"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
"When news of the arrests of the three Ukrainians broke, a rumour soon began to spread online that the alleged perpetrators were, in fact, Ukrainian male sex workers employed by Starmer and that the arson attack was revenge for unpaid bills. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most influential online figures involved in spreading this 'Rent Boys' conspiracy theory was Stephen Lennon." Joe Mulhall and Nick Lowles argue that Tommy Robinson is Putin's useful idiot.
Theo Rodwell fears the Liberal Democrats are being held hostage by Conservatives who have lent them their votes.
"The mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, announced that 'one thousand New Yorkers won our lottery for affordable tickets to the World Cup ... the beautiful game belongs to everyone.' Having to run an affordable lottery suggests that maybe it doesn't." Natasha Chahal on FIFA and Trump's world cup.
Emma Peplow looks back to the Christchurch by-election of 1993.
Richard Williams reads a new biography of Brian Epstein: "A man who loved the theatre and classical music, he understood their adventurous creative instincts. When they made that first film, it was directed by the innovative Dick Lester rather than a Wardour Street hack. When the sleeve art of their second album was being prepared, he guided them towards Robert Freeman, whose photos of John Coltrane he had admired and who listened to the group when they showed him Astrid Kirchherr's black and white chiaroscuro Hamburg photographs as a potential template."
"Every day, in New York alone, millions pass by her. On Columbia University’s campus, at the Frick Collection, in Central Park, near City Hall, and at the Brooklyn entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. ... Yet the woman behind the face lived a life marked by exploitation, disappointment, and profound tragedy. Her death in 1996, at the age of 104, attracted almost no attention at all, as if history forgot all that she had been and given. The statues remain, but she was buried in an unmarked grave in northern New York state." Josie Cox tells the sad story of Audrey Munson, America's first supermodel.
In awarding Headline of the Day to the Telegraph, the judges expressed scepticism towards the idea that lobsters can be used as a substitute for classroom teachers.
I walked The Salt Path myself – we called it the South Coastal Path in those days – from Minehead to Weymouth, over four summer holidays, in the Eighties and Nineties.
Don't tell Jennie, but I left out the stretch through Torbay (my guidebook said it was allowed) because it was so built up.
The National Trust has launched a £300,000 appeall to buy the land surrounding the Cerne Abbas Giant, reports BBC News. The site it hopes to acquire amounts to 341 acres, but size isn't everything.
The Guardian says it has already exchanged contracts on the site and will use funds, grants and bequests to cover £2.2m of the asking price. Presumably the £300,000 is needed on top of that.
Its report also says:
The planned purchase is expected to clear the way for more archaeological investigations around Britain’s largest chalk hill figure, which looms over the rolling Dorset landscape.
It would also mean more work can be done to protect the flora and fauna on the hillside, including the rare Duke of Burgundy butterfly. And the conservation charity hopes the purchase will lead to better access for people to the figure, with more chances for exploration and play.
The National Trust clearly regards this as a major project, because it is using the graphic above on social media to promote it.
There was something about the immediate post-war period that made its most notorious murderers remain long in the public's memory. There was Christie at 10 Rillington Place, Haigh the acid-bath murderer and Neville Heath.
Heath had already murdered one woman in a London hotel when he arrived in Bournemouth. Lindsay Neal takes up the story:
A wanted suspect for the Margery Gardner killing, Heath fled London with the police on his heels and ended up in Bournemouth where, calling himself Brook after the World War I poet (but without the poet’s final ‘e’), he met ex-Wren Doreen Marshall, who was staying at the Norfolk Hotel on Richmond Hill as she recovered from ’flu.
He invited her to afternoon tea that day, Wednesday 3 July [1946], at the Pavilion and met her again that evening for dinner at his hotel, after which they left together, saying he was going to walk her back to the Norfolk.
On the Friday, the manager of the Norfolk reported her missing to the police and contacted his counterpart at the Tollard Royal, who advised his guest Group Captain Brook – Heath – that he should contact the police, which he did by phone on the Saturday.
He then walked into Bournemouth Police Station where, quite by chance, he met Doreen Marshall’s father and sister who had come to Bournemouth to find her and joked with them that he looked like the fugitive Heath.
Under questioning later that evening, he confessed to being Heath and was taken to London before Doreen’s body was found the next day.
I wondered whether the Tollard Royal still stood, but not enough to go hunting for it. Then I saw this sign and realised that it still stands. Not only that, it is next to the Highcliffe, which was the conference hotel.
The building has been altered several times in its history, but I think this may be the part of the hotel shown in the photo from 1946.
This is what was the front of the hotel today, and you can learn all about the latest alterations to the building in the edition of Grand Designs embedded below.
Bournemouth was my first Liberal Democrat Conference in I don't know how many years - I suspect the last one was in the same town in 2008.
And, of course, many of the people I knew then aren't at conference these days. So next time I attend Conference, and I don't intend waiting another 17 years, I shall make more effort to go to events and fringe meetings.
I was more ready for the internet cafe (ask your parents) in St Michael's Road from which I posted an edition of the Britblog Roundup (ask your parents) no longer being there.
Anyway, this time I kept passing a fascinating piece of Victorian Nonconformist fantasy on the way from the Metropole back to my own hotel.
The Unitarian Church, designed by Lawson & Donkin and built 1890, had seating for 400 persons. When the dwindling congregation sold the building it became a "mediaeval" banqueting hall, then a burlesque and cabaret venue, before a more sympathetic restoration and conversion to offices.
He also quotes its Listing as saying it offers:
A very rich mannerist interpretation of mediaeval items coupled with imaginative freestyle touches.
"The general intention of the Act’s drafters is clear: they wanted those who supported terrorist groups to be given long jail terms; they wanted those who campaigned against proscription to remain free. But this is another line that the police are now crossing. Among those arrested in London on 19 July were protesters carrying placards which read ‘Ban Starmer not Palestine Action’, although saying that Palestine Action should not be banned is the one speech act the Act expressly permits." David Renton on the challenge to the banning of Palestine Action.
Liberal Democrat Women responded to the Women and Equalities Committee consultation on misogyny and the manosphere.
"To encourage young people to flourish as learners, we need to help them value non-formal and informal learning contexts. Hobbies are great for this. Hobbies are serious leisure activities which young people find interesting and fulfilling. They are serious because hobbies require perseverance to gain experience, a skillset and a knowledge base." Ioannis Costas Batlle reminds us that learning doesn't just take place in the classroom.
The England and Wales Cricket Board has admitted it has no evidence to show the Hundred as attracted new fans to other forms of cricket, reports Simon Burnton.
Roads.org.uk argues that Britain's first motorway is unclassified, tolled and links a small Dorset village to a chain ferry.
Graham McCann remembers a forgotten comedian: "Paul Squire was a comedian who shot to fame in 1980 with the ITV talent show Search For A Star and a spot in that year's Royal Variety Performance. He was promptly hailed as 'television's newest superstar', handed his own series by ITV in 1981, starred in another show for the BBC in 1983, and then, little more than one year later, he found himself ostracised by television so completely that he spent the rest of his career playing working men's clubs and the cruise ships."
"The government’s planned disability benefit cuts could affect the majority of current working-age claimants with ischaemic heart disease, inflammatory arthritis, hip and knee disorders and Crohn’s disease, according to official figures revealed to Big Issue." Chaminda Jayanetti analyses data on the likely impact of the cuts.
Ella Cockbain interviews a representative of SPACE (Stop & Prevent Adolescent Criminal Exploitation) about the authorities' inadequate response to recruitment of children into serious crime: "Nobody’s trying to look beyond that to see the child’s victimisation as the source of their criminality. We’re not asking, why has this child got drugs? Why is this child miles away from home? Why does the story begin where it suits the police – with the child’s criminal act – rather than showing the problem in its entirety?"
Hans Broekman took his school from the private to the public sector. Here he recommends a series of measures the government could take to encourage more schools to do the same.
"From the point, in February 2024, when directors began to tell authors that cash flow difficulties would result in postponed payment, Unbound continued to spend on everything but authors – including the Boundless Substack magazine, launched this January. And the company continued to solicit pledges and sell to readers right up to March 2025." The Bookseller prints a letter from more than 30 authors who published with Unbound.
Finding a tale of British landed gentry, slavery and sugar plantations, Paul Lashmar traces the source of the Drax family's wealth.
Sven Mikulec praises Peter Yates 1973 film The Friends of Eddie Coyle: "The large portion of this masterfully executed film’s appeal lies on the back of Robert Mitchum, one of the best American actors of all time, who never uses his screen time for any affectations or theatricality, only to deliver the distressing story fully immersed into the character he embodies."
Yesterday Steffan Aquarone, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk, led a backbench Commons debate on coastal communities. Here is part of his speech:
I have covered just some of the key pillars of the challenges that our coastal communities face, as well as their resilience and our opportunity as a whole country to support them. What frustrates me greatly is that despite the wide-ranging and various challenges, responsibility for supporting them is fragmented and siloed across Government.
I am delighted to see the Minister in his place; however, his remit contains only the communities aspect of our coastal communities. We have unique health challenges, economic challenges and opportunities of major environmental importance.
Our coastal communities are too important to be bit parts of different portfolios, and we urgently need to take a holistic approach to supporting them, understanding how the different factors interact with one another. We need to be able to see and understand the impact of economic outcomes on health and wellbeing and how environmental challenges and renewable energy opportunities can go hand in hand.
That is why I have been calling for the creation of a Minister for coastal communities to give us a specific representative, speaking up for our areas in Government. That call has cross-party support, with MPs from across the House supporting it in the previous Parliament.
You can read the whole debate in Hansard. It was a good debate, and several other Lib Dem MPs spoke or intervened.
Behind the concerns expressed by members on both sides of the chamber, I suspect, is an anxiety about the appeal of Reform UK to some of these communities.
A new memorial to the five schoolboys killed by a mine on Swanage beach in 1955 will be unveiled on 10 May from 10.30am. The event will take place in front of the War Memorial in Swanage, and a short service will also be held in memory of the boys.
I came across the story last year when I found a folder of press cuttings I had saved back in the Nineties - think of them as pre-internet bookmarks. Today's news comes from the gofundme page set up to raise money for a new memorial.
I love Milton Jones's comedy. He doesn't just use puns and word play. If that was all he did, he's be Tim Vine.
It's because every funny line of his creates an alternative world. And that world exists for a second or two on stage with him until its bubble bursts and it is no more.
Here Jones talks to the always likeable Rob Brydon about his career and approach to comedy.
The party's autumn conference is in Bournemouth this year. I doubt I'll have the self-control to resist stealing Jones's joke about the Japanese attack on Poole Harbour for Lord Bonkers.
Robert Key, who died last year, was the Conservative MP for Salisbury between 1983 and 2010. On 17 March 2010 he gave his last Commons speech, and it was one of the most remarkable ever given there.
It was on the second reading of the Gordon Brown government's Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill, which passed into law before the general election of that year.
Early in Key's speech, he said:
The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) referred to the question of far-off lands, saying that if mines exploded around our shores or in our country there would be immediate public outrage and very swift action indeed. Well, I can tell the House that that has happened in our land. I was there, and I want to pass on, for those who will be here long after I have gone, what happens in those circumstances.
And that is just what he did:
On Friday 13 May 1955, when I was 10 years old, I was on Swanage beach in Dorset with some 20 other children of about the same age. We were doing what children on a beach on a Friday afternoon in May do-building sandcastles, digging holes in the sand, making dams and so on. I was building my castle with a chap called Richard Dunstan: five of my friends were digging holes, and then one of them found a tin. He thought that it was Spam, or something really exotic-yes, Spam was exotic in 1955. He was wrestling to move it, because it was lodged between two rocks. He got out a shoehorn but could not break the tin open. The boys stood back, and were seen throwing things at it.
My friend and I got bored. We turned round. We had our backs to our friends, and were about the same distance from them as I am from you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, when there was a huge explosion. We were blown into the sea, and lived. Five of my friends died. Five British children were blown up by a British mine on a British beach, within my living memory, and the living memory of many other people. It was an extraordinary thing. It happened in the middle of the 1955 general election. The front page of the following day's edition of The Daily Telegraph carried a story with the headline, "4 Boys Die, One Missing in Explosion". Below that, smaller headlines stated, "Big Crater Torn in Beach" and "Wartime Mine Theory".
There was not much theory involved for the five who were killed, or for the two of us who were the luckiest people alive. I still think that I am the luckiest person alive in this House. Of course, my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Milton Keynes has deliberately put himself in harm's way, and I salute him for it, but I was there as a child and got tangled up in what happened by mistake. So what was the response in Britain when a mine exploded around our shores? Many years later, I was a Minister in the Department of National Heritage, and the Imperial War Museum was one of my responsibilities. One day, I asked the staff there whether they had any records of something happening on Swanage beach on 13 May 1955. A couple of weeks later, a large box arrived, full of all the documentation relating to that horrible event.
I have here in my hand copies of the Dorset police documents entitled "Report to Coroner Concerning Death". They detail how, on 13 May at about 4.20 pm, four boys were reported dead. I also have a copy of the report from the police constable who found them, but the strange thing is that the fifth boy was never found. Within a day or two, a plimsoll that he had been wearing was found. Another was found a few days later. That meant that the then Home Secretary had to issue a document giving authority to the coroner to investigate the matter. The coroner simply declared that there was no conclusion to reach other than that the fifth boy had been a victim of the same mine explosion.
In the inquest, the coroner called for evidence from the officer responsible for de-mining the beach, who had issued a class IIA certificate in January 1950. The officer said:
"I am convinced that this mine had been in the sea and from evidence of marine growth I consider the mine had been washed ashore.
What the boys were seen to have been doing was quite sufficient to have exploded the mine...As an expert I would have allowed boys to walk across the beach."
I have read the mine clearance officer's reports, and have with me a copy of the plan of the mines that were laid on Swanage beach in 1940. A clearance operation was undertaken in 1945, which was repeated in 1947 and again 1949. Eventually, a clearance certificate was issued on 17 February 1950. The documents reveal that 117 mines had been laid, of which five were lifted in clearance. They also show that, although there was some evidence of the existence of 54 others, the remaining 58 are still unaccounted for. That was what I found so horrendous when I discovered all this as a Minister of the Crown so many years later.
The coroner concluded his remarkable summing up-in those days, of course, everything was handwritten, and I have a copy of his notes-by saying:
"I think the bomb was in all probability washed ashore.
I do not think any blame can be attached to any living persons in this matter. The boys were all playing among the rocks in a perfectly normal way so far as"
the master in charge
"could see and I do not consider he has any reason to reproach himself, and after the explosion he could not have done more nor acted more resolutely than he did."
I certainly concur with that. He was my favourite master. He was my French master, and a remarkable and good man. I think that he must have been through hell ever since.
One can imagine how horrified the staff at the school were by what had happened. They, too, were remarkable in the way in which they handled the incident, the enormity of which was overwhelming. The headmaster, John Strange, who was a wonderful man, managed to hold the whole community together. The retired headmaster, the Rev. Chadwick, also played his part. The master who had been at the heart of the incident and who had been taking his charges on the beach was wonderful.
The school could not have done more to look after the children, but the fact remained that the mine clearances had not been completed satisfactorily. The mine clearance officers had, in fact, refused a certificate of clearance on one occasion, but had been overruled.
In the final certificate of removal of dangerous military defence works, the officer concerned-who, ironically, was operating out of Southern Command in Salisbury in my constituency-stated:
"The whole area has been swept with a detector and those portions of the area which have been subject to disturbances have been explored thoroughly to the apparent depth of that disturbance".
Bulldozers were brought in, and the beach was removed down to the rock and put back again. The officer continued:
"Though no guarantee can be given the area may be considered safe except for the possibility of mines being washed up from other fields",
and that is what happened.
This is a horrendous story, and I repeat it to the House to point out that on the issue of mine clearance, whether it is cluster bombs, cluster munitions or mines of any kind, the impact is the same on a child of 10 at play, whether in Beirut or in Swanage. Personally, I would like to see the mystery of the missing mines of Swanage bay cleared up. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood), who also knows more about military matters than most of us, and who has first-hand experience in his military service, might be interested.
After the event, the coastguard swept the whole coast from St. Aldhelm's head right round past Poole harbour all the way to the Isle of Wight for any traces of that missing body. None were found.
More significant now is the fact that we have the technology to detect those mines. I would like to see minehunters of the Sandown class or equivalent brought in, perhaps in training, to sweep Swanage beach and the coast right round Bournemouth. We have the evidence in the 1950 statements of the officer who did the clearance and also from the 1955 inquest that the bomb which killed those children had probably been swept inshore by a gale. There is an opportunity for the Ministry of Defence, in the course of training our Royal Navy operatives, to have another go. That would be an opportunity worth taking.
I support the Bill - of course I do, after what I have been through in my life. I still think I am the luckiest Member to be alive. It motivated me in my politics, and it motivated me to be interested in defence once I came to the House. I have done that for 27 years.
I hope the lessons of Swanage beach will not be forgotten. I hope the Bill will be but one step on the road to realising that although war may have to be fought, we should always strive to do it honourably, morally, with integrity, and always and everywhere with the minimum impact on a civilian population that has not put itself in harm's way. That is my wish, and that is why I support the Bill.
I am blogging about this story today because I found an interview with Robert Key that he gave just after making the speech, in the folder of press cuttings I turned up the other day.
In it he gave some details of the boys' deaths which he didn't mention in the Commons (and which I shan't repeat here), and talked about the effect on him:
"I had just started making friends in my new school when the land mine went off. My mother came to see me, and my father prayed with the other parents, but I was desperately homesick and miserable. My back was badly injured. My friend was taking shrapnel out for years.
"We hated having to go back to the beach every Friday. The Army said they hadn't found any other mines. But we heard the explosions in our classroom, everyone went white. It was very stiff upper lip, pretending not to notice the spaces in the dormitory."
Reading the contemporary news reports of this tragedy and the inquest into it, I get the impression that the authorities seized too readily upon the explanation that the mine responsible had drifted ashore, because it meant that no one need be held responsible. That seems to be what Robert Key believed too.
Swanage was not the only tragedy involving wartime mines. A Sunday Mirror article from 28 June 1959 warned:
Death Hides in the Sands!
Killers, silent, corroded, rusty, lurk where the holiday families play this summer - on beaches and moors, in woods and fields.
The tides, or children with spades, will uncover-some 40 beach mines on Britain’s East and South Coasts.
These are the deadliest of all, warns Lieutenant-Colonel N. Barker, who commands the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Unit at Horsham, Sussex.
They can kill at 100 yards, And they have done frequently since World War II ended - fourteen years ago.
And the report goes on to remind readers:
Killers all - that, only recently, killed four men near Harrogate and five boys at Swanage, Dorset... and maimed six children in Yorkshire.
I now wonder if the danger of mines was something that every holidaying family was once aware of. Certainly, I can remember being told before a family caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967 that I shouldn't pick up anything metal I found on the shore. At the end of this post you can a public information film that was issued after the Swanage tragedy.
The five boys are remembered by a tablet on a building erected in their memory at what was Forres school, the prep school they attended. Forres later merged with another school and its buildings at Swanage are now occupied by a special school, which means the tablet is not generally open to public view.
So money is being raised to provide a more accessible memorial to the boys and one that is near the place where the tragedy took place.
Michael Medwin is one of those actors who often turns up in old British films and always makes them better. He usually, but not always, played cockney characters.
He also went on to have an influential second career as film and theatre producer. He was the producer behind Lindsay Anderson's If.... and O Lucky Man! and behind the first production of Julian Mitchell's play Another Country, which helped establish the careers of Kenneth Branagh, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth and Daniel Day-Lewis.
But I come from a generation that knew him as Don Satchley, the smooth boss of Radio West in Shoestring.
When Medwin died in 2020, the Guardian quoted Michael Caine in his obituary:
"I was amazed when I met him to discover that he had a very upper-crust accent. Cockney is a hard accent to do and he did it brilliantly."
Yes, Medwin went to a public school, but his childhood was far from conventional.
His family background was Dutch and Irish, and he was adopted from an orphanage by two elderly unmarried women, Dr Mary Jeremy and a Miss Clopton-Roberts.
I can't find anything about Clopton-Roberts online, but Mary Jeremy was a substantial figure - an early woman doctor who chaired the National Council for Women, which was an early feminist organisation. You can read a profile of her at the bottom of this page of the Poole's Health Record site.
She was also chaired the National Council for Women, an early feminist organisation that concerned itself with causes like equal pay.
And if you search for Michael Medwin on the British Newspaper Archive, the earliest story to come up is from the Western Gazette for 17 June 1932. It concerns a fete held to raise funds for the Hants and Dorset Babies' Home, Parkestone, at the garden of Meadowside, Colehill, the home of Dr Mary Jeremy:
Dr, Mary Jeremy was responsible for the serving of teas, and Mrs Kitching (Bournemouth) and little Miss Mary Medwin and Master Michael Medwin had change of stalls.
So it sounds as though we have discovered that he had, if not a sister, then at least an adoptive sister.
Tom Forth examines the prospects for HS2 now: "Building a new railway from Birmingham to not-quite-London at Old Oak Common would be ridiculous. It is good that Labour seem likely to continue the railway to the city centre. But it is also painful that a huge national investment sold for more than a decade on the promise to benefit North England is now likely to barely benefit it at all. What little gains remain from the plan will fall overwhelmingly to London."
"Duncan came back to his foster home from college one day and found all his bags were packed. It hadn’t even been a week since he turned 18, and his foster carers were happy for him to stay. He’d been living with them since he was 11. But social services said it wasn’t an option. The police would be called if he didn’t go calmly." Greg Barradale reports on the Staying Put scheme, which is helping reduce homelessness among care leavers.
A year ago, the Independent Commission on Equity in Cricket published a bombshell report that exposed many of the game’s ills. Alan White asks why the sport decided to rip the shroud away from itself, and finds out what comes next.
Jeni Rizio on the many good reasons for learning Welsh.
Melina Spanoudi visits Nottingham's Five Leaves Bookshop: "The bookshop is not located on the high street, so events are key to get customers into the shop; the booksellers hold 100 or so a year. In the past weeks, these have included a talk on the history of lesbian fashion, a conversation between human rights activist and politician Shami Chakrabarti and biographer Rachel Holmes, a launch of poetry pamphlets and a discussion with Jonathan Coe and Graham Caveney."
"The sight of glow-worms lighting our way along the hedgerows of a country lane at the height of summer, with all the smells of hay and flowers, is delightful and often unexpected. They are a source of amazement, like seeing a shooting star." Steven Morris meets the glow-worm survey volunteers of Dorset.
Michael Mullaney, who was our candidate in Hinckley and Bosworth on Thursday, has tweeted a list of the Liberal Democrat near misses at this election. They form a handy list of targets for the next election.
The second column gives the number votes we were adrift of the winner, and the third the percentage swing needed to win it next time. It is this latter figure that determines a seat's ranking in the list.
All these seats are held by the Conservatives except Burnley, which is held by Labour.
%
Godalming and Ash8910.81
Farnham and Bordon13491.27
Hampshire East1275 1.27
Shropshire South16241.57
Dorset North15891.60
Romsey and Southampton North21912.19
Cotswold North33573.34
Torridge and Tavistock39503.89
Burnley34204.31
Hamble Valley4802 4.35
Hertfordshire South West44564.62
Salisbury52855.27
Buckinghamshire Mid58725.44
Sevenoaks54405.45
Hinckley and Bosworth5408 5.66
When I blogged about Gordon Birtwistle, who was our candidate in Burnley having been MP for the town between 2005 and 2010, I wondered about his claim that the contest was between him and Labour, But he turned out to be quite right.
George Parker and Anna Gross have been to Yeovil for the Financial Times, and who should they meet there but the leader of the Liberal Democrats?
Sir Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat leader, has claimed his party could unexpectedly win back a host of Conservative seats in its former South West heartlands, announcing a last-minute “Project A30” election offensive.
Davey told the Financial Times in an interview that some of the seats had previously been seen as “out of reach” but were now in range if the party managed to raise more money from donors for last-minute campaigning.
On a visit to Yeovil in Somerset, he declared: “The Liberal Democrats are back in the West Country.” The town lies on the A30 trunk road, linking London to Land’s End, with a host of Lib Dem targets on either side.
The seats Parker and Gross quote Ed Davey as mentioning are St Ives, North Cornwall, Honiton, Torbay, South Devon and West Dorset.
In Somerset, where Ed says we are "spoilt for choice", they list Yeovil and Taunton.
I suspect St Ives has always been seen as a good prospect, but it's good to see the party looking beyond the Home Counties now the campaign has passed the halfway point.
A new Guardian article suggests the Liberal Democrats' strong performance in the local elections means its strategy of concentrating campaigning on key seats may deliver gains from the Conservatives at the coming general election.
It quotes the party's leader, Ed Davey, on a visit to Dorset, where we took control of the council after gaining 13 wards from the Tories:
"This victory in Dorset is an historic and stunning result for the Liberal Democrats,” he said. “People here in Dorset and right across the country are fed up with this chaotic and out-of-touch Conservative government and they’re voting for change with the Liberal Democrats. ...
"After our victory in Somerset two years ago and our stunning successes in Devon last year, this win in Dorset confirms that the Liberal Democrats are back in the West Country and will be the main challengers to Conservative MPs here whenever the general election is called."
The Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway is one of our most mourned lines. Jointly owned by the Midland and the London and South Western, it ran from Bath to Bournemouth
As well as carrying Somerset coal and agricultural produce, it brought holidaymakers to the South Coast. It's crack train was the Pines Express, which ran from Manchester to Bournemouth.
My mother worked for the police in Somerset before I was born. She used to say that their exercise to test their preparedness for a civil emergency imagined the wrecking of this train.
As you will see from this video, the line ran through some beautiful country.
The Liberal Democrat party is stepping up campaigning in more than a dozen seats predominantly in the south of England following recent by-election wins, as it starts to broaden its ambitions ahead of the general election expected next year.
Dave McCobb, the director of field campaigns, presented a paper to members on Tuesday night that identified areas where support for the Lib Dems was growing, giving the party a good chance of pushing out the Conservatives at the next election.
Most of these constituencies are in the party’s former heartland in the south-west of England, including Taunton Deane and West Dorset, as well in Surrey in the south-east and the seat of Stratford-on-Avon in the West Midlands.
As someone who was at the meeting has told the FT, some of these seats were not thought to be winnable even a few months ago. Certainly, the three that Gross mentions here have not been much discussed in the media.
The worry, as ever, is that we will become too ambitious, spread our resources too thinly and suffer a series of narrow defeats. But this optimism seems better founded than that which fuelled the our 2019 campaign, which was based on wishful thinking and some unlikely opinion poll findings.
