Paul Marshall: From SDP researcher to right-wing media mogul

The new London Review of Books has a substantial article by Peter Geoghegan on SDP researcher turned right-wing media mogul Paul Marshall.

It takes us through his career, from researcher to Charles Kennedy in Kennedy's days as an SDP Alliance MP, via his own candidacy in the 1987 general election to his take over of the party's ailing think-tank Centre for Reform. He relaunched this as CentreForum, with a far more right-wing agenda.

Then it's on to The Orange Book, which Geoghegan, unlike many of its critics and adherents, appears to have read:

Many Lib Dems still remember Marshall primarily for The Orange Book, the controversial collection he edited in 2004 with David Laws, then a rising star on the Lib Dem right. The Orange Book is less incendiary than its reputation might suggest. 

Although the book was billed as a response to ‘nanny-state liberalism’, most of the essays are standard social democratic fare: Vince Cable making the case for financial reforms, bromides from Nick Clegg about the need for transparency in the European Union. 

Other chapters, however, suggest an effort to move the party to the right. [David] Laws proposed replacing the NHS with a French-style social insurance system. Another MP, Mark Oaten, contributed an essay about cutting crime titled ‘Tough Liberalism’. (He later admitted that it had been written by a researcher.) 

It was David Laws' chapter, which he reportedly included without informing the other authors, that led to a row at the Liberal Democrat conference and to the whole publication being seen as an attack on Charles Kennedy's leadership.

As to an attack on nanny-state liberalism, The Orange Book contained the purest expression of that creed I've ever read. It was largely a cuttings job (and cuttings from the Daily Mail, if I recall rightly) by the normally sound Steve Webb and a researcher.

Those cuttings were full of horror stories about the effects of bad parenting. I suppose the idea was that if the lower orders could be persuaded to raise their children properly, then there would be less need for public spending and it would be possible to cut taxes for the middle classes.

It was all a long time ago, but you can read my Liberator review of The Orange Book on this blog.

Then it's on to Brexit. Geoghegan says of Marshall:

In the aftermath of the referendum he attacked the Bank of England for being anti-Brexit, donated £500,000 to the Tories under Boris Johnson and funded the Alternative Arrangements Commission on the Irish border question. The AAC looked like an official government body but was in fact run by a private think tank. It was dominated by right-wing Tory MPs such as Steve Baker and Suella Braverman who opposed the 'backstop' that would have kept Northern Ireland in the single market.

Money well spent? It doesn't sound like it

After he was done with Brexit, Marshall founded the Unherd website. It's tone is the sort of world-weary Toryism you once found in the Spectator and for which I have a weakness myself. And it's a clever name, though many of its contributors have long been heard elsewhere and few of their opinions lack a herd that already follows them.

None of this tone was to be found in his next media venture GB News.

Geoghegan dwells on Marshall's financial career, his membership of the influential and fashionable congregation of Holy Trinity Brompton and, in education, his funding of his own multi-academy trust.

But I am left wondering, for all his money, how much political nous Marshall has if he thought the SDP and then the Liberal Democrats could be wrenched away from their instinctive support for pan-European institutions.

Nigel Farage's defamation action against the Mail is going nowhere

Says who? Says a practising barrister, that's who.

Following the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has introduced me to the world of legal vloggers. And one of my favourites is Alan Robertshaw, whose YouTube account is Art of Law.

He provides legal comment on stories in the news, and you can watch his views on Nigel Farage's spat with the Daily Mail at the top of this post.

Robertshaw, who also teaches young barristers, provides more general comment on the law from time to time.

So you can enjoy his thoughts on the art of advocacy and on how to be the perfect witness.

The latter could be useful to anyone. I once gave a witness statement for the defence in a civil action, but the plaintiff died before the case was heard, so I never got my day in court.

Professor Mary Beard on the history of the National Trust

The BBC. The RNLI. The National Trust. There seems to be no British institution that the right does not despise. Hence the Daily Mail's current campaign against the Trust.

Which makes this lecture by Mary Beard on the Trust's history timely.

As the blurb on YouTube explains:

This is the second annual Octavia Hill Lecture from the National Trust, in collaboration with Times Radio. 

Professor Beard asks ‘Who owns the past?’ She examines what the past is for, how we can learn from and challenge it, and how we can bring it to life. 

Throughout her lecture, Professor Beard considers issues of authenticity and ownership and questions who makes the decisions about collection displays. She looks at how the past is reconstructed and how it's discussed and presented. 

Professor Beard uses the National Trust and the historic houses in our care as a gateway to speak on wider debates around history, heritage and ownership, and to shed a light on what the past says about society and the wider world.

Simon Hughes makes phone-hacking claim against the owners of the Daily Mail

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From the Guardian this evening:

The Daily Mail’s parent company is facing its first legal claim for phone hacking, after the former Liberal Democrat MP Sir Simon Hughes filed a case against the newspaper publisher.

Hughes is alleging that Associated Newspapers – the owner of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and MailOnline – misused his private information. He is expected to claim that the newspaper publisher employed a private investigator who improperly accessed his voicemail messages.

The paper says this is the first time the publisher of the Daily Mail has faced a legal claim based on allegations of voicemail interception.

Now Boris Johnson has lost the support of the Daily Mail

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Mandrake in The New European (AKA Tim Walker) has a huge-if-true story this evening:

Long regarded as a dormant volcano, the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere has erupted. Mandrake is reliably informed he has told his editors – and his editor-in-chief Paul Dacre – that he believes his national titles have “lost all touch” with what their readers are thinking about Boris Johnson.

I am told tomorrow’s Mail on Sunday will make it abundantly clear it no longer has confidence in Johnson. The language will be strong and the change of tone and direction dramatic. It will send shock waves through Downing Street and the Conservative party and make a leadership challenge this year all the more likely.

I am reminded of the observation that Tony Blair didn't win in 1997 because Rupert Murdoch's papers supported him: they supported him because he was going to win.

The Joy of Six 1057

David Hencke argues that the Supreme Court has taken to backing the government against the people: "The change appears to have taken place after Lord Robert Reed became President in 2020 replacing Baroness Brenda Hale of Richmond. It also follows a change in the composition of the court which is now almost exclusively male with just one token female judge out of 10."

"The question that arises from the current furore is not one about the Church of England’s role and purpose within the life of the nation, but rather one about the role of the Conservative and Unionist party. If that august body no longer believes in the concept of a national conversation where the ancient institutions of Church - and, indeed, Crown - get a voice; then what, pray, is its purpose?" Fergus Butler-Gallie asks what the Conservative Party is for if it's no longer Conservative.

Colleen Morgan on what to do if you are the subject of a Daily Mail outrage-bait article.

When things feel unreal, is that a delusion or an insight? John Horgan looks at the psychiatric syndrome called derealisation.

"Inside, the house is preserved just as it was in Britten’s day, not only furniture and paintings but manuscripts, correspondence and bills and postcards from friends. Somehow it manages to avoid feeling like a museum and you feel instead you’ve stepped into a private house still occupied by the owner." Kay Gale visits Aldeburgh and The Red House museum.

Paul Walter blogs from St Kilda, "the islands at the end of the world".

Boris Johnson will destroy the Conservative Party if he doesn't destroy the country first

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I came across two article today which argue that Boris Johnson's adoption of populism may in the long run prove disastrous for the Conservative Party.

On The Conversation, Andy Knott notes how the approach for Johnson's government marks a complete break with traditional Conservatism:

For conservatism, protecting “what is” (in other words, the institutions that have been handed down to us) is a joint project between conservative politicians and the people, their constituents. Together they have been engaged in this project for centuries. 

This means there is a seamless bond between the people and the elite (or establishment, or government, or parliament, or judiciary), which enables them to rule and the people to view the Conservatives as the natural party of government and their proper representatives. 

Populism, in stark contrast, operates by breaking that bond. It decrees that the elite has abandoned the people, and acts against their interests.

Johnson may think he can control the definition of the elite - judges, civil servants urban liberals - but sooner or later the people will notice that he is supported by the super-rich and adopt their own definition.

Once they do he will be finished and the tissue of interests the Conservative Party represents ripped to shreds.

Over to the Guardian, where William Davies argues that this Conservative ideology has long been in decline for 30 years:

There was one force in Britain’s public life that never gave up on the Tories: the press. All those resentments that took the place of conservative ideology – the loathing of multiculturalism, Brussels, Blairism, immigration, and the vast riches being made in London – were given a safe space in the pages of the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph. 

With their constant attacks on all symptoms of liberal globalisation, these papers provided the incubator for the rage currently sweeping British politics, during the long years when national borders and rural England were out of political fashion.

The result is that those newspapers now have one of their own as prime minister.

And the Conservatives?

The current poll lead feels precarious; 59 per cent of Tory members have already voted for the Brexit party once (in the European parliament elections), and many could well do so in future. The Conservatives are now to the Brexit party what cocaine is to crack: more acceptable in polite company, but ultimately made of the same stuff.

Davies reaches a similar conclusion to Andy Knott:

The forces behind Brexit will need new scapegoats soon – and Johnson, Cummings and the Conservative party could be next in line.

All very encouraging if you wish to see the Tories destroyed, but the worry must be that they will destroy the country before that stage is reached.

The Daily Mail goes to the Glee Club

In his foreword to the new Liberator Songbook, Lord Bonkers addressed himself to those attending for the first time:

You may see impressionable young journalists wandering around the hall. If you do, please be gentle with them. 

Newspapers publish horrified exposés of the Glee Club ever year. I think there must be some sort of legal requirement upon them, so it is best not to worry about it too much.

Sure enough, Tim Sculthorpe, the deputy political editor of Mail Online, went along and came away with revelations to freeze his readers' blood:

The booze-fuelled party, which took place on the final night of this year's party conference, also saw party members sing the 'Ode to Charlie'. 

The controversial lyrics, first produced after Charles Kennedy died due to complications from alcoholism, concludes: 'Charlie is pissed again.' 

Another song performed at the 2017 edition included 'Country Garden' which mocks David Cameron over allegations in a book by Lord Ashcroft about his student days and a pig.

I don't know who told him 'Ode to Charlie' was written after Charles Kennedy died: it dates from the 1990s if not the 1980s.

And while I can understand the Mail asterisking 'Fuck', I don't suppose even its readers would be offended by the 'off'.

Incidentally, the Mail illustrated the article with the original words of 'Country Garden', which long predate Isabel Oakeshott's fantasy about David Cameron and a pig.

This allows me to repeat my boast that I was responsible for a couple of verses of that first version.

Six of the Best 695

Peter Sloman makes an important point: "If centre-left politicians are ever to regain support for progressive and internationalist policies, they will have to find new ways of engaging with provincial Britain – with its economic needs, its sense of place, and its estrangement from the corridors of power."

"Every day in Dacre’s paper, the people who make up the population of Britain, the people who teach your children and bandage your wounds, drive your trains or clean your floors, are described as aliens and forgers and scum." Andrew O'Hagan skewers the Daily Mail and its editor.

CNN and Fox News were wrong to show so much footage of screaming teens after the Manchester Arena bombing, argues Will Oremus.

Denis Fischbacher-Smith reports on the collapse of British Airways' IT systems.

Dawn Scott explains how foxes have adapted to life in the cities we have built around them.

Andy Peake - son of Market Harborough, top division footballer and police officer - is interviewed by John Hutchinson.

The making of Gregory's Girl

John Gordon Sinclair, Dee Hepburn and Clare Grogan reminisce about the making of this 1980 film in a discussion recorded last year.

If this were the Daily Mail I would be astounded that they look a lot older 35 years on.

Harriet Harman, the NCCL and PIE

People’s incredulity that Harriet Harman might have something to explain or apologise for over relations between the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) arose from hatred for the Daily Mail and a willingness to accept Harman at her own high estimation.

Another factor, though, was that some younger people did not realise just how different social attitudes were on the left in the 1970s.

It happened that I discussed this era in a book chapter that I published in 2005.

This is an era in which books with titles like Escape from Childhood were written. John Holt’s work contains chapters on, among other subjects, ‘The right to vote.’ ‘The right to work’ and ‘The right to drive’. Reading him today it is hard to resist the idea that Holt was not so much calling for a change in our attitude towards children as calling for the abolition of the very concept of childhood. See for evidence his rather stern chapter on ‘How children exploit cuteness’. 

The chapter that reads most strangely today is the one entitled ‘The law, the young, and sex’. One would not, I think, come across a passage like the following in any current book:

Some people have voiced to me the fear that if it were legal for an adult to have sex with a consulting child, many young people would be exploited by unscrupulous older ones. The image here is of the innocent young girl and the dirty old man; few worry about the young boy having sex with an older woman. Here, too, we are caught with the remains of old myths – in this case that only men were sexual, that women were pure and above it – from which it follows that any young girl having sex with an older man must necessarily be his victim.

This is not a simplistic call for the ‘sexual liberation’ of children; if anything, it is an anguished examination of Holt’s own internal conflicts on the idea. But such ideas were in the air in the 1970s. When I worked in Birmingham, which dates it as late as 1981 or 1982, pamphlets from the Paedophile Information Exchange [PIE] could still be found among a tableful of literature from other municipally approved good causes in the Central Library. 

There is some coverage of this period in Christian Wolmar’s book on childcare scandals, Forgotten Children, but he treats it largely as a plot by a few paedophiles to infiltrate more respectable movements. This approach tends to underestimate the extent to which a broader strand of educated opinion was prepared at least to entertain the idea of something like the sexual liberation of children.

Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman were the public face of the NCCL in the 1970s, but ultimately they were its employees , so it is not clear how far they were responsible for the organisation’s policies. (Jack Dromey flew beneath my political radar in those days.)

But I note that Patricia Hewitt has broken her silence and apologised for the NCCL’s stance in those days. I find this preferable to Harriet Harman’s self-righteousness - however much she hates the Daily Mail.

Times have moved on, thank goodness. As I concluded with something of a rhetorical flourish in that chapter, the problem with abolishing the concept of childhood is that you also abolish that of child abuse.

Not that everything has improved over the past 30 years or so. We have made parents nervous of photographing their own children at sports days, but the most vulnerable children of all - those in public care - do not seem to be much better protected.

Gordon Brown on Paul Dacre: "Great personal warmth and kindness"

In view of Labour's outrage (which I share) at the Daily Mail's attack on Ralph Miliband, let me remind you of what Gordon Brown said about him.

This is taken from Nick Davies' excellent Flat Earth News:

Politicians works hard socially as well as politically to make the Mail their friend. Gordon Brown caught the tone in a videoed message for Paul Dacre's tenth anniversary as editor:

"Paul Dacre has devised and delivered one of the great newspaper success stories. He also shows great personal warmth and kindness as well as great journalistic skill."

A blast from the past as John Moore defends Ralph Miliband

This article by Nicholas Watt appeared on the Guardian website this afternoon:

A former member of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet has accused the Daily Mail of "telling lies" about Ralph Miliband after the newspaper claimed that the Marxist writings of the late father of the Labour party meant that he hated Britain. 

In the biggest blow to the Mail editor Paul Dacre, who has launched a strong defence of his paper's decision to claim that Ralph Miliband had left an "evil legacy", Lord Moore of Lower Marsh said his former tutor was a good man who never had a bad word to say about Britain.

Lord Moore of Lower Marsh? I had to look him up, but he is indeed John Moore.

Young reader's voice: John Moore? Who's he?

Long before you were born, young reader, John Moore was widely seen as a future leader of the Conservative Party.

As his Wikipedia entry says, John Moore enjoyed a meteoric rise through the ranks of government under Margaret Thatcher. He was an impressive media performer and had the sort of matinée idol looks Maggie always had a weakness for.

So high was his political stock that in 1987 he was appointed Secretary of State for Social Services - this was in the days when that brief also included responsibility for the National Health Service.

This mammoth job proved far beyond his capabilities and he was sacked from the Cabinet in 1989.

And it seems he really had flown too near the sun. As Wikipedia says:

After leaving the Commons in 1992 Moore became a life peer as Baron Moore of Lower Marsh, of Lower Marsh in the London Borough of Lambeth. A BBC feature in August 2011 reported that after 20 years in the House of Lords, Moore had still to make his maiden speech.

Still, good for him for speaking out on Paul Dacre and his odious attack on the Labour leader's father.

Trivial Fact of the Day: Bruce Reynolds worked for the Daily Mail

The Guardian report of the death of Bruce Reynolds, the brains behind the Great Train Robbery, reveals a striking piece of information:

In 1995, Reynolds wrote his memoirs which recounted, without sentimentality or self-pity, how he had embarked on a life of crime after initially seeking a job as a journalist but ended up working in the accounts department of the Daily Mail.

Liberal England Comment

It backed the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley. It employed the mastermind of Britain's most notorious theft.

Today we ask:

Are there no depths to which the Daily Mail will not sink?

Headline of the Day

A win for the Daily Mail:

Mutant 'super rats' with resistance to poison invade Henley-on-Thames 

Daily Mail fails to cover its pawprints over the Essex lion

Go the Daily Mail website and you will find an article laughing at today's furore over the lion that was supposed to be on the loose in Essex.

The headline shouts:

Here, kitty kitty: Image of 'Essex Lion' that sparked massive police hunt is finally revealed as officers call off the search and admit sightings were probably of a 'large domestic cat'

And the article goes on to say:

It also emerged that an image believed to show the lion which was widely viewed online was in fact a fake. 

Essex police warned that 'several doctored photographs are in circulation through social networking sites and other media forums'. 

And officers said one night-time picture in circulation showing the silhouette of what looked like a lion, was 'never one that police were examining'. 

The image - which was widely distributed on Twitter - was thought to show the beast behind a car in a residential area in Basildon, Essex.

And it reprints the phony picture - note the credit to @Twitter.

But where did all those people on Twitter get this photo from? My guess is that for many of them the answer is the Daily Mail earlier today.

Christmas in Town Hall Square, Leicester

The tableaux of children's book or television characters in Town Hall Square are one of the pleasures of Christmas in Leicester. There are always two of them - usually one inspired by a literary classic and one by something more contemporary.

This year it is tradition all the way, with displays inspired by Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter. Add to that a nativity scene and a "Christmas Greetings" banner on the front of the Town Hall in Britain's most ethnically diverse city and it seems Christmas is safe for a few years yet whatever the Daily Mail says.

But then my view of multiculturalism has always been that we should celebrate any festival going, not cancel them all in case we offend someone.

Late Night Shopping Festival in Market Harborough tonight

I am working at a conference in Birmingham today, so am unlikely to be back in time. But it is worth recording that it is late shopping night in Market Harborough tonight.

As the Harborough Mail tells it:

A pair of reindeer will be one of the main attractions at this year’s Late Night Shopping festival in Harborough. 

Sponsored by estate agents Andrew Granger & Co, the reindeer are sure to draw crowds of youngsters. 

Thousands of people are expected to flock to the annual event on Friday, December 2, 2011, for which the town centre will again be closed off to traffic from 6pm. 

The volunteers who organise the evening are also hoping to bring a farmer’s market, as well as the usual fairground rides, charity stalls and other attractions.

One word of warning. We were promised reindeer two years ago, but their appearance was cancelled because it snowed.

The story subsequently made the Daily Mail, but for some reason the paper resisted the headline "Elf and safety".

Blaming the victims of burglary

The Daily Mail rightly gets indignant about a letter of "apology" sent by a 16-year-old burglar to his victims:

"I don’t no why I am writing a letter to you! I have been forced to write this letter by ISSP. To be honest I’m not bothered or sorry about the fact that I burgled your house.

"Basicly it was your own fault anyways. I’m going to run you through the dumb mistakes you made. 

"Firstly you didn’t draw your curtains which most people now to do before they go to sleep. 

"Secondly your dumb you live in Stainburns a high risk burglary area and your thick enough to leave your downstairs kitchen window open. I wouldnt do that in a million years. But anyways I don’t feel sorry for you and Im not going to show any sympath or remores."

The trouble is that this young villain has absorbed a view that the crime prevention movement tends to put over. That is, if you are burgled it is your fault for not having taken sufficient precautions.

I once wrote about this in a post (rather pretentiously) titled David Cameron's bicycle and the demoralisation of society:

The world that the current anti-crime movement envisages is something like a cross between a secure psychiatric hospital and an airport departure lounge. There are no sharp edges, in case we hurt ourselves or someone else, and to own or display something attractive is an invitation to have it stolen. 

To escape this fate we need to start talking about morality again. We cannot go on treating every crime as a sign that something else needs to be banned or that the state has failed and therefore needs to spend even more money.

So it is not such a surprise to see that the Mail has accompanied its report with a photograph captioned:

Chief Inspector Melanie Jones said the contents of the letter were 'disgusting' but could prove useful as a warning to householders

Nick Clegg has always been a bit of a Euro-realist

"Could the pro-European Lib Dems swallow some reduction in Brussels power after all?"  asks a Daily Mail website headline this evening. And the article beneath goes on to say:

But are there signs that the Lib Dems may be shifting somewhat? In fact, Clegg and his former leader Lord Ashdown are now speaking of ‘rebalancing’ our relationship with Europe and seeking reform of certain ‘intrusive’ directives. It’s all semantics but, in the end, couldn’t ‘rebalancing’ mean much the same as ‘repatriation’?

But that has always been Nick Clegg's view (and mine, come to that). Reviewing his pamphlet The Liberal Moment at the start of last year, I recalled his speech to a Liberator fringe meeting at out Brighton Autumn Conference in 2006:

He did speak at a Liberator fringe meeting while still an MEP, advocating what he termed “crunchy” liberalism and attacking over-regulation, but he was careful to confine himself to matters that were the concern of the European parliament and not to trespass on the concerns of his Westminster colleagues.

What the Mail fails to grasp is that Nick's statement that there will be no "smash and grab raid" to claw back powers handed to Brussels while he is Deputy Prime Minister is simply common sense.

We need to move beyond debates about whether we should be "in Europe" or not, because in the economic world we now inhabit we are part of Europe whether we will it or not. What we need to do is to start talking about the sort of Europe we want and finding allies there who will help us bring that about.

But David Cameron's decision to placate his members and backbenchers by pulling the Conservatives out of the European People's Party grouping and set up his own European Fruitcake Alliance means that this will be next to impossible for him to bring about.