When the United States worried about migrants in small boats

Here's a short passage from Roger Greaves's book Reading Madeleine that describes one of the British writer Robert Henrey's adventures in Canada as a young journalist in the early 1920s:

He was sent to Niagara to investigate a rumour that an organisation had been formed for passing aliens into the United States. The passengers were collected in Toronto or Hamilton, taken by car to the Canadian bank of the Niagara river a couple of miles below the falls and a crossing was attempted by night. 

The immigrants were packed in a small boat and the other side would be signalled with a flash lamp. However, the tangle of branches and undergrowth proved a good hiding place for United States immigration officers, who were always on the watch.

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"The scale of the beating handed to Labour in these local elections is difficult to convey just in words. You need to see numbers and maps, showing seas of red replaced by turquoise and green and yellow; you perhaps need to see the tears and feel the desolation longtime servants of the party are feeling this evening. That this defeat has been suffered in the heartland of the modern Labour Party – the stronghold atop which names like Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Lisa Nandy and Lucy Powell have built their reputations – is all the more harrowing." Lucy McLaughlin and Joshi Herrmann witness the fall of Labour Manchester.

Jonathan M. Winer warns us that Donald Trump is planning to use emergency powers to take control of this year's midterm elections.

Emily Enns on the campaign to deny the abuse of native Canadian children in residential schools. "Even now... there’s not a Facebook post that goes out about Indigenous events in Kamloops where there’s not at least one person in a comment section on a shared post saying something about how our experiences as Indigenous people are fabricated."

"The latest ChatGPT model, released last week, included the instructions: 'Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.'" Alex Nguyen explains why.

"History, in Mad Men, shapes the air around the characters, occasionally intrudes to seize control of the story, and nevertheless slowly changes each person. History is also experienced as something beyond the characters’ control and understanding. Like real human beings, they respond with a mix of bewilderment, accommodation, grumpiness, opportunism, and, occasionally, a full embrace of change." Joseph Stieb looks at the way Mad Men shows history reshaping people’s lives, perspectives and interactions, often without them fully realising that things have changed.

James Warren considers the unexpected evolution of the progressive band Stackridge into the poptastic The Korgis.

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Jess Asato, Labour MP for Lowestoft, says AI nudification is the latest weapon of violence against women and girls: "Using AI to strip a woman of her clothes is the modern equivalent of locking her in stocks in the town square and throwing rotten fruit at her. It is a weapon of shame, designed to humiliate. Like other pillories, it is meant to send a message to everyone else: do not do what this woman has done."

"The shortage of legal children’s homes across the UK is fast becoming a national crisis. Last week, a Public Accounts Committee report revealed that nearly 800 children were sent to live in illegal accommodation in 2024, staying an average of around six months each." Gareth Davies and Tom Wall report on a national scandal.

Chris Grey on Donald Trump, Greenland and Mark Carney: "Carney’s speech can be read as a general prescription for middle powers, of which the UK is one, in the rapidly emerging new order. It can also be read, not coincidentally, as a devastating repudiation of the core propositions of Brexiters and of Brexitism."

Emma McClarkin argues that Britain's tax regime is forcing pubs to raise the price of a pint.

"After she finished The Left Hand of Darkness in 1968, she worked for Eugene McCarthy’s primary campaign, stuffing envelopes and writing newsletters in his Oregon field office. In 1972, recovering from the first draft of her novel The Dispossessed, she did newsletters for McGovern." Julie Phillips on Ursula Le Guin the political activist.

"As I walk, I wonder what one ought to put on the grave of a cat." Natalie Guest visits Ilford pet cemetery.

Ed Davey: Donald Trump is behaving like an international gangster and Starmer’s Mr Nice Guy diplomacy has failed

It's easy for politicians in opposition to talk tough, but Mark Carney and Emmanuel Macron have proved that you can do it while leading a government too.

Part of a prime minister's job is speaking to the nation and speaking for the nation, and I fear that, at this time of crisis, Britain is stuck with a PM who is unwilling or unable to do either. And his whole government is wearing Starmer's lack of personality like a shroud.

Anyway, Ed Davey spoke about Donald Trump in the Commons yesterday and has an article in today's Guardian:

Donald Trump is behaving like an international gangster. His threats to Greenland this week have crossed a line, blackmailing America’s closest allies and threatening the future of Nato itself. From leaking messages with other world leaders to whining about the Nobel peace prize, the US president has gone from unstable to seemingly unhinged. And our government needs to wake up.

For months, Keir Starmer has pursued a strategy of quiet appeasement. He told us that by avoiding confrontation the UK could carve out a special status that would shield our industries from the coming storm. Only a few months ago, Trump hailed the “special relationship” at Windsor Castle after being lavished with a state banquet. Now, thanks to his actions, it is nearly in tatters. Starmer’s Mr Nice Guy diplomacy has failed.

A Fish Falls From the Sky and Sparks a Brush Fire in British Columbia

The New York Times wins our Headline of the Day Award.

It's believed the Mounties are looking for the osprey responsible.

Ed Davey calls for Mark Carney to pay official visit before Trump

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Ed Davey has called for Mark Carney to be invited to pay an official visit just before President Trump and for him to be invited to address parliament too, reports The London Economic.

Trump will be here on a state visit from 17 to 19 September, while parliament is in recess.

In a statement quoted by the digital newspaper, the Liberal Democrat leader said:

“The Prime Minister should invite Mark Carney for an official visit to the UK just ahead of Trump’s visit, including the opportunity to address Parliament. This would send an important signal that Britain stands shoulder to shoulder with Canada against Trump’s chaotic trade war.

“With Trump threatening our Commonwealth partners like Canada with yet more tariffs while hitting the UK steel industry, now is the time stand firm with our allies.”

“Nigel Farage may want to abandon our Commonwealth allies and cosy up to his idol Trump, it just shows yet again he is a false patriot who cares more about promoting Trump at home than standing up for the UK abroad.”

If Mark Carney got to address parliament and he didn't, Trump would be intensely annoyed. This, of course, is a point in favour of the idea. Elbows up, everybody.

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.

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?

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Andrew Page draws some lessons from Mark Carney's victory: "What we saw in Canada is that, when political leaders focus on the issues voters care about, minds (and voting intentions) can be changed. It also became apparent that the populist tactics previously employed by the Conservatives ceased to work once the incumbent party found a way of reconnecting with the electorate." 

"The Conservatives are defending a high watermark, a freakishly good result for them in 2021 created by the short-lived vaccine bounce that put wind in their sails for a few months." Matthew Pennell previews tomorrow's local elections.

Commenting on the suicide of Virginia Giuffre, Emily Maitlis says "We have to believe women while they’re alive."

City Monitor asks why Britain has let trams fall by the wayside: "People won’t leave their cars at home until there is an efficient, reliable and comfortable alternative. Trams provide that alternative. No other form of public transport allows you to travel about town smoothly and quietly, doesn’t emit noxious exhaust fumes, doesn't need a parking space, runs so frequently that you don’t even need a timetable – and actually enhances the urban environment."

Johnny Meynell explodes a popular myth about the 1970 FA Cup final: "No show-jumping took place at Wembley Stadium in the days, weeks, or even nine months before Chelsea took on Leeds United for the right to lift the FA Cup on April 11."

"It’s a surprise to arrive in Bexhill, prepared to take a look at one of the most famous examples of English modernism, the De La Warr Pavilion, all white walls, glass and steel, and to encounter a group of buildings with a whiff of the Mughal empire about them." Philip Wilkinson visits the Sussex coast.

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Anthony Painter explains how Britain's weak economy is limiting Labour's room for manoeuvre: "What is the difference between the austerity state and the Brexterity state? There was a way out of the austerity state. And in fact, ahead of the EU referendum, things were starting to recover. They recovered enough to give the Conservative party a majority in the 2015 election. Sometimes you have to think we are cursed. That majority enabled them to follow through on an insane referendum. The rest is, well, not yet history."

"Due to the collapse of my country, which surrendered to Russia in full view of the world on February 28, 2025, I have been seeking out dissident voices from the past ... to help us figure out what we need to do in the present." Heidi Siegmund Cuda turns to Václav Havel’s dissident essays from 1978, The Power of the Powerless, to learn how people can find a collective way back from democratic ruin.

Taylor Noakes explains how Donald Trump has brought a divided Canada together - against him.

Are mental health conditions overdiagnosed in the UK? On The Conversation, Susan McPherson (professor in psychology and sociology) and Joanna Moncrieff (professor of critical and social psychiatry) have an enlightening debate.

"In a nation that often demands that Black people perform either rage or gratitude, George Foreman dared to be something else: complex." Bryan Armen Graham on the career of the twice world heavyweight champion.

Sheila O'Malley dissects the artistry of Joan Crawford: "Crawford was extremely smart in choosing material for herself once she was in a position to do so. She had to campaign hard for some of her best roles. She understood her own persona intimately. Acting teachers often say that self-knowledge is even more important than talent. Crawford knew which roles were 'hers' even before she had landed them."

Ed Davey urges Starmer to visit Canada to show support for Mark Carney in his stand against Trump

From the Guardian live politics blog this morning:

Last night Mark Carney, the formconer governor of the Bank of England, was elected leader of the Liberal party in Canada, which means he will become prime minister. Canadian election results don’t often take centre stage in UK politics, but Carney was elected promising fierce opposition to President Trump’s talk of annexing Canada and in London Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is urging Starmer to fly to Ottawa this week “to stand in solidarity with the country’s new prime minister in response to Trump’s threats against Canada”. 

In a statement Davey said:

It’s vital for both British and Canadian security that we stand strong together. With global instability rising, it’s never been more important to show a united front with our Commonwealth friends – and to stand together against Trump senselessly turning the screws on his allies, whether that’s Canada, the UK or Europe.

Responding to the trade war along the North American border, our prime minister must stand in solidarity against Trump’s bullying and visit Ottawa in a joint show of strength. Starmer must be clear that Trump’s threats against Commonwealth nations’ sovereignty are unacceptable.

The Guardian continues:

Davey won’t be expecting Starmer to take his advice. But he has touched a nerve. Starmer angered Canadians during his press conference with Trump in the White House last month by refusing to answer a question about Trump’s stance on Canada, claiming the journalist who asked about it was “trying to find “a divide between us that does not exist”. 

And, with King Charles attending a Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey this afternoon, there will be close interest in whether he says anything that might be seen as a comment about Trump’s plan to seize the country where he is head of state.

Lord Bonkers tells me that when Queen Victoria was once urged to visit Canada, she replied: "We are not a moose."

The Epsom Riot of 1919

Last summer Epsom & Ewell Borough Council advertised an organised walk:

A walk about the 1919 Epsom riot, the attack on Epsom Police Station and the death of Sergeant Thomas Green. Discover what happened in Epsom during WW1 with its crowded Military Hospitals, camps and large numbers of Canadian soldiers left behind in Woodcote Camp waiting to go home. 

See how events boiled over out of hand during an incident in a local pub, which led to the infamous riot of 1919, the attack on Epsom Police Station and the death of Sergeant Thomas Green. 

The walk begins outside the Rifleman pub in East Street and ends in Ashley Road at the site of the police station.

Serious criminality and public disorder recycled as heritage. I had this in mind to share the story of the Epsom Riot on 1919 with you a while before the current unpleasantness broke out, and now I wonder if they will be organising riot walks around Hartlepool and Sunderland one day.

Wikipedia has a good article on the Epsom riot and a photo of Sergeant Green:

The Canadians were from the nearby Woodcote Park Convalescent Hospital, a former temporary military base that had been converted for use as a convalescent hospital. With the First World War over, discipline at the camp was relaxed. Delays in repatriating Canadian soldiers had resulted in thirteen riots by troops in British camps between November 1918 and June 1919. 

The riot began when two Canadian servicemen were arrested following a disturbance at a local public house. Their comrades marched on the town police station to demand their release. The soldiers ripped up the railings surrounding the station to use as projectiles and clubs. In the ensuing fighting, Private Allan McMaster, a former blacksmith, picked up a metal bar and struck Green on the head. The sergeant died the following day, having never regained consciousness.

Seven men appeared at the Surrey Assizes in July 1919. They were found guilty of rioting, but were acquitted of manslaughter. They were sentenced to one year in prison, but were released after only a few months. Ten years after returning to Canada, McMaster, one of those imprisoned, confessed to the killing. As he had already been found not guilty of manslaughter, he was not returned to the UK.

Those sentences look lenient to modern eyes, but then, despite what we are always told by right-wingers, sentences have been getting longer for decades.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The Moosetrap

This is just the sort of gentle humour at the expense of foreigners that I've always been a little too fond of.

It could be worse though. Jerry Sadowitz was once knocked unconscious by a member of a Montreal audience after starting his act with "Hello Moosefuckers!"

Thursday

The morning post includes a gratifyingly large cheque drawn on a Toronto bank. I have long been a patron of the arts, and from time to time have dabbled on the creative side of things too. You will know of my part in the Rutbeat movement of the Sixties and perhaps of the success of my film studios and its ‘Oakham Comedies’ in the immediate post-war years. 

What you may not know is that I also wrote what has turned out to be the most successful play ever produced on the Canadian stage: The Moosetrap. 

In the construction of this whodunit I made the great Agatha Christie my study, and played about with the conventions of the genre (as we theatrical folk say) just as she did. In particular, I presented the audience with a cast that Did Not Include A Butler, thus leaving them in the dark as to who had committed the murder until the end of the play.

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• Keep the flag of freedom burning
• I set off with the Well-Informed Orphan
• The Rest is Under the Table
• "A drop of What-killed-Aunty"
• Committing arson in His Majesty’s dockyards

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Sarah Wise uncovers a forgotten passage of British history: "Between 1869 and 1925 an estimated 80,000 British boys and girls were sent to Canada as agricultural labourers and domestic servants by Macpherson, Thomas Barnardo and Maria Rye – the latter one of a small number of other philanthropists active in Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin. Only one third of them were orphans, meaning that the majority had been removed from parents and/or siblings."

Alexander Smith from NBC News shows us how Britain is now seen by the wider world: "Britain once compared itself to giants like France and Germany; today many of its metrics more closely resemble Eastern Europe’s weaker economies."

"In the British media, the correspondents and columnists who make their livings from the characters of the royal family are furious because Harry and Meghan presume to write their own story and to profit from it. The only ‘truth’ the British press can countenance is one delivered beneath their bylines and that’s why Harry & Meghan will be so stringently fact-checked while other cosier fictions continue to go unquestioned." Mic Wright on the royals and the media. 

"If you want policies that actually work, you have to change the political conversation from 'tough candidates punishing bad people' to 'strong communities keeping everyone safe'." The root cause of violent crime is not what we think it is, argues Phillip Atiba Goff.

Colin Hyde has been mapping Leicester with electric paint.

"Men and women should beware if a poet starts sending them love letters. They can be sure that the poet is using them to hone their technique rather than valuing them as individuals. The displays of emotion in their letters will be self-regarding contrivances; most of the promises will prove false." Richard Davenport-Hines reviews two books on the romantic life of T.S. Eliot.

Saint Pierre and Miquelon: The surviving French colony in North America

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Something I discovered from the coverage of Emmanuel Macron's victory over Marine Le Pen at the weekend is that there is still a French possession in North America.

Saint Pierre and Miquelon are two small islands off the South-West coast of Newfoundland. Their six thousand inhabitants are French citizens, elect their own deputy to the National Assembly in Paris and take part in in senatorial and presidential elections.

This time the islands saw a narrow victory for Marine Le pen, who received 50.69 per cent of the votes cast.

The islands form the last remnant of the colony of New France that in the middle of the 18th century occupied much of the Eastern side of what are now Canada and the United States.

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Francesca Borri visits the Hyde Park neighbourhood in Leeds, and finds a community abandoned by government and ravaged by deprivation as much as Covid-19.

A Canadian research project gave homeless people $7,500 each. Bridgette Watson finds the results were "beautifully surprising",

"It’s possible that the first MP from what we might consider an ethnic minority background today was elected as early as 1767. James Townshend, Whig MP for West Looe in Cornwall, had a British grandfather who worked for the Royal African Company, a mercantile trading company that also traded enslaved people. His grandmother, a prominent businesswoman who also owned enslaved people, was of African and Dutch descent." Rebecca Lees discovers the first MPs from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Colin Horgan on a study of 'little men' in 1930s Germany that shows how people allow tyranny to spread.

Michael Seely looks back on Alan Plater’s Beiderbecke trilogy.

As a treat for Halloween, David Castleton selects the London Underground's seven most haunted stations. Expect "tales of 'black nuns' with a fondness for harassing banking establishments, screams that still echo from World-War-II air-raids, crypts converted into ticket offices, prehistoric elephants with axes in their heads and attempts to explain why the Underground has acquired such a reputation for being a haven of spooks."

Canadian police make arrests as tempers flare in lobster feud

Our Headline of the Day Award goes to BBC News.

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John Harris says the Tories are creating a cookie-cutter Britain: "Anyone who has watched what has happened to British housing will know what is surely coming: more and more Unplaces, in which community and collective purpose are beyond people’s grasp because the physical means to create and sustain them simply do not exist."

Polio terrified Americans, and in 1955, when Jonas Salk’s vaccine became available, they snapped it up like candy. Sixty-five years later, reports Arthur Allen, this is a different story.

Casting envious eyes on Canada, Adam Gopnik asks if the American Revolution was really a good idea.

"Eliot’s own consideration of the name she should be known by is as complicated a psychological and moral question as any depicted in her novels. However, her wish to be known professionally as George Eliot is resolute and clearly articulated." Eleanor Dumbill argues that it is not empowering to abandon the male pseudonyms used by female writers.

"He remembers a game where the other team had a player from Barbados. 'I didn’t get any runs, but he did. And when I went out to field their team was shouting: "Our one is better than yours," and you’ve got 20 people laughing, do I laugh? Or do I look like the angry black man?'" Andy Bull talks to black British cricketers whose careers were cut short by racist stereotyping,

James Collingwood on Robin Redbreast, a piece of folk horror broadcast in the BBC's Play for Today slot in 1970.

How some Lib Dems misunderstand the rise of Justin Trudeau

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Ed Davey writes on Liberal Democrat Voice:

If you compare our recent slow recovery with Canada’s Liberals’ fast-track to power, you’ll of course find quite a few differences – but for me the biggest is that Canada’s Liberal Party went big on reform – and grew massively as a result.

But how similar were positions the Canadian Liberals and the British Liberal Democrats faced a few years ago?

The answer is that they were not similar at all.

As the new issue of Liberator reminds us, the Canadian Liberals are their country's natural party of government, having been in power or the official opposition for all but four of the last 144 years.

So you could well argue that it would have been remarkable if the Canadian Liberals hadn't bounced back significantly after coming third in 2011.

Sadly, all this is a world away from the history of the Liberal Democrats and the parties that merged to form us.

There is an irony here. The Canadian Liberals' debacle at the 2011 federal election came after they had adopted another of the ideas being urged on the Liberal Democrats by the leadership. They appointed a leader from outside the political bubble.

Michael Ignatieiff - a distant kinsman of Nick Clegg - was an academic and broadcaster, known in Britain ("the thinking-woman's crumpet") from his spell as a television arts presenter. He also wrote a good biography of Isiah Berlin.

The Canadian Liberals' bounce-back from their unprecedented third place in 2011 was to turn to a leader who was so deep in the bubble it's a wonder he could breathe.

Justin Trudeau, of course, is the son of the former Canadian prime minister and Liberal leader Pierre Trudeau.

The Lib Dems should be open to new ideas from every quarter, but I am sceptical of the idea that the recent experience of the Canadian Liberals offers us a blueprint for guaranteed success.

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"Are they hiding something, or is it simply that they are so confused and divided by the outcome of the referendum that they daren’t doubt its legality?" Paul Tyler asks why Labour is silent on the possibility that Russia interfered with the 2016 EU referendum.

Judges in Canada are sentencing youth offenders to chess with promising results, report Monique Sedgwick, Jeffrey MacCormack and Lance Grigg. Chess joke: After 37 consecutive Berlins they break down in tears and promise to go straight.

Talking of Chess, Sarah Hurst looks at the Kremlin's plans to maintain control of world chess.

Ian Visits on the revival of London's pedways.

"The character of Dido was the embodiment of many of that small girl’s dreams, as, when Joan grew up to be a writer she was able to give her all the wonderful adventures she had imagined for herself, and encourage others to be bold and follow their dreams as well." Her daughter Lizza Aiken celebrates Joan Aiken's heroine Dido Twite.

Paul Steele takes us on a walk through some of this blog's sacred places, including White Grit and the Stiperstones Inn.