Here's an unexpected twist: the man who took the photograph of that "Making plans for Nigel" T-shirt is suing people – one N. Farage in particular – for using his work. It has, after all, been spread all over the internet.
Alan Robertshaw, whose videos I post here occasionally, takes the opportunity to give us a quick guide to copyright law.
My advice to fellow bloggers is to steer clear of photographs from the big agencies that cater for newspapers, because they will find you and invoice you.
Next up on Lib Dem Voice was Shaun Ennis:
No one has ever asked me to devise an idea for Ed Davey’s next stunt. But if I was approached from on high, I might suggest having him wade through a river of treacle.
That’s how it feels trying to spread the Liberal Democrat message in the North of England these days.
It’s been an underwhelming set of elections in our part of the country. Despite some notable and very important exceptions such as Stockport, Preston and Sefton, the Liberal Democrats have failed to cut through with what has been a predominantly nationally motivated electorate.
And Johan Prinsloo saw a similar pattern in London:
We saw major success stories in Brent and Ealing, with the local parties there making significant gains on Labour. Our ground game all across London was a marvel to watch, and the establishment of a 100 per cent majority in Richmond, as well as maintaining/improving large majorities in Kingston and Sutton is something to champion going forward.
These are emblematic of our strong ground game resonating well, when there was a record of results behind them.
However, it is also important to accept the reality of the situation that we have underperformed in many areas, even just in London. Our major target of Merton has fallen flat with only two councillors gained.
Also, in Lambeth, Southwark, Islington and my home borough of Croydon, expected gains have somehow evaporated and in some areas, paper candidate Greens in areas like Newham, Barking and Enfield have won without ever campaigning!
While Tara Foster detected a malaise than goes beyond disappointing election results:
In my view, from 2024, we've been electorally and politically stagnant, and the Party has forgotten how to be an effective campaigning machine. Many MPs are well-educated, but their expertise is being wasted.
For example, we don’t have the tax experts working on treasury matters, and as a result we had Daisy Cooper come out with the politically-weightless idea of a Trumpian "Department of Growth" with a tagline of "Get Britain Growing Again."
James Graham, a fellow survivor of the golden age of Lib Dem blogging, has also gone deeper on his own Quaequam Blog!:
The party continues to do well in places where it has been doing well in recent years, and continues to decline in areas where it took a knock during the coalition years. The areas it does well tend to be rural, formerly Conservative dominated areas and it continues to decline in areas that historically were dominated by Labour. In the latter areas, the Greens have completely eclipsed the party.
Even in places where the party was doing well in recent history, such as Hornsey and Friern Barnet (most of which represented by Lynne Featherstone until 2015) and Manchester Withington (most of which was represented by John Leech), the Greens have replaced the Lib Dems as the main challengers to Labour. Wales, with the exception of a single MS in the form of Jane Dodds and a smattering of councillors, is now a no-go area for the party. ...
As some have pointed out, the extent to which the Lib Dems now represent the richest parts of the UK is quite striking; at the top end, Lib Dem MPs represent even wealthier areas than the Conservatives. No wonder Ed Davey has been quite as hostile to any suggestion of redistributing wealth as he has been over the last couple of years.
And this is my worry too. If we are increasingly drawn to campaigning on the grievances of these comfortably off constituents, then our policies are going to seem at best irrelevant to much of the country.
Let me end with an observation on Keir Starmer and Ed Davey from the Commentary in the current issue of Liberator:
There are worrying similarities in the predicaments of the leaders of what are traditionally the two main centre-left parties as they try to contend with both the Greens and Reform.
Both became leader by replacing an extremely unsuccessful predecessor, both conveyed an “adults are back in charge” air of calm competence and both won bigger than they can have dared hope in 2024.
Since then they have both shown little sign of knowing what to do with that success, both have struggled to manage a larger than expected parliamentary party and both have been unable to clearly articulate in public any narrative about what their party is for and what it wants to do.
While Starmer has made a series of u-turns Davey has made a series of diversion side turnings while not really getting anywhere. British missiles? A new Magna Carta? Splitting the Treasury? Defence bonds? Some of these ideas may have merits but nothing links them and they get the public no nearer to knowing what sort of country they would be living in were the Lib Dems in power.
That issue is no. 434 and you can download it free of charge from the magazine's website. You can also sign up to a mailing list there so you are informed each time a new issue appears.
This single was the first CD I bought. I liked it so much I bought it even though I didn't yet have a CD player.
This is my thousandth blog post of the year, a feat I haven't managed since 2016. I've no particular ambition to do it again, and I'm starting to write more for other outlets now, but you never know.
Richard Kemp reminds us of something important: You can like, work with and respect a person whose political beliefs differ from yours.
Elizabeth Spiers misses the early years of blogging: "If you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it."
"A linguistic panic has swept America in recent months, corrupting our youth, annoying our teachers and leaving countless adults hopelessly confused. The question that has sparked the uproar: what, exactly, does it mean when an otherwise upstanding young person blurts out the phrase 'six-seven'?" Matthew Cantor is down with the kids.
"In England, the Cotswolds and Wessex supported an organicist version of Englishness in the interwar period, defined by its 'Westernness' against a ‘south-east metropolitan zone’, and Cornwall has also been understood as a place of difference which, with its distinctive national identity, has made it both familiar and yet potentially threatening to English unity." Gareth Roddy discusses the hold that the Western has on the imagination of all four nations of the British Isles.
Ian Richardson visits the National Railway Museum in York.
This post was written for Written for Terence Towles Canote's 12th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon.
What do we know about Britain in the Fifties? Well for one thing, people couldn’t get enough of films about the recent war, could they?
Not so fast. Here’s the beginning of a film review from Picturegoer (24 October 1953):
Hold your groans about yet another war film. This one really is different. The war flashbacks are just the frame for an enthralling postwar story about an ex-soldier who goes to the dogs.
What turns a good combat-man into a bitter delinquent? Colonel Jack Hawkins makes it his conscience-stricken duty to find out.
And to make sure you’ve got the message, it concludes:
If you're tired of war films, this is the one to kill the yawns.
It seems the conventional view of the Fifties needs a bit more work.
The great thing about Jack Hawkins
The film being talked about in Picturegoer is The Intruder, which was directed by the future James Bond director Guy Hamilton and based on the novel Line on Ginger by Robin Maugham. He was the nephew of the writer W. Somerset Maugham, and his first novel, The Servant, was adapted by Harold Pinter for the celebrated film directed by Joseph Losey.
That review tells you enough to see the parallel between The Intruder and another film involving Colonel Jack Hawkins and men who have not coped well since the war. And indeed, Hawkins’ Colonel Merton in The Intruder is a benign prototype of his bitter Colonel Hyde in The League of Gentlemen, who puts together a whole team of such former soldiers to rob the Bank of England.
The great thing about Jack Hawkins in such roles is that he has an authority that makes you absolutely believe he has commanded men in battle. And he did see action as an officer in the war, though he ended it with ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association), which organised entertainment for troops. He reached the rank of Lieutenant and was made an honorary Colonel in 1946.
In The Intruder, Hawkins’s Colonel Merton arrives home from an evening out to find an armed burglar in his house. He recognises him as Ginger Edwards, one of the men he commanded in the war – and one of the bravest. He starts to talk to Edwards, but then there’s a misunderstanding and Edwards, thinking the Colonel has called the police, flees.
The rest of the film sees Merton tracking down Edwards, who has escaped from prison, to see if he can help him. Merton has left the Army, but has a crisis of conscience that he has not, as a good officer should, still been concerned for the welfare of the men he commanded. In the course of the film, part of which is told in flashbacks to the war, we see why Edwards has turned to the bad.
There turns out not to be much of a mystery to that, but there is much to enjoy from the talented cast as we follow the Colonel on his journey.
The amazing Michael Medwin
Ginger Edwards is played by Michael Medwin, who was a popular young actor in 1953. Helped by his “cheeky chappy” looks, he often played Cockney characters. Yet his background was not what you would expect from his performance in The Intruder. He came from a Dutch and Irish background, but was adopted from an orphanage by two rather grand English ladies who were to send him to public school – for American readers, in Britain a public school means a private school. Obviously.
When Medwin died in 2020, the Guardian quoted Michael Caine in its obituary:
"I was amazed when I met him to discover that he had a very upper-crust accent. Cockney is a hard accent to do and he did it brilliantly."
And Edward Fox heard of Medwin’s childhood for the first time when he sat in on a press interview Medwin gave as the two of them were about to open a touring production of My Fair Lady (Fox was Professor Higgins, Medwin Colonel Pickering) in Glasgow:
Fox, who would be an asset to any audience, had by this time gone into spasms of laughter that were obviously causing him great pain. ''A handbag? A handbag?'' he shrieked, Lady Bracknell-like, although, so far as he knew, Medwin had not actually been found in one.
As the years went on, Medwin acted less and became more involved as a successful producer in both films and the theatre. If he’s remembered now, it’s as Don Satchley, the radio station boss, in Shoestring, the late-Seventies private detective series that launched the career of Trevor Eve.
Jack Hawkins turns to his old comrades
The first old comrade Jack Hawkins turns to in his hunt for Medwin, is John Summers, who is played by George Cole. Summers has returned to running his wholesale greengrocery business in Covent Garden market. We learn that Hawkins promoted him from the ranks and that we see him struggle with the snobbery of the officers’ mess and go carousing with Edwards for old times’ sake. Nevertheless, Hawkins refuses to listen to him when he wants to hand back his commission.
After Cole, Hawkins meets his former second-in-command, and we find him played by Dennis Price in a typically cool, disengaged performance. We learn that an act of cowardice on Price’s part would have cost an injured soldier his life if Medwin had not risked his own to save him. Angered by Price’s lack of cooperation, Hawkins tells him that if it weren’t for Edwards he would have had him court martialled. After Hawkins has left, Price phones the police and tells them that Hawkins may know the whereabout of Medwin.
Then Hawkins visits Arthur Howard, who is now the headmaster of a private school. Arthur Howard was the younger (by almost 20 years) brother of the film star Leslie Howard and specialised in small comic parts. Sure enough, he is in The Intruder to provide comic relief. His character was not a member of Hawkins’ tank corps, but became mixed up with them and, through a chapter of accidents set in motion by his showing a good-time girl played by Dora Bryan the inside of a tank, was the subject of a famous photograph depicting a heroic British tank driver. Dora Bryan is, of course, wonderful – she brightened any film by her presence.
Finally, Medwin runs Hawkins to ground at a farm in Wales belonging to another of his former soldiers. There is at last some tension, as Hawkins has to reach him while avoiding the attentions of the police. Medwin is persuaded to give himself up and Hawkins promises to help him when he leaves prison.
What turned Ginger bad
What did happen to turn Ginger Edwards bad? The answer is simple: he came home from the war to found his girl (played by Susan Shaw) with another man. He also found his younger brother was being beaten by the uncle who was raising him (and had raised him the same way). When the boy was knocked down and killed running into the road, the uncle blamed Edwards, who punched him and sent him crashing down a conveniently placed flight of stairs to his death. Edwards was then imprisoned for manslaughter.
It's not a great film: the pleasure lies not in the unravelling of the mystery so much as the comic interludes and the tension at the end when Hawkins fears arrest himself for helping an escaped prisoner. And its unchallenging moral is that things would be fine if only a benign upper class helped the lower orders.
There is an unexpected twist involving Dora Bryan though, and I won’t spoil that for you.
It may be unintentional, but as it stands the government's Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill allows the creation of a new generation of church schools that are not bound by the existing 50 per cent cap on faith-based admissions.
So I'm pleased that the Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Munira Wilson is to move an amendment that would make new schools subject to this cap too.
Pleased? Back in 2017, I blogged about a Sunday Times report that Muslim pupils outnumber Christian children in more than 30 church schools.
I said I regarded this as good news and quoted Timothy Garton Ash, in his book Free World, on the woolly duffle-coat of Britishness:
Gisela Stuart, herself a German-British MP, describes a neighbourhood in her Birmingham constituency that has a large Asian population. Since Asian parents want the best education for their children, and the best school in the neighbourhood is a convent school, they send their daughters there. Never mind the Catholicism; that can be expunged by Islamic instruction after school hours, at the local madrasah.
So there they sit, row upon row of girls in their Islamic headscarves, being taught maths, British history and, incidentally, the story of baby Jesus, by nuns in their Christian headscarves. A complete muddle, of course, but Europe will need more such muddling through if it is to make its tens of millions of Muslims feel at home.
As to whether we should have faith schools at all, I remembered tackling this question long ago in an article for the Guardian website.
Reading it today, I find it better than I remembered - I'd still be happy to defend the views in it.
What I had forgotten completely is that it was written as a reply to the mighty James Graham.
Those were the days. When the Guardian would invite one Lib Dem blogger to reply to another Lib Dem blogger and they both got paid for the privilege.
Such was Mike Brearley standing in 1981, his last summer as captain of the England cricket team, that the writer of a letter to the Guardian claimed to have seen him set the field and then "look up at the sun and indicate that it should move a little squarer".
For me, it was a wonder to have a representative of liberal North London occupying the most prestigious position in what can be a very Tory game. It was as though Jonathan Miller or Michael Frayn were leading England out.
Of his 31 tests as England captain, Brearley won 18 and lost only 4; and in that summer of 1981, he resumed command when England were a test down to Australia. Under his leadership, the team reeled off three consecutive wins, with a previously despondent Ian Botham playing like a cricketing Superman.
His path to the England captaincy, despite his public school and Cambridge background, was not a conventional one. He made enough runs for the university and Middlesex to be picked for the 1964/5 England tour of South Africa at the age of 22, but after that – as a postgraduate student and then a lecturer – he played for Middlesex only in the university vacations, like at old-fashioned amateur.
Brearley showed his mettle in 1968 when the England selectors left the mixed-race Basil D’Oliveira out of their party to tour Apartheid South Africa to avoid a political row. He insisted on seconding the motion condemning the selectors at a meeting of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which was then the game’s effective governing body.
Soon afterwards, he became a lecture in philosophy at Newcastle University, in thrall to the later Wittgenstein like most young academic philosophers of his generation. I spent most of Brearley’s reign as England captain studying the subject at York, and we discovered that he had unsuccessfully applied for a lectureship there.
“I can’t escape the feeling that you’re slightly disappointed in me,” said the man who had got the job instead. We weren’t, but even liberals are allowed to have heroes.
******
By the time Brearley retired from cricket in 1982 he was already training as a psychoanalyst, and he was later to serve as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Fans and journalists were interested in how his psychoanalytic studies had informed his captaincy – the Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg famously said that Brearley had “a degree in people” – but Brearley himself has emphasised that there was an effect in the opposite direction.
In his latest book, Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, he writes:
Playing cricket, and captaining, taught me a lot about what makes players tick, both those on the same side and opponents, and it stimulated my interest in what others and I myself feel, how we respond to pressure, how we impinge on each other, and so on.
There are of course two main features of the job of captaincy – one to do with tactics and strategy, the other to do with human relations. the latter calls for personal qualities of empathy, truthfulness and courage.
But not everyone was convinced. Brearley recalls one patient asking him: “How can a little boy like you, playing latency games with other little boys, have anything to offer a mature woman like me?”
Why an educated man should spend his time playing games is a question that clearly occupied Brearley even before he turned to psychoanalysis as a profession. His first cricket book The Ashes Regained, an account of his first series as England captain in 1977 written with the journalist Dudley Doust, includes a chapter on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, the author of Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element of Culture.
This may have nonplussed readers more interested in how Brearley persuaded Derek Underwood to bowl over the wicket at Greg Chappell in the second innings at Old Trafford.
In Turning Over the Pebbles, Brearley discusses the writings of Wilfred Bion and his belief that a game must be played purely for its own sake. Bion wrote in his memoirs:
Games were in themselves enjoyable. I was fortunate not to have had them buried under a mass of subsidiary irrelevancies – such as winning matches, keeping my ghastly sexual impulses from obtruding, and keeping a fit body the for the habitation of a supposedly healthy mind.
For Bion, unlike Brearley, even being captain detracted from the game.
******
One of the great things about Mike Brearley’s books are the indexes. His willingness to discuss psychoanalysis, philosophy and high culture alongside cricket produces some striking juxtapositions:
******
‘The best leaders are great teachers,’ says an article I’ve turned up in the Harvard Business Review, and there was always something of the teacher about Brearley. A photograph that shows him, perched on a windowsill, answering questions at a press conference as England captain could easily be of a friendly young academic leading a seminar.
As captain of Middlesex, he challenged the dressing-room ethos that young players should be seen and not heard. If the county was fielding and the game was in danger of drifting, he would start asking his players, the younger ones included, what they thought he should do.
Some youngsters welcomed this more than others, and I’ve recently heard two of them talk about Brearley’s approach. Simon Hughes, now a cricket journalist, had thought “Why’s the England captain asking me what we should do?” – he rather sounded as though he still thinks that – and felt vindicated when the bowling change he suggested failed to bring a wicket.
By contrast, Mike Gatting, who was a teenager when he made his Middlesex debut, remembered being flustered the first time Brearley turned to him – “But I made sure I had something sensible to say the next time he asked me.” Gatting went on to captain England himself.
