Lord Bonkers' Diary: I hurry to book the rather singed Kwarteng for next year

I'm pleased to see the Well-Behaved Orphans' having a better time of it today. Lord Bonkers had the Village Hall renamed as the Alexandra Hall Hall Hall during Donald Trump's first term, and I note that he very nearly quotes an Elvis Costello lyric here.

Tuesday

To the Alexandra Hall Hall Hall for the Christmas party I hold every year for the village children and Well-Behaved Orphans – ginger beer flows like vintage champagne and I insist on trying every cake to make sure it’s up to snuff. The afternoon’s entertainment is provided by a strangely familiar magician. Then it hits me: it’s Kwasi Kwarteng! 

He, you may recall, was Chancellor for several days under the reign of that strange, pixie-looking woman who jumped ship to the Tories when Conference refused to support her motion saying she should be Queen. Unfortunately, Kwarteng proves no more adept as a prestidigitator than he was as custodian of the nation’s finances. In attempting to retrieve a rabbit from his hat, he sets fire to the stage; and as he runs about in a panic, his trousers fall down. 

Fortunately, the youth of Rutland are of stronger mettle than Old Etonians: a stream of ginger beer is directed at the heart of the blaze, and the WBOs form a human chain to bring pails of water from the pond. The consensus among my young guests is that it has been the best party ever, so I hurry to book the rather singed Kwarteng for next year.

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

Earlier this week...

• The Duke of Buccleuch is pretty chuffed too

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

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

Mark Garnett

Agenda, 2025, £20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This review appears in issue 432 of Liberator magazine.

By welcoming Natalie Elphicke, Keir Starmer risks making Labour look desperate or devoid of principle

Embed from Getty Images

When Natalie Elphicke crossed the floor last week, there were plenty of us who had doubts about Keir Starmer's wisdom in allowing her to take the Labour whip.

But there were also worldly commentators who criticised us as political obsessives. The average voter, we were reminded, knows very little about politics. All they will notice is that a Conservative MP has joined Labour, and they will conclude that Starmer and Labour must be doing well.

But it's now beginning to look as though the average voter will come away from this episode with the conclusion that Labour will take anyone and must be desperate or devoid of principle.

Longstanding readers of this blog will not be surprised. For Calder's Third Law of politics holds that:

When politicians do something which they think is very clever, it will eventually turn out to have been very stupid.

Kwasi Kwarteng's only budget exemplified this. Boy, did it exemplify it!

Incidentally, you can find all seven of my Laws of Politics in an earlier post on here.

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Tony Heron and Gabriel Siles-Brügge argue that the decision to ditch the UK’s Department for International Trade is a tacit acknowledgement that attempts to seize Brexit 'opportunities' through trade have been a failure.

"The 'grassroots' backlash to a traffic reduction scheme in Oxfordshire is being boosted by an international network of established climate and Covid science deniers and amplified by right-wing media." Adam Barnett, Michaela Herrmann and Christopher Deane reveal all.

"His claim to fame, or rather infamy, will be that of being a man who once wrote a PhD thesis on the links between the political and economic dimensions of a currency crisis, who was himself being fired for causing a currency crisis." Charles Sirey says Kwasi Kwarteng should have read his own book War and Gold.

James Butler reviews three books on the crisis in social care.

"When Striplings (1934), the first volume, appeared in America, it was acclaimed as a comic masterpiece. 'A rare combination of Wodehouse and Rabelais!' declared the president of the American Booksellers Association. Reviews were so enthusiastic the book went into five printings in less than a month." Neglected Books introduces us to the Biff and Netta trilogy by Nina Warner Hooke.

A London Inheritance sets off on a tour of Hampstead.

The inescapable boom of Kwasi Kwarteng

Not being a Sun reader, you may have missed this entertaining extract from Harry Cole and James Heale's Out of the Blue - a biography of Liz Truss that turned into an account of her spectacular implosion:

In early January, Johnson’s chief whip Mark Spencer was hosting Scottish secretary ­Alister Jack on a day’s shooting at an estate in Devon.

Between drives, the tweed-clad pair were in a Land Rover with others, when Jack’s phone rang.

As he was behind the wheel, Jack answered on the built-in hands-free.

On the other end was the inescapable boom of Kwasi Kwarteng, voicing fears the PM was on his knees.

“If it all goes wrong, what happens? Are you a Liz guy?”, Kwarteng asked Jack, with the eavesdropping chief whip flitting between silent laughter and seething incredulity.

“No, no, no I am not,” replied Jack.

“Oh,” said a disheartened Kwarteng, “so you are a Rishi guy?”

“No, let’s be clear Kwasi, I am a Boris guy,” hit back Jack. “And furthermore I have the Chief Whip in the car with me.”

Collapse of stout party. Liz Truss phoned not long afterwards to assure tall concerned that Kwarteng had got carried away and was not canvassing Cabinet support on her orders. Which only strengthened their conclusion that he was.

After this you would have expected Truss to have concluded that Kwarteng was not a man to entrust with a job requiring subtlety or sound judgement - such as running a whelk stall, for instance.

Not a bit of it. She made him her chancellor, with results we shall still be paying for years from now.

Market Harborough will lose its NatWest branch in January

NatWest Bank is to close its Market Harborough Branch in January, reports the Leicester Mercury.

The decision has been condemned by the president of the Market Harborough Chamber of Trade and Commerce. Kyra Williams told the Mercury:

"We've got a market here and not all of our traders actually use digital banking.

"So it does exclude a large cohort of especially small businesses. I think the Government needs to intervene, really, and force banks to provide a physical network of banks that people and small businesses can use.

"Because I think it is going to be a problem, unless we move to a cashless system there are always going to be people who do need physical banks."

It seems there's not much enthusiasm among small business for turbo-capitalism along the lines of the Truss/Kwarteng model.

On the same page, you can hear the views of the local Liberal Democrat councillor Barbara Johnson.

My mother banked with the NatWest and I was grateful it had a local branch where I could sort out things like the power of attorney in her last months. It will be harder to do things like that after the branch has closed.

And a word for that lovely little building, which must have been built for a small local bank in the 19th century.

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"It appears those who called Friday’s mini-budget a “special fiscal operation” had it right. Not just because of the subterfuge involved in undertaking a full-scale budget under the guise of a 'Growth Plan 2022 speech,' but also because of the government’s inability to foresee its self-destructive consequences." Robin Niblett explains why markets don't buy the government's growth plan.

Will Lloyd witnessed the eclipse of Jeremy Corbyn's supporters at the Labour Party Conference.

"Looking for the reasons for children's behaviour is often equated with 'the soft bigotry of low expectations', lack of responsibility and chaos. Here's why that's a mistake." Take it away, Naomi Fisher.

Harry Cheadle opposes Style Guide Liberalism, which he defines as "a fixation on terms and language that is well-intentioned but inevitably creates a murky layer of jargon between speaker and listener, writer and reader. However egalitarian its aims, it inevitably results in an in-group and out-group."

Corporal punishment can still be used in schools in 19 US states. Jamie Davis Smith looks at its long-term effects.

"It was the photograph that did it. Joe Root pictured on a Scottish golf course while Yorkshire supporters were coming to terms with relegation. Root, the epitome of Yorkshire cricket, grinning broadly alongside Michael Vaughan, Kevin Pietersen and Piers Morgan (none of them particularly renowned for checking the county cricket scores), on a day that had reduced many White Rose loyalists to dismay." David Hopps says there's a danger that professional cricket is being asked to redesign itself for the benefit of established players who rarely play it.

The only Leicester councillor elected as a Tory leaves the party and calls on Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng to resign

The only member of Leicester City Council elected as a Conservative has resigned from the party and called on Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng to resign.

Daniel Crewe told BBC News:

"When Liz Truss got in, I didn't think she was right for the job but I thought at least I'd give her the benefit of the doubt and see what she was willing to do.

"But when they introduced that budget, it's going to detrimentally affect the poorest people in society whilst looking after the richest.

"It's old school conservativism and I can't be a part of that."

He also told the BBC that Liz Truss should resign and take Kwasi Kwarteng with her.

Crewe became Leicester City Council's only Tory member when he won a by-election in Humberstone and Hamilton ward last summer. He will now sit as an Independent.

A Labour councillor later joined the Conservative Party and, as of tonight, remains a member.

GUEST POST Why we need an emergency Lib Dem special conference this year

Ed Davey, party members and Britain as a whole need a Liberal Democrat emergency special conference, argues David Evans.

In less than 26 minutes last Friday Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng took an axe to what remains of the British economy and to the hopes and prospects of so many people, and totally destroyed the last vestiges that the Conservatives are the party of Economic competence.

By the end of the day the pound had crashed over 4 per cent in value (and is still falling) and the FTSE a further 2 per cent, undermining the savings, pensions, and prospects of workers, the retired and the unemployed, be they teachers, doctors, farmers, workers in industry or workers in entertainment.  It affects them all.

Earlier this month, the Liberal Democrats' federal board and federal conference committee had decided to completely cancel the party's annual conference and put everything on hold until Spring conference is held In York next March.  

While the decision that it would be seen to be inappropriate to hold conference during the period leading up to the Queen’s funeral was justified, it was misguided to think that the Lib Dems, as a party, should have no opportunity to say anything about the new prime minister and her deeply damaging new ideas for six months.

Every Lib Dem who met Liz Truss when she was, temporarily, a member of our party seems to have quickly formed the view that she had an eye for self-publicity and an extremely radical view on things. But it wasn’t a Liberal Democrat view, as she quickly found out when they began to question the reasoning behind her vision.

Everyone who works in business knows that real growth and progress comes slowly, and need careful planning and sustained amounts of effort over years and sometimes decades. The desire for a quick fix, a dash for growth based on throwing vast amounts of borrowed money at its supporters, underpinned by a total lack of understanding of simple economic realities is no substitute for hard work and effort.

Sacking a permanent secretary on Day One and calling the most outrageous gamble with our nation’s economy "a fiscal event" in order to avoid Office of Budget Responsibility scrutiny shows linguistic cunning that Vladimir Putin would be proud of. 

We all know that our party has a proud record of economic competence thanks to Vince and his spell as secretary of state for business, innovation and skills - a time when he actually got industry leaders talking to each other and dealing with the fundamental issues they faced.  He even started to develop a proper industrial strategy, something the UK hasn’t had since the 1970s.  

However, we can’t expect Ed and his few close advisers to develop and make a case for a radically different Lib Dem solution to Conservative incompetence on their own in a five-minute slot on the BBC between coverage of the Labour Party Conference and the sports news.

He needs the support of the whole party and help from party members to develop a radical Liberal Democrat alternative to this Tory-created crisis, and a forum that will cut through into the national media, so we can present these to the country.  

We can only do this by being more wide ranging, radical and comprehensively better in our proposals, and to do this he, and we, need a conference.

But we don’t need yet another set of deadly dull Lib Dem policy motions that simply say

1. Conference notes - Things are bad.
2. Conference believes - Things should be better.
3. Conference further notes – The Government are responsible for this mess.
4. Conference reaffirms – Everything we ever said about this in the past, that the government still hasn’t done.
5. Conference calls on – The Government to magically change its mind and do what we want.

When what need to get cut through is

• This is the solution and Lib Dems Commit to do everything it can in government to sort it all out

Currently there are good Lib Dems working on a solution to these problems, but to make it successful we need a federal conference to give it the publicity it needs.

So in summary

1. I note - Things are bad.
2. I believe - Things can be made much better.
3. I further note – That we have better solutions but we need to promote, debate and agree them, quickly.
4. I reaffirm – That we need to hold this government responsible for the mess
5. I call on - the federal conference committee and federal board to convene an emergency special conference later this year to allow these to be discussed
6. To make sure this happens - Every Lib Dem who cares about our country’s future and our party’s continuing relevance should formally request that the party call an emergency special conference later this year, in accordance with Section 6.3 of the party’s constitution, to discuss our solution to the economic crisis that the Conservative Party has unleased on the British people.

David Evans is a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat.

The Joy of Six 1076

Sarah O'Connor, in a Twitter thread, fact-checks five key assertions from Britannia Unchained (which was co-authored by our new PM and chancellor) and finds them all untrue.

Putin’s Western apologists don’t reflect the usual conflict between left and right, argues Quillette, but offer an example of the two poles making common cause against the centre.

Jeff Sparrow argues that the stronger resistance to fossil fuels grows, the more laws spring up to contain activists: "In Australia, where fossil fuel lobbyists exert tremendous influence over the major political parties, the trend has probably gone further than anywhere else."

"Lord Salisbury, the prime minister at the end of her reign, did everything he could to escape from 'the gruesomeness' of public ceremonies. The result was that the few ceremonial occasions under Victoria often involved embarrassment: marching columns that concertinaed, coffins carried the wrong way, words that were misread and ceremonies that were botched." Adrian Wooldridge examines how the British crown learnt to do pageantry in the 20th century.

"So profound was the PM's passion of the moving picture, her first words on being introduced to Lord Attenborough were 'Why didn't you come years ago?' 'Because I wasn't asked, darling,' Dickie replied." Richard Luck on Margaret Thatcher's ambitions to revive the British film industry.

Simon Matthews reviews a new biography of Aleister Crowley: "Along the way we meet W.B. Yeats, who scorned Crowley as a writer, Clifford Bax, Dennis Wheatley, Gerald Yorke (personal representative of the Dalai Lama), Tom Driberg, Anthony Powell, Arthur Calder-Marshall and Clifford Bax."