The Joy of Six 1550

Jonathan Simons fears that Labour have picked a new leader who communicates well, but whose instincts are wrong: "This easy, reflexive tilt back to the left being about class, and steel mills and coalfields and shipyards and dockyards, and Northern men in Northern towns, is politically weird in 2026."

"Two weeks ago, the Sunday Times published a scoop: that Farage had failed to declare donations from George Cottrell, a convicted money launderer. In doing so, it thrust a new character on to the national stage. Only George Cottrell isn’t a new character. He has operated at the highest levels of UK politics, in plain sight, for more than a decade. And that includes playing a central role in the Brexit campaign." Carole Cadwalladr on the way the media allowed Nigel Farage to operate without scrutiny for so long and why things have suddenly changed.

"The phenomenon of ever-bigger cars has not come about accidentally. It has been sustained by an aggressive marketing campaign, as they are far more profitable for manufacturers than conventional-sized vehicles. They are sold on the basis that they are safer. Extra safety for your family is a key marketing strategy. But while Daddy drives Olivia and Rufus to school in perfect safety, other pupils are in greater peril. And that risk is growing as the cars get ever bigger." Christian Wolmar calls for a halt to carspreading.

Karina Colombo and Elisa Failache find that the rapid expansion of high-speed internet in Uruguay led to a reduction in children's test scores in communication, problem solving and social skills. But it wasn't because the children were spending too long online: it was because their parents were.

"Each retelling reflects contemporary concerns about technological risk, climate uncertainty, social inequality, disaster preparedness, media spectacle and the ethics of dark tourism while maintaining the same underlying core narrative." Jonathan Peter Skinner explains our undying interest in the sinking of the Titanic.

Lucy Janes says the River Clyde is central to modern Glasgow’s identity. "It flows through the core of the city and, as you look downstream, a moment's reflection can lead your mind’s eye out to sea and the wider world."

Labour's weakening of local government will do nothing for voters' confidence in the political system

So Harborough District Council is to disappear, subsumed into a single authority for the whole of the county outside the city of Leicestershire. And Leicester is to be expanded to make the hole in the doughnut bigger.

City boundaries have to be expanded from time to time, but I'm not sure the areas Leicester is taking will be delighted. For some years there has been criticism that its elected mayor Peter Soulsby, now in his fourth term, is keen on prestige projects in the city centre, but less interested in bread-and-butter issues like litter and the state of the pavements out in the suburbs.

Meanwhile, the abolition of all the district and borough councils in the county can only make government feel more distant, and this at a time when our democracy is being challenged from within and without. 

I was in Loughborough today. It's a large town with a university, but it will soon lose Charnwood Borough, the council that looks after it and its hinterland. And Leicestershire, of course, is not the only county seeing huge changes.

This revolution in local government was not mentioned in Labour's last manifesto and there has been little debate about it since the election. It does appear to have been set in place because Labour has a vision for revitalising local democracy, but simply because someone has told ministers that there is an ideal size for a council and many are smaller than this.

I am reminded of a comment by Lord Bonkers:

I’m told that when a Labour junior minister discovered that councils are not All The Same Size, he started screaming and had to be sent home in a taxi. 

Tory fury at VAT on school fees is all about social class

There was a story the other day about dozens of Labour MPs failing to mention the private schools they had attended in their Who's Who entries. I wasn't surprised by this: if I find it difficult to discover which schools a Labour MP attended, I generally assume they were privately educated.

But what was striking was the accusation by the Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake that 

"Their hypocrisy knows no limits. While they plot around the Cabinet table to impose this spiteful tax on education, many Labour MPs have been busy covering up their own private school educations. They have no shame in pulling up the ladder behind them."

Because it is a naked appeal to upper-class solidarity. If you benefited from an unfair educational system, it implies, you are duty-bund to ensure that people of your class can continue to enjoy that advantage.

In reality, there's nothing hypocritical about deciding that a system you went through yourself should be reformed or abolished. I'd say it is a sign of a mature intellect, and we expect the Labour Party, even the timid version of it we see today that never mentions social class, to believe in fairness.

But sending their children to private schools is what upper class people do. It's an important part of their identity. Question the practice, and the clang of closing ranks is resounding.

And that solidarity can take extreme forms, as Alex Renton discovered when he went public about the abuse he had suffered as a small boy at his expensive prep school:

The reaction to my story was immediate – and shockingly personal.  "You’re a class traitor," said one friend, whose son had just started at  Eton. I thought she might have been joking – but she wasn’t the only one.

A few days after publication I was at a smart Edinburgh art gallery  party, standing with a glass of free wine in a group of people I  vaguely know. "Don’t stand too close to Renton!" one of them, an old  Etonian businessman, suddenly announced, grabbing my arm. "He might put  his hand down your trousers!" Most of the group chuckled. 

You may disagree with Labour's imposition of VAT on school fees, but there's nothing hypocritical about the policy.

The Joy of Six 1543

"In many cases, lack of coordination and administrative errors in the Home Office cause failed removals. Complications around booking flights, arranging escorts and other practicalities have all been found to prevent deportations, as well as procedural issues such as lack of travel documents. But continued misrepresentation in the media and political rhetoric means the ECHR has continued to be a scapegoat." Sarah Singer argues that the government's new immigration and asylum bill won't work.

"'I’m Northern Irish', I would say with indignation, every time an English person referred to me as Irish. Growing up in Newtownards in the 1990s there was never any question of my Britishness. British passport, Union Jacks on every lamppost, and fully immersed in British pop culture." Yet Claire JC is now campaigning for a United Ireland – she explains why.

Nick Baird thinks the Liberal Democrats' proposed scheme for Defence Bonds is a bad idea.

"Picked up by the stump microphone as England’s batting unravelled at Trent Bridge, the Kiwis summed up what a lot of us are thinking: 'What are they doing?' It was aimed at the batters in front of them. But by the end of what was an extraordinary, shocking and chaotic day, it felt like the question that summed up English cricket from top to bottom." Elizabeth Ammon asks if anyone in English cricket knows what they are doing.

Timothy Ott on Charles Dickens's visit to Washington: "Dickens and an unnamed official, 'having twice or thrice rung a bell which nobody answered,' simply entered the White House and attempted to find the president on their own."

Nigel Andrew on the forgotten genius of Ivy Compton-Burnett: "The critic Norman Shrapnel wrote: 'Of the two candidates for greatness among comic novelists of our time, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is her prospect that looks the more secure.'"

Liverpool Lib Dem boss accused of using "sex appeal to build fanbase" in cover shoot

Today the Liverpool Echo walks off with our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges requested several copies of Attitude. #JustSayin

Labour and the Liberals in 1924 and today

Malcolm Petrie reviewed two books on the first Labour government for the London Review of Books a couple of years ago. The books were The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government by Peter Clark and The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government by David Torrance.

In the course of his article, Petrie cast light on the relation between Labour and the Liberals – in 1924 and even, to an extent, today:

Rather than seeking to implement a distinctive socialist programme, then, the Labour cabinet had two main ambitions in 1924. The first was to cement the party's position as the progressive alternative to the Conservatives and to prevent a Liberal revival. 

It’s striking, given Labour's ideological debt to Liberalism, how visceral the dislike of the Liberal Party was among its senior figures. One reason for Labour’s emergence had been the unwillingness of local Liberal associations to accept working-class parliamentary candidates; in addition, Liberal MPs had tended to see their Labour counterparts as subordinate elements in the prewar Liberal coalition: useful, but not equal. 

The result was that Labour MPs felt, often justifiably, that the Liberals were unbearable snobs; and, in the case of Lloyd George and his followers, corrupt, dishonest hypocrites. 

As Torrance remarks, MacDonald thought he "could get on with the Tories": while there might be disagreements over policy, they ‘were gentlemen’; the Liberals, however, "were cads". There was also a sharp awareness that Labour and the Liberals were, in effect, competing for a single vacancy: if Labour was to have a long-term future as a governing party, the goal had to be, as Clark argues, "to destroy" the Liberals.

That point about competing for a single vacancy explains a paradox about the Liberals and Liberal Democrats. Liberal in the West Country often sound rather right wing to the rest of the party, yet they and the Conservative Party are at each other's throats there. Equally, Northern urban Liberals sound left wing, but hate the Labour Party.

And Labour's second attitude in 1924 reminds me of that of many Labourites and Liberals over my political lifetime:

The second objective was to repudiate the accusation, voiced most bluntly by Winston Churchill in 1920 when he was still a Liberal, that Labour wasn’t fit to govern. This explains the composition of the cabinet, and Labour ministers' willingness to appear in court dress, despite the unease this provoked on the political left. It is also the reason some of the party’s most prominent policies were discarded as soon as it became clear that Labour could form a government. 

The proposed wealth tax, the capital levy, was dumped: Snowden called it "an electoral millstone". Scottish home rule, a cause inherited from Radical Liberalism, was also abandoned. When, in May 1924, George Buchanan, the ILP MP for Glasgow Gorbals, introduced a Private Members’ Bill on the issue, it was talked out by Conservative backbenchers. 

Buchanan, backed by his fellow Clydesiders, pleaded with MacDonald to grant additional parliamentary time, but MacDonald, who was Scottish and had been a supporter of home rule, refused. Torrance, who makes excellent use of material from the Royal Archives, reveals that MacDonald, in his updates to George V, was happy to criticise, and even ridicule, the advocates of home rule.

Which suggests that the monarch had more political nous than his prime minister, as George V is widely reported to have said to MacDonald: 

"What fools we were not to listen to Gladstone on Ireland!"

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.

Lib Dem billboards attack Farage’s £5m "reward for Brexit"

The only person to profit from Brexit is Nigel Farage, who has walked away with a £5 million payout he described as his reward for Brexit, the Liberal Democrats claimed yesterday.

The Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey launched a nationwide billboard campaign to mark the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum. The campaign highlights how ordinary families across the UK are facing skyrocketing household bills in the aftermath of Brexit, all while taxpayers face a £90 billion hit every year.

Speaking at a rally held in front of one of the billboards in London, Davey said:

"After ten years of the Conservatives’ Brexit experiment, the British public have had enough. We are the ones who have had to pay for their lies.

"Nigel Farage pocketed a £5 million 'reward' for the damage he’s caused, while the rest of us are paying for it dearly. When he promised we would be better off, he clearly only meant himself.

"We are taking over billboards across the UK today to say enough is enough.

“Our message to Andy Burnham and the rest of Labour is clear: drop the damaging red lines on Europe, and drop them now. It’s time to end the chaos and fix our broken relationship with Europe.”

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'."

Al Carns portrays Labour politics as a form of ancestor worship

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Writing about Blue Labour in Liberator at the start of year, I suggested that:

Maurice Glasman’s target voter is a white working-class man in a manual job in the North of England in 1957.

That makes him a modernist when set against Al Carns, judging by the defence minister's resignation statement in the Commons today.

Here's how Carns began:

As honourable members know, I came into politics for one reason. That was to enact change.

But to be able to work out where you’re going, we must realise where we have come from. The Labour party I joined is one that was chiselled out of the mines of the north-east. It was hammered out of the shipyards of Govan, Liverpool and Belfast. And it was forged in the factories of the industrial revolution.

Calloused hands, sore backs, people who did a hard day’s graft and asked for one thing in return – a government that has their back.

That’s the tradition I serve in this house, and it’s a tradition that shaped that decision I took last week.

Commercial shipbuilding had largely disappeared from Britain before Carns was born in 1980 – what remains is almost all in the defence sector. Brian Potter has mapped its demise:

Despite taking virtually any order that it could get, even at loss-making prices, the UK’s shipbuilding industry continued its inexorable decline. Between 1975 and 1985, the UK’s shipbuilding output declined by nearly 90 per cent, and its share of the world market fell from 3.6 per cent to less than 1 per cent. 

British Shipbuilders began re-privatization in 1983 with the passage of the British Shipbuilders Act, and over the next several years most of those newly privatised yards would close. In 2024, the UK produced just 0.01 per cent of the commercial ship tonnage built worldwide that year. In 2022 and 2023, the percentage was 0.

Potter's whole article is worth reading. It provides evidence for the view that many of Britain's economic problems stem from the fact that our managers aren't very good.

Returning to Carns's speech, coal mining in the North East of England reached its peak in 1923, with the last deep mine in the region closing in 2005. And the Industrial Revolution is generally reckoned to have begun in the middle of the 18th century.

If these are really Carns's politics, then they have nothing to do with Labour's voters and members or with the British working class today. That class, forced to exist on temporary work and zero-hours contracts, are the very people who would be hurt by his enthusiasm for yet more welfare cuts.

So when Carns went on to talk about modernising defence, you feared he was going to demand that eight Dreadnoughts be built or call for an improved flintlock for the infantry. 

In fact he had sensible things about the need to grasp how warfare is changing, which means we can give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he didn't believe the first part of his statement either. 

But he's not the only Labour politician who, when asked to explain it, makes their attachment to the party sound like a form of ancestor worship.

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."

Green and Lib Dem Southwark brings government closer to voters

Community councils, which last operated in Southwark in 2016, are to be restored by the Green and Liberal Democrat coalition that took control of the borough from Labour at last month's elections.

Victor Chamberlain is the Lib Dem deputy leader of the council and holder of the neighbourhoods, strategic planning and wellbeing portfolio. He told Southwark News:

"This is something that both parties are very passionate about and making sure that we are supporting and empowering our diverse communities.

"That’s best done by bringing the council back into their neighbourhoods and making sure the council is visible and responding to different challenges.

"We have different challenges but by looking at those issues at a community level, we can create change in a more effective way and spend money more efficiently than presuming that everything is the same, which the previous administration did by being so top down and having everything run from this glass Town Hall on Tooley Street.

"But actually if we talk to communities, if we empower them again, we’ll be able to deliver better change and more long-term change for the communities."

Bringing councils closer to the people is an authentically Liberal agenda. Labour by contrast, has embarked on another round of centralisation in local government.

The Joy of Six 1529

Chris Dillow on Labour's mistaken strategy: "All good businesspeople know that it’s easier to keep a customer than to win a new one; that you can’t always choose your customers; and that one must never 'do a Ratner' and insult your customers. In ignoring all this Labour has been simply grossly amateurish.

Keyvan Hosseini and Dawn-Marie Walker say their research shows that the electric SUV boom is a problem for climate, health and equity: "Larger vehicles can also make streets more dangerous, especially for children. A study using Great Britain crash data found that children aged 0-18 hit by SUVs, rather than passenger cars, had 77 per cent higher odds of fatal injury. For children under nine, the odds were more than three times higher."

"Too many inspections end up evaluating whether schools are good at being inspected. That is not the same thing as being good at educating. We mistake performance for learning." David Didau argues that systems designed to raise standards too often teach schools to look good rather than get better.

"Boudicca and co surprised the Reserve staff by digging canals. Because there are plenty of trees on the edge of the lake, the presumption had been that they would not require canals. The beavers knew otherwise, and the ditches are altering the way water flows around the site. They’ve built two lodges and, as well as stripping bark and eating foliage, have begun to fell some larger trees. In one area, they have cut down most of the young saplings." Isabella Clarke reports on the remarkable success of the Nene Valley beavers.

Discontinued Notes has been to Somerset House to see the the M.C. Escher exhibition.

"The Station Hotel, the original home of the Crawdaddy Club where the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds played some of their earliest gigs, is now a gastro-pub. L'Auberge, the coffee bar at the bottom of Richmond Hill where beatniks and then hippies gathered to trade gossip and other substances, has become a branch of Nando’s. A little further up the hill, there is no trace of Sandover Hall (another early venue for the Stones), Potter’s Music Shop, or the Hanging Lamp, one of the key sixties folk clubs." David Buckingham goes in search of the South West London venues that fostered British rhythm and blues.

The Joy of Six 1527

"In the Wigan constituency, which has always been Labour-held but where Reform picked up 24 out of 25 seats in last month’s local elections, the governing party’s by-election message is focused squarely on Burnham. It is a cartoon of his face emblazoned across leaflets and Correx boards, along with the words “ANDY FOR US”. Labour branding is limited, pretty much, to what is legally required." Sienna Rodgers takes us inside the Labour campaign in the Makerfield by-election.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley interviews Gisèle Pelicot, whose courage transformed the debate around abuse, about survival, reclaiming confidence – and shutting down the tools of sexual exploitation.

Flip Chart Fairy Tales notes the end of the right's state-shrinking dream: "Far from Brexit being the cue for the Thatcher revolution’s last phase, it may mark the end of it altogether. ... It’s no wonder the small-staters are so exercised. They have now realised that tomorrow belongs to someone else."

"When you launch a product that's designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn't that you haven't told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them." Brian Phillips nominates the 40 most rage-inducing problems in tech.

JacquiWine praises Rumer Godden's novel The Battle of the Villa Fiorita: "I loved this evocative, immersive read, a psychologically astute exploration of the impact of a woman’s adulterous affair and subsequent divorce on her two adolescent children, fourteen-year-old Hugh Clavering and his younger sister Caddie, who is almost twelve."

"Born in 1918, Denys Fisher was raised in a railway carriage in a field in Leeds in a family full of inventors, free thinkers, and social reformists with connections to women's suffrage." Eleanor Tait talks to Duncan Fisher about his father, the man who invented Spirograph.

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

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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.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A nation holds its breath

It's been an eventful week with Lord Bonkers, but let me recover my breath and acknowledge a couple of debts.

The idea of Andy Burnham employing a sealed tram came from Andrew Crowther on Bluesky. The list of Labour grandees recalled by Starmer also comes from Bluesky. It was involuntarily contributed by Brynley Heaven, who once wrote a guest post here. I had intended to use the idea but substitute my own choice of names. When it came to it I couldn't improve on his list.

Bad writers borrow, darling, but good writers steal.

Sunday

News reaches me that Labour is taking its rout in the local elections badly. Starmer has drafted Hazel Blears, Nick Raynsford, Ruth Kelly and Ernest Bevin to freshen things up, but there are rumours that Andy Burnham is approaching Euston in a sealed tram. 

Will whichever of the Millipede brothers it is who is left throw his hat into the ring? Will Starmer face them down? A nation holds its breath.

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

Earlier this week...

• A cloud passes over the sun
• In return for a chunky donation
• Drinking gin with Matron
• Bouncing through custard on a Spacehopper
• Too close to the wicker hare
• The Procurator Fiscal at Dingwall

The Joy of Six 1523

Niamh McIntyre had been investigating the spike in racist AI videos aimed at British surfers: "It is often young, entrepreneurial men from south Asia. They tend to have zero interest in UK politics, but the content they create often boosts far-right talking points in Britain and contributes to the increasingly hostile atmosphere for immigrants and British Muslims. They’re part of a booming cottage industry producing commercial AI slop."

Joshi Hermann advises us to stop looking for "Burnhamism". He's bee reporting the mayor of Greater Manchester for six years and has never been able to locate it.

"The culls were not only cruel: they were ineffective. Thousands of badgers died, yet bTB [bovine tuberculosis] rates in cattle remained high. But rather than end the cull or re-evaluate the policy, the government decided to roll it out to even more parts of the country." The Hunt Saboteurs Association welcomes the end of England's badger cull, which has seen nearly 250,000 animals, shot or trapped.

"It is not often I get angry, but a recent encounter with a standing stone has really annoyed – and shocked me." The Urban Prehistorian condemns the treatment of the Bogleys Stone of Fife.

Melanie Williams has been researching Muriel Box, Muriel Sly and British women scriptwriters in general. "Medical comedy was all the rage in the fifties – from Doctor in the House to Carry On Nurse – but it seems an honest comedic look at pregnancy and childbirth may have been a little too far beyond British cinema’s comfort zone at the time."

The long career of E.J. "Tiger" Smith as Warwickshire and England's wicketkeeper, test umpire and batting guru is considered by Giles Wilcock.