Church could get first toilet in more than 700 years

To the great relief of the parishioners of St Giles's at Hartington in Derbyshire, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Adrianne Lenker: Real House

Matt Mitchell wrote on Paste in 2024:

As soon as I finished listening to Real House, the opening track from Adrianne Lenker's new album Bright Future, for the first time, I paused the music and immediately called my mother—not to say “I love you” but to hear her voice and remember the gift of connection we hold together even in distance. 

The song, easily Lenker's rawest and intimate yet, rebels against mystery, refusing to be enshrouded by opaqueness. It’s a plainspoken, minimal and articulated collection of reflective vignettes – an archival of 22 years of Lenker's life as she remembers them. She conjures images of braiding willow branches into a crown, trying to build a portal to another world, dreams of flying, a mother and daughter's shared laughter in a hospital, a family coming together to say goodbye to their aging dog. 

Lenker's only muse on Real House is the past, and there are no cryptic metaphors. It's, as she calls it, "an autobiographical, condensed montage of the most pivotal moments in my childhood up until the moment of my dog’s death."

Lenker is also the lead vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter of the band Big Thief.

If you're in the mood for songs about children's dogs dying, I chose Shannon by Henry Grose on a Sunday long ago.

Dangerous Exile (1957): Richard O'Sullivan and Vaughan Wilkins

The death of Richard O'Sullivan gives me an excuse to mention one of this blog's more obscure heroes, the mid 20th century historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins. Because, as a boy, O'Sullivan appeared in the only film to be made from one of Wilkins's novels.

Dangerous Exile, which was directed by Desmond Hurst and released in 1957, was based on the novel A King Reluctant. 

It tells the story of the escape of the young son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from France to Wales and the attempts of the Revolutionary government to recapture him. The boy is played by Richard O'Sullivan.

I saw the film on BBC1 some decades ago, and don't recall it being particularly outstanding, but the adult cast is interesting: Louis Jourdan, Belinda Lee, Keith Michell, Martita Hunt and Finlay Currie. And I do remember a scene, carried over from the novel and containing the surprising nastiness of which Wilkins was capable, in which O'Sullivan is plied with brandy by his Revolutionary guards to make him assent to all sorts of obscene stories about his mother's sex life.

You didn't hear it from me, but Dangerous Exile can be watched on more than one of the dodgy Russian website that carry old British films.

The Joy of Six 1572

"How did a former lawyer-turned theologian become Reform UK’s lead ideologue and political heavyweight on so many issues? To understand that, you have to follow a covert combination of faith and finance, of evangelical doom-mongering and disruptive tech and media, from the two real kingmakers in right-wing British and American politics – the deeply religious and deeply wealthy owners of GB News and Palantir: Sir Paul Marshall and Peter Thiel." Peter Jukes and Nafeez Ahmed map the strange rise of James Orr.

Elaine Craig has researched family carers' attitude to the use of restraint in mental hospitals: "A mother discovered her son was restrained 33 times in six weeks. Another was told her distressed daughter is 'aggressive' as six staff pin her to the floor and inject her with medication. Through tears, families describe images they cannot forget: bruises, broken bones, loved ones left sitting in urine-soaked clothes, isolated and afraid."

"Students in England’s least deprived areas are three times as likely to enter GCSE PE and drama as those in the most deprived areas. There are also large disadvantage gaps in music, food preparation and nutrition, design and technology and the separate sciences, with the pattern continuing into A-level subjects such as geography." Jabed Ahmed reports.

Garrett M. Graff on the 17 minutes before America changed: "The earliest moments of the 9/11 attacks did not unfold in the way you’ve been taught to think of them: a plane striking a tower, a city looking up in horror, a nation gripped by panic. Instead, for the briefest of windows, the unfolding drama of September 11, 2001, wasn’t yet a calamity but merely a strange accident."

Greg Cwik celebrates the "gleeful terror" of Tim Curry's Pennywise.

"Several residents had paid the considerable sum of three guineas for the privilege of accompanying the celebrity aeronaut on his ascent. As Coxwell now battled to complete his preparations, some of these passengers decided to vent their disapproval at the delay by climbing into the basket and staging a protest. According to Coxwell, one passenger, using 'gestures and foul language', even proceeded to incite the crowd still further by telling them that the aeronaut was refusing to continue with the display." Margaret Brecknell discovers Leicester's balloon riot of 1864.

John Rogers takes us on a fantastic stroll around South Kensington

John shows us Exhibition Road, the French district of Kensington and Benny Hill's blue plaque.

Richard O'Sullivan's This is Your Life from 1974

The actor Richard O'Sullivan has died at the age of 82. He was never out of the studio as child star in the Fifties and early Sixties, and became a sitcom heartthrob of the Seventies.

Talking Pictures TV is currently running the children's show Dick Turpin that he made at the start of the Eighties. O'Sullivan retired from acting after suffering a stroke in 2003.

This edition of This is Your Life was filmed just as O'Sullivan's adult career had taken off because of his starring role in ITV's Man About the House.

Look out for an appearance by a barking mad Trevor Howard.

That Channel 4 News report on Reform UK and illicit funding in full

 From this evening's Channel 4 News...

Charles Masterman and Charles Dickens on 19th-century poverty

Here's a book review that features my favourite writers on Victorian poverty – the two Charlies. That's Charles Masterman and Charles Dickens.

The book reviewed is Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834-1929 by Elizabeth Hurren, the reviewer is John Prebble, and it appears in the London Review of Books for 5 October 2012:

Like everyone who has written about Victorian poverty, she’s obstructed by the problem identified by the Liberal politician Charles Masterman in 1902. "We are very silent," the collective poor say in Masterman's From the Abyss; "so very silent that no one to this hour knows what we think ... or why we think it."

That remains true even now. From all the multitude of workhouse voices, not one has yet been recovered that says "this is how it was," "this is what we did," "this is how I felt." Victorian poverty is mute either because, in Masterman's words, it was "living for the most part with no articulate expression", or because it was too ashamed to speak. 

The Victorians who wrote about it were strangers in its midst: either middle-class missionaries, philanthropists and sociologists perceiving the London slums as "the undiscovered country of the poor" and "the dark continent ... within easy walking distance of the General Post Office", and casting themselves as intrepid explorers or scientific investigators; or slumming journalists (James Greenwood, Jack London, Robert Sherard and, later, Orwell) trying to share an experience that they could never penetrate because they knew they could always escape. 

And there was Dickens, who lived in denial about his childhood labour in a blacking factory and displaced his trauma onto martyred surrogates in other hells – the workhouse, Yorkshire schools, Lancashire mills, slums like Tom-all-Alone's. Dickens confronting his own past is Oliver Twist confronting his. Having escaped into bourgeois security, Oliver revisits the town of his childhood, but he sees the workhouse only from outside, and his old acquaintances only as faces at the windows.

Robert Sherard, as we saw a few months ago, was the grandson of the fearsome Lord Harborough and Oscar Wilde's first biographer. 

The Joy of Six 1571

"This is Britain at the end of the hottest summer on record. So, it beggars belief that the Conservatives have chosen this time – or would choose any – to try to scrap the world’s first legally binding framework to cut carbon emissions. Legislation born in Britain and adopted by over 60 countries around the world including Germany, France, Mexico and countless others." Pippa Heylings condemns the Tories' scorched earth policy.

Anna Merlan tells us what ICE's scrobbling of Milo Yiannopoulos tells us about America's far right: "But while Yiannopoulos’ deportation contains an extremely rich vein of schadenfreude – he previously called for deporting 'millions and millions of people' and joked about masturbating while witnessing ICE raids – it’s also indicative of how power, punishment, and influence currently work in the MAGA movement, and broader crackup within that feud-heavy world, where fragile alliances are constantly being made, broken and remade anew."

Simon Ophir on assisted dying, the House of Lords and democracy: "I have delivered palliative and end-of-life care to many patients, including this man. It cannot help everyone and I know that even with excellent palliative care many patients are terrified of death. It is this experience, more than anything else, that makes me so determined to see the assisted dying bill reach the statute book."

"Lloyd George was much driven by his experiences as a child and as a youth, growing up amongst the mostly poor, non-conformist natives of North Wales, groaning under a dominant, minority, privileged class of wealthy, mostly Anglican English landlords and churchmen. He witnessed and early on complained bitterly against unjust evictions of tenants who ‘voted the wrong way’, of tenants who had to pay tithes to a church they did not believe in. Even at school he protested at injustice." Paul Spackman, author of a forthcoming biography of David Lloyd George, is interviewed by Nicholas Alderton.

Ishaan Selby discusses T.H. White's The Goshawk: "While White is generally seen as a misanthropic figure, I read his difficult kinship with the goshawk as an example of a kin relationship that formed outside of hereditary bonds and through a queering of domesticity; one that shows a difficult love and connection outside the bounds of the human."

"What burns on that clifftop isn’t Christianity losing to paganism. It’s a re-enchantment scheme running out of road, with nothing left to offer but a fire. Choose your priests wisely." Moreau Vazh reconsiders The Wicker Man.

Restoration of Gone to Earth to be shown in London Film Festival

From the London Film Festival website:

Long overshadowed within Powell and Pressburger's canon, this major new restoration reveals the visual splendour and dramatic intensity of one of their most misunderstood films.

Powell and Pressburger’s passionate Technicolor melodrama stars Jennifer Jones as the free-spirited Hazel, who refuses to be bound either by her clergyman husband or the predatory squire who pursues her. 

The untamed Shropshire landscape is at one with Hazel’s primal spirit, making this one of the filmmakers' most rhapsodic odes to the English countryside and among their most intoxicatingly sensual achievements.

The showing of Gone to Earth is on Wednesday 7 October (6pm) at the National Film Theatre.

Lib Dem policy is light on politics not on outside expertise

The Liberal Democrats are getting a new think tank, reports Politico.

The Britain Project, though it will not be formally affiliated to the party, will be launched at the Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference later this month:

Tim Leunig, the group’s policy director, who recently became a Liberal Democrat peer in Britain’s unelected House of Lords, said: "We are here to help them."

"But we’re also here to ask them tough questions because: who knows? They might be a minister one day, and then the civil service will ask them tough questions."

And Lord Leunig does sound a little like a cross between a regimental sergeant major and a dyspeptic Oxbridge admissions tutor throughout the piece.

You are probably wondering who is funding The Britain Project. Politico says the names of the individual donors will not be revealed, but I wonder if that arrangement is wise or tenable.

My experience on the party's federal policy committee (FPC) led me to conclude that the Lib Dems were not short of expert input into their policy – or at least outside input, as much of it was from campaign groups – but short of political input.

What happened was that reports written by a working party and then brought to FPC. Much as happened at Conference, there would be a debate on one controversial idea, but the rest of it would be nodded through.

I remember questioning one recommendation and being told by the chair of the working party that the RSPCA would condemn us if we said anything different. It sometimes felt as though we did not so much make policy as buy it in.

There was sometimes talk of an alternative model, a select committee model, where a small group of FPC members would take evidence from outside bodies and then write the final policy themselves. #

This still seems to me a better model, because it offers the possibility of policy that is at once informed by outside expertise and Liberal in its effect.

Politico says many Lib Dem MPs are interested in being involved with the new think tank, which may be a reflection of the thinness of the party's policy offer in recent years, but it's still encouraging, given how little engagement they had with FPC when I was on it.

I hope, however, that The Britain Project will contribute to party policy and not write it.

Back to Sandy Campbell and Tsar Nicholas II

My great great grandmother's brother Sandy Campbell, as we have seen, was the subject of an article in The Sphere (13 October 1900). This photograph was one of those that accompanied it, and was captioned:

Sandy Campbell looking our for deer on Lochnagar 

These field-glasses were presented to Mr. Campbell by the Czar when his Imperial Majesty visited Glassalt Shiel

 According to A,N. Wilson's Victoria: A Life, the Nicholas II did not much enjoy his visit to Balmoral in 1896:

Nicholas hated Balmoral; he hated being surrounded by all his wife's extended German family; and he disliked being taken out for sport in the freezing wet weather. They had no luck in finding a stag and only managed to shoot a brace of grouse.

Perhaps the Tsar's gift to Sandy was a veiled criticism of his competence as a ghillie?

The Rolling Stones: Paint It Black

This topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and is one of those Sixties singles where the sitar, played here by Brian Jones, sounds at home.

Severn Valley Railway sees eight-week trial of commuter trains

From BBC News:

The Bewdley Express is an eight-week trial taking travellers from Bewdley to Kidderminster on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, where they can change to a Birmingham service.

The trial, run by the Severn Valley Railway and West Midlands Railway, is intended to test demand for a regular rail connection between Bewdley and the wider West Midlands network.

Former Reform UK councillor joins the Lib Dem group on West Northamptonshire

Jonathan Harris (left) and Kathryn Shaw. Photo: West Northants Lib Dems  

NN Journal reports some unexpected news from Northamptonshire:

A former Reform UK cabinet member on West Northamptonshire Council has now joined the Liberal Democrat group.

Cllr Kathryn Shaw previously stepped down from her role as portfolio holder for children, families and education at the start of 2026. In March, she later quit the Reform UK group completely, becoming an independent.

Cllr Shaw told NN Journal:

"Over the past eight months, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what matters most to me, both as a councillor and as a person. For me, it has always been about people before politics, with children, families and our communities at the forefront of everything I do.

"Joining the Liberal Democrats feels like the right next step, alongside a group who share that strong community focus and who understand the importance of putting residents first.

"I have also been consistently impressed by the calibre of the Liberal Democrat group. There is a depth of knowledge, intellect, experience and thoughtful challenge within the team that I genuinely believe has a great deal to offer West Northamptonshire.

"I will continue to ask challenging questions, push boundaries and make a bit of noise when it’s needed but always with the same purpose: to make a genuine difference to the people I represent."

Back in March, she explained her resignation from Reform UK to BBC News:

"My decision is grounded in professional judgement and principle. I believe I can more effectively advocate for strong safeguarding systems, accountable governance and the removal of unnecessary bureaucracy affecting children and vulnerable people outside of a party structure.

"My commitment to protecting children, strengthening safeguarding culture and demanding accountability remains unwavering. The work continues, and it must continue with integrity, consciousness and courage."

Jonathan Harris, leader of the Lib Dem group on West Northamptonshire told NN Journal today:

"We are delighted that Kathryn has decided to join the Liberal Democrats. It is clear that Kathryn is passionate about making a difference to the people of West Northants.

"We welcome her energy, enthusiasm, commitment and experience to the team and we are looking forward to supporting her in her work.

"She joins our group as another community-focused councillor; Lib Dem Councillors work hard to support their communities and have a strong desire to make a difference to people’s lives."

God adds:

I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.

h/t Mark Pack.

An afternoon at Foxton locks (with added alpacas)

I went to Foxton Locks this afternoon. I met these charming alpacas, and there were boats, locks, the remains of an Edwardian inclined plane and stuff too.

The Joy of Six 1570

"This is a staggering death rate of 130 per 100,000 care leavers, a figure at least three times higher than the general population. It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the failure that has led to this point. There are a range of causes of death, but the single largest cause is suicide." Michael Sanders looks at a new government report that lays bare the tragedy of care-leaver deaths.

Keenan Malik says the Grenfell Tower fire has "exposed a social and legal landscape shaped by an exaggerated contempt for ordinary people. It is the story of a corporate world displaying, in the words of journalist Peter Apps, 'a callous indifference to anything – morality, honesty, life safety – that was not related to the bottom line."

Ed Conway explains why the cod on your plate has probably been round the world: "Follow this cod on its way and you begin to see why so many regions in Europe and America feel like they have been 'left behind'; you begin to see why it is so difficult to take on Vladimir Putin and the Russian economy... all from a simple pack of fish fingers."

"If you’ve had a sugary treat and you’re feeling good, you’re probably feeling good because you’re having fun with family and friends, rather than from the sugar." Talitha Best on the myth of the sugar rush.

"Suddenly, he was 43 years old with a solo career that plenty of pundits thought had reached the end of the road. According to his detractors, Simon’s signature sound had nowhere else to go and, based on where he went next, maybe they were right." Matt Fish considers Paul Simon and Graceland.

JacquiWine reads The Bell by Iris Murdoch, "a sophisticated, richly textured novel that explores complicated feelings between complex individuals, encompassing faith, guilt, resentment, anger, fear, and perhaps most importantly, love. Love can take many forms, from a pure, spiritual type of love to a platonic or romantic love to a more carnal, possessive love – and Murdoch touches on all of them here to a greater or lesser extent. It’s also a radical novel for its time, particularly as Murdoch centres her storyline on a provocative moral dilemma: what happens when a person’s sexual orientation (in this instance, their homosexuality) is at odds with their religious beliefs?"