Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain’s Prime Minister Since Thatcher by Mark Garnett

Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain’s Prime Minister Since Thatcher

Mark Garnett

Agenda, 2025, £20

It’s not a novelty for British prime ministers to leave No. 10 without having lost an election: Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Wilson all did so. What is new, says Mark Garnett, is for them to be bundled out of power when they are still in good health.

He dates this trend to the fall of Thatcher in 1990, and it’s tempting to put its acceleration in the years since then down to Brexit. As Garnett says:

The 2016 referendum, and its consequences, accounted directly for Cameron and May; and while Johnson and Truss found means of self-sabotage, arguably neither would have earned the chance to showcase their ineptitude for leadership without Brexit.

But he sees other forces at work. The social upheavals of the Sixties led to a decline in class consciousness and in strong identification with a particular party among voters. In this new world, the popularity and perceived strengths of party leaders became increasingly important, as seen from the fact that Margaret Thatcher is the last party leader to have won an election while being less popular than her main opponent. 

This trend has encouraged a presidential style among prime ministers – a style that the public and press seem to have come to expect. When John Major tried to undo some of the changes of Thatcher’s Boadicea years and restore the importance of the cabinet, it was widely seen as a sign of weakness.

It’s no wonder, then, that politicians, journalists and voters alike now look to a change in prime minister to improve things when a government is in the doldrums. Keir Starmer had better watch out.

Garnett writes with wit and an eye for a good anecdote. David Cameron’s courtship of the Liberal Democrats after the 2010 election "made Casanova sound like a tongue-tied ingénue". At her post-election party conference, Theresa May received "the kind of sympathetic audience response that, in bygone days, had greeted the arrival of the condemned at Tyburn Tree". The claim that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng crashed the economy was inaccurate, "but it was certainly not from want of trying".

Downing Street Downfalls is an agreeable companion to contemporary political history and, when it turns to the last ten years, a reminder that there’s nothing quite as strange as the recent past.

This review appears in issue 432 of Liberator magazine.

One of the problems with our political system is that it produces such inexperienced leaders

In recent days I've come across three instances of people arguing that one of the problems with our political system today is that it produces such inexperienced leaders.

You can hear Robert Saunders making this argument in the latest episode of Nick Cohen's podcast The Lowdown. (Click play on the video and you'll get the relevant extract.)

Mark Garnett also touches on it in his new book Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain's Prime Ministers Since Thatcher, which I review in the next Liberator.

In the book he writes:

Even before Brexit there had been signs that individuals with slender qualifications were beginning to regard themselves as viable candidates. In January 2015 Adam Afriyie, a right-wing backbencher little known to parliamentary colleagues let alone the public, was mooted as a serious challenger to David Cameron's position. Unlike Sir Anthony Meyer in 1989, before the rumours fizzled out Afriyie showed every sign of wanting to run purely on his own behalf.

And you can see the same concern in the Chris Dillow article I blogged about the other day:

Labour party members in 2020 were so keen to see Corbynism without Corbyn that they overlooked questions about Starmer's suitability: is a man who became an MP only in 2015 sufficiently experienced in Westminster politics? Does being head of a large hierarchical organization equip a man to lead a more egalitarian one facing fierce competition? Does he have any good record in developing and selling policy?

Closer to home, how much did Liberal Democrat members know about Nick Clegg when they elected him as their leader.

I know I'm getting old, but I think there is something in the argument that our leaders are too inexperienced.

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"Years of historic underinvestment in favour of profit has run the business into the ground. It now finds itself on the brink of collapse despite a financial lifeline that it ought not to have been awarded, when a court last month allowed the company to take on another three billion pounds of debt." Thames Water is failing, Ofwat is toothless and the public is paying the price, says Luke Taylor.

Tim Bale explores the motives that led David Cameron to call the EU referendum and the subsequent impact Brexit has had on the Conservative Party.

Laura Laker asks why the BBC published 22 negative articles on a 300m bike lane in Somerset.

"Following the Second World War, considering where and how children could play was an intrinsic part of the narrative of rebuilding the country. 'Attitudes towards play fitted within the political and social context at the time,' she writes, 'representing the freedom societies had fought for and optimism for the future'." Julia Thrift reviews All to Play for by Dinah Bornat, which makes the case that child-friendly design creates housing that benefits everyone.

Philippe Auclair on the Premier League's closed circle of promotion and relegation and the illusion of competitiveness - it's in French, but your browser will translate if for you: "Ipswich est toujours assis dans l'antichambre, mais son entrée est imminente. Il suffira pour cela que les Tractor Boys perdent à Newcastle ce weekend, ce qui n'étonnerait pas grand monde, ou que West Ham ramène un point de Brighton."

"In Brazil there is no plot against Sam. On the contrary, he’s a well-connected man from a wealthy family; people in authority go out of their way to help him. The regime ends up targeting him because of a series of completely random mix-ups, starting with a fly getting caught in a typewriter and changing the subject of an arrest warrant from a 'Mr Tuttle' to a 'Mr Buttle'. Buttle gets tortured to death, Sam has to take his widow a check as an apology, at which point he runs into Jill - and things spiral from there." Noah Berlatsky argues that Terry Gilliam was more prescient than George Orwell.

Mike Martin: David Cameron suspended collective responsibility for the EU referendum - and the Tories haven't been responsible since

Introduced as "one of the most interesting new politicians in Britain", Mike Martin is the guest on the latest edition of Nick Cohen's podcast The Lowdown.

They talk of the international situation, the need to increase the size of the British Army and the strange death of the Conservative Party.

As Mike observes, David Cameron suspended cabinet collective responsibility for the 2016 EU referendum, and the Tories never regained a sense of responsibility after it. 

They spent a decade fighting a civil war rather than governing the country. Hence  many of the problems we now face, including the underfunded condition of Britain's Armed Forces.

Cohen suggests that the media missed the biggest story of the 2024 general election - the gains the Liberal Democrats made in what used to be the heart of Tory England.

Mike Martin's Tunbridge Wells seat is perhaps the most startling example of this, and he says it's easy to imagine the Tories finishing third there in May's local elections, behind the Lib Dems and Reform.

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Amanda Litman argues that it's time for the ageing leadership of the US Democrats to stand down: "While their wisdom and experience have value, and while some can certainly still hold their own, the septuagenarian and octogenarian class of Democratic leaders - predominantly older white men—are by and large ill-equipped for this crisis we have found ourselves in."

How do radical ideas go mainstream? Alice Evans studies the women's magazines of the 1970s to help her understand the rise of feminism.

How well did Queen Elizabeth II get along with her prime ministers? Rebecca Cope has the answers: "It would be easy to think that as a Labour Party leader from a northern middle-class background, Harold Wilson would not have gotten on well with the Queen, but quite the opposite was true. A regular at Balmoral, he was frequently asked on picnics with the wider family, and reportedly enjoyed the informality of the occasion, mucking in to help clear up after the Duke of Edinburgh’s famous barbeques."

Ellie Robson on the philosopher Mary Midgley: "In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men."

Writing in Country Life of all places, Lewis Winks demolishes the case against allowing wild camping on Dartmoor.

Michael Wood goes to the movies and thinks about Brady Corbet’s films: "How brutal or damaging does your childhood have to be to make you a great dictator or a memorable pop star? Are the connecting words ‘because of’ or ‘in spite of’? Or is there no causality here at all, just a sort of baffling coexistence? Are the films in love with an ugly idea of chance? This possibility seems especially relevant to The Brutalist."

Losing It: The Conservative Party and the 2024 General Election by Michael A. Ashcroft

This short review appears in the current Liberator - that's issue 427. You can download it for free from the magazine's website.

Losing It: The Conservative Party and the 2024 General Election

Michael A. Ashcroft

Biteback Publishing, 2024, £10 pbk

There are two people inside Lord Ashcroft. One is Mr Hyde, who co-wrote what was intended to be a damaging biography of David Cameron. It contained a baseless story about a pig’s head, which useful idiots among the online left, as Hyde had no doubt intended, spread far and wide.

But Losing It is written by the impartial psephologist Dr Jekyll. It contains the fruits of two large opinion polls Ashcroft funded just after last year’s general election, and of 24 focus groups conducted with people who voted Conservative in 2019 but switched to another party in 2024.  

Having studied all this data, Ashcroft puts forward three principal reasons for the Conservatives defeat: it’s hard for any party to keep winning after 14 years in power; the coalition of voters Boris Johnson put together to win in 2019 was, like its architect, always likely to prove unstable; and the Conservative administration became – “to use a technical term from political science” – a total shambles.

It was this last point, he argues, that turned a likely defeat into a rout where the party lost half its vote and two-thirds of its MPs. The Conservatives forfeited the trust of voters because “senior Tories seemed to be playing out a soap opera for their own amusement, rather than tackling the country’s mounting problems”.

Ashcroft goes on to present the findings from his polls, interspersing the tables and charts with quotations from focus group participants. Liberal Democrat readers will find that someone voting for us in 2024 was most likely to be motivated by a wish to keep another party out (no wonder we can struggle under PR), and that the one factor on which we lead the other parties among voters as a whole is having our heart in the right place. This left me feeling at once pleased and a little patronised.

So we must thank Dr Jekyll for Losing It, even as we wonder what advantage Mr Hyde hopes its publication will bring in his internal Conservative Party politicking.

Jonathan Calder

Thought for the Day: Lord Macaulay on coalitions

I've just been sorting out some old papers, including a folder of press cuttings that I obviously thought might come in useful one day for something I was writing. Today they would be Chrome bookmarks.

One cutting is what looks like a Guardian Diary item inspired by Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair's grand strategy. It includes this comment on the errors of Fox and Lord North from one of Lord Macaulay's essays on the younger Pitt:

They ought to have known that coalitions between parties which have long been hostile can succeed only when the wish for coalition pervades the lower ranks of both.

Discuss with relation to the Cameron-Clegg coalition of 2010-15.

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"The UK now has the outline of a modern welfare state, but it is increasingly failing to fill in the gaps. Those gaps let far too many people fall through, and the consequences are both individual misery and collective decline." The state should be there when things go wrong in our lives, argues Andrew Sissons.

The most senior former judges in England and Wales have called on the government to reverse the trend of imposing ever longer sentences, giving warning that radical solutions are needed to address the acute crisis in prisons. A briefing from the Howard League for Penal Reform looks at what can be done#.

Robert Saunders reminds us that David Cameron rose without trace: "No prime minister of modern times has been so deeply rooted in the Establishment. None has been so routinely tipped for greatness. And yet few retain such an enduring air of mystery."

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Rosalie Henry de Frahan assess the effects of private schooling and school composition on student performance. "Our findings contribute to the growing body of research questioning the comparative advantage of private schools, demonstrating that their perceived superiority often arises from the socio-economic advantages of the students they enroll, rather than the quality of education provided." 

Christina Bollen presents five surprising ways that trees help prevent flooding.

"For Maynard, the old lesson 'be kind to people on the way up, because you'll meet them again on the way down', was, belatedly, about to hit home hard." Graham McGrath on a great stage feud: Bill Maynard vs Derek Nimmo.

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'We cannot sit by as the left denigrate our history and pull down our monuments,' said Kemi Badenoch last week: she and her colleagues’ wilful neglect of museums shows that such talk is absurd." John Harris is angry about the assault on local museums since the election of David Cameron in 2010.

Erica Lamberg introduces to the concept of 'resenteeism', where lack of advancement opportunities, a toxic corporate culture, an excessive workload and feelings of burnout lead to people feeling trapped in jobs they do not want. Not surprisingly, this affects productivity.

More evidence that nothing works properly in Britain any more because it's underfunded: We Love Stornoway reports on the end of the tourism service on the Western Isles.

Simon Matthews looks at the 1949 film Now Barabbas Was a Robber, which was based on a play by William Douglas Home: "There are flashbacks to their lives before jail, the corrupting effect of the war is shown (a topic of much thought at the time, with talk of crime waves and a much readier resort to violence) and, indeed much of it, with its succession of interior scenes and wardens, plays like a POW film. The dialogue, and acting, are impressive."

Jon Hotten remembers Brian Close, the controversial Yorkshire and England captain: "The length of time that Richards and Botham spent talking about Brian Close spoke of his influence on the game and on their lives."

"Witchcraft, and the threat of such could be found from the collieries of East Shropshire through to the Clun and the distant agrarian places, whose names feel like an ode to Middle earth. Witchcraft was the hidden threat, the force that you could not control but also that which you turned to for comfort, or help." Amy Boucher on an important aspect of the county's social history and folklore.

Sayeeda Warsi resigns from Conservative Party

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Sayeeda Warsi was once a living symbol of the changes David Cameron claimed to have made to the Conservative Party. Today she resigned her membership.

It is with a heavy heart that I have today informed my whip and decided for now to no longer take the @Conservatives whip.
This is a sad day for me.
I am a Conservative and remain so but sadly the current Party are far removed from the Party I joined and served in Cabinet.
My…

— Sayeeda Warsi (@SayeedaWarsi) September 26, 2024

I'm surprised she has lasted as long as she has. 

Back in 2011 I blogged about the way the Tory right tried to turn an invited lecture she gave at the University of Leicester into some kind of scandal.

Guardian quotes Lib Dem sources: Tory support is "collapsing" in the South

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I don't want to spread false optimism, but a remarkable story went up on the Guardian website this afternoon:

The Liberal Democrats are increasingly confident they can beat the Conservatives in large parts of southern England, including the two Oxfordshire seats formerly held by David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, spent Sunday campaigning in Bicester, where the party believes it can defeat the Conservative candidate, Rupert Harrison, a highly regarded economist and one-time adviser to the former chancellor George Osborne.

Davey’s visit was part of a strategy that has seen the party roam further into safe Tory territory as the campaign has gone one, buoyed up by polls that show it picking up support across large parts of the south and south-east.

A party source said: “We’re really encouraged by what we’re seeing in the final stretch of the campaign. Tory support seems to be collapsing in southern England and we’ve continued to pick up support.”

The report goes on to say the Lib Dems will spend the last days of the campaign targeting Labour voters in seats where their party finished third in 2019.

Sunak should not resign as Tory leader after he loses the election

He has not, God knows, been much of a leader, and it's not even certain that he will be returned for Richmond and Northallerton next week, but Rishi Sunak should not resign the Conservative leadership if he loses the election.

Martin Kettle makes the point in the Guardian today:

He should wait until at least after the autumn party conference before making any announcement, to allow the Tories some time for reflection and, if possible, to change the leadership election process. 

And Kettle links to a whole article on the subject that he wrote back in March:

Many Tory MPs seem to take it as read that Sunak, if he loses office, will do the same thing.

He should not do so. Instead Sunak should stay on as Conservative leader if he loses the election. He should prepare the ground for staying on with trusted colleagues. He should then stand at the Downing Street lectern and say responsible leaders do not just jump ship. He should say it is his duty to see the party through a period of necessary reflection. He could even say what Callaghan told Labour MPs in 1979: “There is no vacancy for my job.”

But he needs to have a plan for what he can bring to opposition as well as a plan to then leave later. Here, Michael Howard could be the model. Howard stayed five months after losing the 2005 election before resigning. This had important consequences. The leadership election process was rethought, though not as radically as Howard wanted, and the shadow cabinet was reshaped. This allowed younger faces to catch the spotlight. The result was the election of David Cameron.

The first weeks of a new government can set the tone of a whole parliament. In 2010, because Gordon Brown resigned his party's leadership immediately after leaving Downing Street, Labour had no one to challenge the growing narrative that it had "maxed out the nation's credit card". It was still having this claim hung around its neck at the 2015 general election.

So the Tories need to remain in the debate following their coming defeat and not spend all their energies on a leadership election.

But all this sounds far too sensible for the modern Conservative Party, so expect an immediate resignation with civil war to follow.

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Anna Tarrant praises Ed Davey's celebration of fatherhood and says we are all better off when men do more of the caring.

"Looking back to that December morning in 2019 I don't think any of us could have imagined that it would come to this. That picture of Boris Johnson, arms aloft celebrating victory, was a painful one for those of us on the opposition benches. Five years later his ejection from the scene has not saved the party whose reputation he did so much to damage, and the divisions he encouraged threaten to engulf them." Christine Jardine asks if the Tories are facing the equivalent of the Liberal party’s 1922 election disaster.

"A decade ago, the Islamic State swept through northern Iraq and declared a ‘caliphate’ and soon after launched a genocidal assault on Iraq’s Yezidi minority, murdering Yezidi men and capturing woman and girls as sex slaves. Now, six years after IS was defeated, accountability for those horrific crimes is in doubt." Deb Amos on the failure of the international community to hold anyone to account for the Yezidi genocide.

Richard Carr reviews a new book on cross-party politics in Britain since the second world war - Clegg, Cameron and all.

Meth-Addict Fish, Aggro Starlings - not heavy-metal bands but the result of pharmaceutical compounds polluting the ecosphere. Patrick Greenfield reports on a worrying trend.

Philip Cowley and Matthew Bailey offer a history of fringe parliamentary candidates: "At the Crosby by-election in 1981 [Lt Commander Bill] Boaks shared the ballot paper with Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel, although the returning officer took the understandable decision to shorten it to Tarquin Biscuitbarrel. Tarquin (original name: John Desmond Dougrez-Lewis) had his origins in a Monty Python spoof on election night coverage."

The real reason for the Tories assault on universities? Educated people are less likely to vote for them

They dress it up in concerns about immigration and academic quality, but I suspect there's a more fundamental reason for the Conservatives' current war on the universities.

You can find it in a research paper published by the Social Market Foundation:

The education divide has played a decisive role in recent votes in the UK. Education is one of the strongest predictors of Brexit preferences, with school leavers and graduates overwhelmingly backing Leave and Remain respectively. The Conservatives’ increased vote share in 2017 and 2019 was also driven by a near doubling of support among school leavers between 2015 and 2019.

This is a new development - before 2016, school leavers were more likely to vote Labour in every election since 1979, while graduates have tended to vote Conservative.

Education is the strongest predictor of voters’ social values - graduates tend to hold more liberal values while school leavers tend to have more authoritarian views. It also predicts social identities, as graduates are more likely to identify as middle class and European, whereas school leavers tend to identify as working class and with local and national identities.

That's right: people who study at university are less likely to vote Conservative.

If this seems too simplistic - almost a conspiracy theory - then look at this 2016 Independent article where Nick Clegg talks about the politics of the Coalition cabinet:

The Conservatives refused to build more social housing because they worried it would create more Labour voters, Nick Clegg has said. 

Speaking ahead of the release of his new book, Politics Between the Extremes, the former Deputy Prime Minister said top figures on David Cameron’s team viewed housing as a “petri dish”. 

“It would have been in a Quad meeting, so either Cameron or Osborne. One of them – I honestly can’t remember whom – looked genuinely nonplussed and said, ‘I don’t understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing – it just creates Labour voters.’ They genuinely saw housing as a petri dish for voters. It was unbelievable,” he said.

If party advantage dictated Tory housing policy, then it can dictate their education policy too. And the Social Market Foundation paper forecast that, if current trends continue, graduates will outnumber school leavers by 2031.

That paper, incidentally, may also give a rationale for current Liberal Democrat strategy:

Steeply rising graduate vote shares in ‘blue wall’ seats in the London commuter belt present new opportunities for the Liberal Democrats to build a geographically and demographically coherent heartland.

The blue wall is a flexible concept indeed if it can encompass London suburbs, but I'd rather bet on education than ignorance.

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"Over the past decade the Conservative Party has taken millions of pounds from individuals and businesses with ties to Russia. Just this week it was revealed that JCB, which is owned by a major Conservative donor, continued to send equipment to Russia for months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, despite publicly saying that they wouldn’t. This is not a one off. Over the past decade, Russia-linked donors have repeatedly been given access to senior Conservative ministers after donating to the party. This culminated in the absurd spectacle of former Prime Ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson." Adam Bienkov reminds us how the Tories emboldened Vladimir Putin.

Giorgia Tolfo on Chiswick Women's Aid, who opened the world’s first safe house for women and children in 1971: "In the first month of opening the centre, a woman suffering violence at home arrived asking for shelter. Erin Pizzey, CWA's coordinator and spokesperson, didn't think twice. She quickly made arrangements to host the woman at the centre until her situation improved. Word spread and soon more women arrived seeking shelter."

Amid rising rents and closing businesses and venues, locals in South London are increasingly forming cooperatives to take charge of spaces and reinvigorate their communities, reports Kemi Alemoru.

"He discovered ... the fine perspectivist and occasional architect Raymond Myerscough Walker living in a vagabond caravan in a wood near Chichester, his archive stored in his car, a near sunken Rover. Such persons are much more than also-rans. They are the substance of a parallel history of Stamp’s creation that abjures inflated reputations, vapid self-promoters and the slimy gibberish of PRs and journalists who pump them up to this day." Jonathan Meades reviews Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 by Gavin Stamp.

John Boughton has been to Thamesmead, where tenants are trying to fight off unwanted redevelopment.

Jonathan Denby discusses the importance of gardening to Victorian politicians: "Their involvement in gardening went much further than being responsible for a large estate. At Hawarden, it was a fixture of Gladstone’s calendar to host the annual horticultural society show in his garden, giving an address on horticulture, which was later published as a pamphlet."

Time to say "Evenin' all" to the police and crime commissioners

Police and crime commissioners have not lived up to the hopes for them when the role was created, so it should be scrapped.

In 2012 David Cameron told us:

"This is a big job for a big local figure. It’s a voice for the people, someone to lead the fight against crime, and someone to hold to account if they don’t deliver."

And:

"This isn’t just for politicians, but community leaders and pioneers of all sorts. People with real experience who’ve done things and run organisations, whether they are charities or companies.

"Whatever their background, they will need to be outstanding leaders ready to take a really big role on behalf of all of us."

While the Home Office press release those quotes are taken from said:

PCCs will bring a democratic voice to people in 41 police forces across England and Wales (outside London), replacing the current system of police authorities. They will not interfere in operational decisions, but will set the direction for chief constables. 

PCCs will be driven by one clear aim - to use the backing they have received from the public to deliver a real, tangible difference to the lives of the people they serve by cutting crime.

Yesterday saw the third round of PCC elections, and I believe we can now say that the experiment has failed. It has not delivered any of what Cameron and the Home Office promised.

Not only that, it has proved an expensive experiment. PCCs have discovered the need to appoint a deputy on a generous public salary as well as the need to employ researchers.

Here in Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, there was no visible campaign - on the doorstep or online - for the PCC election. And the Labour and Conservative candidates were both party hacks who have never made it to Westminster.

Though to be fair to Labour's Rory Palmer, he has, unlike his Conservative opponent Rupert Matthews, never been a lecturer on the paranormal for the International Metaphysical University or expressed the view that "the evidence for UFOs and for the humanoid creatures linked to them is pretty compelling".

It seems that who wins the PCC contest here depends on what other elections are taking place at the same time. 

In 2016 it took place at the same time as Leicester City Council elections, so the Labour vote came out there and we got a Labour PCC. Five years later it coincided with county council elections, so the Tory vote came out and we got a Tory PCC.

Yesterday there were no other elections and Rupert Matthews won a second term with a majority of only 860. Rory Palmer would have won for Labour if the Tories had not changed the voting system since last time.

As to what we put in the place of PCCs, I suggest we go back to something like the old police authorities, which included various interest groups like local councils and magistrates.

I've seen no evidence that the system that replaced them has been better at overseeing local police forces.

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"Everything John Barnett said about Boeing’s problems was true. Everything. If the company had been willing to listen to him, 346 airline passengers would still be alive. And maybe Barnett would be too." Joe Nocera on the death of whistleblower.

Tim Eaton and Christopher Phillips look at British foreign policy with David Cameron as foreign secretary. "Cameron’s energy ... does not appear to be part of a broader foreign policy strategy. The UK’s response towards Gaza and MENA [ the Middle East and North Africa] in general remains reactive and Britain is not at the forefront of discussion on what comes next."

Roz Kaveney, a veteran trans activist, talks to Hackney History about the history of the struggle: "I noticed a lot of bleakness creeping into trans social media and thought it my job as a community elder to remind young people that things had been, if not worse, at least as bad in different ways... The important thing about life in an embattled community is to have each others backs."

"There are loud voices, currently holding the microphone, who seem determined to run classical music into the ground. Even Arifa Akbar, The Guardian’s chief theatre critic, recently announced that traditional modes of listening to such music (respectfully and quietly) are elitist. This is only going to get worse. Those of us who really care about classical music, whether listeners, performers, educators, critics or arts administrators, need to be prepared to stand up and speak out." Alexandra Wilson says classical music is under threat from accusations of elitism.

"Train travellers approaching Peterborough from the south can still, for now, see what might once have been the future of train travel. It might have been yet another fruit of what many see as the engineering genius of the UK. What went wrong?" J.J. Jackson finds out.

Andy Walmsley takes us back 50 years to the launch of Radio Caroline.

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"I am a Liberal Democrat because of my belief in liberty and social justice, and I expect those who lead the party to be expounding the distinctive and radical messages associated with that philosophy at every opportunity. Instead we have settled for a sort of bland mediocrity, a quest for the vanilla centre ground that is neither distinctive nor radical." Peter Black says he would have happily signed that letter to Ed Davey.

Imran Mulla and Peter Oborne ask if David Cameron has revived the Tory Arabist tradition.

"Despite this still being a trial we have recruited into 13 notoriously hard to fill roles and expect to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds less this year on agency staff than predicted. Our performance has held up across the board and has improved in places. We are getting significantly more and higher calibre applicants for every job than in the past." Bridget Smith champions South Cambridgeshire's trial of a four-day working week.

Cat Gillen is our guide to a philosophical question: do electrons really exist and does the answer matter?

Catherine Croft takes us to 10 shops that showcase the stylistic diversity of British retail architecture.

"I thought I could write a play which was about myself as I imagined my life might have been from the age of eight. And then I would find out whether I was brave enough to be a dissenter, or just somebody who would keep his head down and his nose clean. And I have a terrible feeling that it would have been the latter." Tom Stoppard talks to Claire Armitstead.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: We have talked of little but Europe ever since

The new Liberator is on the magazine's website - you can download it free of charge from there.

I've just realised that I have forgotten to reprint anything from Lord Bonkers' diaries in the October and November 1992 issues, but the old boy hasn't noticed yet, so let's get stuck into his latest thoughts.

Monday

So Cameron has decided to emerge from his shed and become foreign secretary, nabbing himself a peerage in the process. You may remember him: face like a carved ham; used to be prime minister; decided he was a political genius and called a referendum to “settle the issue of Europe once and for all”. We have talked of little but Europe ever since. 

Cameron, incidentally, was the fellow Clegg was so keen on and with whom he shared fragrant moments in the Downing Street rose garden. That didn’t stop him sandbagging Clegg the moment he thought it to his advantage. There’s a moral there: if you’re going to sup with a Tory, make sure you bring a long spoon, a hard hat and an abdominal protector.

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

Shirley Williams: a Liberal lion and trailblazer?

Shirley Williams was the subject of a fringe meeting organised by the Liberal Democrat History Group at the party's spring conference this year. You can watch the proceedings in the video above

What comes over is that it was Williams's personal qualities as much as her political beliefs that attracted people to her, and that a certain diffidence held her back in her political career. I think being a woman in politics in her era is enough to explain the latter point.

I was a little surprised by the fringe meeting's title - 'Shirley Williams: Liberal Lion and Trailblazer' - because throughout her time in her first party, Williams was seen as a mainstream Labour figure. She received considerable trade union support in internal elections, for instance.

It was her intellectual opposition to Trotskyism that led her to leave Labour: she wasn't prepared to mouth  clichés about 'a broad church' or tolerate the compromises necessary to thrive under Michael Foot's leadership. That made her a lion, but not in itself a Liberal, still less a trailblazing one.

A puzzle late in her career is why she staked so much of her political capital on getting the Lib Dems to support Andrew Lansley's changes to the National Health Service. They were not in the Coalition agreement, went against everything David Cameron had said about health before the 2010 election and few people even in the Conservative Party had any idea what Lansley was trying to achieve.

When I started editing Lord Bonkers' diaries the old boy said of Shirley Williams: "Surely she must be the most popular politician ever to be defeated at three consecutive general elections?"

But I would never be that brutal, because I remember just how difficult it was to get elected as a Liberal or SDP parliamentary candidate in the Alliance years.