"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
"The Cabinet Office, Lord Gove and Ciga Healthcare were approached for comment but did not respond by time of publication." Byline Times has news of another alleged scandal in government procurement during the Covid pandemic.
Max Sullivan on his experiences of introducing on-street bicycle hangars in the London Borough of Westminster: "Make decisions on merit. Objections that don't have merit can be listened to, but not indulged, if you want to move faster. Officers need to have the confidence in the need for the scheme (lack of space to park a bike is a major barrier to cycling) to give their politicians good advice. Politicians must be prepared to respectfully disagree with their residents, to deliver for their other residents. Who are many in number, waiting for somewhere safe to keep a bike."
"A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television." Derek Thompson explains his theory.
James Coverley draws an important lesson from the death of the Roman Emperor Domitian: "Caesar, of course, was betrayed by someone close to him. Mussolini ended up hanging from a streetlamp. You can only bully people into liking you for so long until someone, one day, realises that you’re the problem and that your grip on power is, actually, paper-thin and depends on the illusion of fear."
Koraljka Suton takes us deep into David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001): "Some of these narrative threads appear superfluous at first glance because we seemingly never get back to them. Others take us down rabbit holes that leave us feeling dazed, confused and disoriented. But all of them have their rightful place in Lynch’s surrealist picture that stubbornly defies genre categorization."
"A few clubs have boreholes, able to provide clean water on their wickets which then filters back into the aquifer in a virtuous circle. This was interesting and unexpected, revealing how certain clubs can benefit from their local geology, whereas others rely on ageing infrastructure and water companies." Dan Looney recently walked the Kennet & Avon Canal from Reading to Bath, then onwards via the River Avon to Bristol, visiting 11 cricket grounds along the way to see how they are adapting to climate change.
"Weaponising food deprivation has been Israeli policy for decades. As a senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it in 2006, the government’s aim, in strictly restricting the entrance of foodstuffs into Gaza, was to 'put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.' Now, Israel seems to have committed fully to the latter goal." Jennifer Zacharia details the sufferings of the Palestinians.
Roland Smith weighs the objections to the European Convention on Human Rights and says we'll need good arguments against them if we're to resist the coming campaign for Britain to withdraw from it.
"I moved to the city eight years ago to study neuroscience at University College London. Since then, rents have nearly doubled but the square footage of my digs has stayed the same. As I grow up in age and out in size, I begin to see that the hoped-for upgrade that should come with time now looks impossible. My generation is running but we’re not moving." Rose Dodd reports on life as a private tenant in London.
Michael Rosen proves that educational research did not begin with Michael Gove.
Londonopia tells the story of a unique London store: "Arthur Liberty wasn’t just flogging fabrics. He was hawking a vision - a sensual rebellion against the stiff moral corsetry of Victorian Britain. Where others sold sensible serge, Liberty offered peacock-feather glamour, hand-painted decadence, and the vague but thrilling possibility that you might run away with an artist and spend your life eating figs in an atelier."
"War is a dreadful thing, amongst all of the horrific things that human inflicts upon other human in the name of 'war' there are some events that stand out as atrocities: one such atrocity took place in the aftermath of the battle of Naseby." Keep Your Powder Dry tries to pin down the exact location of The Farndon Massacre in the villages just south of Market Harborough.
Rachel Reeves is starting to make Danny Alexander look like a maverick economic expansionist, but maybe the reason they succumbed to orthodoxy lies in the Treasury rather within them.
Michael Gove, stay with me, spoke to Jo Timan of the Manchester Evening News, and the interview is discussed in today's Northern Agenda email from Rob Parsons:
Describing an issue that's all-too-familiar to Northern leaders, he criticised so-called “Treasury brain” in government ahead of a Budget due on October 30.
On the way in which civil servants review investments, he said: “The way it works unfortunately means that the nominal return, say, on improving train times between Guildford and London is weighted disproportionately in such a way that it looks much better in terms of bang for your buck than improving rail links between, say, Sheffield and Manchester.”
Mr Gove said the phrase “Treasury brain … speaks to two things”, and claimed officials would have raised concerns with the 1944 D-Day landings on the basis they were “novel and contentious”.
He said: “The Treasury is where the brightest brains are in government but it’s also the case that the Treasury brain – and it’s quite a small-c conservative thing – looks at different propositions and it takes the view: ‘Hmm, you sir are saying that if we invest now, we’ll secure all sorts of benefits later.
“‘I’ve heard that a hundred times. All I know is you’re calling on me to invest now, that means spending money. These benefits, they may never come.’
“So there’s a classic sort of Tory scepticism of utopianism within the Treasury, but the parallel to that is there’s also a scepticism of anything which is anything which is in Treasury phrase ‘novel and contentious’.”
It's well worth subscribing to Northern Agenda, which bills itself as
Read by policy-makers from the North's town halls to Whitehall, you'll get a bitesize guide to the stories that matter in our region from journalists outside the Westminster bubble.
Chris Grey on the right's desire to recover a past that never was: "This is also almost invariably what lies behind contemporary demands to 'get my country back', with Allison Pearson writing that “our nation is being abducted by aliens” (though also, inadvertently, demonstrating the endless recurrence of these claims by opening her article with a mournful lament for England written by Philip Larkin in 1946)."
Using the government's new definition of extremism, argues Nafeez Ahmed, Michael Gove is an extremist.
"'If you ask young people, would you like a job where you won’t see daylight in the winter, digging underground, and you might get killed - they would laugh at you. When our generation goes, people won’t even know what a lump of coal is.' But the former pit villages that continue to play cricket carry the history of industry around not only in their names, but in their heritage." Tanya Aldred on the links between cricket and coal mining and how well they have survived the 1984-5 strike.
Catherine Bennett says that, in the name of anti-elitism, Arts Council England has declared war on opera and excellence.
Fortesa Latifi lays bare the terrible price of having your childhood turned into content: "Being the child of an influencer, Vanessa tells me, was the equivalent of having a full-time job - and then some. She remembers late nights in which the family recorded and rerecorded videos until her mother considered them perfect and days when creating content for the blog stretched into her homeschooling time."
"I was the second eldest, with an older sister and three younger brothers. I shared with my brothers until I was 15, sleeping in bunk beds, after which I slept in the front room for a couple of years. There was a communal yard for the 48 flats to share, and we would play ball games and cycle. I also had my first ciggy in the cellars there. I was a pupil at Haberdasher's Askes grammar school, but between the ages of 3 and 16 I spent about four years at Queen Mary's Hospital, in Carshalton Breeches, as I had caught polio in the 1950s epidemic." A glimpse of the young Steve Harley - born Stephen Nice - from Transpontine.
And Tory hegemony there is under threat from social change:
Alongside the material decline of the Home Counties, a further dimension to the campaign has opened up. As London ages and gentrifies, and a "parasitical housing market" bites, an exodus of young families, millennials and renters unable to afford life in the capital have found themselves pushed beyond the sprawl of London and out into the Tory shires.
Skulthorp emphasises that this is not the traditional move to the suburbs that comes with economic maturity and that people driven out of the capital arrive in a Surrey that is very different from the stereotype of Surrey comfort.
That hegemony is also under threat from ferocious Liberal Democrats.
Take Chris Coughlan, who will fight Mole Valley at the next general election: he may be, in Skulthorp's words:
the product of the Surrey incarnation of the suburban dream; the son of a stockbroker, he grew up in the village of Peaslake, joined the army and then the Conservative Party, and had a stint in the City.
But his verdict is clear:
"The Tory party needs to die."
Or at greater length:
Coghlan certainly says it a lot and so do other Tory defectors. Young families are using food banks in Dorking; the River Mole that runs through the Surrey Hills is one of the most polluted in the country. When Ed Davey came to visit Mole Valley, he was taken to a swimming pond in Fetcham, which is now, as one local told me, “full of shit”. The arrival of England’s decline in these once-protected suburban idylls is now as visible as it is pungent.
Some of this new mood Skulthorp findsin the Home Counties may be an unwind from Brexit.
The referendum wasn't won by Leave because of working-class voters in the North: it was won because great swathes of comfortable Southern England voted against their own economic interests.
Given what has hit the country since that vote, there must be many who are sick of the sight of sleek figures like Gove and Raab.
Nick Cohen gives Matt Goodwin both barrels: "Democracy depends on holding the powerful to account so that an informed electorate can judge them. But in the professor’s formulation, criticising Boris Johnson and Michael Gove meant criticising the people who voted for him. Performing your democratic duty became anti-democratic; holding the elite to account became elitist."
"Given the terrible ordeal that Kara-Murza faces, the resources of courage, conviction and determination that he must have summoned to make this statement, defy comprehension. He knows that Putin’s regime will bury him alive and yet he refuses to flinch." Adam Tooze salutes the courage of the historian Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Karen Shannon on Yuri Gagarin's visit to Manchester.
"Buffalo Bill went in for a drink and expressed concern about having to drink in the pub with a black man, so Charlesworth ordered Buffalo Bill out. It's quite a well known local tale in Glossop." Andrew Aloia tells the story of Charles Ollivierre, the black West Indian cricketer who played for Derbyshire in the game's Edwardian golden age.
Micah Tillman explores what Nirvana can tell us about the philosophy of history.
"Quite fun, involving little more than successfully collecting and dropping off three passengers without being interrupted by Blakey by means of dice, cards, a zany road map, and chunky plastic buses and punters." Tim Worthington remembers the days when sitcoms were turned into board games.
Yesterday Michael Gove suggested that parents whose children are persistently absent from school should have their child benefit stopped.
That was the headline that emerged from an event organised yesterday by the Conservative think tank Onward. Which suggests that the Tories are in real trouble.
Yes, the cruelty of it will appeal to the Tory membership, but they badly need to reach out to people who have become disenchanted with the party and intend to vote for someone else next time. This doesn't look like a way of doing it.
Gove was at least helpful to the Liberal Democrats, twice emphasising that this was a proposal we had put a stop to during the coalition.
And it was a reminder that when Tories talk about the individual freedom and the risk of an overmighty state, it is there own freedom they are worried about and no one else's.
It's wrong to reduce every political blog post to an ad hominem attack, but I'm afraid I can't resist finishing with this old story from the Sunday Mirror (29 October 2016):
Michael Gove left son, 11, alone in hotel for six HOURS while he went to showbiz party
Child was found by night porter wandering the corridors and asking for his parents before they eventually returned at 1.30am
Michael Gove’s young son was left alone in a room at a posh B&B for six hours while his parents enjoyed a glitzy celebrity party.
The ex-Cabinet minister and his wife Sarah Vine told hotel workers they would be back by around 9.30pm.
But the couple are said to have failed to answer calls from a concerned night porter who found the 11-year-old wandering the corridors, asking where his parents were.
The Goves are believed to have returned to the £250-a-night, 13-bedroom B&B at 1.30am the next morning – four hours later than they said they would be.
TV comic Dom Joly – among stars at the party thrown to celebrate the end of the Cheltenham Literary Festival – took to Twitter to reveal how the former Justice Secretary had enjoyed the evening. ...
And comedy writer Armando Iannucci, creator of political comedy The Thick Of It, is understood to have given a talk at the festival the following day in which he said he had seen Michael Gove "busting moves" on the dance floor.
Perhaps Mr Gove should address his own sense of parental responsibility before he worries about other people?
If Rishi Sunak was meant to offer a fresh start, then his first cabinet was deeply disappointing. There was little sign of a cabinet of all the talents, made possible by the soothing of old enmities, beyond the return of Michael Gove.
If you try to come up with a list of four more encouraging names, you are likely to come up with something like: David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Justine Greening, Rory Stewart.
Trouble is, none of that four is still in the Commons. All were among the 21 Conservative MPs who lost the whip in September 2019 for, in effect, voting against a no-deal Brexit.
Gauke and Grieve stood as Independents in the general election later that year, while the other two did not defend their seats under any label.
It's clear that Boris Johnson's 2019 purge will continue to hurt his party for years to come, and not just because it cannot spare people of that talent.
If the Conservative Party is to have a future that does not involve a permanent shift to being the English Nationalist Party, then at some point the moderates are going to have to fight back.
And if they are going to do so, those moderates and the party as a whole will need a leader - a Tory version of Neil Kinnock, if you will.
It's possible to imagine that such a figure can be found among the four names I chose. It's much harder to imagine he or she is to be found in Sunak's new cabinet.
The Liberal Democrats have brought forward the selection of a prospective parliamentary candidate for Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath seat because of rumours that he may resign from the Commons and trigger a byelection there.
"We are selecting a candidate and we are on high alert, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the byelection will happen. We are also preparing in other seats, for example in Mid Bedfordshire, if Nadine Dorries is given a peerage."
Gove had a majority of more 18,000 at the 2019 general election, but then the Conservative majority was greater than that in North Shropshire and in Tiverton and Honiton, both seats that the Lib Dems have won in a by-election within the last year.
You may think that making sure they have a candidate in place is a reasonable thing for the Lib Dems to do, but that's not how the Tories the Guardian has spoken to see it:
"Sadly this is yet another example of Lib Dem dirty tricks. They are more interested in playing politics than delivering for voters."
It is, of course, precisely because we want to deliver for voters that we are urgnetly selecting a candidate for a possible Surrey Heath by-election.
This really is another astonishing Brexit moment at the despatch box, following on from Brandon Lewis’ breaking international law admission https://t.co/qsOGI5fk8k
Today's news that, as far as hauliers are concerned, there will be customs posts at the Kent border is not news as far as readers of this blog are concerned.
That's right. Brexit won't just introduce a hard border with our European neighbours: it will, as far as hauliers are concerned. introduce borders within the UK.
Why didn't business leaders speak out sooner? We heard little from during the referendum campaign.
I suspect they could not believe any government could be this mad.
At least the haulage industry is speaking up today.
Politics Home quotes Richard Burnett, the chief executive of the Road Haulage Association:
"We already know this. It’s what we’ve been saying for many months. We know that traders and haulage operators will face new customs controls and processes and we know that if they haven’t completed the right paperwork their goods will be stopped when entering the EU.
"Mr Gove stresses that it’s essential that traders act now to get ready for new the formalities. We know for a fact that they are only too keen to be ready
but how on earth can they prepare when there is still no clarity as to what they need to do?
"Government’s promises that the UK will be ready for business on 1 January are just a whitewash, and right now it appears that traders and haulage operators are being left to carry the can."
Ever since Michael Gove said "I think the people of this country have had enough of experts" the left hasn't been able to get enough of them.
Yet if you are on the left then at some point you will have decided that Important People are wrong.
For me it was the debate over nuclear power. At the start of 1978, when I was still 17, Lord Justice Parker recommended in his inquiry report that a thermal oxide reprocessing plant be built at Windscale and the government went ahead with the idea.
I decided Parker had got it wrong. I remember asking a visiting speaker at school, who was there to promote nuclear, why we didn't develop renewables instead.
And I had a 'Nuclear Power? No Thanks' T-shirt and bought a Penguin Special on the subject: Windscale Fallout by Ian Breach.
Though they sound like something out of the 1940s, Penguin Special were very much a thing in those days. They felt serious and grown up and I liked them in the way I liked the New Statesman because it had its leading article on the front cover.
The scene that Breach describes is familiar: A company which has been doing a profitable business in reprocessing nuclear fuel wants to expand its operations. It already has a very lucrative contract with Japan. The workers are in general in favour of this expansion. And so is the Labour Government. The expansion goes along with future plans for a commercial fast breeder reactor program. But because the company has been secretive about the safety of its operations, because local people are concerned, the Government is induced to hold a public inquiry.
The wide terms of reference of the inquiry encourage those who have objections, mostly environmentalists, to throw a great deal of time, effort and money into presenting their case. They raise the issues of safety, civil liberties, nuclear proliferation, the need for public participation in setting safety standards and making energy policy. In the end, the Commissioners write the report which the company and the Government expected and wanted.
Not much has changed in more than 40 years.
Breach was an interesting figure who became one of the BBC's first environmental correspondents before, his Guardian obituary records, being sacked by John Birt for demanding the corporation devote more airtime to the environment.
With the new BBC director general (and former deputy chairman of Hammersmith and Fulham Conservatives) Tim Davie questioning the left-wing slant of the corporations's comedy output, there is an obvious opening for right-wing comedians.
Step forward Michael Gove, who once fancied himself in this role.
Louis Barfe will tell you more about A Stab in the Dark and has more substantial footage from it.
#countryfile exclusive: Environment Secretary Theresa Villiers tells @tomheapmedia that chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef will not be allowed in the UK and she would ‘hold the line’ in US trade negotiations... More on @BBCCountryfile, BBC1, 26th January pic.twitter.com/4ijbhN7JmB
I enjoyed doing this for 18 April - whether my readers enjoyed it as much is another question - so here is a survey of what has concerned this blog down the years on 17 May.
"The players coming in during the next few years come from a generation deprived of free to air cricket. This generation will have come in on the echoes. Soon it will be a privileged generation: in the main sons/daughters of club cricketers and sons of parents able to afford a very expensive education, or sons able to win scholarships to such institutions."
2014
I went to Woodhouse Eaves, which had once been a sort of health resort in Leicestershire's Charnwood Forest:
Today, the first hot day of the year, the countryside was alive with hikers and Scouts, giving it something of the atmosphere of its 1930s heyday.
2013
UKIP supporters, I suggested, were not that keen on the UK. They were English Nationalists.
2012
I quoted Christopher Hitchens and his praise for Karl Popper's insistence on the importance of argument:
It is very seldom, as he noticed, that in debate any one of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or "converting" the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end upholding exactly the same position as that with which he began.
2011
Lord Bonkers reacted to the headline "Fox blasts British overseas aid plan":
It was clearly set out in the Coalition agreement. Now clear off down the garden and leave our dustbins alone.
2010
I quoted something I had written for the Guardian website back in 2006 (when it paid much better than it does today):
When [Charles] Kennedy stood for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats in 1999, the West Highland Free Press - a radical newspaper published in his own constituency - remarked that people in London were beginning to ask what it had been asking for 15 years: what exactly does Charles Kennedy stand for?
Though he won that contest and went on to lead the party for nearly seven years, we never really found out.
2009
Those were the days. I wrote seven posts on 17 May 2009 and most of them were about politics.
the causes of the anger over MPs' expenses go beyond indignation at what has been done with our money. That anger is so great because this affair has laid bare what an unequal society we now live in.
2008
Michael Gove wanted to tell teachers what they should wear:
No doubt this is meant to appeal to Tory voters who like tradition, but in reality there is little tradition of teachers dressing smartly. The traditional dress for teachers was the academic gown, which was designed precisely to distance education from the world where a good business suit matters.
Less grand teachers wore a tweed jacket with leather patches and a worried expression.
I asked why people could not forgive Ming Campbell for being old:
If a comedian or journalist had made similar reference to the fact that a politician was a woman or was gay or was Black, it would have finished that comedian or journalist's career. Yet in our society it is perfectly acceptable to make fun of people for being old.
2006
The idea that the state should decide the speed at which people walk their dogs is ridiculous.
there is a law that people accuse others of the faults they most fear in themselves, much as those who make most fuss about homosexuality are supposed to be repressed homosexuals themselves.
2004
Iraq Body Count estimated the number of civilian deaths in the country since the start of the invasion at somewhere between 9,148 and 11,005
A general election campaign was underway and I posted the top 20 Lib Dem targets, based on the results in 2015. We were to win seven of them, plus one from outside the list - Layla Moran in Oxford West and Abingdon. Trouble is, we also lost five of the nine seats we held.when the election was called.
2016
I posted a video of the Great Central - Nottingham, which I once described as a bit of a mystery to us in Leicestershire - "Rather like the Eastern Roman Empire."
2015
Lord Bonkers gently mocked Norman Lamb's claim that his friends were urging him to stand for the Lib Dem leadership.
2014
I wrote about Leicester's mysterious Humber Stone and quoted a local history site on the subject:
“Boy drew creature that stood beside his bed” was a Leicester Mercury headline as recently as 1980, when a 10-year-old boy, living close to the Humber Stone, had constant “visits” from a devilish entity. It was, apparently, a creature with a goat’s head and long curving horns, a man’s body and cloven hoofs. After drawing it at school, the boy’s teacher asked what it was. “I don’t know, miss”, he said. “It’s the thing I sometimes see at the end of my bed”.
2013
Michael Gove, I argued, had been talking nonsense about the history of school holidays. They have nothing to do with the farming calendar.
2012
Lord Bonkers discussed the governance of Rutland: "We now live as an anarcho-syndicalist collective – albeit one consistent with our most ancient families continuing to enjoy full possession of their landed estates."
2011
A by-election was taking place in Leicester South and I explained why Zuffar Haq was the perfect candidate for the constituency:
He grew up and went to school in the constituency – even in the short time I was with him we came across the father of someone with whom he had been at Lancaster Boys (the school that featured in Gareth Malone’s series “Boys Don’t Sing”). I also heard him slip into Punjabi to speak to an elderly Asian voter.
He was to come second in the contest, which must count as a remarkable achievement.
2010
I celebrated some wayside discovers made in the Northamptonshire village of Maidwell. They included the remains of a footbridge over the former Market Harborough to Northampton railway line.
2009
Government and foods companies were conspiring to denigrate home cooking, or so I argued:
Personally, I find that cake pleasingly old fashioned. White icing, with a cherry on top. It's the sort of cake children scheme to win in the Beano and the Dandy.
2008
In House Points, my weekly Liberal Democrat News column, I looked at Labour and poverty:
For everyone loves children. Even the Daily Mail loves children. At any rate, it loves very young children with fair hair. And if you don’t love children, maybe keeping their parents out of poverty will lessen the chance that, high on glue and SunnyD, they will twoc your new motor.
2007
I celebrated the Middlesex opening pair of Hutton and Compton: "That's Ben (grandson of Len) and Nick (grandson of Denis)."
2006
"Lib Dems should drop their collectivist approach to education and ensure that respect for individual differences is central," I argued in an article for the Guardian's website.
2005
Recommending an article on the Collins New Naturalist series I quoted the great Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies:
In his The Amateur Poacher he records that his early interest in the natural world had a strong sporting component, but that he came to see things differently.
With his finger on the trigger he "hesitated, dropped the barrel and watched the beautiful bird" and:
watching so often stayed the shot that at last it grew to be a habit ... Time after time I have flushed partridges without firing, and have let the hare bound over the furrow free.
He was MP for Cardigan from 1974 to 1983 and for Ceredigion and Pembroke North from 1983 to 1992, and was known to Lord Bonkers as the Big Friendly Geraint.
"Leaving the single market would have profound consequences. Most of our economy has been built around the single market for 30 years, from manufacturing to farming.
"Losing our biggest market will cause a glut of lamb, so the price will collapse, meaning sheep farmers will soon go bankrupt. Dairy will also be severely affected.
"Farmers will not be able to sell very much if they have to pay a 40 per cent export tariff. If we Brexit without a replacement for the Single Farm Payment, livelihoods will be gone. And if you read Michael Gove's Agriculture Bill, as I have, you will see that no replacement is intended."
He said much more, so do read the report in the Star.
It was announced today that Andrew Neil is giving up presenting This Week and the BBC is taking the opportunity to scrap the programme.
There was a time when I never missed This Week. The problem, as a confirmed hater of Question Time, was how to fill the 20 minutes between Newsnight ended and it began.
Then I got older and realised that I could go to bed and watch it on iPlayer the next day.
Then I gave up watching it at all.
There were always too many "funny" items that weren't funny - step forward Kevin Maguire and Quentin Letts.
But Andrew Neil is a better broadcaster than the Dimblebys added to John Humphrys and multiplied several times over.
OK so he has run with the hare and hunted with the hounds too much recently, but at his best he is peerless. The BBC should have made better use of him.
I remember, in the days when he was seen as a meritocrat from a humble background, Neil's forensic politeness forcing from Michael Gove the admission that his adoptive parents had paid for him to attend one of Scotland's most expensive private schools.
And This Week could be brilliant. I remember a riveting discussion of alcoholism with Shirley Williams and Rosie Boycott on the evening of the day that Charles Kennedy resigned as Liberal Democrat leader.
I used to grumble about its late-night slot, but maybe the BBC should have made a virtue of it and made it open ended - something along the lines of Channel 4's old After Dark.
If you keep politicians up late enough and lubricate them with Blue Nun, they start to tell the truth.
For years it has been impossible for a party of children to leave their school unless they are dressed like navvies.
Michael Gove used to dream of putting every child in the country into a blazer, but it is the hi-vis jacket that has triumpjed.
I sometimes have lunch at the cafe at Leicester's museum. and even there the visiting school parties all wear this garment.
It is, I suppose, a reflection of teachers' fears of being blamed if anything happens to a child in their charge and of wider society's belief that something terrible will befall a child who is left unsupervised for even a second.
But I suspect it has also led to the rise of the Gilets Jaunes.
It looks as though Mark Littlewood will be in the news this week thanks to this Guardian story:
The director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) was secretly recorded telling an undercover reporter that funders could get to know ministers on first-name terms and that his organisation was in “the Brexit influencing game”.
Mark Littlewood claimed the IEA could make introductions to ministers and said the thinktank’s trade expert knew Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Davis and Liam Fox well.
The IEA chief was also recorded suggesting potential US donors could fund and shape “substantial content” of research commissioned by the thinktank and that its findings would always support the argument for free-trade deals.
The Guardian also quotes Littlewood's response that there is nothing wrong with any of this, though I am not convinced by research whose conclusions you know before you have conducted it.
Sir Karl Popper writes: Neither am I and nor is Caron Lindsay. And is "thinktank" really one word?
As Littlewood is in the news, it seems a good time to quote a 2010 item from Liberator's Radical Bulletin - you can download a pdf of the whole issue yourself.
That story runs:
A fascinating Chard Group document comes our way (and that is not a phrase you will often read in Liberator). Long before its present preoccupation with running conference raffles, the Chard Group was set up and run by Richard Denton-White to support Paddy Ashdown’s objective, set out in his 1992 speech in Chard, of working more closely with Labour.
The September 1995 issue of the group’s Campaigner newsletter says its new vice-chair is Mark Littlewood, who “is now the youth president of the European Movement”.
Someone called Mark Littlewood was the Lib Dems’ head of media until his unfortunate spot of bother with Ming Campbell’s inaugural conference speech as leader in March 2006, and later ran the lunatic-fringe libertarian right Liberal Vision, before departing the Lib Dems last year to become director of the Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs.
That Mark Littlewood was, by an extraordinary coincidence, described as a former youth officer of the European Movement in a 2004 interview in PR Week to mark his appointment as Lib Dem press officer.
So did Littlewood really make the strange political journey from Denton-White’s pro-Labour body to the wilder shores of the libertarian right – and, if so, where might he next be found?
Well, he's still to be found at the IEA. But if he did start our with the Chard Group his journey has been stranger even than that of his employee Darren Grimes.
