Zack Polanski in a Yes to AV campaign video

I remember very little of the Alternative Vote referendum campaign except that it turned out to be a referendum on Nick Clegg instead. The only party that much liked AV was the Labour Party, and it campaigned against it.

So thanks to Josiah Mortimer for posting this video from the Yes side, which turns out to feature a young Zack Polanski in the days before he joined the Liberal Democrats. Presumably he turned up here because he was still working as an actor.

I don't imagine this video converted many people. Though it sets out to show that AV is simple, it risks making it seem rather complicated. Worse than that, I just don't care whether Zack and his friends go for a coffee, go to the pub or fall down an unmarked mine shaft. It's dull.

Perhaps it looks forward to the Bluesky assumption that anyone who does not share our politics must be stupid. But at least it sets out to educate them, rather than blocking them and then boasting that it has done so to its friends.

Another mercy is that it doesn't feature Stephen Fry, which it might well have done. Dan Snow, as fans of Liberal trivia will know, is Lloyd George's great great grandson.

Later. I'm told this video wasn't issued by the official Yes campaign but by an independent group of activists. They made it because they thought the official campaign material was so poor.

For an informed view of the Yes campaign, see this post by James Graham.

Lloyd George’s oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall

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In 1992 the journalist Edward Pearce published a diary of that year's general election campaign. It was reviewed for the London Review of Books by Peter Clarke.

Here is Clarke on Lloyd George:

Lloyd George, too, did his bit to lower the tone of politics once secularisation had made the pulpit an obsolescent model. 

As A.J.P. Taylor liked to point out, Lloyd George's platform oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall. He could control an audience with the inspired timing of a stand-up comic. His one-liner about the House of Lords – "five hundred men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed" – was fit to bring the house down. 

He was the politician as entertainer, subordinating reason to emotion as much as any party political broadcast in the last campaign. He could pirouette, like Chaplin, from the broadest belly-laugh to tear-jerking pathos without having to say: "but to be serious for a moment, ladies and gentlemen ..." 

Yet, as the last of the great pre-electronic politicians, Lloyd George became a hapless victim of technological advance in the Twenties. While, like Archie Rice, he was still having a go on the public stage, Stanley Baldwin stole into the sitting-room of anyone lucky enough to have a new wireless. 

His avoidance of histrionics in favour of the fireside manner was pitched perfectly for his middle-brow, middle-class constituency, and showed that the public meeting, in its classic form, was doomed. Baldwin could be relied upon to rise to the small occasion.

Asquith: The Movie

This television play, screened in 1983 as part of the ITV series Number 10, deals with Asquith's battle with the House of Lords to secure the passage of the budget in 1910.

That measure has gone down in history as Lloyd George's budget, but Asquith himself had done much of the work on it while he was still chancellor.

One thing that must have confused viewers at the time is that Asquith is played by David Langton, who had become well known a few years before for playing a Tory MP, Richard Bellamy in the wildly popular series Upstairs, Downstairs. Think of it as a superior version of Downton Abbey.

As to young Puffin Asquith, I have a book signed by him.

BOOK REVIEW Liberalism by Jonathan Parry

This review appears in the latest Liberator (issue 431), which can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's website.

Liberalism

Jonathan Parry

Agenda Publishing (2025), £19.99

In this short book, written as part of a series that promises “incisive and provocative introductions to topics, ideas and events for students wanting to know more about how we got where we are today”, Jonathan Parry provides a history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats and makes you think again about the relation between political philosophy and political practice.

The first three chapters deal with the years 1830 to 1914 – the Liberal Party’s era as a party of government – and do so thematically rather than chronologically. In the first of these, Parry discusses the widening of the franchise, the taming of the House of Lords and the intermittent Liberal enthusiasm for proportional representation.

Asquith’s battles with the Lords will be familiar to all, but the Liberal attitude to the widening of the franchise was more ambivalent than you might imagine. The Liberal Party, Parry argues, was forged in the struggle for parliamentary reform, but that was not the same thing as democratic reform. 

So the Reform Act of 1832 swept away many of the abuses of the old system – notably 143 rotten boroughs, which effectively allowed seats in the Commons to be bought – but it was not born out of zeal for any abstract principle of democracy. Rather, it was intended to make sure the Commons did its job of representing the country’s various interests and allowing the peaceful expression of grievances.

Many 19th-century Liberals had their doubts about democracy. John Stuart Mill, for instance, hedged his support for the democratic principle in his Representative Government with all sorts of conditions that would ensure educated opinion was well represented in any elected chamber. Among these conditions was the introduction of proportional representation to ensure that minority points of view were heard.

But other tendencies within the Liberal Party did not share these patrician fears, so no legislation to change the voting system appeared. Nor did it under Asquith, when the rise of the Labour Party and the consequent inevitably of three-cornered contests led Liberals to explore the virtues of the Alternative Vote.

Parry’s second chapter on Liberal history before 1914 deals with the development of the Liberal attitude towards the state. Gladstonian retrenchment had great appeal earlier in the 19th century when the party was busy attacking the corrupt old city corporations. When these were replaced by elected local councils, school boards and health boards, then the good that government, national and local, might do became of increasing interest to the party. The growth of the Empire also brought with it irresistible pressure for more spending.

The third of these chapters looks at Liberal moves towards a pluralist society, notably in religion, where the party became the champions of Nonconformists in their disputes with the power of the Established church and a supporter of Catholic emancipation, both in Britain and Ireland. Parry notes that support for Home Rule changed the social basis of the Liberal Party, with most of its members from the landowning classes becoming Liberal Unionists.

Parry’s final two chapters cover the Liberal Party’s long years in the wilderness as it tried to survive as a centre party in a two-party system – and that in an era when politics was principally about economics and the struggle between capital and Labour. There were interesting Liberal economic ideas – the party was putting forward Keynesian policies on the need for public works while Asquith was still leader, and Elliott Dodds’s advocacy of an idiosyncratic blend of Distributism and private enterprise was influential after World War II – but no single one that voters identified with the party.

The Alliance years are passed over quickly, which is surely fair, as social democracy never did cohere as a force or a philosophy outside the Labour Party. The two most prominent former SDP members of the new Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy and Robert Maclennan, were already pretty much Liberals by the time the parties merged.

Nor did The Orange Book have much discernible long-term effect on the party. Its reputation was always a triumph of marketing over content, as it wasn’t the bracing call for an end to “nanny state” interventionism its adherents sometimes pretended. The chapter on social policy was thoroughly Blairite, born from middle-class impatience with the lower orders and the way they brought up their children. If only they were better raised, the authors reasoned, there would be less need for public spending on them in later life and taxes could be cut.

And maybe we have always worried too much about economic policy. Today’s Liberal Democrats have little to say on the subject, but that didn’t stop us electing 72 MPs last year.

Finally. Parry looks at the agenda that the Liberal Democrats have made their own: devolution, civil rights and Europe. Much of it has been party policy since the Grimond years – our early support for British membership of the European Economic Community, in particular, was seen as proof of our farsightedness and proof that, despite all the humiliations of life as a third party, history was on our side. This, I think, explains the reluctance, noted by Parry, of Liberal Democrats to criticise the EU in the years before the referendum.

I enjoyed this breezy and unusually accurate history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats, but what I will remember most from Liberalism is Parry’s discussion of the relationship between a party’s philosophy and its practice.

There is a temptation – I have been guilty of this myself – to turn to works by John Stuart Mill or L.T. Hobhouse or Jo Grimond in search of an expression of Liberal philosophy that will tell us what the party should be saying today. But this is to put the philosophical cart before the horse of practice.

Parry has no truck with this view:

This book claims that Liberal leaders such as Lord John Russell, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, Jo Grimond and Paddy Ashdown are better guides to political Liberalism than theoretical writers such as J.S. Mill or T.H. Green. It argues that politics has its own rationale, and that politicians take up bodies of ideas for specific purposes, rather than allowing works of theory to set their policy agendas for them.

This is surely right, as is his reminder that:

Hundreds of Victorian Liberal pundits made interesting and rich contributions to national political debate. We know much more about these than was once the case, so there is no longer any excuse for elevating Mill or Green into a small elite of Liberal “thinkers” who have had a transcendental impact on the party’s definition.

And when we do read the works of this elite, we are likely to misunderstand what they were about:

Liberal intellectuals such as Green, or later L.T. Hobhouse, described the aim of Liberalism as the socialisation of individuals into civil society without the intervention of a heavy-handed state that would suppress the energy and self-control that was the essence of their individuality. These writings sound more utopian and radical than they were. They were elegant ways of describing social arrangements that were increasingly visible in many towns by the end of the century.

And if that is not enough iconoclasm for you, here is Parry on Mill:

On Liberty was not intended as a political party bible but as a contribution to general educated discourse. It was also intended to be provocative. Mill knew that most Victorians would not agree with his underlying assumptions. Most educated Victorians did not see orthodox religion as a restrictive cultural force. On the contrary many of them viewed the issue of liberty through a religious lens. Individual responsibility was responsibility and accountability before God.

Again this is surely right. Gladstone, for one, certainly took this view of liberty.

I shall add Parry’s Liberalism to my shelf of very good short books alongside Bryan Magee’s ones on Karl Popper and Richard Wagner and James Hawes’s “shortest histories” of England and Germany.

Jonathan Calder

The Brecon and Radnor by-election: Myths and memories from 40 years ago

Peter Black reminds us that the Brecon and Radnor by-election took place on 4 July 1985. I was there, so he is surely wrong when he says that this was 40 years ago.

I went down for the last two or three days of the campaign with the Liberal Party's regional agent for the East Midlands, Chris Rennard. I wonder what happened to him?

So here are a jumble of memories from those days and a couple of myths that I hope are true.

I remember setting off with a couple of other Liberals in a car to deliver blue letters to the area around Pontneddfechan. It turned out to be an intensely rural area with no house numbers. Instead there were house names in Welsh, so every letter we delivered felt like a victory.

Still in a rural area, perhaps doing some clerical work, we were regularly visited by a Labour loudspeaker van. This felt somehow threatening, until someone christened it "the Willey Wagon" after Labour's candidate Richard Willey. After that we were impatient for it to reappear so we could laugh at it. again. Ah, the power of nicknames.

Then I was delivering in the a solid Labour area in the very south of the constituency - I was told we were going to use cars with no Liberal branding there on polling day. Certainly, I remember a cul-de-sac in which every house had a Labour poster, but I still had a gang of small boys practically fighting for the honour of delivering my Liberal leaflets.

I remember sitting in the garden of the Castle Hotel on the eve of polling day - it was thronged with Liberal workers. The sky was still light at 10 in the evening and there was a hot-air balloon above the town.

And on polling day, back in the Labour-leaning south of the constituency, I remember telling at Cwm-twrch Isaf or Cwm-twrch Uchaf. The polling station was in the local community centre, and it was quite the friendliest I have ever encountered - tellers from all parties were kept supplied with tea and Welsh cakes.

I've written about one of the myths before:

I once heard a story about polling day in the Brecon and Radnor by-election of 1985, which saw a gain for the Liberal Alliance candidate Richard Livsey. 

A hirsute Young Liberal was telling on the day at a remote rural polling station when an old farmer arrived and challenged him.

"What are you doing? I always take the numbers for the Liberals."

It turned out that he had for years been coming here on polling day for an hour or two, taking voters' numbers and then going home with them.

This was a folk memory of political organisation. All that remained of it was the notion that taking voters' polling-card numbers somehow helped the Liberals.

The other myth is that at least one of our leaflets in the by-election mentioned David Lloyd George.

Lord Bonkers 30 years ago: I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles

Lord Bonkers mentioned the other day that my rent falls due on Lady Day. I took this as a subtle reminder that it's a long time since I looked to see what the old brute was saying 30 years ago.

So here's an entry from his diary in Liberator 227 (March 1995), when John Major was fighting the bastards of Euroscepticism - he now seems a giant in comparison to the Tory leaders who were to come after him:

The Palace of Westminster is not a happy place at present. One can hardly enter the gentlemen's lavatory without seeing a gang of Europhobes forcing some poor moderate Conservative's head down the pan and pulling the chain, and this morning I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles. 

The problem, I would argue, lies in a lack of leadership at the very top of the Conservative Party. This little grey chap they have nowadays may be very good when it comes to traffic cones and motorway service stations, but he is not the sort one would readily follow into battle. It is all too reminiscent of Woolacombe in 1968, when Jeremy Thorpe had to be rescued after he was pushed through a trap door and imprisoned under the stage by the Young Liberals.

I also enjoyed a detail from his visit to Wales, where he passes and enjoyable evening at a village whose name, he is informed, is best translated as: 

The Church of St Mary in the hollow by the pool where Lloyd George seduced Bronwyn - you know, the big girl who used to work in the Co-op.

It doesn't go back quite this far, but there's a free archive of back numbers of Liberator on the magazine's website.

David Laws and Jim Wallace on Lib-Lab cooperation 1903-2019

The Liberal Democrat History Group website is a goldmine. With my pick and my mule, I have found this video of a fringe meeting the group held during the Lib Dem Conference last September.

Its title was Friends or Enemies, Allies or Competitors? Liberals and Labour 1903–2019, and the speakers were David Laws and Jim Wallace. Wendy Chamberlain was in the chair.

You can also hear David Laws speaking on the subject on a recent edition of Never Mind the Bar Charts - I endorse David's condemnation of Lloyd George, but am slightly mystified by the parallel Mark Pack draws between him and Boris Johnson. 

David's book Serpents, Goats and Turkeys: 100 years of Liberal–Labour relations is published by Politicos.

Despotism Renewed? Lord Hewart Unburied by Neil Hickman

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This review appears in the Conference issue of Liberator (Liberator 425), which you can download free of charge from the magazine's website.

Despotism Renewed? Lord Hewart Unburied

Neil Hickman

£24.95 from Amazon UK

Gordon Hewart is a figure from those Dark Ages of the Liberal Party between the end of the First World War and the revival under Jo Grimond. Born in Bury in 1870, Hewart came to prominence as a radical journalist in the North West before becoming a barrister. He was elected for the two-member seat of Leicester in a 1913 by-election and, with the help of the Coupon from the Lloyd George coalition, won the new single-member Leicester East seat in 1918. He had served as Solicitor General from 1916 and became Attorney General in 1919.

Hewart left the Commons in 1922 on being appointed Lord Chief Justice, having already turned down the chance of becoming Home Secretary. No doubt this offer was a tribute to his talents, but it may also have been a sign of the limited number of people who were loyal to Lloyd George and his premiership.

Neil Hickman’s book is concerned to defend Hewart’s performance as Lord Chief Justice – he has gone down in history with a poor reputation – and to press the relevance of his thought today. His most important writing is to be found in The New Despotism from 1929, and the route by which he fears despotism arising has much in common with the practice or ambitions of recent Conservative governments: pass only skeleton legislation, fill in the details with orders parliament cannot vote on and bar legal challenges to the new laws. Hickman argues that the danger to democracy from such processes is graver than it was when Hewart was writing.

Hewart may be best remembered today for his maxim that “Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done” – though he never arrived at such a concise formulation of it himself. This belief was of a piece with his distrust with the ‘Good Chap’ theory of government; this holds that officials need not be bound with burdensome rules if we can trust them to do the right thing because they are the right sort of people.

Those with a passing knowledge of the law may recognise two cases that crop up in Hewart’s career. One is the libel case brought against a newspaper publisher by one Artemus Jones – Hewart came to prominence as a barrister by winning it for him. The second is his decision in the Court of Appeal to support the quashing of a guilty verdict against the Liverpool insurance collector William Wallace for the murder of his wife because it was unreasonable given the evidence the jury had before it. This case has become a favourite with true crime enthusiasts, and the consensus among them seems to be that Wallace did it. I am sure Hewart was not swayed by the fact that Wallace had once been the Liberal agent in Harrogate.

All in all, this is a welcome introduction to the life of a forgotten Liberal. Though written with his legal career most in mind, it says much that is relevant to the politics of Hewart’s era and of the present day.

Jonathan Calder

Are there Liberal thinkers for good times and Liberal thinkers for hard times?

Politicians can be divided between those suited to good times and those suited to hard times, or so I suggested in a post I wrote here back in 2008.

Looking at some leading politicians of the day and of past days, I divided them like this:

Good times: Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne, David Miliband.

Hard times: Gordon Brown, Margaret Thatcher, Vince Cable, Denis Healey, Alistair Darling

We have lived in hard times for so long now that it's hard to know who among today's politicians would be more suited to good times, so I'm not sure this categorisation is useful today.

But I have been wondering if, among Liberal thinkers, there are some suited to good times and some suited to hard times.

The growing threat of Russian aggression in Europe makes Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin look more relevant than they did 20 or 30 years ago. It's unfair to dismiss them as 'Cold War Liberals', as many on the left do, but their views were formed as a reaction to tyranny and the threat of tyranny.

By contrast, I am an admirer of the postmodern Liberal philosopher Richard Rorty, yet when I came to write about him for Liberator in 2017, I found I had growing doubts about him. I did question Rorty's account of George Orwell, but there was a more fundamental doubt that I steered away from.

It was whether postmodernism's relaxed view of truth was so appealing in a word where Trump was US President and the internet was choked with lies and conspiracy theories.

Rorty, it seemed, was a Liberal thinkers for good times, not hard times.

You might think of Mill as a believer in progress, and thus a good times man. But I remember writing a seminar paper about On Liberty in which I commented on its pessimistic tone. One reason Mill wanted freedom of thought and speech was that he was dissatisfied with the intellectual climate of the day.

There is definitely an element of "All great men are dead, and I'm not feeling too well myself", in Mark Twain's words, about On Liberty.

So if I put Mill in the hard times column, it's more about his temperament than the fine details of his philosophy. 

And, for the same reason, he is joined there by Charles Masterman. Though Masterman was a practical politician - he was the minister who spent countless hours taking Lloyd George's health insurance act through the Commons in the face of implacable opposition from the Conservatives and the medical profession - there is an air of melancholy about his writings - notably The Condition of England.

Jo Grimond, by contrast, has a sunny temperament and that gets him into the good times club.

What do you think? Is this distinction useful?

Sighcology: Davids Garnett, Lloyd George, Lawrence, Copperfield, Rook and Bronstein

Here's my column ('Sighcology') from the Summer issue of the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

The theme of the issue was 'David', and these are the thoughts I came up with.

Davids Garnett, Lloyd George, Lawrence, Copperfield, Rook and Bronstein

There’s a law that whenever you submit a piece of academic writing you immediately come across something you wish you had known about and been able to include. I recently published a chapter on Dickens and antisemitism that drew parallels between Oliver Twist and the local cults of unofficial boy saints, supposedly the victims of ritual killings by Jews, that flourished in the Middle Ages. Just after sending it off, I learnt that – shockingly – a textbook used in British schools until the 1980s stated that the blood libel was true in the case of the most famous of these ‘saints’, Little St Hugh of Lincoln.

Many years before, I completed a Masters dissertation on the romances of the 19th-century writer Richard Jefferies. One of these, Bevis: The Story of a Boy, was published in 1882 as a three-volume novel for adults but was gradually supplied with the apparatus that allowed it to be sold as a children’s classic. In the 1930s it acquired illustrations by E.H. Shepard:  the map on the endpapers had been drawn back in 1904 by an 11-year-old David Garnett.

I was reading Bevis as the adult novel it had once been, noting how Jefferies was aware that the freedom to play and wander it celebrated existed only because his young heroes were the sons of farmers rather than agricultural labourers. So I wish I had happened upon Lucy Masterman’s biography of her husband Charles Masterman. He was the minister who piloted David Lloyd George’s Health Insurance Act through the Commons in the teeth of opposition from the Conservatives and the medical profession.

Lucy Masterman remembers a stay with Lloyd George and his family:

"If we kept the law about trespassing when we were children … we should have nowhere to play but a dusty strip of grass by the high road." I never remember during all our visit passing a 'trespassers will be prosecuted' notice without him remarking “I hate that sort of thing.”

Yes, children’s freedom is an intensely political subject. The best summation of the debate is in Victor Watson’s Reading Series Fiction, where he discusses the children’s ‘camping and tramping’ fiction Bevis helped to inspire:

The rural background to all those friendly and welcoming fictional farmers was, in reality, one of economic and social stagnation in which farmers had to supplement their incomes in any way they could. When farmers began to prosper and agriculture became intensive, an entire genre of children’s fiction was effectively wiped out by Common Market farming subsidies. And at about the same time the Beeching cuts closed down the branch lines that had taken so many fictional children by steam to their favourite holiday destinations.

******

Is D.H. Lawrence – that’s David Herbert Richards Lawrence – much read these days? Back in the Seventies, when we were taught by teachers who had been trained by people who had studied under F.R. Leavis, he was a fixture in the curriculum.

Not only did I study The Rainbow for A level, I kept a second-hand selection of his literary criticism by me as a charm or for inspiration. I don’t know if it included anything from Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, but there you will find his most famous critical principle:

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.

And Lawrence is right. The idea that the artist’s intention inhabits a work like a thin ghost is mistaken, as is the belief that it is this intention that gives the work its meaning. But then the idea that any work of art has just one meaning is wrong too. That’s a belief you see reflected in everyday criticism of popular music, where if a song can be seen to be about drugs or about sex then that becomes its real meaning and all other mere disguise

The truth is that works of art that remain of interest to us are the ones that reveal new meanings as the world changes around them. If you have just one thing to say, you don’t write a poem or produce a sculpture, you write a memo or put it on a coffee mug.

*****

The adult David Copperfield can be a bit of a cold fish, so let’s quote George Orwell’s praise for Dickens’s depiction of him as a child:

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written by a child.

******

The novelist and illustrator David Rook has disappeared from view. There is no Wikipedia entry for him and the website of a dealer who sometimes has his artwork suggests that Rook is still alive. In fact, he died in a car crash 1970 at the age of 35.

Rook’s eclipse is surprising, because he specialised in the sort of nature stories that find a loyal following. Not only that: one of his Exmoor novels was filmed as Run Wild, Run Free in 1967 and a second as The Belstone Fox after his death. And the Disney film The Hound and the Fox sounds as though it owes more to that second novel (The Ballad of the Belstone Fox) than to the one it was officially adapting.

Rook gets a mention here because Run Wild, Run Free, which was based on his novel The White Colt, is about a boy whom we would now probably place somewhere on the autism spectrum. And the film is a firm believer in the ‘iceberg mother’ theory of the condition’s genesis.

That’s the thing about the Sixities: if there was a child with difficulties, it was always Sylvia Syms’s fault.

*****

David Bronstein drew a match for the world chess championship in 1951, but under the rules the reigning champion, his fellow Soviet Mikhail Botvinnik, kept the title. Bronstein remained one of the greats of the game for another three decades.

The story is told that Bronstein once spent more than 30 minutes over his opening move in a tournament game. The audience thought: “This is wonderful. The maestro is working out a whole new opening scheme at the board.” But when one of his fellow grandmasters asked what he’d been thinking about all that time, he replied: “I was trying to remember where I’d left my hotel keys.”

The Ukranian-born Bronstein fell foul of the authorities when he declined to sign a round robin condemning the defection of the leading Soviet player Viktor Korchnoi. His own father had been sent to the Gulag because of an official belief, right or wrong, that he was related to Trotsky. There were also rumours that Bronstein had been put under pressure not to win his match against the model Soviet citizen Botvinnik.

But maybe he had already had his revenge. There is a story I have always believed, but am struggling to prove, that he named his son Lev. This made his full name Lev Davidovich Bronstein.

Boris Johnson up before the headmaster

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Martin Hammond, who was Boris Johnson's housemaster at Eton, famously summed up his 17-year-old pupil:

"Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies. [He] sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the school for the next half).

"I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else."

On Sunday the historian and public school headmaster Anthony Seldon summoned him to his study.

Seldon was interviewed on Johnson by Tim Adams, who wrote:

Seldon is a man who has devoted his life to understanding and nurturing the kind of emotional intelligence and civic responsibility from which society can be woven. Johnson represents the wilful rupture of those beliefs. 

Talking about him, Seldon acknowledges the former prime minister’s charisma "lights up the room", but you sense too his almost personal feeling of betrayal at the squandering of those gifts, that headmasterly reaction that Johnson had let down his school, his family, his nation, but most of all, himself.

And here is Seldon's view in his own words:

“"The great prime ministers are all there at moments of great historical importance,but they have to respond to them well. Chamberlain didn’t; Churchill in 1940, did. Asquith didn’t; Lloyd George did in 1916.

"Johnson had Brexit, he had the pandemic, he had the invasion of Ukraine and incipient third world war. He could have been the prime minister he craved to be, but he wasn’t, because of his utter inability to learn."

Moving on from school, I'm currently reading Simon Kuper's Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Over the UK. 

My conclusion so far is that Oxford, with its emphasis on the ability to talk plausibly on a subject you know little about, fits its alumni to be contrarian journalists but not serious politicians.

Kenneth Griffith's film Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman

I'm not bringing you a contemporary newspaper account of the 1899 meeting to oppose the Boer War that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch chaired in Liskeard: I'm bringing you a dramatic reconstruction of it.

Kenneth Griffith was an actor and maker of documentaries whose strongly held political views regularly brought him into conflict with television bosses and the broadcasting authorities.

His Independent obituary from 2006 was candid:

He could exasperate colleagues by his cantankerous manner and stout refusal to compromise his artistic and professional integrity, especially when offered work by those whom he called the "priggish cuckoos" of the BBC's middle management. Even those who were kind to him found he would insist on marching to a different drum.

For someone normally seen as on the left, Griffith had a surprising sympathy for the Afrikaners. From it flowed his 1984 documentary Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman, which dealt with her humanitarian and political efforts to help the inmates of the concentration camps the British had established in the Boer republics.

This tactic of removing the civil population from areas of conflict so guerrilla forces cannot use it as cover had already been used by Spain in Cuba and was recently used by the Sri Lankan government in Tamil areas of the island.

In Cuba and South Africa at least, the conditions in which these civilians were held were appalling and resulted in many deaths. 

I have chosen the section of Griffiths's film that deals with the Liskeard meeting, but the whole of it is worth watching if you do not know the story. All the parts are played by Griffith or the South African actress Hermien Dommisse.

Six years later, a film called That Englishwoman: An Account of the Life of Emily Hobhouse was made in South Africa, with Veronica Lang in the title role. Lang enjoyed a long but not stellar career in British television.

Emily's father, the Rev. Reginald Hobhouse, was played by Terence Alexander, in the era when he was Charlie Hungerford in Bergcrac. 

You can see a fragment of the film below. 

Emily Hobhouse: A Cornish humanitarian

Looking for an account of the meeting against the Boer War that Arthur Quiller-Couch chaired at Liskeard in 1899, I came across this tribute to one of the speakers, Emily Hobhouse.

It comes from the Western Morning News for Friday 11 June 1926, when she had just died at the age of 66. It's more about her male relatives than Emily, but it's a start as an introduction to someone I want to know much more about. (John Hall's book, whose cover I've used as an illustration here, looks the place to go for that.)

A Cornish Humanitarian

Opinions differ still as to whether the humanitarian zeal of Miss Emily Hobhouse always found the wisest outlet, but the noble motives this distinguished Cornish woman there are, so tar as I know, no two opinions. A great many people in London and elsewhere think of her as the Florence Nightingale of South Africa, and they will probably be present at Kensington Cemetery to-morrow when Miss Hobhouse's remains are laid to rest. 

Among them I should not be surprised to see Mr. Lloyd George, with whom many Cornishmen may remember Miss Houhouse spoke from the same platform at Liskeard in the 'nineties in connection with the South African War. The district was familiar to her, for it was at St. Ive near Liskeard that Miss Hobhouse was born. Her father, the Venerable Reginald Hobhouse, was then rector. He became afterwards Archdeacon of Bodmin. 

As the niece of Lord Hobhouse on her father's side and of Sir William Trelawney, for some time Radical member for East Cornwall, on her mother's, Miss Hobhouse was related to two Lord Byron's most intimate friends. Her work in the concentration camps South Africa was followed with sympathetic attention nobody more than her famous fellow-Cornishman, Leonard Courtney, then a commoner. 

Cornish settlers in Minnesota still remember gratefully, no doubt, the two years Miss Hobhouse spent in their settlement after the loss of her venerable father. Her brother, Professor Leonard Hobhocse, is probably Cornwall's most distinguished son the sphere of philosophical and sociological research. He is, of course, the author of the little book "Liberalism" the Home University Library.

Leonard Courtney, incidentally, became the 1st Baron Courtney of Penwith. He is described by Wikipedia as "an advocate of proportional representation in Parliament and acting as an opponent of imperialism and militarism".

He was MP for Liskeard between 1876 and 1885 as a Liberal, and then for Bodmin between 1885 and 1900. There, from 1886, he sat as a Liberal Unionist, but his radical views became an increasingly uncomfortable fit with that party.

He did not stand in Bodmin in 1900, and when he did stand for again in 1906 it was as a Liberal.in Edinburgh West. There he was defeated by a Liberal Unionist.

I'll look out for an account of that Liskeard meeting and for more on Emily Hobhouse. The more you know, the more there is to find out.

Later. A bit of googling has turned up a dramatic reconstruction of the Liskeard meeting and a South African film biography of Emily.

Later again. Despite what the contemporary report here says, Emily Hobhouse was cremated and her ashes were ensconced in a niche in the National Women's Monument at Bloemfontein.

He was a good Cornish Liberal and a Radical: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and True Tilda

I once imagined that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (rhymes with Gooch), who signed himself Q and edited Horace Rumpole's beloved Oxford Book of English Verse, was an austere and distant figure.

Not a bit of it. When he was knighted by Asquith's government in 1910, it was for literary, educational and political services. He was a good Cornish Liberal and a Radical with it.

In 1899 he chaired a Liskeard meeting against the Boer War. The speakers were David  Lloyd George and the remarkable Emily Hobhouse, sister of L.T. 

As so often at these meetings, there were ugly scenes and Lloyd George had to be smuggled out of the building.

And in the academic world Quiller-Couch defended Liberalism against the Modernist High Toryism of T.S. Eliot.

He also wrote fiction, including at least one book for children, True Tilda.

This is a sort of feminist reworking of Oliver Twist, in which Tilda, a resourceful female Artful Dodger on the side of good, helps a traumatised younger boy find his fortune.

In hospital after an accident in the circus ring, Tilda hears a tale of injustice from a woman dying in the next bed. As soon as she is discharged she springs the boy, Arthur, from the evil Dr Glasson's orphanage and, travelling by canal boat and other means, the two of them evade his pursuit.

Eventually they arrive at Holmness in the Bristol Channel where Arthur finds his fortune. He turns out, inevitably, to be the lost son of an aristocratic family.

True Tilda was adapted by the BBC in the 1990s, an era when I didn't own a television. The other day - and this is my reason for writing all this - a fragment of the series turned up on YouTube.

I'd normally skip to the start of the episode, but the trailers here are of period interest - Chesterfield in an FA Cup semi-final and the great Stephen Lewis.

Later. This video disappeared soon after I posted this, but now it's back.

Lord Bonkers 30 years ago: "Can Lloyd George Do It?"

"You didn't do it last month" said Lord Bonkers. "Do what?" I asked. "You didn't reprint something from my diary of 30 years ago. They'll be letters."

So here is something from the old boy's diary in the September 1992 issue of Liberator.

Wednesday

I must confess that I have not succeeded in following every twist and turn of Liberal economic policy. Once Free Trade was the pith and marrow of our cause, but later the likes of Milton Keynes came to the fore with quite other ideas. (Keynes, I recall was the author of a pamphlet entitled Can Lloyd George Do It? - a singularly redundant question in the eyes of many a Liberal lady.) 

Thus I am confused when I hear my younger colleagues saying that we should seek an accommodation with the Socialists while displaying greater enthusiasm for the free market than do the Tories. As ever we Liberals should seek the mean, and I advice those who are so fond of capitalism to go to live in Russia and see how much they are for it then.

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

The Church of England border polls of 1915-16

I have a new favourite group of elections.

The disestablishment of the Church in Wales was a favourite cause of Lloyd George Liberalism. Why should the majority of the population, who were nonconformists, pay tithes to support a church in whose doctrines they did not believe?

Disestablishment was secured by the passing of the Welsh Church Act of 1914, which was put into effect n 1920.

But there was a problem in the shape of a number of parishes that straddled the border between England and Wales. What do to with them?

The solution was to invite the residents to vote, so 18 local elections were held in 1915 and 1916 to see if residents wanted to stay with the Church of England or try their luck with the new disestablished Church in Wakes.

Some of the parishes polled were in my favourite part of the world, being half in Shropshire or Herefordshire: Brampton Bryan, Churchstoke, Hyssington with Snead.

Seventeen of the eighteen parishes voted to remain with the Church of England. The only exception was Llansilin, which is on the Montgomeryshire border near Oswestry.

From Wagner to Kim Philby: Meet the Comyns Carrs

The other day I told the story about Sir Arthur Comyns Carr and the 1958 Liberal Party Assembly. Newly elected as the party’s president, he had expressed his intention not to say anything that might exacerbate tensions in China.

Sir Arthur deserves to be remembered for more than that. He stood for parliament many times and his one victory saw him sitting for Islington East between 1923 and 1924. His last contest was at Shrewsbury in 1945, where he captured a quarter of the votes cast.

Wikipedia says that his expertise in National Insurance led him to co-author a book on the subject in 1912 to which David Lloyd George wrote the preface. He was a member of the Liberal land inquiry committee of 1912 and also sat on the land acquisition committee in 1917.

Outside politics he was a prosecutor in the trials of German and Japanese war criminals after the second world war, and it was for this that he was knighted for this work in 1949. And long before that his cross-examination in a libel case speeded the downfall of the corrupt Liberal MP Horatio Bottomley.

But then the Comyns-Carrs are an interesting family all round. Arthur’s father was Joseph Comyns Carr, a drama and art critic, gallery director, author, poet, playwright and theatre manager. Wikipedia describes him as “a vigorous advocate for Pre-Raphaelite art and a vocal critic of the "short-sighted" art establishment”.

As an adviser to the Royal Opera House, he was responsible for the first English performance of Parsifal.

Arthur’s son Richard worked for MI5 in the same section as Graham Greene, overseen by Kim Philby. His wife, a writer who published under the name Barbara Comyns, explained that this association did little for Richard’s career:

Comyns claimed that MI6 dropped her husband in 1955 because of his association with Philby … : “Oh Kim was a delightful man. So funny. Always here playing cards. Neither of us had a notion! When he disappeared – to Moscow, you know – they sacked my husband. They said that either he must have known and therefore was a traitor, or that he hadn’t spotted it and therefore must have been a fool.”

And, in an essay on Boundless, Lucy Scholes celebrates “The forgotten genius of Barbara Comyns”:

With every new reissue of her novels, the ranks of dedicated Comyns fans swell and strengthen, proof that it’s little more than a stroke of bad luck that so much of her work languishes for the most part unknown. She’s an author of rare genius, ripe for rediscovery, her novels not so much a gentle breath of fresh air, but rather a chilling, bracing blast.

A difficult year: Lord Bonkers in 2020

Putting my life back in order will be more of an undertaking, but I can at least start returning Liberal England to normality. So let's begin by looking at what Lord Bonkers got up to last year.

February

The old boy was fully in support of Harry's decision to elope with Meghan Markle:

Congratulations to the Duke of Sussex for making it over the wall and quitting the Royal Family, together with his delightful wife and child.

In my experience his family are a ghastly crew – in my young day it was common knowledge that the Jack the Ripper murders had been committed by Queen Victoria – and he is well shot of them.

April

By now the coronavirus was affecting life on the Bonkers Hall Estate:

Meadowcroft has taken this damned virus badly, locking himself in his potting shed and  morning, noon and night. You may very well feel he is Going A Bit Far, but he is determined not to pass the virus on to his beloved geraniums. As I gaze out of the window I see Cook pushing slices of cheese on toast under the door. What a fine woman she is!

June

This month saw some characteristically forthright comments on the leading lights of the Liberal Democrats in the Coalition years:

Whenever I questioned their actions, Clegg and Alexander assured me they were making Britain a better place to live. Yet now I find that the former has upped sticks to Seattle and the latter has fled to China. 

You may feel that rather gives the game away.

July

Lord Bonkers paid tribute to the Liberal Democrat MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross:

Jamie Stone telephones, full of his plans for his new spaceport in Sutherland; no wonder they call him the Wernher von Braun of the Flow Country. 

August

I made a personal donation to the Bonkers Home for Well-Behaved Orphans after publishing an inaccurate post about Sir Nicholas Clegg.

September

Readers were treated to my employer's recollections of the the Stilton strike of 1919 when the miners came out demanding better pay and Lloyd George sent the troops in:

I recall telling LG at the time that this was Going A Bit Far, but by then he only had ears for his new Conservative friends and the trade with Japan never recovered. Really, I wonder what they teach in school History classes nowadays.

October

Most scholars now accept the theory that the model for Bonkers Hall is Nevill Holt Hall near Medbourne in Leicestershire. 

So Liberal England was interested in the news that the 17-year-old son of the owner of Nevill Holt has received a garnt of £85,000 from the Culture Recovery Fund.

The lad is "patron" of Nevill Holt Opera, but I concluded that "it does sound more Darren Grimes than Peter Grimes".

November

Things were getting factitious in Rutland's alternative medicine sector:

Lunch with the High King of the Elves of Rockingham Forest, who tells me of their plans to help during the new lockdown: "We like to think of ourselves as putting the 'elf' into 'welfare'." ...

In the afternoon I call on the Wise Woman of Wing and purchase some of her herbal remedies as a precaution against the virus. "I’m much cheaper than those elves, dearie" she tells me, "and what’s more my shit works."

December

At the end of the year I took to reprinting Lord Bonkers' thoughts from 30 years ago, as his diaries have been appearing there that long.

Here he is on the 1990 Eastbourne by-election:

I presented myself bright and early at the committee rooms and was asked to drive some pensioners to the polls. A menial task for a man of my experience, you might think, but we Liberals are nothing if not democratic and I went about it with a will.

Fortunately, I had brought with me my collapsible travelling horsewhip and this eased matters considerably. the elderly voters made a terrible fuss and were constantly tripping over each other's Zimmer frames, but I got them all into the booths eventually.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The Stilton Strike of 1919

An unexpected and valuable insight into the economic history of Rutland and also into Lord Bonkers' relationship with Lloyd George.

Saturday

Liz Truss – I could have sworn she used to be one of ours – has had what she believes to be the novel idea of selling Stilton to the Japanese. It’s not novel at all, as anyone familiar with the economic history of Rutland could tell her. 

When Japan opened herself to trade with the West in the 19th century, our merchant captains were among the first to sail into Yokohama and Nagasaki. Sweating with thick blue veins and a pungent odour, those skippers chose Stilton as their cargo. Trade with Japan grew steadily and I remember as a boy seeing Japanese craft tied up at Oakham Quay having made the perilous crossing of Rutland Water with their bales of silk. 

All went well until the Stilton Strike of 1919, when the miners came out demanding better pay and Lloyd George sent the troops in. They were billeted in Cropwell Bishop, and I recall telling LG at the time that this was Going A Bit Far, but by then he only had ears for his new Conservative friends and the trade with Japan never recovered. Really, I wonder what they teach in school History classes nowadays.

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• Haddock and chips (hold the mushy peas)
• The little inmates hung upon my every word
• When teddy bears terrorised Britain
• Lunch with Freddie and Fiona
• The occasional bulk order from a gang of armed robbers

Dan Snow is voting Lib Dem - and this is why we shouldn't be surprised

Embed from Getty Images

From the Independent:

Television historian Dan Snow has endorsed the Liberal Democrats after calling Boris Johnson "profoundly incompetent" and claiming that Jeremy Corbyn is "economically illiterate" 

The BBC presenter said he supported the party's position of opposing Brexit and praised Jo Swinson as "a really engaging, exciting young leader".

Those are all excellent reasons for voting Liberal Democrat.

But, though the report goes on to say that Snow describes himself as a "floating voter", we should not be too surprised that he is voting that way.

You see, it runs in the family.

Because Dan Snow is the great great grandson of David Lloyd George.