Have the Liberals been forgiven in Devon for shooting Rinka?

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We have, because Nick Harvey won North Devon back from the Tories in 1992 and held it until the debacle of 2015.

But there were promising signs even before Nick was elected.

I am reminded of one of the first pieces I ever wrote for Liberal Democrat News - a review of the register of MPs' interests, which appeared in the edition of 17 May 1996.

It was all a long time ago: Alex Carlile was still an MP and still a Liberal Democrat.

I wrote of him:

Alex Carlile is another hard-working member, including among his interests membership of the board of the British Field Sports Society and the loan of a fax machine from the Liberal Democrat Country Forum. 

On second thoughts, that may be a misprint for "fox machine" - an experimental robot which Mr Carlile and his friends pursue across the hills of the Welsh Border, enjoying cruelty-free hunting. Let us hope so.

But the point of this post and mention of Rinka lies in the the entry for Emma Nicholson, who was still an MP and still a Liberal Democrat then too:

She supplies a long and immensely impressive list of all the good causes with which she is involved - everything from the Women's Engineering Society to the Child Psychotherapy Trust. 

But she holds one post which stands out even above these. Emma is a vice-patron of the North West Devon Canine Association. 

I don't know about you, but I suspect that some of her recent Liberal predecessors in the region were not invited to serve in this capacity.

Later. Because I was tired last night I left out the main point of this post. That was to congratulate Kirsten Johnson on being selected as the new Lib Dem PPC for North Devon.

Alex Carlile co-owns a consultancy with an ex-MI6 chief

From the Guardian website this afternoon:

Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation who this week mounted a spirited defence of the intelligence services, has received £400,000 from a private consultancy he co-owns with a former head of MI6. 

SC Strategy Ltd, the company that Carlile established with Sir John Scarlett, who ran MI6 from 2004 to 2009, is described as offering clients strategic advice on UK policy and regulation and has paid out dividends to the pair totalling £800,000 over the past three years, according to accounts filed with Companies House. 

On Monday, Carlile made a pointed intervention in the debate over the extent of powers enjoyed by the security and intelligence agencies in advance of the government’s publication of the draft investigatory powers bill on Wednesday.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "Who told you that?"

Wednesday

Do you know Alex Carlile? He was at one time Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire before being replaced by Lembit Opik – the general view in Welshpool and Caersws was that the latter brought some much needed gravitas to the role.

Yet Carlile’s career has prospered in recent years and I meet him this morning while strolling by the Thames at Westminster.

"I hear you’ve been asked to serve on the committee that is going to review freedom of information legislation," I say brightly.

He looks at me suspiciously: "Who told you that?"

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

Armed to the teeth with duck-handled umbrellas

The current Lady Bonkers

The choirboys' rifle practice

Greville Janner's supporters melt away

Thanks to Spotlight for the illustration.

After the allegations against Greville Janner had received their first public airing during the trial of Frank Beck in 1991, he received extraordinary support from a group of colleagues in the Commons,

In recent days two of them who are still active in politics have backed away from supporting him again.

In 1991 Keith Vaz told the House:

The people of his constituency do not believe the lies. They are with him now, and they will be with him in the future, because they know of his unstinting service to anyone who approaches him, for whatever cause. He has vindicated himself, and all of us, in what he has said tonight. ... 

My hon. and learned Friend, too, is a brave man in what he has done, said and endured over the past weeks and months. Every one of us should be grateful to him, because ... what has happened to my hon. and learned Friend could happen to any one of us, so we should all be aware of it.

Now, according to BBC News, he supports the comments of Leicestershire police and crime commissioner, who wants the case to be reconsidered.

In 1991 Alex Carlile said:

I can but echo the tributes that have been paid to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Mr. Janner). He is a man of determination and enthusiasm, whose integrity and will power have crossed party lines. I for one value the friendship that he has given me in the eight and a half years that I have been a Member of the House, despite the fact that we are in different parties and disagree on many issues. ... 

I respectfully suggest to the Solicitor-General that a clear and simple change can be made to the law which would protect those who are not the parties to a trial—third parties outside a trial. It would in no way inhibit the right of a defendant to make his defence, however dishonest. It would in no way inhibit his right to instruct his solicitors, however egregiously. But it would prevent the press from publishing calumnies which cannot be answered, as in the Beck case, sometimes until weeks or even months after the allegation is made in the public arena of a court.

Now, according to the Telegraph:

Lord Carlile last night said evidence since gathered by Leicestershire police meant he would “not make the same comments today”. ... 

He said: “This was 24 years ago. At that time, there was absolutely no evidence that would stand up in a court of law against, as then was, Mr Janner.”

And, though he was not around in 1991, it is worth noting the interview Norman Lamb gave to LBC saying Janner should have been prosecuted earlier.

That is because, as my Trivial Fact of the Day once revealed, Norman worked for Greville Janner after leaving university.

Memories of Greville Janner and the trial of Frank Beck

Two journalists who were in Leicester for the trial of Frank Beck in 1991 have been writing about the event.

Dani Garavelli was then a junior reporter on the Leicester Mercury. In Scotland on Sunday today she recalls:

As part of his defence, Beck claimed he had acted to protect a 13-year-old from Janner, who had groomed and abused the boy over two years. The evidence against Janner amounted to allegations made by Beck and the boy, a witness who overheard Beck telling the boy to stop seeing the MP, and affectionate, but not sexually explicit, letters written by Janner to the boy. 

The development opened up many dilemmas for a regional newspaper. On the one hand, the claims were explosive. On the other, Janner was a highly respected figure. Not only was he an MP, but he had co-founded the Holocaust Education Trust. In journalistic terms, he was an important contact. And, he hadn’t been charged with anything. Ultimately the Mercury, like everyone else, had no choice but to play it straight, reporting only what was said in court. 

In the end, the Beck jury was told the Janner allegations were a “red herring” and he was exonerated. The narrative was he had been the victim of a smear campaign by Beck, and other Leicestershire MPs, including Keith Vaz, rallied to his defence.

And what an effective defence it was! Jay Rayner, then a young freelancer working the Independent on Sunday, writes in the Observer:

The establishment, in the shape of his fellow MPs, men such as Labour’s Keith Vaz, Tory David Ashby and the then Lib Dem MP now Lord Carlile, closed ranks. Janner was a barrister and MP, a man who campaigned for justice for the victims of the Holocaust. It simply couldn’t be true. That Frank Beck was eventually found guilty of horrendous abuse charges and sent to prison (where he later died of a heart attack) aided them. Clearly Beck had been trying to save his own skin. The possibility that Janner had also been guilty didn’t seem to occur to them.

He goes on:

All reporters have stories that get away from them. The Janner story is mine. At the pub meeting, I was given copies of letters from Janner to one of his alleged victims. Only if you had been told a backstory do those letters look incriminating. They make arrangements to meet in hotels, talk of “mutual understanding” and sign off with expressions of “love”. My expectation was that these letters would be tested in court alongside other evidence. 

Getting Beck’s shouted accusation about Janner suited my purposes. Since it happened in open court it put something on the record that at some point could be used in a story. While the Beck case was ongoing it was all sub judice and nothing further about Janner could be reported. The MP was also bound by the Contempt of Court Act. The moment Beck was found guilty, however, Janner declared in the House of Commons that there was “not a shred of truth in any of the allegations”. 

What happened next was crucial. There was a (failed) parliamentary attempt to change the Contempt of Court Act to protect people named during proceedings in the way Janner had been. During the debate, many MPs, including Ashby and Carlile, spoke up for him.

Key was Vaz, MP for the neighbouring Leicestershire constituency, who clearly hadn’t been party to the rumours circulating in his home town. He said his dear friend had been the “victim of a cowardly and wicked attack”. That was it. The story was dead.

And what of Mr Vaz today?

Today, Vaz is chair of the Commons home affairs select committee. He enjoys portraying himself as a champion of the voiceless, happy to castigate the Home Office over its handling of the current investigation into child abuse. Last week, I asked Vaz via Twitter whether he had anything to say about Janner, given the CPS announcement. He responded by blocking me. He later unblocked me but, at the time of writing, has still not commented.

Former MP for Montgomeryshire is a fruitcake

I know what you are thinking and it's not worthy of you.

Because the County Times is reporting that the former Conservative MP for Montgomeryshire, Delwyn Williams, has been backing the UKIP candidate Des Parkinson’s election campaign in the constituency.

Williams won Montgomeryshire from Emlyn Hooson in 1979, only to lose it to Alex Carlile in 1983.

Did Magna Carta die in vain?

The other day I posted Tony Hancock's take on Magna Carta (as written for him by Galton and Simpson, of course).

Since then I have seen an awful lot of people rubbishing any thought of commemorating the 800th anniversary of its signing next year. Nothing of Magna Carta remains part of our law and the whole thing was irredeemably sexist and all sorts of other ists too.

There is something deeply silly about someone who is shocked to find that the social attitudes of the 13th century were different from those of our own. And even if nothing of Magna Carta remains in law, it remains a symbol somewhere deep in the public mind of the idea that the powers of government can be curbed.

Those who resist this seem to feel that if only they could strip all symbols away the votes would sweep them and their radical ideas to power. I wish them luck with that project.

And their rubbishing of Magna Carta reminds me of one of the sillier speeches given in the House of Lords in recent years.

On 13 October 2008 Lord Carlile decided it was part of brief as the government's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation to speak in favour of Labour's Counter-Terrorism Bill and join the payroll vote (and no one else) in voting for it.

Then he said:

I have heard it said that this is a breach of Magna Carta. I disqualify that on the grounds of misrepresentation and over-reliance on a document that, although of its time, by today's values is sexist and racist. I would expect Liberty to be marching in the streets against it.

Perhaps the best summation of Magna Carta's place in modern life was that given by Marriott Edgar, who was once famous for his monologues - including The Lion and Albert.

His The Magna Charter concludes:

And it's through that there Magna Charter,
As were made by the Barons of old,
That in England today we can do what we like,
So long as we do what we're told.

The different treatment of Chris Rennard and Jenny Tonge

Have I got this right? The Liberal Democrats asked Alistair Webster to decide whether there was a better than even chance that an inquiry would find beyond reasonable doubt that Chris Rennard had intended to harass women in the party.

So we didn't hold an inquiry: we asked a QC to guess what would happen if we did.

If it were not so damaging to the party's reputation, our adoption of this byzantine approach would be comic.

This is a difficult issue for me to write about, because I have known Chris Rennard for almost 30 years. When I first heard of the allegations against him my reaction was to hope they were not true. I make no comment on them now beyond what is contained in Alistair Webster's statement.

But I am struck by the difference between his treatment and that of someone I first met even before I met Chris.

When Jenny Tonge suggested that Israel would not last for ever in its present form, she was given an ultimatum by Nick Clegg: apologise or resign.

When she failed to apologise, Nick told the Guardian:

"I asked Baroness Tonge to withdraw her remarks and apologise for the offence she has caused. She has refused to do so and will now be leaving the party."

If Nick has the power to force someone out of the party like this, why is he not exercising it now?

The kindest explanation I can think of is that Nick is scared of Alex Carlile.

Just because you murder someone, it doesn't mean your views are worth hearing

The front page of today's Guardian is the worst I have ever seen on any newspaper. Why the Guardian wants to turn itself into a propaganda sheet for a murderer, I cannot imagine.

When you are over the anger, two possible explanations suggest themselves.

One is that this is an example of the sort of self-hatred that Western liberals can fall prey to and that Christopher Hitchens used to complain about. Hurt us because we deserve it, the paper thinks its readers will say.

The other is that we tend to assume that their must be something remarkable about someone who commits such a grotesque crime and that his view must therefore be listening to.

That is a fallacy, as Munira Mirza showed when writing of the videos the 'martyrdom videos' the 7/7 bombers left behind them:

What we see in these videos are not soldiers in a war, but self-righteous young men who believe that their own moral certainty absolves them of the need to explain themselves properly. 

Nobody elected Khan or Tanweer. As far as we know, they did not have relations with anyone in Palestine, Bosnia or Chechnya. Indeed, these two men did not even bother to ask their family, friends or neighbours what they thought. 

At the local mosque near where three of the bombers grew up, one of the committee members, Muhboob Hussein, reacted with anger to 7/7: ‘This is not Islam, this is not jihad, these people are not Muslim. This man [Khan] never came to our mosque....’ 

Obviously, Khan or Tanweer did not show much interest in trying to win people over to their worldview - they thought that ‘democratically elected governments’ had less claim to act on behalf of people than they did.

And we saw just the same contempt for democratic government from the idiot presented on the front page of today's Guardian.

When I blogged about Mirza's article at the time, someone left a comment reminding me of a prophetic piece by Ian Buruma that began:

Does masturbation lead to suicide bombing? One would think not. There is no more direct link to suicide bombing than there is to blindness or schizophrenia. But there may be a connection between sexual inadequacy or frustration and the pull towards violent extremism.

Almost as depressing as the Guardian front page was the discussion of the Woolwich murder on Newsnight yesterday evening. One participant, the impressive Maajid Nawaz, spoke of the need for a Western narrative to challenge the world-view of Islamism. But you only had to look at the people with him to see there was little chance we would hear it last night.

There was John Reid who, as a Communist while the Soviet Union was the greatest tyranny on this planet, never bought into the Western narrative in the first place and is now employed by the security industry - though Newsnight never reminds of us during his frequent appearances. And there was Alex Carlile, a Liberal Democrat who long ago threw in his lot with the most repressive elements of Labourism.

And, sure enough, both Reid and Carlile told us that the most important thing is that we give the state more power to inspect the affairs of law-abiding citizens and weaken the safeguards for those it accuses of crime.

If that is the first reaction of those we are supposed to regard as statesmen, then you can see how weak the West's belief in its own values has become.

Paddy Ashdown on Lords reform - and Alex Carlile

The former Lib Dem leader has an article in the Mail on Sunday today defending the Coalition's plans for reform of the House of Lords:

The Cameron/Clegg reform Bill does not ‘trash’ the Lords, as some claim – it retains the best of what we have now and discards the worst. The more democratic ‘new Lords’ will remain different from the Commons – they will be more separated from the short-termism of a five-year electoral cycle and less likely to kowtow to the whips and the media. 

The Commons will remain more powerful and finally able to get its way if it insists. Which means more democracy, but no deadlock. That’s proper democracy. 

Some write of the ‘amazing expertise’ in the Lords. They are right to do so – we have some eminent, independent figures there. But they are far outnumbered by the retired, the rejected, the defeated and the sometimes dead-beat from the Commons.

And he goes on to show that he has forgotten none of his training in unarmed combat by felling Alex Carlile, who wrote an article critical of the plans last week:

My colleague Alex Carlile, who wrote in this paper last Sunday, is not a Lord because he is a great legal eagle (which he undoubtedly is), but because he is a former Lib Dem MP. I should know. It was me who recommended him for a peerage.

Six of the Best 116

Helen Duffet on Liberal Democrat Voice has the video of Vince Cable's appearance on the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special. "You had total control and leadership. I thought it was really, really good. However, you have a tendency to lean slightly to the right," said that cheeky monkey Craig Revel-Horwood.

The Browser interviews the Lib Dem peer Alex Carlile about ethics in public life.

Conservative councillor Chris Whiteside praises Chris Mullin's second volume of diaries Decline and Fall.

It is now mathematically impossible to pay off the US national debt, argues The Economic Collapse.

Ianvisits spent Christmas Day at a special opening of the Charles Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury. And he was not the only one: "I was in for maybe an hour, but could probably do 2 hours to look at everything properly. You just couldn’t get to see everything due to the crowds, unless you wanted to spend hours in the place waiting for gaps to appear at the displays."

The latest Britblog Roundup is with my favourite host, Redemption Blues.

Alex Carlile and independence

I have an open mind on Liberal Democrats co-operating with the government.

Matthew Taylor's work on rural housing problems (which he writes about in the current Liberator) seems to have been worthwhile, whereas Shirley Williams's role advising Gordon Brown on nuclear disarmament has never been mentioned again.

But it is becoming increasingly hard to feel anything other than deeply worried about the way Alex Carlile is interpreting his role as the government's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation.

I say this in view of his contribution to the Lords debate on the proposed 42 days' detention for questioning of terrorist subjects. Simon Hoggart, from this monring's Guardian, sets the scene:

Lord Carlile stood up. The Earl of Onslow stood up. Lord Carlile sat down. Onslow sat down.

Then they both stood up. When more than one peer wants to speak, the others can indicate whom they prefer, by murmuring the name loudly, if you see what I mean.

"Carlile, Carlile, Carlile," they shouted diffidently, like a shy train guard on Lancaster station.

Finally Carlile got his way.

And as Hoggart says, he was all in favour of 42 days and poured scorn on his opponents. In particular, he described a newspaper advertisement from Liberty as "shameful" and told the House that Magna Carta is "sexist and racist" - you can read the whole speech in Hansard.

These are the sort of arguments you would expect from a brown-nosing Commons backbencher faced with an unarguable case. What they were doing coming from government's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation defeats me. Shouldn't he be above the fray to some extent rather than getting down and dirty with the government's greatest opponents?

The result of the vote - the government lost by 309 votes to 118 - makes it clear that only the payroll vote turned out. It is hard to see how Alex can justify joining them.

I would also be interested to know how he squares acting as a partisan for a Labour government with taking the Liberal Democrat whip.

Children in custody

It does make life easier when you agree with every word of an article. Read Libby Purves's piece in today's Times here. (You may need to register, but it's free.)

And there is more about the Howard League inquiry, to be chaired by Lord Carlile (the former Liberal MP for Montgomery), here.