Lord Bonkers' Diary: He would sit there like a stuffed haddock

Proof, I think. that Lord Bonkers reads this blog. The theory that Starmer was never meant to be prime minister, but was put in place as a move in Labour's civil war, comes from a Guardian article by Neal Lawson, and I have referred to it here more than once.

Friday

That Starmer fellow didn’t amount to much, did he? Cook, with her generous heart, always thought the best of him and refused to “listen to incinerations”; for myself, there’s an old Gypsy saying that holds… To be honest, I can’t remember what it holds, but I know it would be just the job here. 

My sources in the Labour Party tell me that the man was never meant to be prime minister: the idea was that he would sit there like a stuffed haddock while Mandelson and McSweeney Todd purged the party of anyone who believed in what Labour used to believe in. Then, after an honourable defeat in the 2024 election, he would have made way so that “Streeting” they used to go on about could become PM next time round. 

The moral is don’t appoint temporary leaders, as they may turn out not to be temporary at all. Vinnie Jones’s disastrous stewardship of the Royal Ballet should have alerted everyone to that danger.

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

Earlier this week...

• Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"
• Wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents
• The arid south of Rutland
• "Hooson, we have a problem"

My Liberator article on the Yorkists' New Deal

This article appears in the new Liberator – you can download the whole issue from the magazine's website. Following the best traditions of academic reviewing, I spend a lot of time stating my own views before I get on to the publication I'm meant to be writing about.

You can find The New Deal online.

Lib Dem Narrative – The Search Goes On

The 2024 general election saw 72 Liberal Democrat MPs elected, the most for a third party since the Liberals’ brief revival in 1923. It was a result that exceeded all expectations, yet, two years on, there is a feeling of deflation among many Lib Dems. May’s local elections, whose outcome was in some ways very good for the party, were followed by a series of posts on Lib Dem Voice expressing dissatisfaction with the party’s direction or at least arguing that its current approach had been exhausted and a new one was needed.

This dissatisfaction arises from a sense of disappointment. If we have so many MPs, why aren’t we more central to the political debate? You can blame the media all you like, and they certainly do us no favours, but maybe the problem lies deeper than that. If we were allowed to write out own newspaper headlines, do we know what they would be? The approach with which we fought the last election – three bullet points and a reminder that Labour can’t win here – and its continuation after that election have left us with a limited number of headline policies.

Massive failures

Where we do have them, they aren’t necessarily as strong as we try to make them sound. We won support at the last election by campaigning on the massive failures of the water companies, but what would we do about them? The answer is that we would appoint a new, tougher regulator. The trouble with this is that the model promised at privatisation – businesses that displayed market-driven efficiency and went in fear of powerful regulators – has never looked like working. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is that the water industry is a natural monopoly. The second is regulatory capture, the process by which public institutions that are set up to keep an industry in check are subverted so they come to act in its interests. Nothing about the Lib Dems’ proposals for the water industry suggests they have found the answer to either of these problems.

Then there is the party’s performance in opinion polls and local elections. When it comes to the polls, despite the collapse of the Labour vote, we are happy if we see one where we match the 12 per cent of the vote we achieved at the last general election. We may remember Zack Polanski as an ambitious Liberal Democrat who was keener on austerity than most of us, but as James Butler wrote in the London Review of Books: 

Polanski’s political journey … is sometimes framed as opportunism but in fact reflects the often radicalising economic experience of millennials now approaching middle age.

We need to have more to offer such voters than we do at present.

Our vote is now heavily concentrated in the parliamentary constituencies that we won in 2024. We gained dozens upon dozens of councillors there in May, but I saw debate as to whether we had gained or lost councillors across all the other constituencies. What is certain is that our vote in seats where we have not been active in recent years is as low as one or two per cent, as is demonstrated weekly in local by-elections. And while we are being worried, the party’s membership is generally estimated to be 60,000, which is barely half what it was in 2022.

Many of the areas we now represent are prosperous, which means we must beware of simply representing their interests. Our opposition to inheritance tax on land, for instance, is hard to defend. As far as farmers have a grievance, it’s that the price of land has lost its relationship with the income that can be derived from farming it. But if you allow land to be used as a tax shelter, that problem will not be solved, it will get worse.

In the end, the Liberal Democrat hold on the seats they gained in 2024 may be out of their hands. In order for disillusioned Conservatives to come over to the Lib Dems, it is necessary for them not to be too scared by the possibility of a Labour government. If Andy Burnham turns out to be more Socialist than anyone expects, or at least if the press succeeds in getting the public to see him that way, then there is a danger that those voters will flock back to the Tories, however sensible or moderate we have been.

Against the background of this complicated political landscape comes The New Deal: How the Liberal Democrats Should Go into the 2029 General Election. It’s billed as “a pre-manifesto strategy document from the Yorkist group of Liberal Democrat activists” and, in his foreword, William Wallace explains its purpose:

This paper aims to start a conversation within the party on the narrative we need to construct. We have at most three years until the next election. Too many voters have come to despair of any political party’s ability to overcome the country’s economic stagnation and social divides. Liberal Democrats must find a way to offer them hope that national renewal – economic, social and political – is possible and attainable.”

To that end, The New Deal offers an analysis of the electoral position of the Liberal Democrats, a narrative they should develop before the next election and the policies it says flow from that narrative.

When The New Deal was published in May, it seemed that both the Greens and Reform UK were in line to make sweeping gains at the next election and that the Liberal Democrats would have to change their strategy to take account of this. Since then, both parties have faltered. The Greens appear to have hit their ceiling in the opinion polls and the media have at last started to ask hard questions about how Reform and its leader are funded. This position may change again, of course, but at the moment it seems the 2029 election may be more like the 2024 election than we expected.

Usefully, The New Deal considers the parties along two axes. There is the conventional one of Progressive/Centre Left vs Authoritarian/Orthodox, which sees the Liberal Democrats lined up with Labour, the Nationalists and the Greens against the Conservatives and Reform. From their history, their members and their voters, the Liberal Democrats are inescapably an anti-Conservative party, though that doesn’t mean that, deep down, we are the same as Labour or that ‘Progressive’ is a meaningful political identity rather than just a more impressive way of saying you are against the Tories.

The second axis is System vs Anti System, which sees the Lib Dems (and we still just about deserve this) placed in the Anti-System camp along with the Greens, the Nationalists and Reform, while Labour and the Tories share the System end. 

Anti-system

This ‘anti-system’ concept is a useful one and helps explain why, to the bafflement of the simplicities of social media, there are many voters who choose between Reform and the Liberal Democrats. It’s an identity that I suspect has something to do with being a long way from the centres of power, as voters are in Cornwall or Lincolnshire, and perhaps with the area being a historical stronghold of religious Nonconformity. As academics always say, more research is needed.

The New Deal emphasises the importance of developing a narrative, identifying Keir Starmer’s failure to do this as a key reason for his premiership foundering, but I’m not sure that what they’ve come up with quite fits the bill:

We are a better country than this! We are a kind, welcoming people, proud of our traditions, keen not to be taken for fools, but happy to be a modern, compassionate civic nation. We believe in a helping-hand role for a benign state, but one that doesn’t encroach any more into private lives than is strictly necessary. We believe in giving power back to the people, and in making all votes of equal value. 

This is a collection of four sentences, two of which are immediately qualified with a “but…”, that fails to tell a story. Stories involve movement through time or space, but these words just sit there. And they are statements about the Liberal Democrats when what is needed is a story about Britain today that will make voters nod in assent.

So an effective Liberal Democrat narrative might look more like:

In recent years politicians have looked to party interest rather than what’s good for Britain, the gap between rich and poor has grown too wide, and young people are finding it too hard to get a start in life. We need to rebuild our democracy, make it easier for people from all homes to make the most of their talents, and revive social housing.

That’s what’s on the back of my envelope, anyway.

When it comes to the paper’s policy offer, the cover leads you to expect great things because it has a mock-up of FDR wearing a Lib Dem rosette. In fact, it’s not always clear how different this New Deal would be. There are places where it talks about “success and progress being about more than GDP, including measures of social wellbeing and the environment” and “markets working for society rather than society being there to support markets”, but it’s not clear what these encouraging sentiments would mean in practice. Nor is it clear what the “unashamedly Keynesian” policy it wants to see at the next election would be. It seems to envisage more government intervention in the economy, which is welcome, but Keynes’s great theoretical innovation was the idea of demand management to avoid the cycle of economic booms and slumps. I’m not sure that’s on offer here.

But there are some very good ideas in The New Deal, and not only rejoining the European Union either. There’s a welcome emphasis on localism, and the inevitable support for electoral reform is strengthened by a call for it to be “linked to some form of bottom-up democracy to allow citizens to generate legislation, and to take more control over their local affairs”. There’s a call for the provision of rented accommodation (though it doesn’t say in which sector) and for an emphasis on “doing up the housing at the bottom of the ladder which is a health hazard for many of those living in it”. Education is there too, with a thoroughly Liberal emphasis on the importance of teaching critical thinking.

Above all, it’s great to see Liberal Democrat members publishing their ideas in a long form. Since the demise of Lib Dem News and then political blogging, communication within the party has tended to be very short (hello social media) or very top down. I hope The New Deal will be the first of many such publications.

We have no idea what history will say about Keir Starmer and it may not be right anyway

I see a lot of people saying that history will be kind to Keir Starmer - much kinder than commentators have been in recent weeks.

Three points...

First, history is not a single agreed narrative but a collection of debates. History will say lots of things about Keir Starmer, some of them quite contradictory.

Second, we have no idea what history will say about Keir Starmer, because his career will be seen in a wider context, much of which hasn't happened yet.

Andy Burnham may be lead Labour to defeat at the next general election, or he may win that election, bite the bullet and start the process of rejoining the European Union. How Keir Starmer is viewed by future will depend greatly on how Burnham and Burnham's successors fare in office.

Third, history may be wrong about Keir Starmer. History may be wrong about a lot of things.

There is an implicit assumption here that the judgements of future historians are bound to be correct, both factually and ethically. This blog's hero Karl Popper used to call this view "moral futurism", whether it was inspired by the Marxist view that socialism was historically inevitable or Liberal confidence in the inevitably of "Progress".

But these future historians will operate in a social and academic climate they have not themselves made. Imagine a far-right government coming to power in Britain – sadly it's much easier to imagine than it used to be.

We have seen the accommodations that American academia has made to please Donald Trump, and I see no reason to believe that its British counterpart would behave any differently Now imagine the sort of history that would be produced here after five or ten years of that.

And even without the intervention of a far-right government, there is no reason for us to assume that the judgements of future historians will be informed by years of moral progress.

So it's no use appealing to future historians. If there are any, we don't know what they will say and we might not like it if we did.

The Joy of Six 1537

David Howarth reminds us that both Tony Blair and Keir Starmer said pluralist things in opposition, only to go back on them in power: "Given that history, why should Liberals believe that Andy Burnham would be any different? He has already backtracked on his previous anti-Brexit pronouncements and his only promise on electoral reform is that he might include a 'pledge' on it in Labour’s next manifesto. We know what such 'pledges' from Labour are worth."

A deliberate strategy to push the British right – from the Conservative Party to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – into a radicalising auction over the mass deportations of ethnic minority British citizens is being underwritten by the owner of 55 Tufton Street, the Westminster townhouse that houses a cluster of opaquely funded right-wing lobby groups, reports Nafeez Ahmed.

"The party holds one seat in a chamber that has grown from 60 to 96 members, meaning their proportional presence is smaller now than at any point since devolution began." Elsie Jones asks why the Welsh Liberal Democrats underperformed in last month's Senedd elections.

Andy Bull looks back on Brendon McCullum's career in New Zealand: "All of which may, or may not, be a timely reminder that McCullum's dressing rooms have not always been the sort of free-and-easy open-to-all environments they seem to be when the team are winning. That, expert as he is handling his players, he is also a pretty ruthless dressing-room politician, a man who knows how to instruct a media team and even deploy his lawyers during a crisis."

Wayne Gooderham explores the influence of Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn on popular music and on the gender sensibilities of The Smiths, Van Morrison and The Velvet Underground in particular. 

"I had never been so far below sea level, it was difficult to comprehend, the layers of rock, millions of years old above us." Neala shows that being an archives volunteer at Manchester Central Library is more exciting that you might expect.

Personality matters in politics: Starmer's lack of one did for him

John Harris's Guardian article on the resignation of Keir Starmer contains a key paragraph:

So there it was: as well as a modern tendency to loathe politicians that regularly seems arbitrary, whipped-up and way over the top, a sense that Starmer's sheer blankness – his painful lack of clarity and the absence of a halfway coherent story about his own government – was making a lot of people dislike and mistrust him all the more.

Harris is obviously a good judge, because that was very much what I was saying on Bluesky at about the same time.

The fall of Starmer is a reminder that personality matters in politics. He never gave the public the impression that he had much of one. The result was that not only did he fail to inspire or enthuse anyone, but also that the public invented an unflattering personality for him. 1/3

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) 22 June 2026 at 10:29

World events gave him almost weekly opportunities to address the nation and sound prime-ministerial, yet he rarely took them. But then he didn't even talk to the junior ministers he sacked. 2/3

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) 22 June 2026 at 10:29

I'd also say that not being the Tories, which was Labour's strong selling point in the election, does not of itself generate a coherent programme for government. Perhaps Sunak's early election caught them on the hop, but you do get the impression that they came to power underprepared. 3/3

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) 22 June 2026 at 10:29

The Joy of Six 1536

"Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of right-wing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grown ups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured." This seems a good day to air again this Neal Lawson theory.

Prem Sikka on the curse of the finance industry: "Private equity takes over existing businesses with finance from banks, insurance companies, pension funds and wealthy individuals seeking higher returns. It acquires control but injects little share capital. Takeover targets are loaded with the secured debt, often routed through opaque offshore entities, and are expected to pay it off."

Matt Gallagher says the Online Safety Act is forcing us to hand over personal data to unregulated overseas corporations with questionable privacy records.

"Behind every great director ... is a great editor – and as the tributes paid earlier this month to the late Marcia Lucas, Oscar-winning editor of Star Wars: Episodes IV to VI, and former wife of creator George Lucas, reminded us, that editor is often a woman." Bethany Elliott investigates a familiar dynamic in male-dominated Hollywood.

Carrie Marshall goes to see the B52s.

"She grows smaller. Was she approximately human-sized in her wearing-a-pinny-and-doing-the-laundry phase, but then hedgehog-sized at the end? In the final image, she is a completely naturalistic hedgehog4. She looks like a little brown aubergine. So it's possible that at the end of his story – shudder – Samuel Whiskers has grown bigger." Sam Leith is worried: how big are Beatrix Potter's animals?

The Joy of Six 1534

Keir Starmer should set a timetable for his departure from Number 10 and give his successor the opportunity to prepare for becoming prime minister, argue Hannah White and Alex Thomas.

"Digital spaces should be safe for people of all ages. But I don’t believe bans are the answer. Technology companies need to be held to account and required to block harmful content and build safety into their designs." Lisa M. Given on what Britain can learn from Australia's attempt to ban under-16s from social media.

Ben Mayfield has seen a new film on the countryside access debate in England and Wales: "Our Land is a title with two meanings – private land ownership for the landowners v the campaign for shared rights in land. The film explores different attitudes to ownership as well as the physical borders between landowners and, in the words of access campaigner and contributor Guy Shrubsole, 'the peasants'."

John Drury names six mistaken ideas in crowd psychology that refuse to die: de-individuation, groupthink, mass panic, contagion, the hooligan, mob mentality.

"Almost by chance, they ran across the uncanny, disorienting and inexhaustibly strange works that would help define the culture of the century, and fought against stiff odds to make them common coinage in every Anglophone domain." Boyd Tonkin pays tribute to Edwin and Willa Muir, whose translations made the work of Franz Kafka available to the English-speaking world.

David Hewitt looks back to Oxfam Walk '69 and Wembley Stadium's first concert: "Four-fifths of those who started the walk managed to complete it, and their total mileage was said to be equivalent to three trips to the Moon and back. The first of them arrived at Wembley at 3pm, where they were met by yet more celebrities. Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, told them they were 'the nation’s conscience' and 'one of the finest armies that has taken the field for many years'."

The Joy of Six 1533

James Ball argues that Labour's social media ban for teenagers is an admission of total and utter failure to govern online spaces: "The UK government has lots of powers to govern the internet that it simply isn’t using. Hosting images of child abuse is a strict liability offence, one that Elon Musk’s X platform blatantly breached with its Grok chatbot. The government gave itself extensive powers to regulate social platforms under the Online Safety Act, which it has never even made an attempt to enforce."

"This week contained two stories, which dominated the headlines. One took place on the streets of Belfast, the other in the hallways of Whitehall. One concerned race riots and the other a defence funding plan. But they were in fact the same story. They both concerned security – one at home, the other abroad. And they were both the result of a prime minister who refuses to lead." Ian Dunt says Keir Starmer's inertia threatens national security.

Anja Krstic and Ivona Hideg find that men's careers benefit when they take parental leave but women’s do not.

"Ten years on from the referendum, the tired stereotype of the 'Northern Brexit voter' is one we should retire." J.P. Spencer has the figures that explode a widespread myth.

"Undoubtedly the most important members of the audience were a group of families from formerly occupied territories affected by the abductions: mothers with teenagers they had recovered from Crimea or elsewhere; families who were still trying to get their children back." Charlotte Higgins and Mariana Matveichuk on the Kyiv premiere of Mothers of Kherson, an opera about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian occupiers.

Kenneth George Godwin finds innocence and corruption in the films of Alexander Mackendrick: "The clearest expression of Mackendrick’s worldview is perhaps apparent in the three films he made which centred on children: Mandy (1952), Sammy Going South (1963), and A High Wind In Jamaica (1965). Unsentimental, unafraid of the darkness kids face in a harsh world, unafraid to see the potential for darkness in the kids themselves … these are three of the most adult films about children ever made."

The fault, dear Mandy, is not in your stars, but in yourself

Embed from Getty Images

Someone once  asked Max Clifford: "Max, if you're so brilliant at public relations, why does everyone think you're a cunt?"

Similarly, I would like to ask Peter Mandelson why, if he's such a master of the dark arts, he's always being found out.

Perhaps the answer is to be found in this character sketch by John Crace:

Betrayal is Mandelson’s lifeblood. It’s there in his treatment of Wes Streeting. Poor trusting Wes. A man more used to stabbing others in the back. Wes looked up to Mandy. Treated him as a mentor. How did Peter repay him? By bitching about him being "pathetic" and going through an "early mid-life crisis". 

Then there’s Pat McFadden. Peter encourages Pat to confide in him. Gets him to say the government is directionless. That Keir is weak. That Labour MPs just go on about what taxes to raise so they can give welfare payments to others. Pat’s reward? To be dismissed in an email to Patrick Vallance as an insignificant lightweight.

Nor is Keir Starmer spared. There’s no sense of gratitude for the prime minister having taken a punt on him for the Washington job. For Peter that was no more than he had rightly deserved. The culmination of a lifetime’s brown-nosing the rich, the corrupt and the powerful. So Mandelson happily trash talks Keir to anyone willing to listen. "Rubbish in, rubbish out."

He doesn’t even bother to conceal what he's doing. He’s never happier than when he’s promoting discontent and division. Turns out he hates Labour every bit as much as the Tories do.

The Joy of Six 1519

Roderick Lynch says the Liberal Democrats have a serious problem in urban Britain and pretending otherwise will only make it worse.

"A few months after winning the 2024 general election, Keir Starmer pledged to stop 'powerful people using ... Slapps to intimidate journalists away from their pursuit of the public interest'. But in February this year, anti-Slapp measures were shelved from a civil justice and courts bill, reportedly following interventions from Downing Street." Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy on the government's abandonment of libel law reform – Slapps are "strategic lawsuits against public participation".

"A child living in an illegal care home is being used by an organised crime gang. He may be moving drugs around the country, transporting weapons or laundering money through his bank account. He reaches out for help but the home he’s living in has been infiltrated by the same gang. They refer him to a counsellor – who feeds their conversation back to the criminals controlling his life." Tom Wall has read a new report that sets out the acute dangers faced by children living in unregistered settings.

David Howarth explains what the investigation of Nigel Farage's £5m gift will consider.

"Gianni Infantino arrived at Fifa masquerading as a reformer. Instead, he has gone to great lengths to concentrate and consolidate his power. And yet, despite all the skulduggery, hardly any of the people to whom he ultimately owes his position are holding the Fifa president and his cabal to account." Josimar condemns the Fifa president's attempts to avoid press scrutiny.

Tom Service pays tribute to incomparable Kathleen Ferrier: "Ferrier's voice is still an inspiration, not least because she ought to inspire singers to properly inhabit the contralto register rather than push upwards into mezzo-soprano-dom, as so many singers today think they have to do. But most of all, it's that voice that seems to resonate inside you when you hear it, as if you're physically connected with Ferrier's voice, and which makes everything she sings so direct, so powerful, and so contemporary."

The Joy of Six 1518

Alexandra Hall Hall writes the big reset speech she wishes Keir Starmer had made after Labour’s local elections defeats: "I know that much of what I have said today will be controversial or unpopular. But good leadership requires the courage to say the hard things. What I took from last week’s election results is that I – we all – need to raise our game. We need to be more honest, more forthright, and more willing to take the hard choices."

"Lowe was educated at Radley. He built a career in financial services. He owns substantial agricultural land. He was chairman of Southampton Football Club. He speaks in the measured cadences of a man who has chaired many meetings and expects to chair many more. When he stands on a stage and talks about mass deportation, he sounds like he is presenting a business case. That is the innovation. Not the policy. The presentation." Simon Pearson warns of the threat posed by Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain.

"The real danger that artificial intelligence poses to work is not just job loss – it is the growing divide between people who use AI to extend their skills and those whose working lives are increasingly shaped by opaque, AI-powered systems of surveillance and control." Nazrul Islam on real threat that AI poses to workers.

Jon Rainford and Alex Blower set out their research on what working-class boys need to succeed at school.

Helen Kingstone says the 19th-century novelist Margaret Oliphant has much to teach us about our attitude to ageing: "Her novels (100 of them!) were largely forgotten in the twentieth century, but are now being celebrated by scholars and fellow-novelists. She wrote astutely and sometimes bitterly about society’s failure to recognise women’s capabilities. And she had surprisingly prescient views on ageing, which can offer valuable tools for contemporary campaigners."

"Flowing with an engaging warmth throughout, this wholesome evening not only showcases evidence of Tikaram's timeless talent as a songwriter and sound ability to orchestrate a band of incredible musicians, but it also seems to offer a beautifully open celebration of her queer identity; each song bringing with it its own unique sense of joy and pride." Mari Lane celebrates the music of Tanita Tikaram.

The Joy of Six 1517

"In 2026 our vote share in inner London boroughs was the worst since 1978. We aren’t running any inner London boroughs. We are only even the main opposition party in one, Brent. This isn’t just a London, or a city, problem though. Our 2026 local election vote share of 14 per cent is worse than in the coalition year of 2011 – and our lowest in 8 years." Rob Blackie argues that if the Lib Dems are again to appeal to young voters we must march towards the sound of gunfire.

Jason Cobb says the Starmer project was born in Lambeth and foundered just as Labour lost its grip on that borough.

Sadiq Khan talks to Byline Times: "I think what we have now is an outrage economy. And this outrage economy is built on a division dividend. You can call it 'decline porn', and you have people and companies profiting from poison and division. So I recognise I'm clickbait. I recognise that I’m being monetised. But also London is being monetised in this outrage economy."

"In England and its colonies, no one was burnt at the stake during witch hunts: not at Pendle, not at Salem and not under the campaigns of the 'witchfinder general', Matthew Hopkins. The image of the burning witch is powerful, but in this context, it is largely a myth." But, reveals Stephanie Brown, women were burnt for defying their husbands.

Daniela Rosenow on the efforts to recover the stories of the Egyptians who helped discover the tomb of Tutankhamun.

"Strip away the film’s showy excess, and this is why The Omen is such a compelling tale. A man who lost his only son must choose whether to kill his only son? It’s positively fiendish." Ruth Bushi marks the 50th anniversary of the film's release.

Frank reaction today to the Lib Dem election performance

"Am I alone in thinking our response to the local election results is a little too self-congratulatory?" asked David Vigar on Liberal Democrat Voice this morning. We can safely say he is not alone, judging by comment on that blog and further afield.

Next up on Lib Dem Voice was Shaun Ennis:

No one has ever asked me to devise an idea for Ed Davey’s next stunt. But if I was approached from on high, I might suggest having him wade through a river of treacle.

That’s how it feels trying to spread the Liberal Democrat message in the North of England these days.

It’s been an underwhelming set of elections in our part of the country. Despite some notable and very important exceptions such as Stockport, Preston and Sefton, the Liberal Democrats have failed to cut through with what has been a predominantly nationally motivated electorate.

And Johan Prinsloo saw a similar pattern in London:

We saw major success stories in Brent and Ealing, with the local parties there making significant gains on Labour. Our ground game all across London was a marvel to watch, and the establishment of a 100 per cent majority in Richmond, as well as maintaining/improving large majorities in Kingston and Sutton is something to champion going forward. 

These are emblematic of our strong ground game resonating well, when there was a record of results behind them. 

However, it is also important to accept the reality of the situation that we have underperformed in many areas, even just in London. Our major target of Merton has fallen flat with only two councillors gained. 

Also, in Lambeth, Southwark, Islington and my home borough of Croydon, expected gains have somehow evaporated and in some areas, paper candidate Greens in areas like Newham, Barking and Enfield have won without ever campaigning!

While Tara Foster detected a malaise than goes beyond disappointing election results:

In my view, from 2024, we've been electorally and politically stagnant, and the Party has forgotten how to be an effective campaigning machine. Many MPs are well-educated, but their expertise is being wasted. 

For example, we don’t have the tax experts working on treasury matters, and as a result we had Daisy Cooper come out with the politically-weightless idea of a Trumpian "Department of Growth" with a tagline of "Get Britain Growing Again."

James Graham, a fellow survivor of the golden age of Lib Dem blogging, has also gone deeper on his own Quaequam Blog!:

The party continues to do well in places where it has been doing well in recent years, and continues to decline in areas where it took a knock during the coalition years. The areas it does well tend to be rural, formerly Conservative dominated areas and it continues to decline in areas that historically were dominated by Labour. In the latter areas, the Greens have completely eclipsed the party.

Even in places where the party was doing well in recent history, such as Hornsey and Friern Barnet (most of which represented by Lynne Featherstone until 2015) and Manchester Withington (most of which was represented by John Leech), the Greens have replaced the Lib Dems as the main challengers to Labour. Wales, with the exception of a single MS in the form of Jane Dodds and a smattering of councillors, is now a no-go area for the party. ...

As some have pointed out, the extent to which the Lib Dems now represent the richest parts of the UK is quite striking; at the top end, Lib Dem MPs represent even wealthier areas than the Conservatives. No wonder Ed Davey has been quite as hostile to any suggestion of redistributing wealth as he has been over the last couple of years.

And this is my worry too. If we are increasingly drawn to campaigning on the grievances of these comfortably off constituents, then our policies are going to seem at best irrelevant to much of the country.

Let me end with an observation on Keir Starmer and Ed Davey from the Commentary in the current issue of Liberator:

There are worrying similarities in the predicaments of the leaders of what are traditionally the two main centre-left parties as they try to contend with both the Greens and Reform.

Both became leader by replacing an extremely unsuccessful predecessor, both conveyed an “adults are back in charge” air of calm competence and both won bigger than they can have dared hope in 2024.

Since then they have both shown little sign of knowing what to do with that success, both have struggled to manage a larger than expected parliamentary party and both have been unable to clearly articulate in public any narrative about what their party is for and what it wants to do.

While Starmer has made a series of u-turns Davey has made a series of diversion side turnings while not really getting anywhere. British missiles? A new Magna Carta? Splitting the Treasury? Defence bonds? Some of these ideas may have merits but nothing links them and they get the public no nearer to knowing what sort of country they would be living in were the Lib Dems in power.

That issue is no. 434 and you can download it free of charge from the magazine's website. You can also sign up to a mailing list there so you are informed each time a new issue appears.

Vaughan Wilkins gives Queen Victoria's wicked uncles both barrels and Private Eye has more on Hakluyt

The spooky "strategic advisory" firm Hakluyt that occasionally features in Private Eye.

That was me blogging the other day. And today I bought the new Eye and found that it has featured again:

One of Keir Starmer's first appointments as prime minister in July 2024 was that of Varun Chandra, head of the Hakluyt intelligence consultancy, as investment and trade adviser (while he retained a stake in the firm, as revealed in Eye 1629).

and:

As Mandelson's appointment worked its way through the clearance procedure, with everything hanging on the Foreign Office permanent secretary, who should arrive in this role? One Sir Oliver Robbins, fresh from a stint at... Hakluyt. He duly took the view that what he described last week as a "borderline case" could be confirmed, no questions asked.

and

After Mandelson's sacking last September, Chandra was, remarkably, on the shortlist of three to take on the ambassadorship. Starmer was then reportedly persuaded that recent events perhaps indicated that a professional diplomate might make on a better choice ... In January Chandra was nevertheless given the consolation prize of becoming the PM's "special envoy" to the US on trade and investment to go with his existing role.

After that, the news that I think Vaughan Wilkins' granddaughter, who has published under the names Laura Powell and Laura Vaughan, has also written as Rose Wilkins may fall a little flat.

But let's get on to what this post was going to be about: a splendid reply by Vaughan Wilkins to a critic of his first novel, And So – Victoria, that was published in The Queen (23 September 1937).

l have read with amusement the letter in your issue of September 2nd, in which a simple-minded American correspondent upbraids me for saying unpleasant things in my novel And So – Victoria about the very unpleasant sons of George III. He – or she – chides me too for imagining conversations between historical personages. 

"Boston" obviously has merely a superficial knowledge of the family of George III, or he would not leap to the defence of a creature like the Duke of Cumberland. It is true that on that sinister person’s tomb the customary laudatory inscription is incised – but when he became King of Hanover, the first thing he did was to abolish the constitution. 

The Duke of York was a nasty, muddleheaded old man, whose mistress sold commissions in the army he nominally commanded. The Duke of Clarence was another muddle-head who unquestionably lived on the verge of mental derangement. The Duke of Kent was a pompous egoist and sadist. Let "Boston" read about the mock execution His Royal Highness staged in Canada; or in the Crevy Papers about his curious reactions to marriage. 

"Boston" thinks (does he or she really mean it !) that George III was a nice kind fellow because he made an allowance to the last of the exiled Stuart Princes "out of his own private income". George IV could –  and did – spend £300 on a single coat: he threw away hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pounds in building himself palaces that were both hideous and unnecessary. He raced; he gambled; he kept harems; he drank – not out of his income, but out of contributions which time and again had to be levied for him by the State, He intrigued against his father; he abominated his mother; he persecuted his wife; he tormented (and hated) his daughter; he betrayed his friends; he could not keep his word; he did not pay his bills. This is not a novelist’s imagination: it is a matter of record. 

Of course, I don’t know "for a fact the conversations that took place in the homes of George III sons”. But if "Boston" will not allow me to imagine them then I and every other historical novelist will have to shut up shop. The giants of the past, Dumas, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, must all incur "Boston's" displeasure. Anyhow, it is very odd to find a champion of the Hanoverian from the city of "The Tea-party"!

I suppose that when set against the depredations of the Hanoverians even Peter Mandelson begins to seem palatable.

How the Guardian flattered Morgan McSweeney and why it did so

Those hoping to be impressed when Morgan McSweeney made a rare public appearance, courtesy of the Commons' foreign affairs select committee, will have been disappointed. A No. 10 led by him and Keir Starmer really was a case of the bland leading the bland.

But how did the Guardian's Whitehall editor greet Morgan McSweeney when he was appointed? Those of you with strong stomachs, read on:

As the brains behind Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign, McSweeney is credited with having brought the prime minister to power. He entered No 10 as head of political strategy, in charge of charting the party’s path to another victory in five years' time.

When it emerged there were rival power bases around McSweeney and Gray in No 10, few had any doubt he would survive any fallout. He has now emerged as chief of staff, with unrivalled influence, and is likely to bring a much sharper political focus to the job.

McSweeney is adored by many staffers, with some party figures retaining more affection for him than they do for Starmer. The highest form of praise in Labour HQ has been said to be: "Morgan loves it." However, he is something of a bogeyman on the left after leading the thinktank Labour Together in a campaign to purge the party of Jeremy Corbyn’s influence.

After working in Labour’s attack unit in the New Labour years, McSweeney cut his teeth as chief of staff to the then Lambeth council leader Steve Reed, who is now a cabinet minister, and helped defeat the British National party in Barking and Dagenham. Born in Ireland, he divides his time between Scotland and Westminster. His wife, Imogen Walker, is Labour’s MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley.

Why this unctuous tone? As I explained at the time, it was beat-sweetening and source-greasing.

And I got these terms from an article Timothy Noah published when Obama named his team after first winning the Presidency:

This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter's access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they've been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why. 

My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.

This is why even the teams behind candidates for the leadership of opposition parties get enthusiastic write ups. They may just turn out to be the people the journalist wants to take his calls for years to come.

Ed Davey: If Keir Starmer misled parliament he must resign

After today's revelation that Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting when being considered for appointment as ambassador to the United States, but was appointed anyway, Ed Davey issued this statement:

Keir Starmer had already made a catastrophic error of judgment. Now it looks as though he has also misled parliament and lied to the British public. If that is the case, he must go.

Labour came into Government on a promise to clean up politics. Instead we’re seeing the same old sleaze, scandal and cover-ups as we did under the Conservatives.

You can read the Guardian story that broke the news on the paper's website.

The paper has a second piece that identifies five key questions. They are:

• Did the prime minister mislead the public?
• Did Yvette Cooper and Olly Robbins mislead parliament by omission?
• Who in the Foreign Office decided to grant Mandelson clearance despite the UKSV recommendation?
• Why did Mandelson fail his UKSV check, and will the reasons be made public?
• Will parliament now get to see Mandelson’s vetting documents?

Ed Davey on Hillary Clinton, restive Lib Dem MPs and chess

Ed Davey has been talking to Hillary Clinton:

"We talked about how we need to fight Reform in the way they need to fight Donald Trump, and she gave me some choice advice, which I'm not going to repeat because that would be unfair on her."

He's also been talking to PoliticsHome – that's a quote from an interview they've posted this evening.

"Pressed" (as if he needed pressing) to say more his meeting with Hillary Clinton, he added:

"She said you have to be very strong and stand up to bullies and don't cave in and cosy up to them. She didn't say she was criticising Keir Starmer, but I think the approach we [the Lib Dems] have taken, and the approach that someone like the Liberal Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, has taken, is the sort of approach she will endorse."

He described Clinton as "very friendly and very warm!: "You could tell that she realised that we had shared values."

The interviewer, Zoe Crowther, then turned to restlessness among Liberal Democrat MPs. This is part of Ed's answer:

"I'm restless like they are… I share their restlessness," Davey told PoliticsHome, while stressing that his MPs and the party “work really well together”.

However, in a bid to face down his critics, the Lib Dem leader pointed to his electoral record.

"The polls are the polls, but the elections are the elections," he told PoliticsHome.

"Winning elections is what we've done under my leadership. If we make net gains in May, it will be the eighth year in a row we've made net gains, the sixth under my leadership. It's never happened before. That's a continual increase, year on year.

"This year we could well beat Labour and the Tories for the number of councillors we elect for the second year in a row, and it’s never happened previously."

He insisted that the Lib Dems are "still the most united parliamentary party" despite recent negative briefings.

The MPs know how well the party as done in elections under Ed Davey – I mean, they would, wouldn't they? – but that success is not a complete answer to their restlessness. I suspect that restlessness is rooted in disappointment that achieving the best result by a Liberal party in over a century in 2024 has done so little to raise our profile.

You can complain about media bias, but we have to ask whether our style of campaigning is one of the causes. We adopted the "three bullet points and a reminder that Labour can't win here" approach that won us spectacular by-election victories in the last parliament at the general election too, and are still using it two years on.

Ask the public what the Lib Dem approach to the economy is, and they would be justified in asking how they are supposed to know, even if they've noticed the stand-alone proposals we have made.

And this concentration on target seats in the South of England has coincided with a further fall in our core vote. Yes, we're now in a novel political landscape, but in council by-elections where we have not campaigned, there hardly seems to be a Lib Dem vote at all.

To end on a happier note, Ed also talks about chess:

Davey – similarly to Chancellor Rachel Reeves – played chess competitively until he was about 12 years old, though he said he would "not put myself up as a great chess player" anymore. 

"Playing the long game, that's the key thing in chess," he said. 

Ed may be pleased to learn that my blog post about his chess game with Mike Ross in Hull was responded to on Bluesky by the eight-time Russian chess champion Peter Svidler.

I also liked Svidler's comment on Rachel Reeves.

timid, indecisive, unwilling to commit to even temporary sacrifices when the situation calls for a reassessment, and drastic measures might be needed. the chess game is meh too.

[image or embed]

— Peter Svidler (@polborta.bsky.social) 11 April 2026 at 13:07

Ed Davey on Keir Starmer's "staggering lack of backbone"

A Liberal Democrat media release says: 

Responding to confirmation that the King will make a second state visit to the US, Ed Davey, Leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: 

"The Prime Minister is showing a staggering lack of backbone by pushing ahead with this state visit while Donald Trump treats our country with contempt.

"To send the King on a state visit to the US after Trump dismissed our Royal Navy as ‘toys’ is a humiliation, and a sign of a government too weak to stand up to bullies.

"What appalling thing does Trump have to do next to make the Government see sense and cancel the state visit?"

The Guardian quotes this release – and a number of Labour MPs saying much the same thing. Here's Kim Johnson from Liverpool Riverside:

"This war is causing global economic crisis, which will create deeper levels of poverty for my constituent. The royal visit will only embolden Trump. This shouldn’t be allowed to happen; he has slagged off Starmer and undermined our government."

The Joy of Six 1494

"After months of rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves blaming newts and bats for supposedly blocking growth, it’s good to see the Land Use Framework recognises nature restoration is a priority, underpinning all our other uses of land. Senior civil servants in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs now view their ministry as a 'department of land', and regard implementing the Land Use Framework as their overriding mission." Guy Shrubsole welcomes the news that revealing who owns England has just become government policy.

Josiah Mortimer finds that Reform UK councils are dismantling the fight against climate change.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge on the relationship between Karl Popper's account of human knowledge and her view of raising children.

"The new Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man, offers us a character, John Beckett, who is a British Nazi. One of the two founders of Britain’s first Nazi party in 1937, alongside William Joyce, was indeed a man named John Beckett, who was formerly a Labour MP. He had been director of publications for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, but that year he fell out with Mosley. I'm Beckett’s biographer. I'm also his son." Francis Beckett decries the trend for popular films to create populist myths about the second world war – myths that will do us real harm as we confront the new face of fascism in 2026.

"What if Auden had died on the cusp of exile? If, say, his first airplane flight, to Denmark in 1935, had crashed into the sea? Auden would still be remembered. He was, after all, an astonishingly prolific poet, already well known in Europe and America. But he would not be known as a poet of anxious urbanity, and certainly not as a Christian, or even as a leftist. Instead, he would be defined, as many young people are, by the land of his parents and ancestors. The young Auden was, first and foremost, an Englishman, haunted by England's tortured landscape and its war-battered population." James Chappel considers the early poems of W.H. Auden.

Jo Hutchings has some behind-the-scenes photographs of Jon Pertwee filming filming the Doctor Who story The Dæmons in Aldbourne.

The Joy of Six 1487

"On this occasion Starmer has taken both the correct and popular position and stuck to it despite relentless attacks from the right. The result is that it is now his opponents, rather than him, who is having to embark on a humiliating U-turn." Adam Bienkov argues that the government should learn from Farage and Badenoch's reversal on Iran.

The Lancet dissects Robert F. Kennedy Jr's year of failure.

Michael Webb and Rebecca Flook say the choices universities and colleges make about AI are political: "The systems now being woven into education are shaped by a remarkably small group of people. Not 'the internet' as the source of training material. Not 'society' influencing the way we use these tools. It’s shaped by a small leadership class in a handful of companies, operating within specific political and economic pressures."

"I lived in a suburb on the very edge of London, far away from Soho’s Piano Bar or the Waterloo WHSmith glimpsed in the video to ‘West End Girls’. I was a lonely boy at the back of the garden. There weren’t out gay people or role models in my white working class neighbourhood, just an expectation that you would be the same as everyone else, and fit in – or else." John Grindrod reveals how Pet Shop Boys sold city glamour to queer suburban kids.

Parker Henry on Iris Murdoch as a philosopher. It seems to me she is being discovered in this role as her reputation as a novelist fades.

"Two Italian former amateur radio operators, Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, claimed to have recorded audio from an orbiting capsule in the days before Gagarin made his flight, and it was actually the fourth slice of startling audio released by the pair." Was Yuri Gagarin really the first Soviet cosmonaut? David Crookes considers the theory that the USSR launched earlier, unsuccessful manned missions.