Zack Polanski and Alistair Darling: Two soft rides from the Guardian

I'm late to the party on last week's Guardian interview with Zach Polanski, but I've still decided to come.

Reading it today, I find it's not the first time the Guardian has allowed the politician to present a carefully edited version of his past without challenge.

Zoe Williams¹ tells us that Polanksi:

started by joining the Lib Dems, and standing as a councillor in north London in 2016. “That was for one very clear reason,” he says. “Proportional representation – it’s always been really important to me.” He joined the Greens the following year...

But Polanski didn't stand in a London borough election: he stood for the Greater London Assembly. And, a prominent figure on social media, he clearly had higher ambitions with the Liberal Democrats. 

Some say he had his eye on the by-election in Richmond Park, and made up his mind to leave the Lib Dems once the local party decided to stick with Sarah Olney as their candidate.

And then there was that notorious article where he told a Sun journalist he could make her breasts bigger by using hypnosis.²

Reading it now, it looks like a puff piece for his business rather than a hatchet job. Yet Williams defends it on the grounds that "he was only just 30".

But this is not the first such interview I've seen in the Guardian. Here's Decca Aitkenhead profiling the late Alistair Darling back in 2008:

Studying law at Aberdeen, he stood for election in the student union, but not for a party. "I was just quite interested in getting things done." His manifesto favoured "strictly bread-and-butter issues, things like food prices in the student refectory". When he joined the Labour party in 1977, he never expected to be more than a member.

The truth was rather different and will surprise anyone who remembers Darling in days as Gordon Brown's chancellor.

Here's George Galloway remembering a meeting with Darling in 1973:

When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf.

And joining Labour didn't curb his militant tendencies:

Later ... he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze.

The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy.

Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left.

The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time.

The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been.

Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.

A reader asks: So what's the moral of all this?

Liberal England replies: I suppose it's that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the Guardian.

The reader persists: That a bit obvious, isn't it?

Liberal England admits: I suppose it is. To be honest, I just wanted to repeat that George Galloway story one last time. Oh, and to show that I've found how to do the numbers for footnotes in superscript.³

Notes

1. Nevertheless, I won't hear a word against Zoe Williams: in my press officer days she was always a pleasure to deal with. Polly Toynbee, by contrast, once made me miss my train.
2. I'm not scandalised by that Sun article, it's just that it reminds me of when P.G. Wodehouse's Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts, turns out to be a designer of ladies' underwear. And Polanski's suggested strategy of concentrating on winning an urban, Corbynite vote will appeal to many Green members.
3. See?

Remembering Adrian Slade (1936-2025)

I knew that Adrian Slade had died because I saw we were discussing commissioning an obituary of him for the next Liberator. But I had not found any announcement of the sad news until this morning, when I saw this notice in The Times:

ADRIAN SLADE
Adrian died peacefully on 24th January 2025, aged 88. CBE, cabaret performer,adman and Liberal politician. Husband of Sue. Father of Nicola and Rupert. Much loved by friends and family.

The notice also links to a memorial page for him.

Discussing comedy with Adrian was one of the perks of helping out with production of Liberal Democrat News at party conference - I have mentioned his memories of Peter Cook, whom he auditioned for the Cambridge Footlights, here more than once.

But Adrian was also a politician. He won Richmond at the GLC elections of 1981, defeating Edward Leigh in the process. to become its only Liberal member.

What was impressive was how well known he was. When we went down to the bar after a Liberal meeting, there were always people who came up to him to sat hello or ask for advice. If Adrian had been the parliamentary candidate, we might well have won Richmond earlier than 1997.

That GLC victory was not without cost for Adrian, as the Conservatives contested the election lodged an election petition, contesting the result because of technical errors in Slade's return of expenses. The election result stood, but he was left with potentially ruinous legal expenses. His showbiz friends organised a comedy evening to help pay the bills - sadly the link in my post that told you who was there no longer works.

His experiences of Ken Livingstone were more pleasant. When he went to see Ken, the GLC leader as a new councillor, and was asked which committees he would like to be on. They then fell to discussing where Adrian should sit so as to upset the Tories most.

So farewell to Adrian Slade. We shan't see his like again.

Teenage thug threatened to castrate ex-London Mayor Ken Livingstone

 

"You know who else only had one ball?"

The Evening Standard wins our Headline of the Day competition.

When Ken Livingstone advertised Red Leicester

In 1989 Ken Livingstone made this television commercial for the National Dairy Council - thanks to Alwyn Turner for tweeting it.

He has given me an excuse to say nice things about both Livingstone and Red Leicester.

When Ken Livingstone was suspended by the Labour Party in 2017 because he wouldn't stop talking about Hitler I blogged:

I am sad for Ken because I remember him as leader of the Greater London Council.

It's not that I thought his policies were great, but the way he conducted himself was a model for any aspiring politician.

Though this was the era in which the Sun labelled him "the most odious man in Britain", he remained unfailingly calm in interviews and was witty too.

He was a star. When he resigned his seat and fought a by-election as part of the campaign against the abolition of the GLC, I helped the Liberal candidate Steve Harris.

One Saturday the great and good of Richmond Liberals turned up to help. Their children asked if they could go on Ken's bus.

And then there's Red Leicester.

If you know it only from the plastic-wrapped supermarket version then you have missed a treat.

A proper farmhouse Leicester has a sweet, earthy flavour and a wonderful, almost creamy, texture.

Norman Baker: "Boris Johnson was lazy and petulant"

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The former Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker has written a piece on the departure of Boris Johnson for iNews.

When he was a transport minister Norman saw Boris Johnson, then the mayor of London, close up.

I think it is fair to say he was not impressed:

He spent time and money on a white elephant Boris Island airport that was never going to fly. He promoted a garden bridge that has been torn to shreds by the Public Accounts Committee. 

He introduced at vast cost a huge fleet of new Routemasters with open platforms and conductors, only to withdraw all the conductors and keep the doors shut. He gave us a cable car crossing at Greenwich that is a huge drain on the public finances. 

And he bought water cannon vehicles from Germany in an attempt to bounce the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, into allowing them on London’s streets, and when she resisted, he went behind her back to David Cameron. Quite rightly, she told him where to get off. 

He had a habit of running straight to the Prime Minister of the Chancellor to get his way, ignoring successive Transport Secretaries. He was politically highly partisan in a way that was out of line with the coalition, refusing to engage with Lib Dem ministers even where we could be helpful to him. 

And behind that bonhomie, he was lazy and petulant. That a lot went right was down to his inheritance from Ken Livingstone, and the highly competent Peter Hendy at his right-hand side. What worked did so in spite of Boris, not because of him.

So farewell then, Red Ken, You were a class act once

Jonn Elledge mourns the embarrassment Ken Livingstone has become, arguing that he made a very good job of being London's mayor.

I am sad for Ken because I remember him as leader of the Greater London Council.

It's not that I thought his policies were great, but the way he conducted himself was a model for any aspiring politician.

Though this was the era in which the Sun labelled him "the most odious man in Britain", he remained unfailingly calm in interviews and was witty too.

He was a star. When he resigned his seat and fought a by-election as part of the campaign against the abolition of the GLC, I helped the Liberal candidate Steve Harris.

One Saturday the great and good of Richmond Liberals turned up to help. Their children asked if they could go on Ken's bus.

Contrast that with the Ken Livingstone of today.

It's not just that he is wrong about Hitler and Zionism - David Baddiel is good on this. It's that I have no idea what he was hoping to achieve by raising the subject in the first place. And now it has come to be an obsession that risks being all he will be remembered for

So farewell then, Red Ken, You were a class act once.

The Labour leadership is split between Kennites and Corbynites

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The cool kids agree that this Labour Uncut article from the end of last year by Atul Hatwal got it about right:

At the heart of the split is a long-running tension between two factions of the hard left: Socialist Action and the Labour Representation Committee. 

In the corner on the left is Socialist Action – a Trotskyist group most closely associated with Ken Livingstone with several of his advisers from his time as Mayor, either members or supporters. 

As Livingstone himself said, “Almost all of my advisers had been involved in Socialist Action,” 

“It was the only rational left-wing group you could engage with. They used to produce my socialist economic policies. It was not a secret group.” ...

Prominent Livingstone City Hall alumni, Simon Fletcher and Neale Coleman, now occupy central roles in Jeremy Corbyn’s office as chief of staff and head of policy and rebuttal while the former Mayor is co-chair of Labour’s defence review.

And the other group?

In the corner even further to the left is the Labour Representation Committee. (LRC) Founded in 2004 (lifting the name of Labour’s original founding committee from 1900) by John McDonnell, the LRC has a more doctrinaire and unbending view of the path to socialism. 

Compromise is to be minimised – the frog needs to be dropped into boiling water with the lid clamped tightly shut to prevent escape. 

The majority of Jeremy Corbyn’s inner sanctum is drawn either from the LRC or sympathetic to its perspective. 

For example, John McDonnell MP remains the LRC chair, Corbyn adviser Andrew Fisher was until recently its Secretary, Jon Lansman, who runs Momentum, is on its national committee and Katy Clark, the former MP and now political secretary to Jeremy Corbyn is a long term supporter. 

Until his election as leader, Jeremy Corbyn was one of the most prominent MPs affiliated to the LRC.

The resignation of Neale Coleman suggests the Kennites are losing.

But whatever the truth of that, enjoy the picture of a young John McDonnell above.

Jonathan Meades vs Jackie Ballard

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A paragraph in a 2013 interview with Jonathan Meades intrigues:

He loathed the Taunton public school to which his parents managed to send him, a "philistine place" he has described as "hell". It took him, or so he says, 27 years to return to the town, and when he did, he got his revenge by sending it up in one of his restaurant reviews (he was then the offal-scoffing and somewhat porcine restaurant critic of the Times). The locals and its liberal democrat MP went nuts.

Can this be true?

A 1998 story from BBC News shows that it is:

His article has angered residents so much that the MP has demanded an apology. 

Meades asked in The Times article if the restaurant would thrive in the town. 

He questions whether the "three headed sheep shaggers" would come down from the hills to support the establishment. 

And if they did, he continues, where would they park their combine harvester or tie up their cow?

And who was the Liberal Democrat MP who went nuts?

Local reaction to the article has led the town's Liberal Democrat MP Jackie Ballard to table a Common's (sic) motion seeking an apology. 

She said: "I think its a disgraceful slur on the county town of Somerset and also Mr Meades made some crude comments on the natives of Somerset who he thinks are not sophisticated enough to enjoy a good restaurant. 

"I can assure him they are."

And Jackie Ballard really did table an early day motion on the subject. It ran:

That this House deplores remarks made by Jonathan Meades in The Times Magazine of Saturday 4th July regarding the people and town of Taunton; knows that Taunton is the county town of Somerset and it has many natural and man-made assets including the River Tone and the recently enhanced, thriving town centre; recognises that Taunton is at the heart of a rural community and is also the home of Somerset county cricket, the Charity Commissioners, the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, The Castle Hotel and many other nationally known organisations and businesses; and calls on Mr Meades to apologise specifically to the people of the Somerset levels and the Blackdown Hills for his obscene and offensive comments and to the people of Somerset for his unwarranted slur on their county town.

There were 11 signatories: Jackie, nine loyal Liberal Democrats and, for some odd reason, Ken Livingstone.

Meades's reaction to the affair? According to BBC News:

Mr Meades said he will not withdraw his comments as they were meant light heartedly . 

He said: "She has no sense of humour, she is after all a Liberal Democrat."

People can be so unfair.

Denis Healey: The Best Prime Minister Labour Never Had?

While Britain watched The Great British Bake Off, BBC2 showed this excellent documentary on the career of Denis Healey.

You can now view it on BBC iPlayer, and I urge you to do so.

The still above shows Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn and a young Jeremy Corbyn during the 1981 deputy leadership election in which Healey narrowly defeated Benn and quite possibly saved the Labour Party.

It seems Corbyn is determined to ensure that achievement is only temporary.

Boris bikes for Leicester?

One of Boris Johnson's achievements as mayor has been to make a bicycle hire scheme - long a radical dream - work in London, even if those in the know will tell you this scheme was developed under Ken Livingstone.

Now Leicester's mayor is consulting over bringing the idea to the city.

The Leicester Mercury quotes deputy mayor Rory Palmer:

"We want as many people has possible to give their views on the scheme, to help us decide whether it would be suitable for Leicester. 

"Encouraging cycling in Leicester is a major part of our transport policy. 

"The reduction in car journeys will also help improve air quality and people's health."

The consultation closes on 6 June. You can respond via the City Council website.

Broadcasters need to play fair on mayoral elections

One encouraging aspect of Thursday's elections was the widespread rejection of the mayoral system of local government.

Enthusiasm for that system is a hangover from Blairite heyday, when supporters of debate and discussion just did not get it and Richard Branson was expected to become the first elected mayor of London. The fact that David Cameron still shares that enthusiasm reminds us how much he has modelled his act on Tony Blair's and makes us suspect that, deep down, he is equally shallow.

But the mayoral system is here to stay, in London and a few other cities. And that means the broadcasters have to come to terms with it.

In the recent London campaign, the broadcasters decided that there were four significant candidates: Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone, Brian Paddick and Jenny Jones. Sure enough, they finished in the first four places in the voting - though, sadly, not in that order.

You could take this as confirmation of the broadcasters' good judgement, but the danger is that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Had Siobhan Benita, for instance, been granted equal airtime with the big four it is quite possible that she would have finished third. And the sort of people who work for the BBC are likely to feel warmer about the Greens than they do about UKIP, whatever the parties' objective prospects in a particular contest.

Mayoral politics has for me an irredeemable anti-democratic taint - the desire for a strong leader who will get things done without wasting time on talk. But I presume that one of the reasons its supporters like the system is because it bypasses political parties and allows new figures to break through.

For that to happen, those new figures need to be treated on a more equitable basis. And in an increasingly multi-party system the broadcasters must stop trying to pick winners and leave that to the electorate.

The rule must be equal airtime for all mayoral candidates.

Publishing candidates' tax returns will diminish our politics

"Why don't we end this by everybody just publishing what they earn and then what they pay in tax?" suggested Jenny Jones. And they have.

BBC News reports:

In the 2010-11 tax year, Conservative Mr Johnson paid £210,410 income tax on an income of £473,280. 

Labour's Mr Livingstone paid £22,691 tax on an income of £94,568. He also paid £11,970 in corporation tax. 

Liberal Democrat Mr Paddick paid £14,534 in tax on an income of £76,804. 

And Green Party candidate Ms Jones paid £15,577 in income tax on an income of £63,028.

I cannot summon up any enthusiasm for the practice of candidates publishing their tax returns.

Yes, it's amusing to see that Ken "no one should be allowed to vote in a British election, let alone sit in Parliament, unless they pay their full share of tax" Livingstone is a sharper operator than Boris Johnson. But the problems with his candidacy go deeper than that.

I suggested four years ago I said:

I suspect that a widespread feeling that he had outstayed his welcome was one of the reasons for Ken Livingstone's defeat this time.

And he still won't go away. As to why: blame the mayoral system itself.

What requiring candidates to publish these returns - now a precedent has been set I imagine it will soon become impossible for anyone to avoid doing it - will do is further narrow the pool of people who can become political candidates.

If you have are self-employed or have set up a business, you will be vulnerable to accusations that you have not paid enough tax. But if you have gone to university and then worked for one of the main parties at Westminster and then been parachuted into a safe seat, you tax returns will be impeccable.

But we have too many people like that in the Commons already.

We Liberal Democrats don't have such things as safe seats, but the argument I made last year is still valid:

We should not be asking people to vote for us because we are better people or because we work harder than the other parties. We should be asking them to vote for us because we have good judgement and a convincing set of solutions to the problems the country faces.

I'm sorry to quote so many of my old posts, but if I don't do it, who will?

London Mayoral elections: It's déjà vu all over again

Congratulations to Brian Paddick to on being chosen as the Liberal Democrat candidate in next year's London Mayoral elections.

While we are at it, congratulations to Boris Johnson on being chosen as the Conservative candidate. And congratulations to Ken Livingstone on being chosen as the Labour candidate.

That's right: the big three parties will be fielding the same three candidates in 2012 as they did in 2008.

Why is this? I suspect the answer lies in the Mayoral system itself and the way it makes it harder for people to build a reputation in local politics.

As James Graham wrote back in 2007:

The weakness of the GLA is directly relevant to the difficulty that parties have in finding mayoral candidates. 

The ideal candidate is a big personality who already has a track record of success and a public profile. Back in the day, it was suggested that Tony Blair had Richard Branson in mind for the job. We’ve had talk radio hosts suggested (Nick Ferrari), think tank directors (Nick Boles), cheesy DJs (Mike Read), senior politicians and ex-ministers (Simon Hughes and Steve Norris), but the only candidate who has ever enjoyed public support is someone whose only claim to fame is that he used to run the GLC. In many respects, this is a good thing, and a valuable corrective to the perception that career politics is all bad and disliked by the public. 

But the GLA is not the GLC. Love it or hate it, people took great interest in what the GLC did. Livingstone wasn’t the only personality that emerged from it (Tony Banks, John McDonnell). If we had the GLC now, we would already have half a dozen people being lined up as possible successors to Ken’s crown. Instead, if Livingstone went under a bendy bus tomorrow, Labour would have more difficulty than any other party in finding a credible candidate.

The balance between the mayor and the city council is a problem in Leicester too. In theory the council should be holding the mayor to account: in practice it is the mayor who settles old scores holds the council to account.

Those who favour elected mayors need to solve this problem if they are to convince me of their case.

Six of the Best 102

Andy Crick wishes Boris Johnson would go away.

While Rachel Olgeirsson has had enough emails from Cowley Street and Lib Dem Presidential candidates already.

David Maclean wonders what is going on within Leicester Labour Party: "When Vaz’s man can’t get the outright blessing of his own party members, something is up."

By banning a mildly satirical advertisement for ice cream, the Advertising Standards Authority is reintroducing a blasphemy law to Britain, argues the National Secular Society.

Tim Worstall complains we have "this crazed system whereby if at one point in your life you need a housing subsidy then you get that subsidy for all your life. To take just one example. At some point Lee Jasper qualified for a council house in London. Yet, when he was earning £100,000 a year as an advisor to Ken Livingstone he was still in that council house and still getting that subsidy."

This weekend will see the first passenger trains between Porthmadog and Caernarfon on the Welsh Highland Railway, reports the BBC North West Wales pages. The service will open to the public next spring.