.

As it turns out, Colpeper doesn't have to do penance because Peter, having rediscovered his vocation as a musician, loses interest in his plan of reporting him to the authorities.

I now believe that Colpeper receives a blessing too. And to see it we have to go back to the two scenes that run beneath the films closing credits. (If you click play in the video above, you'll be taken to the very end of the film.)

Last month I blogged about the second of them: 

But right at the end of the film, the closing credits play over another scene of the boys who fought a battle on the river. It may be significant that they are no longer playing war but football.

But what about the first of them?

In it we see men and women, some arm in arm, going to an event at the Colpeper Institute. And, though it's hard to read the poster advertising the event, it's similar in typograph and layout to a poster we see clearly earlier in the film. And that is the poster advertising Colpeper's own lecture there.

So Colpeper has been given his heart's desire too: an audience for his opinions on Kent and its history. And he has found it because he met Alison and realised that he should welcome women to his lectures - rather than pour glue on their hair to keep them at home.

I looked again at these closing titles because I read Deconstructing the Imagined Village: A Canterbury Tale, a long post on the film by Paul Banks.

He writes about the these final scenes:

After a series of increasingly distant views of the exterior of the Cathedral, the closing credits appear over a shot of the Chillingbourne boys paying soccer with the new football paid for by Bob. In fact this closing section was originally planned as being rather longer, with striking visual recapitulations and an explicit concluding message:

We see the bells, great and small, shaking the timbers of the roof with their clamour.

We see the towers of the Cathedral, the Angel Steeple, the mass of the building. The bells are still ringing. There is no sign to show whether the time is 600 years ago or today.

We see the Cathedral, far away across the valley of the Stour, the houses of Canterbury huddled round it.

The bells sound faintly, but the Organ is still playing.

High up white clouds are sailing in the wind. A small black speck appears in the sky. It’s familiar hum breaks through the organ music. It is a Spitfire.

The camera sweeps down from the sky, down to Chillingbourne Camp.

A new battalion of SOLDIERS are marching in to take over.

This time they are Americans.

We see their faces as they march: faces not very different from the faces we left in prayer at Canterbury. Only the uniforms are different.

Here the story ends.

As the usual Credit Titles appear at the end we glimpse a little bit more:

A brand new football! There they go! Leslie, Terry and the other boys, one side, with berets, fighting unequal odds.

Here is the ‘Colpeper Institute’.

There is a new poster up, advertising a series of lectures.

And – believe it or not! – soldiers and girls are going in.

The shots of the Cathedral (a few of which do appear in the released version) and the recapitulated Spitfire sequence reinforce the atemporal symmetrical structure of the film, and seem to be designed to close off the narrative, but the last two images behind the closing credits  – the boys and the poster – for all their ambiguous status both within and outside the ostensibly completed chronicle, seem to be intended as glimpses of an imagined sequel and the last would have suggested that Colpeper’s penance was genuine and that for him the pilgrimage had indeed been a significant learning experience after all. 

However, by omitting that final image (which would have revealed what the outcome would be) Powell and Pressburger encourage viewers to make up their own minds about the character’s ultimate spiritual fate.

But the shot of the crowds going to Colpeper's lecture did make it to the final film, though it is shown before the boys playing football. So Colpeper did receive a blessing after all.

Man gets stuck up tree as he tries to rescue parrot

 For this tale of everyday life in Thurnby, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Bryan Magee on Karl Popper's account of human knowledge

Karl Popper's account of human knowledge, which Bryan Magee sets out at the beginning of this clip, seems to me so obviously right that I still find it hard to believe that no philosopher had put it forward before him.

Years ago I wrote the entry on Popper in Duncan Brack's Dictionary of Liberal Biography. 

What I didn't know then was that Bryan Magee, the great populariser of Popper's thought in Britain, had been evacuated to Market Harborough as a boy during the war and had lived literally round the corner from where I lived as a teenager.

Nigel Farage and Reform UK declare war on evil pixies

Reform UK pledged to remove all low-traffic neighbourhoods from the council areas it took control of on 1 May. It turns out that none of these areas has any.

What with this and Reform councillors' refusal to attend non-existent training courses, I'm reminded of Sir Mortimer Chris and his campaign against the evil pixies that were the cause of unemployment in Britain.

The Joy of Six 1361

"The thing is, I work for The Guardian, right? So I've got this sort of somewhat misplaced belief that the public sector is great, and will always sort you out. And that's true, you know, if you break your leg. We had some idea that they would sort us out with whatever autism entails; but that just wasn’t the case. The paediatrician said 'Come back in a few years and we'll really know what we're dealing with'. Terrible." Dave Haslam interviews John Harris about his book Maybe I'm Amazed.

Over a decade ago, the Coalition government placed many of England and Wales's inland waterways in the hands of the Canal & River Trust. As it struggles with increasing financial pressure and a furious row with part of the boating community, Alan White asks if the experiment has failed.

Madeleine Bunting reviews a history of the Roma People in Europe: "The persecution continued under Mary I whose law required Roma to give up their nomadic lifestyle. If they refused they were to be rounded up, put on boats and deported to Scandinavia."

Sara King celebrates the rewilding pioneers who've helped bring beavers back to Britain’s landscapes.

"Almost a year ago, I stumbled into a weird rabbit hole, trying to outsmart AI. Since I moderate a number of very large subreddits, I started noticing certain patterns in posts that felt just a little too polished or off. One tell in particular kept showing up no matter what, the em dash." Brent Csutoras on one way AI gives itself away.

Mitchell Beaupre watches Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer: "The end product is an exquisite dissection of a particular breed of All-American Man that mystified audiences upon release and has gained in esteem in the decades since. Its simple plot belies the many philosophical and existential musings that lurk underneath, with each dip in the pool washing away more of Ned’s facade until there’s nothing left."

I spent £25k building massive quirky cupcake in my magical West Midlands garden

The Shropshire Star wins our Headline of the Day Award.

In their ruling, the judges point out that a) it's a free country and b) you can see a video of the massive quirky cupcake on the Shropshire Star website.

BBC2 to screen two-part documentary about the Jesus Army

I've blogged before about the Jesus Army, the cult that originated at Bugbrooke in Northamptonshire, and how compensation paid to survivors of abuse within it may reach £10m. And I've long wondered why this story has not received more media attention.

That may at last be changing, as BBC2 is to show a two-part documentary, Inside the Jesus Army, on this scandal.

I've not seen the transmission dates for them yet, but BBC Factual has page about the two programmes:

Daisy Scalchi, Head of Commissioning, Religion and Ethics, said: "This is a shocking tale of abuse hiding in plain sight. Those who have bravely shared their stories will, I hope, give voice not only to their own experiences but many others like them."

Katie Buchanan, Executive Producer, said: “This is a compelling, urgent and timely story that it is only now coming to light thanks to the powerful testimony of survivors and former members.”

Lib Dems go ahead of Tories in latest YouGov poll

The Liberal Democrats have overtaken the Conservatives have slipped to fourth place in a new YouGov opinion poll published today.

We are in third place in the poll on 17 per cent, with the Tories in fourth place on 16 per cent. 

Reform tops the poll on 29 per cent, with Labour in second place on 22 per cent.

All the usual caveats about making too much of one poll apply, but this still feels like a moment worth remarking. And it is a development that has been expected for some time, given recent trends in such polls.

The Tories are usually ruthless at getting rid of failing leaders, but the problem Tory MPs face is that their next leader will be chosen by the party's membership. 

There is no guarantee that this electorate will come up with someone better than Kemi Badenoch.

In the past Tory MPs have got around this problem by agreeing to put only one candidate to the membership (that's how Michael Howard and Rishi Sunak became leader), but Robert Jenrick and his followers would refuse to be party to such an arrangement unless Jenrick himself were that one candidate.

Matt Monro: We're Gonna Change the World

This was all over the radio in 1970, but it wasn't a hit. Maybe people who liked Matt Monro didn't want to hear about demonstrations and people who went on demonstrations didn't buy Matt Monro records? 

But I've always liked it, and you did find the extra-parliamentary political culture of the era seeping into the charts. Think The Banner Man by Blue Mink or United We Stand by Brotherhood of Man.

After I posted this song in 2009, I received an email from David Matthews, who wrote the music. He explained: "The lyrics were about the lives of my co-writer's ex-fiancées."

The Englishman in the High Castle

An Englishman's Castle was a three-part BBC drama that starred Kenneth More and was screened in 1978. It was set in an alternate 1978 where Britain had been conquered by Nazi Germany.

I don't remember it from the time and have long wanted to watch it. The other day I found all three parts on YouTube, namely:

• part 1
  
• part 2
• part 3

If you want a blow-by-blow account, then Archive TV Musings is the site for you. Here I offer some more random thoughts.

To begin, I have a Kenneth More problem: I don't like him when he plays the hero. I'm reminded of Matthew Sweet and his comment on A Night to Remember: 

You almost get the feeling watching A Night To Remember that the ship goes down simply to wipe the smug grin off of Kenneth More's face.

and also of his comment on More's onscreen character in general:

He was heroic in a cocky, big-brotherly way - like a public-school prefect who might have saved a new boy from a beating, but expected three terms of shoe-polishing and crumpet-toasting in return.

But the older, compromised More we see here is more to my taste. He plays the scriptwriter of a popular television drama called An Englishman's Castle, which is set in the recent past and is reaching the time of the German invasion of Britain. 

This, and the complications of his personal life, suddenly make it harder for him to please the viewing public without upsetting the authorities. Up till now, he has made the compromises that allowed him to walk this tightrope.

Then there is the brilliance with which an authoritarian state is conjured up without showing us anything. The violence all takes offscreen and every one running things is British. The only German we see is an amiable young soldier who appears in the drama within the drama.

And then there's the cast. More's wife is played by Kathleen Byron, the mad nun from Black Narcissus. The controller of the television channel is Anthony Bate, soon to play Sir Oliver Lacon in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. One of More's sons, though he's not at his best here, is Nigel Havers.

In the minor roles are two figures with pleasing trivial connections. Jonathan Kydd, the son of the actor Sam Kydd, appears on one of my regular podcast listens - Chelsea Fancast - every week. 

While the young German soldier is played by Louis Sheldon. As Louis Sheldon Williams he was one of the children in Our Mother's House and, better still, his mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the 1960s.

If you click play on the video at the top, you'll soon see a scene between Kenneth More and Anthony Bate. If you like it, I think you'll like the whole thing.

Zack Polanski and Alistair Darling: Two soft rides from the Guardian

I'm late to the party on last week's Guardian interview with Zach Polanski, but I've still decided to come.

Reading it today, I find it's not the first time the Guardian has allowed the politician to present a carefully edited version of his past without challenge.

Zoe Williams¹ tells us that Polanksi:

started by joining the Lib Dems, and standing as a councillor in north London in 2016. “That was for one very clear reason,” he says. “Proportional representation – it’s always been really important to me.” He joined the Greens the following year...

But Polanski didn't stand in a London borough election: he stood for the Greater London Assembly. And, a prominent figure on social media, he clearly had higher ambitions with the Liberal Democrats. 

Some say he had his eye on the by-election in Richmond Park, and made up his mind to leave the Lib Dems once the local party decided to stick with Sarah Olney as their candidate.

And then there was that notorious article where he told a Sun journalist he could make her breasts bigger by using hypnosis.²

Reading it now, it looks like a puff piece for his business rather than a hatchet job. Yet Williams defends it on the grounds that "he was only just 30".

But this is not the first such interview I've seen in the Guardian. Here's Decca Aitkenhead profiling the late Alistair Darling back in 2008:

Studying law at Aberdeen, he stood for election in the student union, but not for a party. "I was just quite interested in getting things done." His manifesto favoured "strictly bread-and-butter issues, things like food prices in the student refectory". When he joined the Labour party in 1977, he never expected to be more than a member.

The truth was rather different and will surprise anyone who remembers Darling in days as Gordon Brown's chancellor.

Here's George Galloway remembering a meeting with Darling in 1973:

When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf.

And joining Labour didn't curb his militant tendencies:

Later ... he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze.

The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy.

Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left.

The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time.

The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been.

Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.

A reader asks: So what's the moral of all this?

Liberal England replies: I suppose it's that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the Guardian.

The reader persists: That a bit obvious, isn't it?

Liberal England admits: I suppose it is. To be honest, I just wanted to repeat that George Galloway story one last time. Oh, and to show that I've found how to do the numbers for footnotes in superscript.³

Notes

1. Nevertheless, I won't hear a word against Zoe Williams: in my press officer days she was always a pleasure to deal with. Polly Toynbee, by contrast, once made me miss my train.
2. I'm not scandalised by that Sun article, it's just that it reminds me of when P.G. Wodehouse's Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts, turns out to be a designer of ladies' underwear. And Polanski's suggested strategy of concentrating on winning an urban, Corbynite vote will appeal to many Green members.
3. See?

GUEST POST The state of our canals - and canalside pubs - today

Fresh from a canal holiday made difficult by unannounced closures, Peter Chambers looks at the many challenges facing the Canal & River Trust.

The British have been using waterways for a long time: we are told that the canal called the Fossdyke was created by the Romans. 

Things started to get busier as entrepreneurs such as the Duke of Bridgewater and Josiah Wedgewood raised capital for specific ventures that would pay for something that by-passed the toll roads of the day – iron mining and pottery in their cases. 

This was the start of the first Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. Once these connections existed, the marginal cost for other uses dropped and more firms used them. The logic of places such as Birmingham became evident, as you were taught in O level Geography. The more you link, the more profitable it is to link more.

At the time. each new major canal required an Act of Parliament. Limited liability companies solicited funds, and shopped around for an MP to propose another Canal Bill. The canal age had started. The emergent network was a strange one. Different fees, widths, depths, keys, windlasses, heights and naming conventions. It topped out at about 8000 miles. Today we have the best 2000 in preservation.

The canals survived into the 20th century. They played a part in winning the two world wars, helped by a big public works programme run by Herbert Morrison in the 1930s.

Then reality caught up. The combination of the post-war car economy and the railways removed most of the profitable trade. The network was taken into public ownership under the British Transport Board. The canal network was put under the British Waterways Board (BWB). Even today there are artefacts stamped BWB. 

The Department of Transport debated the future of the waterways with its boards. However, despite attempts at running high-latency cargo, leisure was the only viable long term use identified. The BWB settled in for a long stretch running a national ‘linear leisure park’. 

During this time a large number of restoration societies restored hundreds of additional miles to use. They then handed over the restored mileage to the BWB, often during ceremonies involving the Queen. Or Prunella Scales.

This led to a happy time for many people. The canals had been built by thirsty 'navvies' for whom real-ale pubs had been constructed. These pubs were retained for the thirsty boatmen who worked the boats during and after the first Industrial Revolution. 

Generally, blond continental beer was kept away from key waterway junctions for decades. Additional supplies of real ale could be supplied by breweries such as Wadsworth's at Devizes on the Kennett and Avon Canal, which operates today and runs tours ending in a small shop only a short walk from the Caen Hill flight of locks.

The restoration effort even benefited from additional charitable funds from the National Lottery. An umbrella body – The Waterways Trust – was formed in 1999 to use charity funds to open new facilities and attract new interest and spending to the waterways. 

Restorers entered a peak activity phase, linking up old routes, and pushing into Wales with the Montgomery Canal past Offa’s Dyke. The "Monty", as it is known, is only a few miles away from the award-winning real-ale pub The Bailey Head in Oswestry (dogs welcome). 

It is probably best to moor outside the Queen’s Head (closed on Mondays) and make your way into town. Alternatively you can cross the border near Chirk and press on to Llangollen, with its excellent hostelries. Ideally do both.

Time, however, moved on. In 2012, during the time Justine Greening was transport secretary, all of British Waterways responsibilities and assets in England and Wales were transferred to a new charity, the Canal & River Trust (CRT). This had the advantage of removing the liabilities of the waterways from the books of the government. 

The CRT was endowed with the assets of the BWB. It was also intended that it would receive tapered funding from the state. It would continue to provide a public benefit, but would increasingly stand on its own thousand feet. One day licence fees and other charges would have to rise, and the ageing physical infrastructure of the endowment would require gradually increasing maintenance charges. 

The restored plant of the waterways had been stabilised, but no programme of replacement or upgrade was baked into the system. There would be no refresh, only an endless set of repair patches, done in priority order. The staff and facilities of the BWB started to age out. After a while the maintenance capability became increasingly contractorised.

Following the Covid pandemic, many old canalside pubs closed. They lacked the financial 'bottom' of large chains, and often served distinct local clienteles. A victory for continental lager seemed certain,, with blond 'craft beer' often substituted to tempt the unwary.

In 2025 there exist many unplanned remedial works that will consume millions in unbudgeted funds. This will mean that planned work to partly remediate the effects the pandemic will not happen, and the deficit of the CRT will rise above £10m. A general review of fees is promised, with all up for grabs – widebeam fee increases, loss of green initiatives, possible closures.

In addition to the effects of long-postponed asset failures, the long-term effects of climate change are making themselves felt. Several waterways this year have restrictions or stoppages due to low water conditions. The Pennines are all but closed. The Macclesfield is in doubt. The Rochdale looks rather dry. The Trent is low, but usable. When planning journeys in these areas, the bleating of the fossil-fuel shills sound particularly self-serving.

Finally, I could mention the pollution levels and the water companies. It is enough to say that you should wash your hands every time you go indoors afloat. I mean it.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.